Month: July 2013

A reader sounds off on a recent post:

Will Wilkinson’s idea that the government is doing just fine with the sequestration made my blood boil. I understand his point about the government being forced to cut and refocus, but the problem is that not all agencies were as bloated as others. Some were better managed than others, and others were already pretty lean after Congress had cut and cut year after year.

Congress and the President completely failed us, though I blame Congress more because at least Obama tried to fix things as the deadline loomed. Congress abdicated its responsibility to make tough budgetary decisions based on reasonable goals and compromises. Wilkinson’s approval of sequestration is approval of a Congress that decided to bury its head in the sand rather than do its job.

I work in law enforcement for a Federal agency, and I have been furloughed. Prior to sequestration’s going into effect, my agency’s budget was already pretty lean, since Congress had already cut billions out of the budget in the preceding years. Those cuts resulted in reduced training and hiring, meaning there were few of us to complete more work with less know-how. The sequestration cut into that budget further still. But nothing else is left to cut except my hours. That doesn’t make us leaner and more streamlined; it just makes us less efficient.

In a law enforcement agency, when there are fewer resources on hand, we take on fewer cases and drop more cases instead of developing them. More people are absolutely getting away with breaking the law because of sequestration.

Also, we are putting off making important investments for future work in the hope that we might have a bigger budget next year. This is not effective management, and it is being forced on us by people who clearly do not care whether government is effective.

Congress is obviously free to find that law enforcement has enough funding to do its job and can redirect money to where it is needed. But that’s not what happened here. My agency was treated exactly the same as the VA, the Department of Education, the DoD, and everyone else. Maybe the DoD needed cuts. That would be a reasonable thing to find, but it is Congress’s job to decide to make those cuts. It is also their job to look at other agencies and increase their funding where appropriate. They didn’t do that. They don’t do anything.

I am frustrated. I love my job, and I am pretty good at it. I want to be a part of the government and do my part to run this great country. The only thing I absolutely hate about this job is that it is subject to the whims of the world’s worst board if directors: the U.S. Congress. I want to work more and serve my country, but the private sector just looks better and better. (Heck, private government contractors’ salaries will go up to $950,000 next year. That’s a much better salary than my CEO – Obama – makes.)

Maybe a meat cleaver works in some places, but it doesn’t in others. And Congress clearly isn’t competent to make that determination. I wish people would not suggest that sequestration worked. It just gives Congress license to do even less.

A reader writes:

I am a pediatric intensive care unit physician with 13 years experience in the field.  The idea that an organism that withdraws from something that would be considered painful in a person with an intact nervous system is therefore experiencing pain and suffering is incorrect.  The idea that an associate professor of neurobiology would make that assertion seems to smack either of incompetence or speciousness.

Withdrawing from a pinch or burn is not a decision or a response to pain, but a spinal cord reflex.  When you touch a hot surface, you don’t think “Jesus, that hurts!” and then withdraw your hand.  You yank your hand back and think “aw crap, that’s going to hurt in a second … yep, there it is!”  The nerve circuits that produce the reflex withdrawal go from the sensory apparatus to the spinal cord, and then right back to the muscle.  No brain involved.  They are also considerably faster than those fibers that go to the spine, the brain stem, the thalamus, and then the cortex to be perceived as pain.  Although the “fetal neural structures” might be in place, simple withdrawal doesn’t prove that those structures go any higher than the spinal cord.

I run into this problem about once a month when we are forced to declare “brain death” in children who are the victims of violence – car wrecks, ATV accidents, gunshots, etc.

These unfortunate people have no detectable brain activity of any kind and are legally dead.  But if you pinch their toe hard enough, you can produce what’s called the triple flexion reflex. This is not obscure knowledge – we teach it to residents all the time.  And it’s certainly something that an associate professor of neurobiology should be very familiar with.

This ultimately gets to the question of what pain is, and what suffering is.  People whacked out on dilaudid can report something as being painful, but it’s as if it is happening to somebody else and they just don’t care.  Are they still “in pain” and need more medicine, or is the fact that they’re not suffering sufficient?  I believe that the “fetal neural structures” might be in place to have the electrical activity associated with parts of the pain sensation in people with more-developed neurological systems.  I do not believe that an organism without a cortex is capable of suffering. And that’s really what we’re talking about, isn’t it?

Update from a reader:

You might find this relevant to your discussion. In my research lab we’re culturing cortical neurons in special petri dishes called “multi-electrode arrays” that allow us to record electrical activity directly from the cultures. We use this setup to study how neurons create and modify electrical connections. Typically we use cortical neurons from fetal rats. This tissue is harvested on day 18 of gestation, just three days before birth. The neurons typically culture easily and start firing right away.

Recently, however, we’ve been able to get access to some human fetal cortical tissue. These cells come from aborted human fetuses. I’m not certain of the gestation period but its almost certainly early 2nd trimester. We’ve recently started culturing these cells and we’ve discovered something amazing. Whereas the rat neurons start firing almost immediately, the human neurons must culture for close to two months before they’ll start spontaneously firing in a way that is consistent with typical normal brain behavior. This is a stunning finding and breaking news to boot; my grad student only told me about all this on Friday! It seems that neurons that are too early into the gestation cycle are not sufficiently mature to produce firing patterns that one would associate with normal brain function.

What this has to do with pain or consciousness is anyone’s guess, but it’s almost certainly an important piece of information that no one has discovered before now. We’ll be busy getting this ready for publication in the coming weeks but I thought your readers might enjoy hearing about it first.

Urban heat islands are man-made areas marked by significantly higher temperatures relative to rural surroundings.  A new study finds that “blacks, Asians, and Latinos are all significantly more likely to live in high-risk heat-island conditions than white people”:

[Researchers] compared Census population data with the 2001 National Land Cover Dataset, mediating for factors such as income, home ownership, and density. Richer folks of color who own their homes are less likely to live in a heat island than the poor, but still significantly more likely than whites. The study doesn’t point to causality, but does mention past and present lending practices which have concentrated people of color in dense, urban neighborhoods that may or may not receive the same level of civic investment as other areas.

Translation: This study highlights the persistent racial segregation of urban areas more than it does a lack of trees. All told, this is just yet another amenity that people of color are losing out on. … It’s not just a potential discomfort, but a serious health risk, when extreme heat is a factor in about one in five deaths resulting from natural hazards.

Ngoc Nguyen at New American Media interviewed study co-author Dr. Rachel Morello-Frosch:

NAM: What accounts for greater [heat] island risk in hyper-segregated cities?

RMF: What we are seeing in the physical environment — the planting of trees and infrastructure that tries to decrease heat island risk in cities — these kind of investments, you tend to see less of in places with high levels of racial inequality. The physical environment in cities is a reflection of the social environment, and it tends to disadvantage people of color particularly.

It’s possible in cities with higher levels of segregation, there is less investment to protect people from [heat] island risk, such as tree-planting campaigns, greening of space and neighborhood, reduction in impervious surfaces that really absorb heat, whiter roofs, those kinds of things, certain levels of public investment.

NAM: What was surprising in the study findings?

RMF: In metropolitan areas with greater levels of racial segregation, everyone — whites included – were more likely to live in heat-prone areas … what this shows is that, in some ways segregation adversely affects everyone. This form of social inequality affects everyone. Segregated places have much higher [heat] island risk compared to less segregated places.

A reader writes:

I think what Ms. Gallagher and Card himself don’t understand (or willfully ignore) is the fact that no one – NO ONE – has said that Mr. Card shouldn’t be allowed to publish his books or have a movie made of his important, seminal novel.  No one wants a McCarthy-like blacklist.  What many of us are angry about is that a book we love might be used to support the frankly repugnant rhetoric of an organization like NOM, of which Card is a member of the board.  Freedom of speech does not mean that you’re free of societal scorn.  I owe Card a lot for teaching me how to be a better writer, and Ender’s Game is a beautiful, heartbreaking book.  But I might not see it because then my ticket would be subsidizing a hate-group.  That’s the issue, point blank.

Another draws another distinction:

Boycotting Wal-Mart and Exxon is one thing. It’s their business practices that make them despicable, and doing business with them encourages those practices.  Boycotting Ender’s Game solves nothing except discourage smart fiction writing.

Another:

I am quite familiar with Ender’s Game, having read it several times, including recently, and I would say with confidence that there is no homophobic element to it.

That’s one reason I was so shocked to find out Card felt so strongly. The book, in fact, is notable for its characters almost asexual lives. They’re children, for the most part. They are interested in very adult things – war and world politics among them – but their sexuality is basically an unexplored province.

Further, I would add – NOT as a defense of Card’s view – that writers in general, and science fiction writers in particular, are idiosyncratic, opinionated, and sometimes insane people. It’s an activity that requires one to basically live in one’s head, and pay much more attention to the world created there than the world outside. Orson Scott Card is a bigot, but he’s an old bigot who should just shut up and write his stories, and whose non-fictional utterances should be heard by no one but his family and any who intentionally befriend him.

Another is more skeptical:

Does Card’s homophobia influence his art? Well, the aliens in Ender’s Game are called “buggers”.

Another looks at Card’s subsequent works:

Ender’s Game is the beginning of a sequence of books (it is followed by Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind) as well as a subsequent set of books that follow the same overall story from the point of view of different characters (Ender’s Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow of the Giant).  In these books, particularly the “Shadow” books, the issue of gay marriage does get inserted and unsurprisingly rejected by the relevant character in the story.  With the caveat that it’s been quite a while since I read it, even this sequence in the books, which is not even central to the plot – which I grant makes it a rather gratuitous political self-indulgence on Card’s part, but hey, it’s his book! – I didn’t have a sense of homophobia from the character or, by extension, the author.  Rather, the issue is presented as one of how society should be structured, but the gay character is at that point essentially one of the good guys, and is not in any way ostracized or harassed, and is treated with respect.

If anything, the attitude in Card’s novels is about as open and accepting as one could ask for from a fairly orthodox, devout Mormon. I have read most of Card’s books and occasionally dip into his blog-like postings at his website hatrack.com. I disagree with a lot of his conclusions, but always respect his analysis.  Kinda like the Dish sometimes.

Update from a reader:

I’m sure I’ll be one of many, but I had to respond to the reader who noted that the aliens are called Buggers. I’ve seen it made other places, and it’s painful to hear, just about as bad as when Rush claimed ‘Bain’ in the Batman movie was to smear Romney. If people want to boycott the film, I totally get it. But please, don’t be so ignorant of the book to claim this as a reason.

Yes, while the aliens are given the official name of Formics, they are more colloquially called Buggers. Given that we were at war with them it’s not exactly shocking they were given a derisive name. But the point is *SPOILER ALERT* that at the end of the day, the whole war was just a giant miscommunication between two very difference species. For the rest of his life, Ender will try to undo the damage he caused the Buggers and live with immense guilt about how he treated them. The future conversation about the war will be about how horrible humanity treated the buggers and how much blame should Ender receive. If the goal was to put down homosexuality, Card did an incredibly horrible job of it.

I think most readers of Card’s work have the same shocked reaction to finding out his views, because they simply don’t come through in the books. The series I keep rethinking about since finding out about his views is the Earthfall series, not the Ender’s Game series. One of male characters is gay, and another female one has written offensive theories about how people become gay. The female one is the one who ends up finding out she is wrong and is extremely embarrassed and ashamed. However, the two end up marrying and having kids together anyhow, in a “need to repopulate the world” situation. The understanding they come to is that they always use a particular position (I’m sure you can guess which) and he be allowed to be thinking about his former lovers during. I have no idea how to read/think about this section anymore.

Spurred by voters in Portland, Oregon who defeated a bill that would have provided for the fluoridation of their drinking water, Mark Oppenheimer decries the trend of “left-wing Puritanism”. He relays this telling anecdote:

Last month, at a birthday party for a three-year-old, I was hit with the realization that most of the parents around me were in the grip of moral panic, the kind of fear of contamination dramatized so well in The Crucible. One mother was trying to keep her daughter from eating a cupcake, because of all the sugar in cupcakes. Another was trying to limit her son to one juice box, because of all the sugar in juice. A father was panicking because there was no place, in this outdoor barn-like space at some nature center or farm or wildlife preserve, where his daughter could wash her hands before eating. And while I did not hear any parent fretting about the organic status of the veggie dip, I became certain there were such whispers all around me.

His broader argument about the meaning of liberalism:

I am only suggesting that we resist thinking of Puritanism as the only, or optimal, parenting style for liberals, for two reasons.

First, thinking that Puritanism—whether a preference for organic foods or natural fibers or home-birthing—is somehow constitutive of a liberal politics is rather insulting to liberalism. Most of the middle-class “liberal” parents I know have allowed lifestyle decisions about what they wear, eat, and drive to entirely replace a more ambitious program for bettering society; they have no particular beliefs about how to end poverty or strengthen the labor movement, and they don’t understand Obamacare, or really want to. It’s enough that they make their midwife-birthed children substitute guava nectar for sugar.

But more important, realizing that Puritanism does not equal liberalism liberates us to think of another way to be liberal: by rejecting the kind of stress that comes from Puritanism. They say hygienic reform; I say the 30-hour work week and not stressing if my children eat Kix. Liberalism, as the political philosopher Corey Robin has recently argued, should be above all about freedom. The best reasons to want a labor union, or universal health care, or Social Security are to be free of worry, want, and privation, and to be out from under the hand of the boss. It makes no sense to re-enslave ourselves with fear, worry, and stress. That is not liberal but reactionary.

Arit John adds a point of contrast:

[C]onservative parents have generally become relatively more open-minded. Lenore Skenazy was famously called the worst mom in America after admitting that she let her 9-year-old ride New York’s subway home alone. But really, she’s just instilling her kids with self reliance and pull-yourself-up- by-your-bootstraps-grit. Skenazy’s Free Range Kids movement supports events like “Take Our Children to the Park and Leave Them There Day,” which is both self-explanatory and (potentially) horrifying. And yet none of her children has gone missing or been taken away by the authorities.

All those liberal worries about about obesity, high blood pressure, germs, autism and industrial chemicals, is leading to a lot of stress, which may in the end be more harmful than anything. Your bickering about the virtues of antibacterial hand lotion might give your kid a complex.