The biology of cancer cell shape and why it’s important

Appearance matters when it comes to cancer cells.

Long before modern medicine, doctors and philosophers learnt about cancer by simply looking at tumours taken from people who had died. This was coined pathology, which loosely translates to the study of disease.

Fast-forward to the 1800s and doctors began inspecting tumours removed during surgery more closely, thanks to the invention of microscopes. They soon realised that cells in tumours look very different from healthy tissue and they could even tell apart different types of cancer.

Studying samples of tumours (biopsies) in this way still plays a vital role in diagnosing cancer patients today. It reveals information about the type of cancer and how aggressive it’s likely to be, which helps doctors offer patients the best treatments.

But until now it has remained a mystery as to why the shape of cancer cells is so good at predicting the disease’s behaviour.

In a study published today in the journal Genome Research, researchers led by Dr Chris Bakal from The Institute of Cancer Research, London and funded by Cancer Research UK, reveal some key information about this strong link between cancer cell shape and patients’ outlook.

This in-depth account of the genes behind cancer cell shape, and how they’re linked to the likelihood of a tumour spreading, could help develop new treatments that make cancer less aggressive and easier to destroy with other therapies.

And Bakal’s team has produced a map to help navigate these next steps.

Constructing the map

The team started building a map using huge amounts of data from breast cancer cells grown in the lab. Some of these breast cancer cells grow aggressively, others more slowly.

They had images of more than 300,000 individual cells that were matched to genetic data showing how active different genes were.

Click to view slideshow.

“We looked at features including the size of the cells, how closely cells were packed together, how much contact they have with their neighbours, and whether the outside of the cell is smooth, ruffled, or spiky,” says Bakal. “And then we matched it to their genetic data.”

The team combined the information into a map, much like the London Underground map, with the cells’ appearance forming the stations and the genetic information revealing the tube lines connecting these shapes.

The team’s map that connects genetic data with the shape of cells. Credit: Dr Chris Bakal

“We already had lists of genes where there are significant differences between aggressive and more slow-growing breast cancers,” Bakal says. “But we were surprised that we found so many of these genes play an important role in determining cancer cells’ shape.”

On closer inspection, the activity of many of these genes was already known to affect cell shape, for example genes that are needed to make cells’ internal ‘skeleton’. But there were also some surprises.

“We found some unexpected results, for example some genes that matched with very rounded cells are involved in processes that happen in the mitochondria – the energy-producing machinery in cells,” says Bakal.

What came first – the genes or the shape?

The next thing the researchers wanted to know was whether cell shape was affecting the levels of genes, or whether those genes being switched on or off was controlling cell shape.

“We had a classic chicken and egg situation,” Bakal says. “A huge data set from the Broad Institute in the US helped us answer this question.”

We discovered that shape was having the bigger effect on genes, rather than the other way round

– Dr Chris Bakal

By analysing publically available data, the researchers could figure out which way information was flowing in their map.

“We discovered that shape was having the bigger effect on genes, rather than the other way round,” says Bakal. “And this could be relevant when it comes to thinking about potential new treatments.”

Cells can sense their environment and the forces around them that push, pull, stretch and squash them.

“We know this environment is important because tumours like their surroundings to be stiff. This stiffness helps cancers grow, spread and resist treatments. And it turns out that the stiffness of their surroundings also affects the shape of cancer cells and in turn changes their genetic profile.”

One of the genes central to the map is called NF-kB. “The close association between highly active NF-kB and aggressive cell shape is really interesting,” says Bakal, “because there are rarely mistakes in this gene in cancer. The gene itself often isn’t faulty in solid tumours, but shape changes can alter its activity, and help the cancer spread.”

On course for potential new treatments

Doctors use pathology data and the shape of cancer cells to diagnose cancer because it gives them reliable information on how aggressive the cancer is likely to be. Bakal’s team wanted to know if the genetic map they’d created could predict the same outcomes.

“We compared our shape-based genetic map, drawn up from lab-grown cells, with genetic and medical information from women who’ve had breast cancer,” says Bakal.

The researchers used data from our METABRIC study, which includes genetic information and clinical records from nearly 2000 women with breast cancer.

More stunning images from our labs

• Understanding where breast cancer stems from
• Leukaemia cells are born to run
• How knowing the shape of cancer cells could improve treatments

“We found that our gene profiles could be used to predict how aggressively breast cancers behaved, telling us the genetic map we’d created was relevant to cancer in the clinic too,” Bakal says.

This is the first glimpse into why – at the genetic level – the ancient practice of studying cells’ shape is a tell-tale sign of a cancer’s behaviour. And Bakal hopes their genetic data map will be mined for information leading to new treatments.

For example, researchers are studying whether drugs that stop cancer cells producing a molecule called LOX can be effective at treating some types of cancer. The LOX molecule works by making the tumour’s surroundings stiffer, “and this will probably change cancer cells’ shape and genetic profile as we’ve seen in our studies of breast cancer,” says Bakal.

As well as drugs targeted to the tumour’s environment, this research could lead to new drugs that change the shape of the cancer cells, re-routing the activity of their genes and hampering their ability to spread.

“Many of the chemotherapy drugs we use today, like paclitaxel, change the shape of the cells,” says Bakal. “Now we’re getting to the bottom of what’s happening at the genetic level, there’s scope to make shape-altering drugs more potent.

“Changing the shape of cancer to make it less aggressive could be effective in combination with other therapies – giving them a better chance to work.”

It’s early days yet, but this research is a big step forward in understanding a fundamental, age-old mystery: why the shape of cancer cells is so important in predicting how the disease will behave.

Emma

• All images featured in this post were provided by Dr Chris Bakal

from Cancer Research UK – Science blog http://ift.tt/2kokqVC

Appearance matters when it comes to cancer cells.

Long before modern medicine, doctors and philosophers learnt about cancer by simply looking at tumours taken from people who had died. This was coined pathology, which loosely translates to the study of disease.

Fast-forward to the 1800s and doctors began inspecting tumours removed during surgery more closely, thanks to the invention of microscopes. They soon realised that cells in tumours look very different from healthy tissue and they could even tell apart different types of cancer.

Studying samples of tumours (biopsies) in this way still plays a vital role in diagnosing cancer patients today. It reveals information about the type of cancer and how aggressive it’s likely to be, which helps doctors offer patients the best treatments.

But until now it has remained a mystery as to why the shape of cancer cells is so good at predicting the disease’s behaviour.

In a study published today in the journal Genome Research, researchers led by Dr Chris Bakal from The Institute of Cancer Research, London and funded by Cancer Research UK, reveal some key information about this strong link between cancer cell shape and patients’ outlook.

This in-depth account of the genes behind cancer cell shape, and how they’re linked to the likelihood of a tumour spreading, could help develop new treatments that make cancer less aggressive and easier to destroy with other therapies.

And Bakal’s team has produced a map to help navigate these next steps.

Constructing the map

The team started building a map using huge amounts of data from breast cancer cells grown in the lab. Some of these breast cancer cells grow aggressively, others more slowly.

They had images of more than 300,000 individual cells that were matched to genetic data showing how active different genes were.

Click to view slideshow.

“We looked at features including the size of the cells, how closely cells were packed together, how much contact they have with their neighbours, and whether the outside of the cell is smooth, ruffled, or spiky,” says Bakal. “And then we matched it to their genetic data.”

The team combined the information into a map, much like the London Underground map, with the cells’ appearance forming the stations and the genetic information revealing the tube lines connecting these shapes.

The team’s map that connects genetic data with the shape of cells. Credit: Dr Chris Bakal

“We already had lists of genes where there are significant differences between aggressive and more slow-growing breast cancers,” Bakal says. “But we were surprised that we found so many of these genes play an important role in determining cancer cells’ shape.”

On closer inspection, the activity of many of these genes was already known to affect cell shape, for example genes that are needed to make cells’ internal ‘skeleton’. But there were also some surprises.

“We found some unexpected results, for example some genes that matched with very rounded cells are involved in processes that happen in the mitochondria – the energy-producing machinery in cells,” says Bakal.

What came first – the genes or the shape?

The next thing the researchers wanted to know was whether cell shape was affecting the levels of genes, or whether those genes being switched on or off was controlling cell shape.

“We had a classic chicken and egg situation,” Bakal says. “A huge data set from the Broad Institute in the US helped us answer this question.”

We discovered that shape was having the bigger effect on genes, rather than the other way round

– Dr Chris Bakal

By analysing publically available data, the researchers could figure out which way information was flowing in their map.

“We discovered that shape was having the bigger effect on genes, rather than the other way round,” says Bakal. “And this could be relevant when it comes to thinking about potential new treatments.”

Cells can sense their environment and the forces around them that push, pull, stretch and squash them.

“We know this environment is important because tumours like their surroundings to be stiff. This stiffness helps cancers grow, spread and resist treatments. And it turns out that the stiffness of their surroundings also affects the shape of cancer cells and in turn changes their genetic profile.”

One of the genes central to the map is called NF-kB. “The close association between highly active NF-kB and aggressive cell shape is really interesting,” says Bakal, “because there are rarely mistakes in this gene in cancer. The gene itself often isn’t faulty in solid tumours, but shape changes can alter its activity, and help the cancer spread.”

On course for potential new treatments

Doctors use pathology data and the shape of cancer cells to diagnose cancer because it gives them reliable information on how aggressive the cancer is likely to be. Bakal’s team wanted to know if the genetic map they’d created could predict the same outcomes.

“We compared our shape-based genetic map, drawn up from lab-grown cells, with genetic and medical information from women who’ve had breast cancer,” says Bakal.

The researchers used data from our METABRIC study, which includes genetic information and clinical records from nearly 2000 women with breast cancer.

More stunning images from our labs

• Understanding where breast cancer stems from
• Leukaemia cells are born to run
• How knowing the shape of cancer cells could improve treatments

“We found that our gene profiles could be used to predict how aggressively breast cancers behaved, telling us the genetic map we’d created was relevant to cancer in the clinic too,” Bakal says.

This is the first glimpse into why – at the genetic level – the ancient practice of studying cells’ shape is a tell-tale sign of a cancer’s behaviour. And Bakal hopes their genetic data map will be mined for information leading to new treatments.

For example, researchers are studying whether drugs that stop cancer cells producing a molecule called LOX can be effective at treating some types of cancer. The LOX molecule works by making the tumour’s surroundings stiffer, “and this will probably change cancer cells’ shape and genetic profile as we’ve seen in our studies of breast cancer,” says Bakal.

As well as drugs targeted to the tumour’s environment, this research could lead to new drugs that change the shape of the cancer cells, re-routing the activity of their genes and hampering their ability to spread.

“Many of the chemotherapy drugs we use today, like paclitaxel, change the shape of the cells,” says Bakal. “Now we’re getting to the bottom of what’s happening at the genetic level, there’s scope to make shape-altering drugs more potent.

“Changing the shape of cancer to make it less aggressive could be effective in combination with other therapies – giving them a better chance to work.”

It’s early days yet, but this research is a big step forward in understanding a fundamental, age-old mystery: why the shape of cancer cells is so important in predicting how the disease will behave.

Emma

• All images featured in this post were provided by Dr Chris Bakal

from Cancer Research UK – Science blog http://ift.tt/2kokqVC

Camouflage in motion [Life Lines]

Cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis) are masters of camouflage. Being able to mimic their surroundings helps them hide from predators. But how do they maintain their camouflage while moving through complex environments, such as coral reefs, sea grass, and varying light patterns? A new study published in Frontiers in Physiology examined this question. They wanted to know how small an object in the environment could be for the cuttlefish to still mimic it quickly enough while moving. What they found was that cuttlefish could match camouflage of objects as small as 10-19cm wide, or just enough to hide them as the mantle length of animals examined in the study averaged 7.2-12.3cm.

These kids could learn a thing or two about hide and seek from cuttlefish…

Image from The Sun, http://ift.tt/2jShoW0

 

Source:

Josef N, Berenshtein I, Rousseau M, Scata G, Fiorito G, Shashar N. Size Matters: Observed and Modeled Camouflage Response of European Cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis) to Different Substrate Patch Sizes during Movement. Frontiers in Physiology. 17 January 2017. http://ift.tt/2jSbNS0

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2jSe2F1

Cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis) are masters of camouflage. Being able to mimic their surroundings helps them hide from predators. But how do they maintain their camouflage while moving through complex environments, such as coral reefs, sea grass, and varying light patterns? A new study published in Frontiers in Physiology examined this question. They wanted to know how small an object in the environment could be for the cuttlefish to still mimic it quickly enough while moving. What they found was that cuttlefish could match camouflage of objects as small as 10-19cm wide, or just enough to hide them as the mantle length of animals examined in the study averaged 7.2-12.3cm.

These kids could learn a thing or two about hide and seek from cuttlefish…

Image from The Sun, http://ift.tt/2jShoW0

 

Source:

Josef N, Berenshtein I, Rousseau M, Scata G, Fiorito G, Shashar N. Size Matters: Observed and Modeled Camouflage Response of European Cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis) to Different Substrate Patch Sizes during Movement. Frontiers in Physiology. 17 January 2017. http://ift.tt/2jSbNS0

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2jSe2F1

How Thinking Like A Scientist Can Improve Your Daily Life (Synopsis) [Starts With A Bang]

“If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.” -Ernest Rutherford

It’s a difficult thing to do, to go against your gut instinct. It’s even more difficult when your gut is backed up by the facts you’ve found doing your own independent research. But the greatest hallmark of science isn’t digging into your conclusions and finding all the evidence you can to support them; it’s to constantly challenge them, to attempt to knock them down, and to see where your present knowledge can be superseded or improved.

Whether through libraries, archives, traditional media, the internet or other forms of new media, independent research can be informative, but only to a point. Image credit: Washington, D.C. OWI (Office of War Information) research workers / U.S. Government.

It may seem that there’s a battle on as far as who you can trust for information, but scientific thinking isn’t about trusting one camp over another. Rather, it’s about looking for the expertise, at the full suite of facts and at the recommendations of those who are more knowledgeable than any of us can ever be ourselves. It’s a difficult and humbling path to take, but it’s how we can arrive at truths that are greater than any of us, individually.

Decades ago, many households switched from butter to margarine, believing the latter was healthier. As new evidence accumulated, however, it was determined that trans fats, not saturated fats, were the fats that were linked to heart disease. Image credit: Bill Branson.

Come get the full story on how each one of us can value science in our daily lives, and how doing so just might save the USA.

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2kNKXMT

“If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.” -Ernest Rutherford

It’s a difficult thing to do, to go against your gut instinct. It’s even more difficult when your gut is backed up by the facts you’ve found doing your own independent research. But the greatest hallmark of science isn’t digging into your conclusions and finding all the evidence you can to support them; it’s to constantly challenge them, to attempt to knock them down, and to see where your present knowledge can be superseded or improved.

Whether through libraries, archives, traditional media, the internet or other forms of new media, independent research can be informative, but only to a point. Image credit: Washington, D.C. OWI (Office of War Information) research workers / U.S. Government.

It may seem that there’s a battle on as far as who you can trust for information, but scientific thinking isn’t about trusting one camp over another. Rather, it’s about looking for the expertise, at the full suite of facts and at the recommendations of those who are more knowledgeable than any of us can ever be ourselves. It’s a difficult and humbling path to take, but it’s how we can arrive at truths that are greater than any of us, individually.

Decades ago, many households switched from butter to margarine, believing the latter was healthier. As new evidence accumulated, however, it was determined that trans fats, not saturated fats, were the fats that were linked to heart disease. Image credit: Bill Branson.

Come get the full story on how each one of us can value science in our daily lives, and how doing so just might save the USA.

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2kNKXMT

When is the next Blue Moon?

Most Blue Moons are not blue in color. This photo of a moon among fast-moving clouds was created using special filters. Image via EarthSky Facebook friend Jv Noriega.

In recent years, people have been using the name Blue Moon for the second of two full moons in a single calendar month. An older definition says a Blue Moon is the third of four full moons in a single season. Someday, you might see an actual blue-colored moon. The term once in a blue moon used to mean something rare. Now that the rules for naming Blue Moons include several different possibilities, Blue Moons are pretty common! The next Blue Moon (second full moon in one calendar month) will be one year from today – January 31, 2018. Follow the links below to learn more about Blue Moons:

Last seasonal Blue Moon on May 21, 2016.

Next monthly Blue Moon on January 31, 2018.

Which Blue Moon definition is better?

Can a moon be blue in color?

Can there be two Blue Moons in a single calendar year?

Desert Blue Moon from our friend Priya Kumar in Oman. August, 2012. Thank you, Priya!

Blue Moon as third full moon of four in a season. The Maine Farmer’s Almanac defined a Blue Moon as an extra full moon that occurred in a season. One season – winter, spring, fall, summer – typically has three full moons. If a season has four full moons, then the third full moon may be called a Blue Moon.

There was a Blue Moon by this definition happened on November 21, 2010. Another occurred on August 20-21, 2013.

It last happened on May 21, 2016.

The next seasonal Blue Moon (third of four full moons in one season) will take place on May 18, 2019.

This photo was created using special blue filters, too. Image via EarthSky Facebook friend Jv Noriega.

Next monthly Blue Moon on January 31, 2018. In recent decades, many people have begun using the name Blue Moon to describe the second full moon of a calendar month. There was a full moon on July 2, 2015. There was another full moon on July 31, 2015. So the July 31, 2015, full moon was called a Blue Moon, according to this definition.

The next one will be on January 31, 2018.

The time between one full moon and the next is close to the length of a calendar month. So the only time one month can have two full moons is when the first full moon happens in the first few days of the month. This happens every 2-3 years, so these sorts of Blue Moons come about that often.

The idea of a Blue Moon as the second full moon in a month stemmed from the March 1946 issue of Sky and Telescope magazine, which contained an article called “Once in a Blue Moon” by James Hugh Pruett. Pruett was referring to the 1937 Maine Farmer’s Almanac, but he inadvertently simplified the definition. He wrote:

Seven times in 19 years there were — and still are — 13 full moons in a year. This gives 11 months with one full moon each and one with two. This second in a month, so I interpret it, was called Blue Moon.

Had James Hugh Pruett looked at the actual date of the 1937 Blue Moon, he would have found that it had occurred on August 21, 1937. Also, there were only 12 full moons in 1937. You need 13 full moons in one calendar year to have two full moons in one calendar month.

However, that fortuitous oversight gave birth to a new and perfectly understandable definition for Blue Moon.

EarthSky’s Deborah Byrd happened upon a copy of this old 1946 issue of Sky and Telescope in the stacks of the Peridier Library at the University of Texas Astronomy Department in the late 1970s. Afterward, she began using the term Blue Moon to describe the second full moon in a calendar month on the radio. Later, this definition of Blue Moon was also popularized by a book for children by Margot McLoon-Basta and Alice Sigel, called “Kids’ World Almanac of Records and Facts,” published in New York by World Almanac Publications, in 1985. The second-full-moon-in-a-month definition was also used in the board game Trivial Pursuit.

Today, it has become part of folklore.

What most call a Blue Moon isn't blue in color. It's only Blue in name. This great moon photo from EarthSky Facebook friend Rebecca Lacey in Cambridge, Idaho.

Which Blue Moon definition is better? In recent years, a controversy has raged – mainly among purists – about which Blue Moon definition is better. The idea of a Blue Moon as the third of four in a season may be older than the idea of a Blue Moon as the second full moon in a month. Is it better? Is one definition right and the other wrong?

Opinions vary, but, remember, this is folklore. So we, the folk, get to decide. In the 21st century, both sorts of full moons have been called Blue.

As the folklorist Phillip Hiscock wrote in his comprehensive article Folklore of the Blue Moon:

Old folklore it is not, but real folklore it is.

Can a moon be blue in color? There’s one kind of blue moon that is still rare. It’s very rare that you would see a blue-colored moon, although unusual sky conditions – certain-sized particles of dust or smoke – can create them.

Blue-colored moons aren’t predictable. So don’t be misled by the photo above. The sorts of moons people commonly call Blue Moons aren’t usually blue.

For more about truly blue-colored moons, click here.

Enjoying EarthSky so far? Sign up for our free daily newsletter today!

Can there be two Blue Moons in a single calendar year? Yes. It last happened in 1999. There were two full moons in January and two full moons in March and no full moon in February. So both January and March had Blue Moons.

The next year of double monthly blue moons is coming up in January and March, 2018 – and then, after that, in January and March, 2037.

Very rarely, a monthly Blue Moon (second of two full moons in one calendar month) and a seasonal Blue Moon (third of four full moons in one season) can occur in the same calendar year. But for this to happen, you need 13 full moons in one calendar year AND 13 full moons in between successive December solstices. This will next happen in the year 2048, when a monthly Blue Moon falls on January 31, and a seasonal Blue Moon on August 23.

Bottom line: A blue-colored moon is rare. But folklore has defined two different kinds of Blue Moons, and moons that are Blue by name have become pretty common. A Blue Moon can be the second full moon in a month. We had that sort of Blue Moon on July 31, 2015, and will happen again on January 31, 2018. Or it can be the third of four full moons in a season. That’ll be May 18, 2019.

Possible to have only 2 full moons in one season?

from EarthSky http://ift.tt/SSlbBZ

Most Blue Moons are not blue in color. This photo of a moon among fast-moving clouds was created using special filters. Image via EarthSky Facebook friend Jv Noriega.

In recent years, people have been using the name Blue Moon for the second of two full moons in a single calendar month. An older definition says a Blue Moon is the third of four full moons in a single season. Someday, you might see an actual blue-colored moon. The term once in a blue moon used to mean something rare. Now that the rules for naming Blue Moons include several different possibilities, Blue Moons are pretty common! The next Blue Moon (second full moon in one calendar month) will be one year from today – January 31, 2018. Follow the links below to learn more about Blue Moons:

Last seasonal Blue Moon on May 21, 2016.

Next monthly Blue Moon on January 31, 2018.

Which Blue Moon definition is better?

Can a moon be blue in color?

Can there be two Blue Moons in a single calendar year?

Desert Blue Moon from our friend Priya Kumar in Oman. August, 2012. Thank you, Priya!

Blue Moon as third full moon of four in a season. The Maine Farmer’s Almanac defined a Blue Moon as an extra full moon that occurred in a season. One season – winter, spring, fall, summer – typically has three full moons. If a season has four full moons, then the third full moon may be called a Blue Moon.

There was a Blue Moon by this definition happened on November 21, 2010. Another occurred on August 20-21, 2013.

It last happened on May 21, 2016.

The next seasonal Blue Moon (third of four full moons in one season) will take place on May 18, 2019.

This photo was created using special blue filters, too. Image via EarthSky Facebook friend Jv Noriega.

Next monthly Blue Moon on January 31, 2018. In recent decades, many people have begun using the name Blue Moon to describe the second full moon of a calendar month. There was a full moon on July 2, 2015. There was another full moon on July 31, 2015. So the July 31, 2015, full moon was called a Blue Moon, according to this definition.

The next one will be on January 31, 2018.

The time between one full moon and the next is close to the length of a calendar month. So the only time one month can have two full moons is when the first full moon happens in the first few days of the month. This happens every 2-3 years, so these sorts of Blue Moons come about that often.

The idea of a Blue Moon as the second full moon in a month stemmed from the March 1946 issue of Sky and Telescope magazine, which contained an article called “Once in a Blue Moon” by James Hugh Pruett. Pruett was referring to the 1937 Maine Farmer’s Almanac, but he inadvertently simplified the definition. He wrote:

Seven times in 19 years there were — and still are — 13 full moons in a year. This gives 11 months with one full moon each and one with two. This second in a month, so I interpret it, was called Blue Moon.

Had James Hugh Pruett looked at the actual date of the 1937 Blue Moon, he would have found that it had occurred on August 21, 1937. Also, there were only 12 full moons in 1937. You need 13 full moons in one calendar year to have two full moons in one calendar month.

However, that fortuitous oversight gave birth to a new and perfectly understandable definition for Blue Moon.

EarthSky’s Deborah Byrd happened upon a copy of this old 1946 issue of Sky and Telescope in the stacks of the Peridier Library at the University of Texas Astronomy Department in the late 1970s. Afterward, she began using the term Blue Moon to describe the second full moon in a calendar month on the radio. Later, this definition of Blue Moon was also popularized by a book for children by Margot McLoon-Basta and Alice Sigel, called “Kids’ World Almanac of Records and Facts,” published in New York by World Almanac Publications, in 1985. The second-full-moon-in-a-month definition was also used in the board game Trivial Pursuit.

Today, it has become part of folklore.

What most call a Blue Moon isn't blue in color. It's only Blue in name. This great moon photo from EarthSky Facebook friend Rebecca Lacey in Cambridge, Idaho.

Which Blue Moon definition is better? In recent years, a controversy has raged – mainly among purists – about which Blue Moon definition is better. The idea of a Blue Moon as the third of four in a season may be older than the idea of a Blue Moon as the second full moon in a month. Is it better? Is one definition right and the other wrong?

Opinions vary, but, remember, this is folklore. So we, the folk, get to decide. In the 21st century, both sorts of full moons have been called Blue.

As the folklorist Phillip Hiscock wrote in his comprehensive article Folklore of the Blue Moon:

Old folklore it is not, but real folklore it is.

Can a moon be blue in color? There’s one kind of blue moon that is still rare. It’s very rare that you would see a blue-colored moon, although unusual sky conditions – certain-sized particles of dust or smoke – can create them.

Blue-colored moons aren’t predictable. So don’t be misled by the photo above. The sorts of moons people commonly call Blue Moons aren’t usually blue.

For more about truly blue-colored moons, click here.

Enjoying EarthSky so far? Sign up for our free daily newsletter today!

Can there be two Blue Moons in a single calendar year? Yes. It last happened in 1999. There were two full moons in January and two full moons in March and no full moon in February. So both January and March had Blue Moons.

The next year of double monthly blue moons is coming up in January and March, 2018 – and then, after that, in January and March, 2037.

Very rarely, a monthly Blue Moon (second of two full moons in one calendar month) and a seasonal Blue Moon (third of four full moons in one season) can occur in the same calendar year. But for this to happen, you need 13 full moons in one calendar year AND 13 full moons in between successive December solstices. This will next happen in the year 2048, when a monthly Blue Moon falls on January 31, and a seasonal Blue Moon on August 23.

Bottom line: A blue-colored moon is rare. But folklore has defined two different kinds of Blue Moons, and moons that are Blue by name have become pretty common. A Blue Moon can be the second full moon in a month. We had that sort of Blue Moon on July 31, 2015, and will happen again on January 31, 2018. Or it can be the third of four full moons in a season. That’ll be May 18, 2019.

Possible to have only 2 full moons in one season?

from EarthSky http://ift.tt/SSlbBZ

Today in science: Launch of Explorer 1

William Pickering, James Van Allen, and German scientist Wernher von Braun (from L to R) hold a model of Explorer 1, the first American satellite, on 31 January 1958 after the satellite was launched by a “Jupiter C” rocket at Cap Canaveral Space Center. Image via gettyimages.

January 31, 1958. This is the anniversary of the launch of Explorer 1, the first U.S. satellite. It was also the first satellite to carry a scientific experiment: a cosmic ray detector designed to take measurements of radiation in the space near Earth. Explorer 1’s data led to Van Allen’s hypothesis, later confirmed to be true, of the Van Allen radiation belts.

Russia had launched Sputnik 1, the world’s first artificial satellite, on October 4, 1957. Explorer 1 was launched in quick response by the U.S. It was designed and built in under three months at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) by William Hayward Pickering. Pickering was JPL’s director for 22 years until his retirement in 1976. He and his group built and operated the satellite.

Explorer 1 was tiny. It weighed just 30 pounds ( 14 kilograms) and was just under 7 feet long (203 cm). It took 114.8 minutes to complete one orbit of Earth, and therefore completed 12.54 orbits a day. Its impact was enormous and helped spur on what was to become an all-out space race.

Explorer 1 was launched with a Jupiter C rocket provided by the U.S Army Ballistic Missile Agency under the guidance of renowned rocket scientist Wernher von Braun. He worked for the Nazis during World War II, but afterwards began working for the United States. He also worked on the Apollo program by designing Saturn V, the gargantuan rocket that ultimately sent people to the moon.

Through the combined efforts of JPL and the Army Ballistic Missile Ballistic Agency, Explorer 1 launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on January 31, 1958. There was a nail-biting wait before tracking stations confirmed that Explorer 1 had gone successfully into orbit around Earth. With the launch of Explorer 1, the United States officially entered the space age. Image and caption via NASA.

The science experiment on the rocket was a cosmic ray detector, built by James Van Allen from the University of Iowa. The detector measured levels of radiation much lower than predicted. In response, Van Allen speculated that the detector was malfunctioning because of very strong radiation from charged particles trapped in the Earth’s magnetic field. This idea has been considered a long time ago by other scientists such as Kristian Birkeland and Carl Stoermer.

Another satellite, Explorer 3, sent up only two months later (after Explorer 2 failed), brought back tapes with more evidence to support Van Allen’s speculation. Explorer 4 and other probes were subsequently launched with the sole purpose of mapping what is now called the Van Allen radiation belts. In 1958, two main radiation belts were discovered. A third radiation belt was discovered by the Van Allen Probes in late 2012.

We now know that radiation belts are quite common: other planets in our solar system, Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus for example, also have radiation belts similar to Earth’s.

Explorer 1 orbited Earth for some months. It sent back its last data on May 23, 1958 and was cremated by Earth’s atmosphere on March 31, 1970. It made over 58,000 orbits of Earth in its lifetime.

Van Allen radiation belts via NASA.

Bottom line: The U.S. launched Explorer 1 59 years ago today. It led to the discovery of the Van Allen radiation belts, bands of charged particles trapped in the Earth’s magnetic field.

from EarthSky http://ift.tt/2kc84NZ

William Pickering, James Van Allen, and German scientist Wernher von Braun (from L to R) hold a model of Explorer 1, the first American satellite, on 31 January 1958 after the satellite was launched by a “Jupiter C” rocket at Cap Canaveral Space Center. Image via gettyimages.

January 31, 1958. This is the anniversary of the launch of Explorer 1, the first U.S. satellite. It was also the first satellite to carry a scientific experiment: a cosmic ray detector designed to take measurements of radiation in the space near Earth. Explorer 1’s data led to Van Allen’s hypothesis, later confirmed to be true, of the Van Allen radiation belts.

Russia had launched Sputnik 1, the world’s first artificial satellite, on October 4, 1957. Explorer 1 was launched in quick response by the U.S. It was designed and built in under three months at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) by William Hayward Pickering. Pickering was JPL’s director for 22 years until his retirement in 1976. He and his group built and operated the satellite.

Explorer 1 was tiny. It weighed just 30 pounds ( 14 kilograms) and was just under 7 feet long (203 cm). It took 114.8 minutes to complete one orbit of Earth, and therefore completed 12.54 orbits a day. Its impact was enormous and helped spur on what was to become an all-out space race.

Explorer 1 was launched with a Jupiter C rocket provided by the U.S Army Ballistic Missile Agency under the guidance of renowned rocket scientist Wernher von Braun. He worked for the Nazis during World War II, but afterwards began working for the United States. He also worked on the Apollo program by designing Saturn V, the gargantuan rocket that ultimately sent people to the moon.

Through the combined efforts of JPL and the Army Ballistic Missile Ballistic Agency, Explorer 1 launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on January 31, 1958. There was a nail-biting wait before tracking stations confirmed that Explorer 1 had gone successfully into orbit around Earth. With the launch of Explorer 1, the United States officially entered the space age. Image and caption via NASA.

The science experiment on the rocket was a cosmic ray detector, built by James Van Allen from the University of Iowa. The detector measured levels of radiation much lower than predicted. In response, Van Allen speculated that the detector was malfunctioning because of very strong radiation from charged particles trapped in the Earth’s magnetic field. This idea has been considered a long time ago by other scientists such as Kristian Birkeland and Carl Stoermer.

Another satellite, Explorer 3, sent up only two months later (after Explorer 2 failed), brought back tapes with more evidence to support Van Allen’s speculation. Explorer 4 and other probes were subsequently launched with the sole purpose of mapping what is now called the Van Allen radiation belts. In 1958, two main radiation belts were discovered. A third radiation belt was discovered by the Van Allen Probes in late 2012.

We now know that radiation belts are quite common: other planets in our solar system, Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus for example, also have radiation belts similar to Earth’s.

Explorer 1 orbited Earth for some months. It sent back its last data on May 23, 1958 and was cremated by Earth’s atmosphere on March 31, 1970. It made over 58,000 orbits of Earth in its lifetime.

Van Allen radiation belts via NASA.

Bottom line: The U.S. launched Explorer 1 59 years ago today. It led to the discovery of the Van Allen radiation belts, bands of charged particles trapped in the Earth’s magnetic field.

from EarthSky http://ift.tt/2kc84NZ

Don’t miss the moon, Venus, Mars triangle

Tonight – January 31, 2017 – look in a general westward direction after sunset to enjoy a close-knit couple, the moon and Venus. A fainter object, Mars, is also nearby so that these three objects, all neighbors to Earth in orbit around our sun, make a triangle on the sky’s dome. The moon and Venus will pop out into your evening twilight almost immediately after sundown. That’s because they rank as the second-brightest and third-brightest heavenly bodies, respectively, after the sun. As dusk turns into darkness, watch for the planet Mars to appear on the sky’s dome, near the waxing crescent moon and dazzling Venus.

Or, if you have binoculars, try spotting Mars near the moon and Venus before nightfall. Venus shines some 185 times more brilliantly than Mars does at present, explaining why Venus comes out first thing at dusk whereas Mars must wait until dark to make its presence known.

Venus, the second planet outward from the sun, lies inside Earth’s orbit; and Mars, the fourth planet outward, resides outside of Earth’s orbit. So how is it possible, some of our readers have asked us over the years, for an inferior planet (like Venus) and an superior planet (like Mars) to appear in the same part of the sky?

The chart below of the inner solar system (Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars) for January 31, 2017 helps to explain. You can see that Earth, Venus and Mars almost make a straight line in space on this date.

The inner solar system on January 31, 2017 via Solar System Live.

We are looking down upon the ecliptic (Earth’s orbital plane) from north side of the solar system, whereby all the planets orbit the sun in a counterclockwise direction. Our planet Earth rotates on its axis in a counterclockwise direction, as well, placing Venus and Mars in Earth’s evening sky.

The moon, Venus and Mars appear in nearly the same spot on the sky’s dome, but are actually nowhere close together in space. Click here to find out the present distances of Venus and Mars from Earth in astronomical units (AU).

Bottom line: As soon as darkness falls on January 31, 2017, see a beautiful trio – the moon, Venus and Mars – gracing the evening sky. Look west!

from EarthSky http://ift.tt/2jOIEXT

Tonight – January 31, 2017 – look in a general westward direction after sunset to enjoy a close-knit couple, the moon and Venus. A fainter object, Mars, is also nearby so that these three objects, all neighbors to Earth in orbit around our sun, make a triangle on the sky’s dome. The moon and Venus will pop out into your evening twilight almost immediately after sundown. That’s because they rank as the second-brightest and third-brightest heavenly bodies, respectively, after the sun. As dusk turns into darkness, watch for the planet Mars to appear on the sky’s dome, near the waxing crescent moon and dazzling Venus.

Or, if you have binoculars, try spotting Mars near the moon and Venus before nightfall. Venus shines some 185 times more brilliantly than Mars does at present, explaining why Venus comes out first thing at dusk whereas Mars must wait until dark to make its presence known.

Venus, the second planet outward from the sun, lies inside Earth’s orbit; and Mars, the fourth planet outward, resides outside of Earth’s orbit. So how is it possible, some of our readers have asked us over the years, for an inferior planet (like Venus) and an superior planet (like Mars) to appear in the same part of the sky?

The chart below of the inner solar system (Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars) for January 31, 2017 helps to explain. You can see that Earth, Venus and Mars almost make a straight line in space on this date.

The inner solar system on January 31, 2017 via Solar System Live.

We are looking down upon the ecliptic (Earth’s orbital plane) from north side of the solar system, whereby all the planets orbit the sun in a counterclockwise direction. Our planet Earth rotates on its axis in a counterclockwise direction, as well, placing Venus and Mars in Earth’s evening sky.

The moon, Venus and Mars appear in nearly the same spot on the sky’s dome, but are actually nowhere close together in space. Click here to find out the present distances of Venus and Mars from Earth in astronomical units (AU).

Bottom line: As soon as darkness falls on January 31, 2017, see a beautiful trio – the moon, Venus and Mars – gracing the evening sky. Look west!

from EarthSky http://ift.tt/2jOIEXT

Holocaust denial from the White House on International Holocaust Remembrance Day [Respectful Insolence]

Most of my regular readers probably haven’t been following this blog long enough to know it, but early in its history this blog was more of a general skeptical blog. True, it always had a heavy emphasis on medical science and pseudoscience, but I also used to write about evolution and other topics from a skeptic perspective. Back then, dating back to the very earliest days after I discovered blogging, Holocaust denial was a frequent topic on this blog because it was a big interest of mine. It still is, even though I haven’t had much opportunity to write about it over the last few years. It was just one of the topics that I drifted away from as this blog became more tightly focused on medicine.

That’s why I debated about whether I was going to write about this or not. I had a topic all lined up for today, but ultimately decided that it could wait for a day, as I simultaneously kicked myself for not cranking something out over the weekend, given what happened: The White House engaged in Holocaust denial, when it issued a statement on Holocaust Remembrance Day last Friday:

It is with a heavy heart and somber mind that we remember and honor the victims, survivors, heroes of the Holocaust. It is impossible to fully fathom the depravity and horror inflicted on innocent people by Nazi terror.

Yet, we know that in the darkest hours of humanity, light shines the brightest.‎ As we remember those who died, we are deeply grateful to those who risked their lives to save the innocent.

In the name of the perished, I pledge to do everything in my power throughout my Presidency, and my life, to ensure that the forces of evil never again defeat the powers of good. Together, we will make love and tolerance prevalent throughout the world.

Do you notice anything? Lots of people did, including someone with whom I seldom agree but who was correct in this case to label the above statement The White House Holocaust Horror. Others called it out for what it is, a form of Holocaust denial, because that’s what it is. Here’s Senator Tim Kaine, for example:

Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt, someone whom I admire a great deal and the subject of the recent film Denial, which portrays her legal battle with David Irving, who sued her for libel in the UK for correctly characterizing him as a Holocaust denier, characterized the “de-Judaization of the Holocaust, as exemplified by the White House statement” as “softcore Holocaust denial.”

Now, I’m sure that there will be readers out there who think this is hyperbole, that I’m exaggerating. I will also confess that at first I wasn’t sure if this was cluelessness or intentional. A reader reminded me of an example of an atheist organization doing just this sort of thing as part of a protest against the use of the Star of David in a then-proposed Holocaust memorial in Columbus, Ohio. That was cluelessness. At first, I thought the White House statement was cluelessness, but it wasn’t. I was quickly disabused of that notion by White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus showing up on Meet The Press to defend the White House statement. Administration spokesperson Hope Hicks also took to the air to lay down the obfuscation, saying that “despite what the media reports, we are an incredible inclusive group and we took into account all of those who suffered.” In other words, the omission of any mention of the Jews in the White House statement was intentional.

So why was this omission of the Jews a form of Holocaust denial? Prof. Lipstadt, who followed a similar trajectory as I did, at first thinking the statement a “rookie mistake,” begins the explanation:

I quickly learned that the White House had released a statement for Holocaust Remembrance Day that did not mention Jews or anti-Semitism. Instead it bemoaned the “innocent victims.” The internet was buzzing and many people were fuming. Though no fan of Trump, I chalked it up as a rookie mistake by a new administration busy issuing a slew of executive orders. Someone had screwed up. I refused to get agitated, and counseled my growing number of correspondents to hold their fire. A clarification would certainly soon follow. I was wrong.

In a clumsy defense Hope Hicks, the White House director of strategic communications, insisted that, the White House, by not referring to Jews, was acting in an “inclusive” manner. It deserved praise not condemnation. Hicks pointed those who inquired to an article which bemoaned the fact that, too often the “other” victims of the Holocaust were forgotten. Underlying this claim is the contention that the Jews are “stealing” the Holocaust for themselves. It is a calumny founded in anti-Semitism.

I will continue it.

So why the controversy? Why all the outrage? Surely it’s not wrong to “include” all the other groups targeted for extermination by the Nazis, such as the Roma, homosexuals, the mentally retarded, and people with mental illnesses, is it? It depends on what you mean by “wrong.” It’s not wrong in that it’s not a bad thing to be inclusive and not to forget the other victims of the Holocaust. On the other hand, intentionally leaving the Jews out of an official statement reveals an intent to provide a distorted view of what the Holocaust actually was. Jews were central to the Holocaust.

As Gord McFee put it:

Does the focus on the Jewishness of the Holocaust take away from or minimize the suffering of the millions of non-Jews who were persecuted? Do the Jews, unintentionally perhaps, try to keep all the suffering for themselves? No. On the other hand, does the Holocaust have a particularly crucial and central Jewish element, even though millions of others died? Simply put, the answer is yes. The Holocaust, from its conception to its implementation had a distinctly Jewish aspect to it and, arguably without this Jewish aspect, there would have been no Holocaust. Most of the non-Jewish people would not have been killed because the killing machinery would not have been put into operation.

Coincidentally, about a week before the statement, I had just finished reading part one of Volker Ullrich’s excellent new biography of Adolf Hitler, Hitler: The Ascent (1889-1939). Even though Part 1 ended just before the invasion of Poland, Ullrich included plenty of discussion of the antisemitism that animated the Nazi Party and Adolf Hitler dating back to at least 1920. Indeed, one of the most puzzling questions in considering Hitler is the origin of his extreme antisemitism. Even though information about his life before he joined the Nazi party is sketchy and sources contradictory, with some claiming Hitler was antisemitic as early as his time in Linz, others saying it originated during his time in Vienna, while still others thinking it originated later, after the defeat of Germany in World War I. Everyone agrees, however, that from 1919 through the early 1920s, Hitler demonstrated increasingly intense antisemitism expressed through increasingly violent and apocalyptic imagery.. Whatever the source of Hitler’s antisemitism, it was one of the animating forces of Nazi-ism, arguably the animating force. Indeed, Nazis regularly harassed and attacked Jews, while Hitler and other Nazis routinely referred to them as “our misfortune” in speeches and predicted a day of reckoning. Not suprirsingly, Jews were the first people targeted when Hitler came to power in 1933 and remained their target until Berlin burned in 1945.

Ever since Donald Trump became a candidate for President and support of the alt right (translation: white nationalists) coalesced around him, I’ve periodically remarked that, having drifted away from the topic, I never thought that all that knowledge of the Holocaust, Nazis, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists would ever come in handy again. To this I always add how sad I am that this knowledge has unexpectedly come in very handy all too many times in reent months. In any case, I knew immediately that it’s a common, long-standing Holocaust denial trope to deny the centrality of Jews to the Holocaust. Basically, Holocaust deniers will say something along the lines of, “The Nazis killed lots of people during the Holocaust, not just Jews. What makes the Jews so special? The Holocaust was about more than the Jews.” Sound familiar? That’s almost exactly what Trump administration flacks have been saying since Friday with its language about how Trump was trying to be “inclusive.” The part about “What makes the Jews so special?” was implied, but not missed, as we will see.

Let’s be clear, though. The central purpose of the Holocaust was to rid the Reich of its Jews, and the Jews were central to the Holocaust. It started with taking away their rights, then evolved to violence against them, both promoted and carried out by the government, then to forced expulsion, and then finally to mass extermination. Yes, the Holocaust later expanded to target lot of other groups that the Nazis didn’t like, but it started with the Jews. To deny this is to deny the essence of the Holocaust.

As Podhoretz puts it:

No, Hope Hicks, and no to whomever you are serving as a mouthpiece. The Nazis killed an astonishing number of people in monstrous ways and targeted certain groups—Gypsies, the mentally challenged, and open homosexuals, among others. But the Final Solution was aimed solely at the Jews. The Holocaust was about the Jews. There is no “proud” way to offer a remembrance of the Holocaust that does not reflect that simple, awful, world-historical fact. To universalize it to “all those who suffered” is to scrub the Holocaust of its meaning.

Prof. Lipstadt agrees:

There were indeed millions of innocent people whom the Nazis killed in many horrific ways, some in the course of the war and some because the Germans perceived them—however deluded their perception—to pose a threat to their rule. They suffered terribly. But that was not the Holocaust.

The Holocaust was something entirely different. It was an organized program with the goal of wiping out a specific people. Jews did not have to do anything to be perceived as worthy of being murdered. Old people who had to be wheeled to the deportation trains and babies who had to be carried were all to be killed. The point was not, as in occupied countries, to get rid of people because they might mount a resistance to Nazism, but to get rid of Jews because they were Jews. Roma (Gypsies) were also targeted. Many were murdered. But the Nazi anti-Roma policy was inconsistent. Some could live in peace and even serve in the German army.

I cant’ help but note here that those who seek to minimize the centrality of the Jews to the Holocaust sometimes like to point out that Communists were also targeted, but such an argument conveniently neglects the way that Hitler conflated Jews and Communism, believing Communism to be a product of Jews and frequently invoking “Judeo-Bolshevism” as the enemy of the Germany people. This is a common conspiracy theory that views Communism as a Jewish conspiracy, positing that Jews dominate and control worldwide Communist movements.

Prof. Lipstadt further observes:

Softcore denial uses different tactics but has the same end-goal. (I use hardcore and softcore deliberately because I see denial as a form of historiographic pornography.) It does not deny the facts, but it minimizes them, arguing that Jews use the Holocaust to draw attention away from criticism of Israel. Softcore denial also makes all sorts of false comparisons to the Holocaust. In certain Eastern European countries today, those who fought the Nazis may be lauded, but if they did so with a communist resistance group they may be prosecuted. Softcore denial also includes Holocaust minimization, as when someone suggests it was not so bad. “Why are we hearing about that again?”

A lot of people don’t understand that, just as there are gradations of antivaccine views (for example), there are gradations of Holocaust denial. Relatively few deniers outright deny that millions of Jews died during the Holocaust. There is just too much evidence that they did for even the most antisemitic of Nazis to outright deny it. There are some, of course, who claim that millions of Jews didn’t die, that there were no gas chambers, and that the Holocaust is all a big Jewish conspiracy, the “Holohoax,” as some call it. They’re the equivalent gradation of Holocaust denier as antivaxers who deny that vaccines work at all and claim they are dangerous or cause disease instead of preventing it are among vaccine denialists. (No, I’m not saying antivaccinationists are the equivalent of Holocaust deniers, just that the two denialism systems exist along their own spectrums of denialist beliefs, not as a yes/no clearcut dichotomy.) Then there are the “softcore” Holocaust deniers, as Prof. Lipstadt terms them. They range from conceding that millions of Jews were killed during World War II and denying that there was a systematic plan (the “World War II was horrible and millions of civilians died” gambit) to those who concede that millions of Jews were targeted and killed but, as the White House statement did, “de-Judaize” it by pointing to the other groups targeted by Nazis. (The “Nazis were horrible and targeted lots of groups” gambit.) In levels of denial, the equivalent would be the “too many too soon” antivaccine activists, who concede that vaccines prevent disease but promote “concerns” that somehow the current vaccine schedule is too much of a good thing that “overwhelms” a baby’s immune system.

Of course, one way to tell if this is Holocaust denial is to look at how real Holocaust deniers reacted to it, for example, Chemi Shalev:

Daily Stormer praises Trump for daring to reject Jewish "science fiction" about Holocaust. https://t.co/yt8b6fN8gu

— Chemi Shalev (@ChemiShalev) January 29, 2017

A Trump supporter responded:

@ChemiShalev There were no gas chambers. You're lucky Trump doesn't launch an official investigation to debunk the whole thing.

— Conservo-Nationalist (@Tabula_Media) January 29, 2017

And:

After 70 years of guilt tripping society with a constant barrage of Holocaust propaganda, is it time for Jews to get over it?

— Conservo-Nationalist (@Tabula_Media) January 30, 2017

You get the idea.

The Daily Stormer is, of course, a vile, white supremacist, neo-Nazi site. The article linked to above was written by Erik Striker and characterizes “organized Jewry” as “frothing at the mouth” over Trump’s statement. It also includes gems like:

The political “misstep”? Equating the suffering of all innocent people in World War II with the sufferink of Jews, which we all are supposed to know is different because Jews are a superior race.

This is the first time in history the President of the United States has made no mention of Jews, anti-Semitism, or the science fiction Zionist folklore about ovens and gas chambers so prominent in (((Hollywood))) narratives.

The Six Million meme Jews require their agents to constantly repeat through amplifiers in order to make the lie stick was also avoided. Without constant repetition, the myth and meme begins to decompose.

The writers at The Daily Stormer are hardcore Holocaust deniers, hence the reference to the “Six Million meme” and “myth.” Either way a real Holocaust denier of the “Holohoax” variety, is happy that Trump is “exceeding expectations in pushing back against Jewish supremacy.” Elsewhere, Andrew Anglin gloats, “Do you get it now, Jews? The jig is up.”

Of course, none of this should be surprising. As Mark Hoofnagle points out, candidate Trump played footsie with white nationalists, who in turn adore him, and has been “hiring white nationalists, including Steve Bannon (also an alleged anti-Semite), and repeating propaganda from white supremacists (eg whitegenocide) and neo-nazis repeatedly during the campaign (anyone remember the “Sheriff’s Star”?),” summing it all up:

To summarize, this is classic Holocaust denial from an administration that (1) has been documented courting racists and neo-Nazis, (2) has a known white nationalist as a political advisor to the president, (3) has admitted the exclusion of the Jews from the statement was purposeful, (4) has expressed no regret about excluding Jews from the statement, and (5) received acclaim from neo-Nazis for the use of this language.

Exactly.

Sadly, I’m beginning to wonder if this is the reading list at the White House.

The bottom line is disturbing. Not only do we have a science-denying administration in power, as evidenced by the appointment of anthropogenic global climate change denialists in positions of power, meeting with antivaccinationists like Andrew Wakefield and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., appointing a member of a crank medical organization as Secretary of Health and Human Services, and considering for the position of FDA commissioner technolibertarian cranks who think that online rating systems can replace science, but this administration openly spouts “softcore” Holocaust denial on Holocaust Remembrance Day, the same day Trump instituted a ban on refugees and immigrants from seven Middle Eastern countries that he linked to terrorism. I used to say that I feared for medical science under Donald Trump, but now I fear that that’s the least of my worries for the next four years.

I also keep saying that nothing Donald Trump does surprises me any more, but fear that he’ll prove me wrong.

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2kOX87Z

Most of my regular readers probably haven’t been following this blog long enough to know it, but early in its history this blog was more of a general skeptical blog. True, it always had a heavy emphasis on medical science and pseudoscience, but I also used to write about evolution and other topics from a skeptic perspective. Back then, dating back to the very earliest days after I discovered blogging, Holocaust denial was a frequent topic on this blog because it was a big interest of mine. It still is, even though I haven’t had much opportunity to write about it over the last few years. It was just one of the topics that I drifted away from as this blog became more tightly focused on medicine.

That’s why I debated about whether I was going to write about this or not. I had a topic all lined up for today, but ultimately decided that it could wait for a day, as I simultaneously kicked myself for not cranking something out over the weekend, given what happened: The White House engaged in Holocaust denial, when it issued a statement on Holocaust Remembrance Day last Friday:

It is with a heavy heart and somber mind that we remember and honor the victims, survivors, heroes of the Holocaust. It is impossible to fully fathom the depravity and horror inflicted on innocent people by Nazi terror.

Yet, we know that in the darkest hours of humanity, light shines the brightest.‎ As we remember those who died, we are deeply grateful to those who risked their lives to save the innocent.

In the name of the perished, I pledge to do everything in my power throughout my Presidency, and my life, to ensure that the forces of evil never again defeat the powers of good. Together, we will make love and tolerance prevalent throughout the world.

Do you notice anything? Lots of people did, including someone with whom I seldom agree but who was correct in this case to label the above statement The White House Holocaust Horror. Others called it out for what it is, a form of Holocaust denial, because that’s what it is. Here’s Senator Tim Kaine, for example:

Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt, someone whom I admire a great deal and the subject of the recent film Denial, which portrays her legal battle with David Irving, who sued her for libel in the UK for correctly characterizing him as a Holocaust denier, characterized the “de-Judaization of the Holocaust, as exemplified by the White House statement” as “softcore Holocaust denial.”

Now, I’m sure that there will be readers out there who think this is hyperbole, that I’m exaggerating. I will also confess that at first I wasn’t sure if this was cluelessness or intentional. A reader reminded me of an example of an atheist organization doing just this sort of thing as part of a protest against the use of the Star of David in a then-proposed Holocaust memorial in Columbus, Ohio. That was cluelessness. At first, I thought the White House statement was cluelessness, but it wasn’t. I was quickly disabused of that notion by White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus showing up on Meet The Press to defend the White House statement. Administration spokesperson Hope Hicks also took to the air to lay down the obfuscation, saying that “despite what the media reports, we are an incredible inclusive group and we took into account all of those who suffered.” In other words, the omission of any mention of the Jews in the White House statement was intentional.

So why was this omission of the Jews a form of Holocaust denial? Prof. Lipstadt, who followed a similar trajectory as I did, at first thinking the statement a “rookie mistake,” begins the explanation:

I quickly learned that the White House had released a statement for Holocaust Remembrance Day that did not mention Jews or anti-Semitism. Instead it bemoaned the “innocent victims.” The internet was buzzing and many people were fuming. Though no fan of Trump, I chalked it up as a rookie mistake by a new administration busy issuing a slew of executive orders. Someone had screwed up. I refused to get agitated, and counseled my growing number of correspondents to hold their fire. A clarification would certainly soon follow. I was wrong.

In a clumsy defense Hope Hicks, the White House director of strategic communications, insisted that, the White House, by not referring to Jews, was acting in an “inclusive” manner. It deserved praise not condemnation. Hicks pointed those who inquired to an article which bemoaned the fact that, too often the “other” victims of the Holocaust were forgotten. Underlying this claim is the contention that the Jews are “stealing” the Holocaust for themselves. It is a calumny founded in anti-Semitism.

I will continue it.

So why the controversy? Why all the outrage? Surely it’s not wrong to “include” all the other groups targeted for extermination by the Nazis, such as the Roma, homosexuals, the mentally retarded, and people with mental illnesses, is it? It depends on what you mean by “wrong.” It’s not wrong in that it’s not a bad thing to be inclusive and not to forget the other victims of the Holocaust. On the other hand, intentionally leaving the Jews out of an official statement reveals an intent to provide a distorted view of what the Holocaust actually was. Jews were central to the Holocaust.

As Gord McFee put it:

Does the focus on the Jewishness of the Holocaust take away from or minimize the suffering of the millions of non-Jews who were persecuted? Do the Jews, unintentionally perhaps, try to keep all the suffering for themselves? No. On the other hand, does the Holocaust have a particularly crucial and central Jewish element, even though millions of others died? Simply put, the answer is yes. The Holocaust, from its conception to its implementation had a distinctly Jewish aspect to it and, arguably without this Jewish aspect, there would have been no Holocaust. Most of the non-Jewish people would not have been killed because the killing machinery would not have been put into operation.

Coincidentally, about a week before the statement, I had just finished reading part one of Volker Ullrich’s excellent new biography of Adolf Hitler, Hitler: The Ascent (1889-1939). Even though Part 1 ended just before the invasion of Poland, Ullrich included plenty of discussion of the antisemitism that animated the Nazi Party and Adolf Hitler dating back to at least 1920. Indeed, one of the most puzzling questions in considering Hitler is the origin of his extreme antisemitism. Even though information about his life before he joined the Nazi party is sketchy and sources contradictory, with some claiming Hitler was antisemitic as early as his time in Linz, others saying it originated during his time in Vienna, while still others thinking it originated later, after the defeat of Germany in World War I. Everyone agrees, however, that from 1919 through the early 1920s, Hitler demonstrated increasingly intense antisemitism expressed through increasingly violent and apocalyptic imagery.. Whatever the source of Hitler’s antisemitism, it was one of the animating forces of Nazi-ism, arguably the animating force. Indeed, Nazis regularly harassed and attacked Jews, while Hitler and other Nazis routinely referred to them as “our misfortune” in speeches and predicted a day of reckoning. Not suprirsingly, Jews were the first people targeted when Hitler came to power in 1933 and remained their target until Berlin burned in 1945.

Ever since Donald Trump became a candidate for President and support of the alt right (translation: white nationalists) coalesced around him, I’ve periodically remarked that, having drifted away from the topic, I never thought that all that knowledge of the Holocaust, Nazis, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists would ever come in handy again. To this I always add how sad I am that this knowledge has unexpectedly come in very handy all too many times in reent months. In any case, I knew immediately that it’s a common, long-standing Holocaust denial trope to deny the centrality of Jews to the Holocaust. Basically, Holocaust deniers will say something along the lines of, “The Nazis killed lots of people during the Holocaust, not just Jews. What makes the Jews so special? The Holocaust was about more than the Jews.” Sound familiar? That’s almost exactly what Trump administration flacks have been saying since Friday with its language about how Trump was trying to be “inclusive.” The part about “What makes the Jews so special?” was implied, but not missed, as we will see.

Let’s be clear, though. The central purpose of the Holocaust was to rid the Reich of its Jews, and the Jews were central to the Holocaust. It started with taking away their rights, then evolved to violence against them, both promoted and carried out by the government, then to forced expulsion, and then finally to mass extermination. Yes, the Holocaust later expanded to target lot of other groups that the Nazis didn’t like, but it started with the Jews. To deny this is to deny the essence of the Holocaust.

As Podhoretz puts it:

No, Hope Hicks, and no to whomever you are serving as a mouthpiece. The Nazis killed an astonishing number of people in monstrous ways and targeted certain groups—Gypsies, the mentally challenged, and open homosexuals, among others. But the Final Solution was aimed solely at the Jews. The Holocaust was about the Jews. There is no “proud” way to offer a remembrance of the Holocaust that does not reflect that simple, awful, world-historical fact. To universalize it to “all those who suffered” is to scrub the Holocaust of its meaning.

Prof. Lipstadt agrees:

There were indeed millions of innocent people whom the Nazis killed in many horrific ways, some in the course of the war and some because the Germans perceived them—however deluded their perception—to pose a threat to their rule. They suffered terribly. But that was not the Holocaust.

The Holocaust was something entirely different. It was an organized program with the goal of wiping out a specific people. Jews did not have to do anything to be perceived as worthy of being murdered. Old people who had to be wheeled to the deportation trains and babies who had to be carried were all to be killed. The point was not, as in occupied countries, to get rid of people because they might mount a resistance to Nazism, but to get rid of Jews because they were Jews. Roma (Gypsies) were also targeted. Many were murdered. But the Nazi anti-Roma policy was inconsistent. Some could live in peace and even serve in the German army.

I cant’ help but note here that those who seek to minimize the centrality of the Jews to the Holocaust sometimes like to point out that Communists were also targeted, but such an argument conveniently neglects the way that Hitler conflated Jews and Communism, believing Communism to be a product of Jews and frequently invoking “Judeo-Bolshevism” as the enemy of the Germany people. This is a common conspiracy theory that views Communism as a Jewish conspiracy, positing that Jews dominate and control worldwide Communist movements.

Prof. Lipstadt further observes:

Softcore denial uses different tactics but has the same end-goal. (I use hardcore and softcore deliberately because I see denial as a form of historiographic pornography.) It does not deny the facts, but it minimizes them, arguing that Jews use the Holocaust to draw attention away from criticism of Israel. Softcore denial also makes all sorts of false comparisons to the Holocaust. In certain Eastern European countries today, those who fought the Nazis may be lauded, but if they did so with a communist resistance group they may be prosecuted. Softcore denial also includes Holocaust minimization, as when someone suggests it was not so bad. “Why are we hearing about that again?”

A lot of people don’t understand that, just as there are gradations of antivaccine views (for example), there are gradations of Holocaust denial. Relatively few deniers outright deny that millions of Jews died during the Holocaust. There is just too much evidence that they did for even the most antisemitic of Nazis to outright deny it. There are some, of course, who claim that millions of Jews didn’t die, that there were no gas chambers, and that the Holocaust is all a big Jewish conspiracy, the “Holohoax,” as some call it. They’re the equivalent gradation of Holocaust denier as antivaxers who deny that vaccines work at all and claim they are dangerous or cause disease instead of preventing it are among vaccine denialists. (No, I’m not saying antivaccinationists are the equivalent of Holocaust deniers, just that the two denialism systems exist along their own spectrums of denialist beliefs, not as a yes/no clearcut dichotomy.) Then there are the “softcore” Holocaust deniers, as Prof. Lipstadt terms them. They range from conceding that millions of Jews were killed during World War II and denying that there was a systematic plan (the “World War II was horrible and millions of civilians died” gambit) to those who concede that millions of Jews were targeted and killed but, as the White House statement did, “de-Judaize” it by pointing to the other groups targeted by Nazis. (The “Nazis were horrible and targeted lots of groups” gambit.) In levels of denial, the equivalent would be the “too many too soon” antivaccine activists, who concede that vaccines prevent disease but promote “concerns” that somehow the current vaccine schedule is too much of a good thing that “overwhelms” a baby’s immune system.

Of course, one way to tell if this is Holocaust denial is to look at how real Holocaust deniers reacted to it, for example, Chemi Shalev:

Daily Stormer praises Trump for daring to reject Jewish "science fiction" about Holocaust. https://t.co/yt8b6fN8gu

— Chemi Shalev (@ChemiShalev) January 29, 2017

A Trump supporter responded:

@ChemiShalev There were no gas chambers. You're lucky Trump doesn't launch an official investigation to debunk the whole thing.

— Conservo-Nationalist (@Tabula_Media) January 29, 2017

And:

After 70 years of guilt tripping society with a constant barrage of Holocaust propaganda, is it time for Jews to get over it?

— Conservo-Nationalist (@Tabula_Media) January 30, 2017

You get the idea.

The Daily Stormer is, of course, a vile, white supremacist, neo-Nazi site. The article linked to above was written by Erik Striker and characterizes “organized Jewry” as “frothing at the mouth” over Trump’s statement. It also includes gems like:

The political “misstep”? Equating the suffering of all innocent people in World War II with the sufferink of Jews, which we all are supposed to know is different because Jews are a superior race.

This is the first time in history the President of the United States has made no mention of Jews, anti-Semitism, or the science fiction Zionist folklore about ovens and gas chambers so prominent in (((Hollywood))) narratives.

The Six Million meme Jews require their agents to constantly repeat through amplifiers in order to make the lie stick was also avoided. Without constant repetition, the myth and meme begins to decompose.

The writers at The Daily Stormer are hardcore Holocaust deniers, hence the reference to the “Six Million meme” and “myth.” Either way a real Holocaust denier of the “Holohoax” variety, is happy that Trump is “exceeding expectations in pushing back against Jewish supremacy.” Elsewhere, Andrew Anglin gloats, “Do you get it now, Jews? The jig is up.”

Of course, none of this should be surprising. As Mark Hoofnagle points out, candidate Trump played footsie with white nationalists, who in turn adore him, and has been “hiring white nationalists, including Steve Bannon (also an alleged anti-Semite), and repeating propaganda from white supremacists (eg whitegenocide) and neo-nazis repeatedly during the campaign (anyone remember the “Sheriff’s Star”?),” summing it all up:

To summarize, this is classic Holocaust denial from an administration that (1) has been documented courting racists and neo-Nazis, (2) has a known white nationalist as a political advisor to the president, (3) has admitted the exclusion of the Jews from the statement was purposeful, (4) has expressed no regret about excluding Jews from the statement, and (5) received acclaim from neo-Nazis for the use of this language.

Exactly.

Sadly, I’m beginning to wonder if this is the reading list at the White House.

The bottom line is disturbing. Not only do we have a science-denying administration in power, as evidenced by the appointment of anthropogenic global climate change denialists in positions of power, meeting with antivaccinationists like Andrew Wakefield and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., appointing a member of a crank medical organization as Secretary of Health and Human Services, and considering for the position of FDA commissioner technolibertarian cranks who think that online rating systems can replace science, but this administration openly spouts “softcore” Holocaust denial on Holocaust Remembrance Day, the same day Trump instituted a ban on refugees and immigrants from seven Middle Eastern countries that he linked to terrorism. I used to say that I feared for medical science under Donald Trump, but now I fear that that’s the least of my worries for the next four years.

I also keep saying that nothing Donald Trump does surprises me any more, but fear that he’ll prove me wrong.

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2kOX87Z

Tillerson Embarassment [Greg Laden's Blog]

Those of us concerned with climate change are especially concerned with the nomination of former Exxon chief Rex Tillerson to be Secretary of State. Well, Rex Tillerson was just confirmed by the US Senate.

Donald Trump is the least liked president ever for this point in a term. And, Rex Tillerson is now the least liked Secretary of State, with a 56-43 vote approving his appointment.

Most of the time a SOC gets close to 100% confirming votes. This is, in fact, true of most cabinet positions most of the time. Once you know a certain nominee is going to win, you just join in, for the purposes of unity etc. etc.

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2klwFC2

Those of us concerned with climate change are especially concerned with the nomination of former Exxon chief Rex Tillerson to be Secretary of State. Well, Rex Tillerson was just confirmed by the US Senate.

Donald Trump is the least liked president ever for this point in a term. And, Rex Tillerson is now the least liked Secretary of State, with a 56-43 vote approving his appointment.

Most of the time a SOC gets close to 100% confirming votes. This is, in fact, true of most cabinet positions most of the time. Once you know a certain nominee is going to win, you just join in, for the purposes of unity etc. etc.

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2klwFC2

Mary’s Monday Metazoan: Candy stripes [Pharyngula]

Pylopaguropsis mollymullerae

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2jNtsKL

Pylopaguropsis mollymullerae

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2jNtsKL

Astronomy statement on US ‘muslim ban’

The following is the full text of the January 30, 2017 statement from the IAU.

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) is profoundly concerned by the impact the recent U.S. executive order, and possible reactions to it from other countries, could have on international collaboration in astronomy and the mobility of scientists.

The IAU’s mission is to promote and safeguard the science of astronomy in all its aspects through international cooperation. The organisation currently counts 79 countries among its National Members and includes members from a further 19 countries. With 2,841 professional astronomers in the IAU, the U.S. is the country with the largest number of IAU members, accounting for nearly a quarter of the total. Another 47 IAU members come from some of the seven countries affected by the recent executive order (Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen), and hundreds more come from other Muslim-majority countries.

The IAU considers that mobility restrictions imposed by any country, similar to the ones recently included in the U.S. executive order, run counter to its mission, which is inspired by the principles of the International Council for Science (ICSU) on the Freedom in the Conduct of Science. Such restrictions can have a direct impact on the astronomical communities of countries at both ends of the ban, as well as astronomy as a whole.

In 2015 the IAU held its General Assembly in Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, which hosted more than 3,000 astronomers from 74 countries all over the world, including some of the seven countries concerned by the US executive order. The meeting had an estimated economic benefit of around $10-20 million on the state.

The IAU urges U.S. officials to develop new screening measures to take into account the absolute necessity of mobility of scientists for the benefit of the USA, the rest of the world and science itself.

The IAU firmly opposes any discrimination based on factors such as ethnic origin, religion, citizenship, language, and political or other opinion and therefore expects U.S. officials to not discriminate on the basis of religion.

The IAU hopes that such actions from a country do not trigger a chain reaction in other countries around the globe, which would severely damage the science of astronomy, and encourages everyone to value cooperation, tolerance and peace.

The IAU General Secretary Piero Benvenuti expressed the concerns of many in the international astronomical community when he said:

The IAU hopes that any new or existing limitations to the free circulation of world citizens, deemed necessary for security reasons, take into account the necessary mobility of astronomers as well as human rights at large. We want to continue organising scientific meetings in the United States of America as well as anywhere else in the world. Scientific progress benefits all humankind and exchange meetings should include scientists from all countries.

Read more: IAU encourages astronomy without borders

IAU General Assembly 2015

Bottom line: Full text of the January 30, 2017 statement from the International
Astronomical Union on U.S. executive order limiting travel from 7 countries.

from EarthSky http://ift.tt/2kLQBiD

The following is the full text of the January 30, 2017 statement from the IAU.

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) is profoundly concerned by the impact the recent U.S. executive order, and possible reactions to it from other countries, could have on international collaboration in astronomy and the mobility of scientists.

The IAU’s mission is to promote and safeguard the science of astronomy in all its aspects through international cooperation. The organisation currently counts 79 countries among its National Members and includes members from a further 19 countries. With 2,841 professional astronomers in the IAU, the U.S. is the country with the largest number of IAU members, accounting for nearly a quarter of the total. Another 47 IAU members come from some of the seven countries affected by the recent executive order (Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen), and hundreds more come from other Muslim-majority countries.

The IAU considers that mobility restrictions imposed by any country, similar to the ones recently included in the U.S. executive order, run counter to its mission, which is inspired by the principles of the International Council for Science (ICSU) on the Freedom in the Conduct of Science. Such restrictions can have a direct impact on the astronomical communities of countries at both ends of the ban, as well as astronomy as a whole.

In 2015 the IAU held its General Assembly in Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, which hosted more than 3,000 astronomers from 74 countries all over the world, including some of the seven countries concerned by the US executive order. The meeting had an estimated economic benefit of around $10-20 million on the state.

The IAU urges U.S. officials to develop new screening measures to take into account the absolute necessity of mobility of scientists for the benefit of the USA, the rest of the world and science itself.

The IAU firmly opposes any discrimination based on factors such as ethnic origin, religion, citizenship, language, and political or other opinion and therefore expects U.S. officials to not discriminate on the basis of religion.

The IAU hopes that such actions from a country do not trigger a chain reaction in other countries around the globe, which would severely damage the science of astronomy, and encourages everyone to value cooperation, tolerance and peace.

The IAU General Secretary Piero Benvenuti expressed the concerns of many in the international astronomical community when he said:

The IAU hopes that any new or existing limitations to the free circulation of world citizens, deemed necessary for security reasons, take into account the necessary mobility of astronomers as well as human rights at large. We want to continue organising scientific meetings in the United States of America as well as anywhere else in the world. Scientific progress benefits all humankind and exchange meetings should include scientists from all countries.

Read more: IAU encourages astronomy without borders

IAU General Assembly 2015

Bottom line: Full text of the January 30, 2017 statement from the International
Astronomical Union on U.S. executive order limiting travel from 7 countries.

from EarthSky http://ift.tt/2kLQBiD

One step forward, two steps back. Dire consequences from Trump’s edict on regulations [The Pump Handle]

Hearing someone describe a situation as “one step forward, two steps back” is never a good thing.  When it involves efforts to protect people’s health or public safety, the consequences can be dire. President Trump doesn’t care. He’s making good on a ludicrous campaign pledge that for every one regulation issued, the agency will have to offset the cost by eliminating two existing regulations. He issued that order today. The nonsense goes something like this:

FAA: “We need to enhance testing requirements to protect against flocking birds affecting airplane engines, such as what occurred to US Airways Flight 1549 (flown by Capt. Sullenberger.)”

Trump:

“You want that rule? OK, let’s get rid of the pesky rule requiring a 10-hour rest period for pilots. Sleep is for sissies.

Also get rid of the rule that requires a minimum number of flight attendants. Flight attendants are over-rated. I hear they don’t even serve meals anymore.  See how easy it is–one in, two out.”

Labor Department: “Mine workers are developing lung disease from breathing too respirable silica dust. It’s a national embarrassment that U.S. workers are dying from black lung disease and silicosis. We need a regulation to reduce the amount of silica dust mine workers have to breathe on the job.

Trump:

“You want that rule?  OK, let’s get rid of the pesky rule requiring a mine operator to check regularly for proper air flow in their underground mine. It’s been more than five years since a coal mine blew-up. Also get rid of the rule that requires mine operators to build berms on roadways at surface mines. Mine workers should just be careful not to drive off a cliff. See how easy it is–one in, two out.”

Ken Kimmel, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists, said this about Trump’s edict:

“This executive order is absurd, imposing a Sophie’s choice on federal agencies. If, for example, the EPA wants to issue a new rule to protect kids from mercury exposure, will it need to get rid of  two other science-based rules, such as limiting lead in drinking water and cutting pollution from school buses?”

“It is also likely illegal. Congress has not called upon EPA to choose between clean air and clean water, and the president cannot do this by executive fiat. As is the case with so many other actions we have seen since the inauguration, Mr. Trump is capturing showy headlines while he drives us off a cliff.”

Robert Verchick, president of the Center for Progressive Reform said this about it:

“It seeks to ration the American people’s health and safety by forcing agencies to arbitrarily drop rules, even if those regulations prevent illnesses, reduce exposure to toxic chemicals, or decrease the number of deaths and serious injuries in the workplace. By focusing on the often-exaggerated costs of regulations, the order ignores the enormous, live-saving benefits that public safeguards deliver to us all. This is not effective government, it won’t create jobs, and it won’t improve our communities.”

Public Citizen also issued a statement which notes:

“This executive order (EO) is as radical and unworkable as the other ones Trump has signed. It will result in immediate and lasting damage to our government’s ability to save lives, protect our environment, police Wall Street, keep consumers safe and fight discrimination.”

The Washington Post’s story included this quintessential Trump-speak quote from the President about this new executive order:

“This will be the largest ever cut by far in terms of regulations.  If you have a regulation you want, number one we’re not going to approve it because it’s already been approved probably in 17 different forms.”

“But if we do, the only way you have a chance is we have to knock out two regulations for every new regulation. So if there’s a new regulation, they have to knock out two. But it goes way beyond that.”

What a hair-brain idea.

 

 

 

 

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2jMh25I

Hearing someone describe a situation as “one step forward, two steps back” is never a good thing.  When it involves efforts to protect people’s health or public safety, the consequences can be dire. President Trump doesn’t care. He’s making good on a ludicrous campaign pledge that for every one regulation issued, the agency will have to offset the cost by eliminating two existing regulations. He issued that order today. The nonsense goes something like this:

FAA: “We need to enhance testing requirements to protect against flocking birds affecting airplane engines, such as what occurred to US Airways Flight 1549 (flown by Capt. Sullenberger.)”

Trump:

“You want that rule? OK, let’s get rid of the pesky rule requiring a 10-hour rest period for pilots. Sleep is for sissies.

Also get rid of the rule that requires a minimum number of flight attendants. Flight attendants are over-rated. I hear they don’t even serve meals anymore.  See how easy it is–one in, two out.”

Labor Department: “Mine workers are developing lung disease from breathing too respirable silica dust. It’s a national embarrassment that U.S. workers are dying from black lung disease and silicosis. We need a regulation to reduce the amount of silica dust mine workers have to breathe on the job.

Trump:

“You want that rule?  OK, let’s get rid of the pesky rule requiring a mine operator to check regularly for proper air flow in their underground mine. It’s been more than five years since a coal mine blew-up. Also get rid of the rule that requires mine operators to build berms on roadways at surface mines. Mine workers should just be careful not to drive off a cliff. See how easy it is–one in, two out.”

Ken Kimmel, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists, said this about Trump’s edict:

“This executive order is absurd, imposing a Sophie’s choice on federal agencies. If, for example, the EPA wants to issue a new rule to protect kids from mercury exposure, will it need to get rid of  two other science-based rules, such as limiting lead in drinking water and cutting pollution from school buses?”

“It is also likely illegal. Congress has not called upon EPA to choose between clean air and clean water, and the president cannot do this by executive fiat. As is the case with so many other actions we have seen since the inauguration, Mr. Trump is capturing showy headlines while he drives us off a cliff.”

Robert Verchick, president of the Center for Progressive Reform said this about it:

“It seeks to ration the American people’s health and safety by forcing agencies to arbitrarily drop rules, even if those regulations prevent illnesses, reduce exposure to toxic chemicals, or decrease the number of deaths and serious injuries in the workplace. By focusing on the often-exaggerated costs of regulations, the order ignores the enormous, live-saving benefits that public safeguards deliver to us all. This is not effective government, it won’t create jobs, and it won’t improve our communities.”

Public Citizen also issued a statement which notes:

“This executive order (EO) is as radical and unworkable as the other ones Trump has signed. It will result in immediate and lasting damage to our government’s ability to save lives, protect our environment, police Wall Street, keep consumers safe and fight discrimination.”

The Washington Post’s story included this quintessential Trump-speak quote from the President about this new executive order:

“This will be the largest ever cut by far in terms of regulations.  If you have a regulation you want, number one we’re not going to approve it because it’s already been approved probably in 17 different forms.”

“But if we do, the only way you have a chance is we have to knock out two regulations for every new regulation. So if there’s a new regulation, they have to knock out two. But it goes way beyond that.”

What a hair-brain idea.

 

 

 

 

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2jMh25I

Public Opinion On Patriots, The Wall, Obamacare, Trump Taxes [Greg Laden's Blog]

Two Polls came out a few days ago, but I’m afraid that the news cycles have been swamped and they may have been missed. Here are some simple graphics. Plenty more data can be found at Public Policy Polling, and see RM on MSBNC below for more.

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2jMd0u6

Two Polls came out a few days ago, but I’m afraid that the news cycles have been swamped and they may have been missed. Here are some simple graphics. Plenty more data can be found at Public Policy Polling, and see RM on MSBNC below for more.

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2jMd0u6

The Donald Trump War on Science: Week 1: How bad could it be? [Confessions of a Science Librarian]

How bad could it be? On so may fronts, the first week or so of the Donald Trump administration was the shit show to end all shit shows.

But we’re only going to talk about the science stuff here.

As the more astute observers among my readership will observe, I still haven’t updated the Pre-Inauguration Edition of this post. Nor should this post really be considered a true beginning to tracking the post-inauguration devastation that the Trump administration will wreck on science, technology, the environment and public health. I’m hitting the high lights here with a more complete accounting to come with the first real chronology post. As well, some of the actions I list below may have been reversed in the days after they were suggested or inacted, but I still include them because the intention to do something negative still counts.

But it’s a start. It’s a wake-up call.

Note: This post will eventually be rolled into the first real chronology of the Trump presidency and science, which I expect to post probably in February or March sometime. My plan is also to disconnect lists of commentary from lists of incidents. In the pre-inauguration post, there are together, which is partly the reason why it’s taking me so long to update. What I will be doing is bare bones lists of commentary fairly frequently and updating the list of incidents only occasionally. Or at least that’s the plan.

Here is a list of the damage done during the first week of the Donald Trump presidency.

• Jan 2017. EPA studies, data must undergo political review before release (more: 1 2 3 4 5 6)

   

• Jan 2017. GOP makes plans to invalidate Endangered Species Act (more: 1 2 3 4)

   

• Jan 2017. Donald Trump will eliminate landmark climate protection plan, says first post on White House website

   

• Jan 2017. Trump’s Wall Could Cause Serious Environmental Damage (more: 1 2 3)

   

• Jan 2017. Trump Administration Orders EPA to Remove Its Climate Change Web Page (more: 1)

   

• Jan 2017. Trump Appoints Anti-Regulation Net Neutrality Enemy to Head FCC (more: 1 2)

   

• Jan 2017. White House orders ‘immediate regulatory freeze’ and proposes slashing regulations (more: 1 2 3 4 5)

   

• Jan 2017. Donald Trump is the sole reliable source of truth, says chair of House Science Committee (more: 1)

   

• Jan 2017. Reported Trump Science Adviser Rejects Climate Science and is generally anti-intellectual (more: 1 2 3)

   

• Jan 2017. Trump’s Anti-Muslim Order Could Have ‘Chilling’ Effect On Science (more: 1 2 3)

   

• Jan 2017. Climate change summit canceled by CDC amid uncertainty of a Trump presidency (more: 1 2 3 4 5)

   

• Jan 2017. Myron Ebell, Trump Adviser, Calling for Overhaul of ‘Junk Science’ at EPA (more: 1 2)

   

• Jan 2017. Trump bans agencies (USDA, NPS, EPA, DoT, etc) from ‘providing updates on social media or to reporters’ (more: 1 2 3 4)

   

• Jan 2017. Trump’s unsupported claim he has ‘received awards on the environment’ (more: 1 2)

   

• Jan 2017. Minutes after Trump becomes president, White House website deletes all mention of climate change (more: 1 2 3)

   

• Jan 2017. Trump Issues Executive Orders Freezing Federal Hiring (more: 1 2)

   

• Jan 2017. White House warns Prince Charles against ‘lecturing’ on climate change (more: 1)

 

As usual with these posts, I rely on you, my readership, to catch the things I’m missing. Please let me know in the comments or via email at dupuisj at gmail dot com. Any incidents I report need to be documented in some form on the open web, either a media report or some sort of blog post or something. Suggestions to beef up the “more” sections of each item will definitely be welcomed, especially the ones where I haven’t added to much additional information.

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2kNdOgh

How bad could it be? On so may fronts, the first week or so of the Donald Trump administration was the shit show to end all shit shows.

But we’re only going to talk about the science stuff here.

As the more astute observers among my readership will observe, I still haven’t updated the Pre-Inauguration Edition of this post. Nor should this post really be considered a true beginning to tracking the post-inauguration devastation that the Trump administration will wreck on science, technology, the environment and public health. I’m hitting the high lights here with a more complete accounting to come with the first real chronology post. As well, some of the actions I list below may have been reversed in the days after they were suggested or inacted, but I still include them because the intention to do something negative still counts.

But it’s a start. It’s a wake-up call.

Note: This post will eventually be rolled into the first real chronology of the Trump presidency and science, which I expect to post probably in February or March sometime. My plan is also to disconnect lists of commentary from lists of incidents. In the pre-inauguration post, there are together, which is partly the reason why it’s taking me so long to update. What I will be doing is bare bones lists of commentary fairly frequently and updating the list of incidents only occasionally. Or at least that’s the plan.

Here is a list of the damage done during the first week of the Donald Trump presidency.

• Jan 2017. EPA studies, data must undergo political review before release (more: 1 2 3 4 5 6)

   

• Jan 2017. GOP makes plans to invalidate Endangered Species Act (more: 1 2 3 4)

   

• Jan 2017. Donald Trump will eliminate landmark climate protection plan, says first post on White House website

   

• Jan 2017. Trump’s Wall Could Cause Serious Environmental Damage (more: 1 2 3)

   

• Jan 2017. Trump Administration Orders EPA to Remove Its Climate Change Web Page (more: 1)

   

• Jan 2017. Trump Appoints Anti-Regulation Net Neutrality Enemy to Head FCC (more: 1 2)

   

• Jan 2017. White House orders ‘immediate regulatory freeze’ and proposes slashing regulations (more: 1 2 3 4 5)

   

• Jan 2017. Donald Trump is the sole reliable source of truth, says chair of House Science Committee (more: 1)

   

• Jan 2017. Reported Trump Science Adviser Rejects Climate Science and is generally anti-intellectual (more: 1 2 3)

   

• Jan 2017. Trump’s Anti-Muslim Order Could Have ‘Chilling’ Effect On Science (more: 1 2 3)

   

• Jan 2017. Climate change summit canceled by CDC amid uncertainty of a Trump presidency (more: 1 2 3 4 5)

   

• Jan 2017. Myron Ebell, Trump Adviser, Calling for Overhaul of ‘Junk Science’ at EPA (more: 1 2)

   

• Jan 2017. Trump bans agencies (USDA, NPS, EPA, DoT, etc) from ‘providing updates on social media or to reporters’ (more: 1 2 3 4)

   

• Jan 2017. Trump’s unsupported claim he has ‘received awards on the environment’ (more: 1 2)

   

• Jan 2017. Minutes after Trump becomes president, White House website deletes all mention of climate change (more: 1 2 3)

   

• Jan 2017. Trump Issues Executive Orders Freezing Federal Hiring (more: 1 2)

   

• Jan 2017. White House warns Prince Charles against ‘lecturing’ on climate change (more: 1)

 

As usual with these posts, I rely on you, my readership, to catch the things I’m missing. Please let me know in the comments or via email at dupuisj at gmail dot com. Any incidents I report need to be documented in some form on the open web, either a media report or some sort of blog post or something. Suggestions to beef up the “more” sections of each item will definitely be welcomed, especially the ones where I haven’t added to much additional information.

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2kNdOgh

Moon, Venus, First Point of Aries

Tonight – January 30, 2017 – check out the beautiful, young moon returning to the evening sky. You’ll find it in the west shortly after sunset, just below the brilliant planet Venus. As the sky darkens, you’ll see another “star” pop into view above Venus that isn’t really a star. It’s another planet, Mars.

It’s fun to identify the planets Venus and Mars. And you can also use this waxing crescent moon and these planets to visualize the First Point of Aries on the sky’s dome. On this night, the First Point of Aries is located more or less between Venus and Mars. Check it out on the sky chart above. By the way, the green line depicts the ecliptic – the sun’s annual path in front of the constellations of the zodiac.

The sun crosses both the celestial (or prime) meridian and the celestial equator on the March equinox. The celestial meridian depicts 0 hours of right ascension on the celestial sphere, this semicircle extending all the way from the north celestial pole to the south celestial pole. The celestial equator is a projection of the Earth’s equator onto the celestial sphere. The intersection of the prime celestial meridian with the celestial equator marks the First Point of Aries (0 hours right ascension and 0^o declination).

Right ascension on the celestial sphere is the equivalent of longitude here on Earth; and declination on the celestial sphere is the equivalent of latitude here on Earth. The chart below helps to more fully illustrate the First Point of Aries.

View larger. | The First Point of Aries pinpoints the intersection of the ecliptic (0^o ecliptic longitude) with the celestial equator (0^o declination).

To summarize, the First Point of Aries marks the location of the sun – in front of the backdrop stars of the zodiac – on the March equinox. Astronomers consider the First Point of Aries to be the zero point in the imaginary grid on the sky’s dome that helps them define star (and planet) locations.

The Royal Observatory at Greenwich, England is used to mark Earth’s prime meridian, the point of 0 degrees longitude. Likewise, the First Point of Aries defines the sky’s prime meridian (0 hours right ascension). Image via Wikipedia.

The moon is now back in the evening sky, moving upward each evening after sunset, passing the planets Mars and Venus.

If you could see the stars in the daytime, you’d see the March equinox sun at the First Point of Aries. It’s not an arbitrary point, but instead marks one of two places on our sky’s dome where the ecliptic intersects the celestial equator on the celestial or stellar sphere. Once again, the ecliptic depicts the sun’s annual path in front the constellations of the zodiac, while the celestial equator is a projection of the Earth’s equator onto the great dome of sky.

In our time, the First Point in Aries lies in front of the constellation Pisces on the March equinox. Look at the chart of the constellation Pisces below to see where the First Point of Aries resides in front of the backdrop stars of the zodiac.

Although they’re not shown on the chart below … on January 30, 2017, both Mars and Venus are in front of Pisces, too.

View larger. | The First Point of Aries pinpoints the intersection of the ecliptic (0^o ecliptic longitude) with the celestial equator (0^o declination).

Bottom line: On January 30, 2017, the waxing crescent moon is below bright Venus in the western sky after sunset. The planet Mars is just above Venus in the west. On this night, if you can identify Venus and Mars, they can be your guide to the first Point of Aries.

from EarthSky http://ift.tt/2kKHdMa

Tonight – January 30, 2017 – check out the beautiful, young moon returning to the evening sky. You’ll find it in the west shortly after sunset, just below the brilliant planet Venus. As the sky darkens, you’ll see another “star” pop into view above Venus that isn’t really a star. It’s another planet, Mars.

It’s fun to identify the planets Venus and Mars. And you can also use this waxing crescent moon and these planets to visualize the First Point of Aries on the sky’s dome. On this night, the First Point of Aries is located more or less between Venus and Mars. Check it out on the sky chart above. By the way, the green line depicts the ecliptic – the sun’s annual path in front of the constellations of the zodiac.

The sun crosses both the celestial (or prime) meridian and the celestial equator on the March equinox. The celestial meridian depicts 0 hours of right ascension on the celestial sphere, this semicircle extending all the way from the north celestial pole to the south celestial pole. The celestial equator is a projection of the Earth’s equator onto the celestial sphere. The intersection of the prime celestial meridian with the celestial equator marks the First Point of Aries (0 hours right ascension and 0^o declination).

Right ascension on the celestial sphere is the equivalent of longitude here on Earth; and declination on the celestial sphere is the equivalent of latitude here on Earth. The chart below helps to more fully illustrate the First Point of Aries.

View larger. | The First Point of Aries pinpoints the intersection of the ecliptic (0^o ecliptic longitude) with the celestial equator (0^o declination).

To summarize, the First Point of Aries marks the location of the sun – in front of the backdrop stars of the zodiac – on the March equinox. Astronomers consider the First Point of Aries to be the zero point in the imaginary grid on the sky’s dome that helps them define star (and planet) locations.

The Royal Observatory at Greenwich, England is used to mark Earth’s prime meridian, the point of 0 degrees longitude. Likewise, the First Point of Aries defines the sky’s prime meridian (0 hours right ascension). Image via Wikipedia.

The moon is now back in the evening sky, moving upward each evening after sunset, passing the planets Mars and Venus.

If you could see the stars in the daytime, you’d see the March equinox sun at the First Point of Aries. It’s not an arbitrary point, but instead marks one of two places on our sky’s dome where the ecliptic intersects the celestial equator on the celestial or stellar sphere. Once again, the ecliptic depicts the sun’s annual path in front the constellations of the zodiac, while the celestial equator is a projection of the Earth’s equator onto the great dome of sky.

In our time, the First Point in Aries lies in front of the constellation Pisces on the March equinox. Look at the chart of the constellation Pisces below to see where the First Point of Aries resides in front of the backdrop stars of the zodiac.

Although they’re not shown on the chart below … on January 30, 2017, both Mars and Venus are in front of Pisces, too.

View larger. | The First Point of Aries pinpoints the intersection of the ecliptic (0^o ecliptic longitude) with the celestial equator (0^o declination).

Bottom line: On January 30, 2017, the waxing crescent moon is below bright Venus in the western sky after sunset. The planet Mars is just above Venus in the west. On this night, if you can identify Venus and Mars, they can be your guide to the first Point of Aries.

from EarthSky http://ift.tt/2kKHdMa

Top 4 keys to mastering moon phases

Artist’s concept of the moon, Earth and sun aligned in space. Image via Ask.com

Why does the moon seem to change its shape every night? Why can I see the moon in the daytime?

The answer to both questions is the same. It’s that the moon is a world in space, just as Earth is. Like Earth, the moon is always half illuminated by the sun; the round globe of the moon has a day side and a night side. From our earthly vantage point, as the moon orbits around Earth, we see varying fractions of its day and night sides. These are the changing phases of the moon. And the moon is in the daytime sky about half the time. It’s just that it’s sometimes it’s so near the sun we don’t notice it. How can you understand moon phases? Here are four things to remember:

1. When you see the moon, think of the whereabouts of the sun

2. The moon rises in the east and sets in the west, each and every day

3. The moon takes about a month (one moonth) to orbit the Earth

4. The moon’s orbital motion is toward the east

Moon phase composite via Fred Espenak. Read more about this image.

1. When you see the moon, think of the whereabouts of the sun. After all, it’s the sun that’s illuminating and creating the dayside of the moon.

Moon phases depend on where the moon is with respect to the sun in space. For example, do you see which moon phase is being shown in the illustration above? The answer is, it’s a full moon. The moon, Earth and sun are aligned with Earth in the middle. The moon’s fully illuminated half – its dayside – faces Earth’s night side. That’s always the case on the night of a full moon.

Don’t just take our word for it. Go outside. No matter what phase of the moon you see in your sky, think about where the sun is. It’ll help you begin to understand why the moon you see is in that particular phase.

Earth’s daily spin causes the moon – like the sun – to rise in the east and set in the west each day. Image via Martin Clebourne’s article Where is the Moon?

2. The moon rises in the east and sets in the west, each and every day. It has to. The rising and setting of all celestial objects is due to Earth’s continuous daily spin beneath the sky.

Just know that – when you see a thin crescent moon in the west after sunset – it’s not a rising moon. Instead, it’s a setting moon.

At the same time, though …

3. The moon takes about a month (one moonth) to orbit the Earth. Although the moon rises in the east and sets in the west each day (due to Earth’s spin), it’s also moving on the sky’s dome each day due to its own motion in orbit around Earth.

This is a slower, less noticeable motion of the moon. It’s a motion in front of the fixed stars. If you just glance at the moon one evening – and see it again a few hours later – you’ll notice it has moved westward. That westward motion is caused by Earth’s spin.

The moon’s own orbital motion can be detected in the course of a single night, too. But you have to watch the moon closely, with respect to stars in its vicinity, over several hours.

The moon’s eastward, orbital motion is easiest to notice from one day (or night) to the next. It’s as though the moon is moving on the inside of a circle of 360 degrees. The moon’s orbit carries it around Earth’s sky once a month, because the moon takes about a month to orbit Earth.

So that the moon moves – with respect to the fixed stars – by about 12-13 degrees each day.

The moon’s orbital motion carries it eastward in Earth’s sky. Image via cseligman.com.

4. The moon’s orbital motion is toward the east. Each day, as the moon moves another 12-13 degrees toward the east on the sky’s dome, Earth has to rotate a little longer to bring you around to where the moon is in space.

Thus the moon rises, on average, about 50 minutes later each day.

The later and later rising times of the moon cause our companion world to appear in a different part of the sky at each nightfall for the two weeks between new and full moon.

Then, in two weeks after full moon, you’ll find the moon rising later and later at night.

We have more details on individual moon phases at the links below. Follow the links to learn more about the various phases of the moon.

Waxing Crescent
First Quarter
Waxing Gibbous
Full Moon
Waning Gibbous
Last Quarter
Waning Crescent
New Moon

… and here are the names of all the full moons.

Earth and moon, via NASA

Bottom line: Why the moon waxes and wanes in phase. Four keys to understanding moon phases. Links to descriptions of the various phases of the moon.

from EarthSky http://ift.tt/1iYdhDd

Artist’s concept of the moon, Earth and sun aligned in space. Image via Ask.com

Why does the moon seem to change its shape every night? Why can I see the moon in the daytime?

The answer to both questions is the same. It’s that the moon is a world in space, just as Earth is. Like Earth, the moon is always half illuminated by the sun; the round globe of the moon has a day side and a night side. From our earthly vantage point, as the moon orbits around Earth, we see varying fractions of its day and night sides. These are the changing phases of the moon. And the moon is in the daytime sky about half the time. It’s just that it’s sometimes it’s so near the sun we don’t notice it. How can you understand moon phases? Here are four things to remember:

1. When you see the moon, think of the whereabouts of the sun

2. The moon rises in the east and sets in the west, each and every day

3. The moon takes about a month (one moonth) to orbit the Earth

4. The moon’s orbital motion is toward the east

Moon phase composite via Fred Espenak. Read more about this image.

1. When you see the moon, think of the whereabouts of the sun. After all, it’s the sun that’s illuminating and creating the dayside of the moon.

Moon phases depend on where the moon is with respect to the sun in space. For example, do you see which moon phase is being shown in the illustration above? The answer is, it’s a full moon. The moon, Earth and sun are aligned with Earth in the middle. The moon’s fully illuminated half – its dayside – faces Earth’s night side. That’s always the case on the night of a full moon.

Don’t just take our word for it. Go outside. No matter what phase of the moon you see in your sky, think about where the sun is. It’ll help you begin to understand why the moon you see is in that particular phase.

Earth’s daily spin causes the moon – like the sun – to rise in the east and set in the west each day. Image via Martin Clebourne’s article Where is the Moon?

2. The moon rises in the east and sets in the west, each and every day. It has to. The rising and setting of all celestial objects is due to Earth’s continuous daily spin beneath the sky.

Just know that – when you see a thin crescent moon in the west after sunset – it’s not a rising moon. Instead, it’s a setting moon.

At the same time, though …

3. The moon takes about a month (one moonth) to orbit the Earth. Although the moon rises in the east and sets in the west each day (due to Earth’s spin), it’s also moving on the sky’s dome each day due to its own motion in orbit around Earth.

This is a slower, less noticeable motion of the moon. It’s a motion in front of the fixed stars. If you just glance at the moon one evening – and see it again a few hours later – you’ll notice it has moved westward. That westward motion is caused by Earth’s spin.

The moon’s own orbital motion can be detected in the course of a single night, too. But you have to watch the moon closely, with respect to stars in its vicinity, over several hours.

The moon’s eastward, orbital motion is easiest to notice from one day (or night) to the next. It’s as though the moon is moving on the inside of a circle of 360 degrees. The moon’s orbit carries it around Earth’s sky once a month, because the moon takes about a month to orbit Earth.

So that the moon moves – with respect to the fixed stars – by about 12-13 degrees each day.

The moon’s orbital motion carries it eastward in Earth’s sky. Image via cseligman.com.

4. The moon’s orbital motion is toward the east. Each day, as the moon moves another 12-13 degrees toward the east on the sky’s dome, Earth has to rotate a little longer to bring you around to where the moon is in space.

Thus the moon rises, on average, about 50 minutes later each day.

The later and later rising times of the moon cause our companion world to appear in a different part of the sky at each nightfall for the two weeks between new and full moon.

Then, in two weeks after full moon, you’ll find the moon rising later and later at night.

We have more details on individual moon phases at the links below. Follow the links to learn more about the various phases of the moon.

Waxing Crescent
First Quarter
Waxing Gibbous
Full Moon
Waning Gibbous
Last Quarter
Waning Crescent
New Moon

… and here are the names of all the full moons.

Earth and moon, via NASA

Bottom line: Why the moon waxes and wanes in phase. Four keys to understanding moon phases. Links to descriptions of the various phases of the moon.

from EarthSky http://ift.tt/1iYdhDd

Trump Preps for War on Vaccines [Page 3.14]

In the latest of a series of appointments that are poised to contravene scientific and medical consensus, Donald Trump met with anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for the purpose of forming a commission on “vaccine safety.” On The Pump Handle, Kim Krisberg says “Kennedy is a lawyer — not a scientist, doctor, child health expert or public health practitioner” yet Trump wants to charge him with “reviewing the safety of one of the greatest life-saving tools of the 20th century.” Like Kennedy, Trump says that vaccines can cause autism, and as Orac notes on Respectful Insolence, “compared to the flip-flops Trump has pulled off regarding beliefs in a variety of areas, Trump’s views on vaccines and autism have been remarkably consistent.” Meanwhile, on Confessions of a Science Librarian, John Dupuis picks up on an article that jokes Trump “will require all reviewers for all journals and grant agencies to end all reviews with the word ‘Sad!'” and may even “Make Astrophysics Great Again.” John says “One word peer review is going to be Huuuuugggggggeeeeee!”

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2kjHm7Y

In the latest of a series of appointments that are poised to contravene scientific and medical consensus, Donald Trump met with anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for the purpose of forming a commission on “vaccine safety.” On The Pump Handle, Kim Krisberg says “Kennedy is a lawyer — not a scientist, doctor, child health expert or public health practitioner” yet Trump wants to charge him with “reviewing the safety of one of the greatest life-saving tools of the 20th century.” Like Kennedy, Trump says that vaccines can cause autism, and as Orac notes on Respectful Insolence, “compared to the flip-flops Trump has pulled off regarding beliefs in a variety of areas, Trump’s views on vaccines and autism have been remarkably consistent.” Meanwhile, on Confessions of a Science Librarian, John Dupuis picks up on an article that jokes Trump “will require all reviewers for all journals and grant agencies to end all reviews with the word ‘Sad!'” and may even “Make Astrophysics Great Again.” John says “One word peer review is going to be Huuuuugggggggeeeeee!”

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2kjHm7Y

A destructive executive action for global health [The Pump Handle]

President Trump’s callous and short-sighted executive order restricting US entry for refugees and travelers from certain countries is rightfully getting a lot of attention, but it risks overshadowing another destructive thing he did for global health during his first week in office: reinstating and expanding the Mexico City Policy, also known more descriptively as the global gag rule. Trump’s adoption of this policy is even more reprehensible than it was for his Republican predecessors, for two reasons: First, he has broadened its scope so it appears to cripple not only family planning, but efforts to fight infectious diseases. Second, he is adopting this policy in the face of evidence that it actually leads to an increase in the number of abortions.

The global gag rule states that in order for foreign NGOs to receive US funds, they must certify that they will not “perform or actively promote abortion as a method of family planning” with any funds they receive from any source. Since 1973, the Helms Amendment has prohibited aid recipients from using US funds to provide abortion services (except in cases of rape, incest, or threat to the mother’s life), so that’s not the issue. The issue is that it’s telling providers that in order to receive US funds, they can’t provide information about or referrals for abortions. Not surprisingly, many groups that work to advance women’s health don’t feel that they can agree to refrain from providing women with comprehensive information about their healthcare options.

Consequences for infectious-disease work – and US health

The Kaiser Family Foundation has created a helpful fact sheet on this policy, and it highlights a crucial difference between the policy’s past and current incarnations. In the past, it has applied only to US family planning funding from USAID and the US Department of State; in 2003, President Bush explicitly stated that it did not apply to funding for global HIV/AIDS programs. Now, though, the Trump administration’s policy applies to all US global health assistance. The KFF fact sheet notes that in addition to USAID and the State Department, other agencies receive direct appropriations for global health: CDC, NIH, and the Department of Defense. The New York Times editorial board adds up the likely impacts:

In the past, the policy has applied only to international family-planning funds, which currently total around $600 million. Mr. Trump’s memorandum, however, would apply the policy to “global health assistance furnished by all departments or agencies.” Although reproductive health groups are still studying the memorandum, this language would appear to apply to any international health funding, around $9 billion, used to fight malaria, H.I.V., Zika, Ebola and many other global health threats.

Taking money away from efforts to fight infectious diseases like AIDS, Zika, and Ebola doesn’t just harm people in the countries where funding has been halted; it also puts US health at risk. Viruses don’t respect borders, so reducing funding for prevention and control of these diseases anywhere in the world increases the risk of exposure for US residents.

Evidence that the global gag rule leads to more abortions

Since the last time the gag rule was reinstated, by President George W. Bush in 2001, evidence of its impacts has accumulated.  The most comprehensive quantitative study is by Eran Bendavid, Patrick Avila, and Grant Miller of Stanford University, and was published in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization in 2011. Using data from nationally representative surveys of women of child-bearing age in Sub-Saharan African countries, they examined the number of abortions between 1994 and 2008. They classified each country as having either low or high exposure to the policy based on how much family planning assistance per capita they were receiving from the US in the years preceding Bush’s reinstatement, and adjusted for a variety of factors that might affect the abortion rate. They found that in countries with high exposure to the policy, abortions increased dramatically in the years following 2001, while the increase was much smaller in countries with low exposure. The authors write:

Our study found robust empirical patterns suggesting that the Mexico City Policy is associated with increases in abortion rates in sub-Saharan African countries. Although we are unable to draw definitive conclusions about the underlying cause of this increase, the complex interrelationships between family planning services and abortion may be involved. In particular, if women consider abortion as a way to prevent unwanted births, then policies curtailing the activities of organizations that provide modern contraceptives may inadvertently lead to an increase in the abortion rate.

Several observations strengthen this conclusion. First, the association is strong: the odds of having an abortion in highly exposed countries were more than twice the odds observed in the reference groups. Second, there is broad agreement among our aggregate graphical analysis and both unadjusted and adjusted statistical analyses, and our main findings are robust across a variety of sensitivity analyses. Third, the timing of divergence between high and low exposure countries is coincident with the policy’s reinstatement: in high exposure countries, abortion rates began to rise noticeably only after the Mexico City Policy was reinstated in 2001 and the increase became more pronounced from 2002 onward. Finally, our findings are consistent with those of previous studies on the relationship between family planning activities and abortion

A closer examination of data from a single country comes from Kelly M. Jones, in a 2011 discussion paper for the International Food Policy Research Institute. To investigate whether the policy affected abortions, she used data collected on pregnancy outcomes from a panel of women in Ghana from 1981 to 2007, and compared pregnancy histories for individual women during and between times when the global gag rule was in force. To see whether any differences in pregnancy occurrences might affect children’s health, she also examined children’s height and weight data and compared these outcomes for children whose births could have been affected by the policy to those of their siblings. Jones writes:

I find no evidence that any demographic group reduces the use of abortion as a result of the policy. On the contrary, rural women significantly increase abortions. This effect seems to arise from their increased rate of conception during these times. The policy-induced budget shortfalls reportedly forced NGOs to cut rural outreach services, reducing the availability of contraceptives in rural areas. The lack of contraceptives likely caused the observed 12 percent increase in rural pregnancies, ultimately resulting in about 200,000 additional abortions and between 500,000 and 750,000 additional unintended births. I find that these additional unwanted children have significantly reduced height and weight for age, relative to their siblings. Rather than reducing abortion, this policy increased pregnancy, abortion, and unintended births, resulting in more than a half-million children of significantly reduced nutritional status.

Did President Trump realize when he signed this executive order that it was likely to increase the risk of infectious disease spread worldwide, including for US residents, and to increase the number of abortions and undernourished children in affected countries? New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof reports that the White House didn’t respond to his inquiries about the gag rule. Kristof also offers a snapshot of the kinds of outcomes we can expect under this executive action:

This all sounds wonkish and antiseptic, but in poor countries, the most dangerous thing a woman can do is become pregnant. I’ve seen too many women dying or suffering in filth on stained cots in remote villages because of childbirth.

I wish Trump could see them: a mother of three in Cameroon dying after her birth attendant sat on her stomach to hasten delivery; a woman in Niger collapsing from a common complication called eclampsia; a 15-year-old girl in Chad whose family dealt with her labor complications by taking her to a healer who diagnosed sorcery and burned her arm as she lay in a coma.

With this new order, Trump will inadvertently cause more of these horrific scenes. Maybe “war on women” sounds hyperbolic, but not if gasping, dying women are seared in your memory.

Kristof noted that Trump’s executive action came just after millions of women and men turned out for Women’s Marches on January 21^st. He writes, “I hope all of the marchers call the White House, 202-456-1111, or their members of Congress, 202-224-3121, to protest.” I tried calling that White House number multiple times during business hours last week, but only ever got a recording saying the comment line is currently closed. (You can still submit comments in writing by going to whitehouse.gov and clicking the “Get in Touch” link in the top right corner.) I hope the comment line reopens soon. Based on his actions during his first week in office, I don’t think President Trump is hearing enough from people with an adequate understanding of public health.

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2kM8865

President Trump’s callous and short-sighted executive order restricting US entry for refugees and travelers from certain countries is rightfully getting a lot of attention, but it risks overshadowing another destructive thing he did for global health during his first week in office: reinstating and expanding the Mexico City Policy, also known more descriptively as the global gag rule. Trump’s adoption of this policy is even more reprehensible than it was for his Republican predecessors, for two reasons: First, he has broadened its scope so it appears to cripple not only family planning, but efforts to fight infectious diseases. Second, he is adopting this policy in the face of evidence that it actually leads to an increase in the number of abortions.

The global gag rule states that in order for foreign NGOs to receive US funds, they must certify that they will not “perform or actively promote abortion as a method of family planning” with any funds they receive from any source. Since 1973, the Helms Amendment has prohibited aid recipients from using US funds to provide abortion services (except in cases of rape, incest, or threat to the mother’s life), so that’s not the issue. The issue is that it’s telling providers that in order to receive US funds, they can’t provide information about or referrals for abortions. Not surprisingly, many groups that work to advance women’s health don’t feel that they can agree to refrain from providing women with comprehensive information about their healthcare options.

Consequences for infectious-disease work – and US health

The Kaiser Family Foundation has created a helpful fact sheet on this policy, and it highlights a crucial difference between the policy’s past and current incarnations. In the past, it has applied only to US family planning funding from USAID and the US Department of State; in 2003, President Bush explicitly stated that it did not apply to funding for global HIV/AIDS programs. Now, though, the Trump administration’s policy applies to all US global health assistance. The KFF fact sheet notes that in addition to USAID and the State Department, other agencies receive direct appropriations for global health: CDC, NIH, and the Department of Defense. The New York Times editorial board adds up the likely impacts:

In the past, the policy has applied only to international family-planning funds, which currently total around $600 million. Mr. Trump’s memorandum, however, would apply the policy to “global health assistance furnished by all departments or agencies.” Although reproductive health groups are still studying the memorandum, this language would appear to apply to any international health funding, around $9 billion, used to fight malaria, H.I.V., Zika, Ebola and many other global health threats.

Taking money away from efforts to fight infectious diseases like AIDS, Zika, and Ebola doesn’t just harm people in the countries where funding has been halted; it also puts US health at risk. Viruses don’t respect borders, so reducing funding for prevention and control of these diseases anywhere in the world increases the risk of exposure for US residents.

Evidence that the global gag rule leads to more abortions

Since the last time the gag rule was reinstated, by President George W. Bush in 2001, evidence of its impacts has accumulated.  The most comprehensive quantitative study is by Eran Bendavid, Patrick Avila, and Grant Miller of Stanford University, and was published in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization in 2011. Using data from nationally representative surveys of women of child-bearing age in Sub-Saharan African countries, they examined the number of abortions between 1994 and 2008. They classified each country as having either low or high exposure to the policy based on how much family planning assistance per capita they were receiving from the US in the years preceding Bush’s reinstatement, and adjusted for a variety of factors that might affect the abortion rate. They found that in countries with high exposure to the policy, abortions increased dramatically in the years following 2001, while the increase was much smaller in countries with low exposure. The authors write:

Our study found robust empirical patterns suggesting that the Mexico City Policy is associated with increases in abortion rates in sub-Saharan African countries. Although we are unable to draw definitive conclusions about the underlying cause of this increase, the complex interrelationships between family planning services and abortion may be involved. In particular, if women consider abortion as a way to prevent unwanted births, then policies curtailing the activities of organizations that provide modern contraceptives may inadvertently lead to an increase in the abortion rate.

Several observations strengthen this conclusion. First, the association is strong: the odds of having an abortion in highly exposed countries were more than twice the odds observed in the reference groups. Second, there is broad agreement among our aggregate graphical analysis and both unadjusted and adjusted statistical analyses, and our main findings are robust across a variety of sensitivity analyses. Third, the timing of divergence between high and low exposure countries is coincident with the policy’s reinstatement: in high exposure countries, abortion rates began to rise noticeably only after the Mexico City Policy was reinstated in 2001 and the increase became more pronounced from 2002 onward. Finally, our findings are consistent with those of previous studies on the relationship between family planning activities and abortion

A closer examination of data from a single country comes from Kelly M. Jones, in a 2011 discussion paper for the International Food Policy Research Institute. To investigate whether the policy affected abortions, she used data collected on pregnancy outcomes from a panel of women in Ghana from 1981 to 2007, and compared pregnancy histories for individual women during and between times when the global gag rule was in force. To see whether any differences in pregnancy occurrences might affect children’s health, she also examined children’s height and weight data and compared these outcomes for children whose births could have been affected by the policy to those of their siblings. Jones writes:

I find no evidence that any demographic group reduces the use of abortion as a result of the policy. On the contrary, rural women significantly increase abortions. This effect seems to arise from their increased rate of conception during these times. The policy-induced budget shortfalls reportedly forced NGOs to cut rural outreach services, reducing the availability of contraceptives in rural areas. The lack of contraceptives likely caused the observed 12 percent increase in rural pregnancies, ultimately resulting in about 200,000 additional abortions and between 500,000 and 750,000 additional unintended births. I find that these additional unwanted children have significantly reduced height and weight for age, relative to their siblings. Rather than reducing abortion, this policy increased pregnancy, abortion, and unintended births, resulting in more than a half-million children of significantly reduced nutritional status.

Did President Trump realize when he signed this executive order that it was likely to increase the risk of infectious disease spread worldwide, including for US residents, and to increase the number of abortions and undernourished children in affected countries? New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof reports that the White House didn’t respond to his inquiries about the gag rule. Kristof also offers a snapshot of the kinds of outcomes we can expect under this executive action:

This all sounds wonkish and antiseptic, but in poor countries, the most dangerous thing a woman can do is become pregnant. I’ve seen too many women dying or suffering in filth on stained cots in remote villages because of childbirth.

I wish Trump could see them: a mother of three in Cameroon dying after her birth attendant sat on her stomach to hasten delivery; a woman in Niger collapsing from a common complication called eclampsia; a 15-year-old girl in Chad whose family dealt with her labor complications by taking her to a healer who diagnosed sorcery and burned her arm as she lay in a coma.

With this new order, Trump will inadvertently cause more of these horrific scenes. Maybe “war on women” sounds hyperbolic, but not if gasping, dying women are seared in your memory.

Kristof noted that Trump’s executive action came just after millions of women and men turned out for Women’s Marches on January 21^st. He writes, “I hope all of the marchers call the White House, 202-456-1111, or their members of Congress, 202-224-3121, to protest.” I tried calling that White House number multiple times during business hours last week, but only ever got a recording saying the comment line is currently closed. (You can still submit comments in writing by going to whitehouse.gov and clicking the “Get in Touch” link in the top right corner.) I hope the comment line reopens soon. Based on his actions during his first week in office, I don’t think President Trump is hearing enough from people with an adequate understanding of public health.

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2kM8865

The Norms of Society and Presidential Executive Orders [Greg Laden's Blog]

The title of this post is based closely on the title of a statement posted by my friend Stephan Lewandowsky, representing the Psychonomic Society.

The post is the official statement by this scientific society responding to President Trump’s recent activities, and it begins,

Last Friday was Holocaust Memorial Day, which falls on the day of the liberation of the Auschwitz Death Camp by Soviet troops in 1945. U.S. President Trump marked the occasion with a statement, although it omitted any specific mention of the 6 million Jews who perished in the Holocaust.

On the same day, Trump also signed an executive order that banned citizens of 7 mainly Islamic countries from entering the United States.

This order—at least initially—also applied to legal permanent residents of the U.S. (“Green card” holders), thus barring them from re-entry to their country of residence after a visit abroad, as well as to dual nationals if one of their citizenships is from one of those 7 countries.

I’m going to use this as a starting point to discuss the most important thing you need to know about the situation in the United States right now.

You know most resources are limited. We can cook along ignoring this for long periods of time, ignoring a particular resource’s limitations, until one day something goes awry and that particular resource suddenly matters more and of it, we have less. So a competitive framework develops and then things happen.

It is the business of the rich and powerful to manipulate the world around them in such a way that when such a limitation occurs, they profit. Candidate Trump mentioned this a while back. A housing crisis is a good thing for a real estate developer. This is not because it is inherently good; a housing crisis can put a real estate developer out of business. But the developer who is positioned to exploit such a crisis, or any kind of economic or resource crisis, is in a good position when thing go badly for everyone else.

One of the long term goals of many powerful entities is to maintain working classes, or other lower classes of servitude, in order to have cheap labor and a market. This has been done in many ways, in many places, at many times. Much of our social history is about this. Many wars have been fought over this, and many social, cultural, and economic revolutions have occurred because of this.

And every now and then, a holocaust happens because of this. This is, in part, because of what I’ll term as Mischa’s Law. Mischa Penn is a friend and colleague who has studied race and racism across all its manifestations as represented in literature, but focusing on the Nazi Holocaust and the holocaust of Native Americans. Mishca’s Law is hard to understand, difficult to believe, enrages many when they hear it, and is often set aside as lunatic raving. Unless, of course, you take Mischa’s class on race and racism, get a few weeks into it, know enough about it. Then, he gives you the thing, the thing I call “Mischa’s Law” (he doesn’t call it that) and you go, “Oh, wait, of course, that’s totally true.” And then you get really depressed for a while, hate Mischa for a while, hate his class. Then, later, ten years later, a life time after you’ve taken the class, and you’ve graduated and moved on to other things, Misha’s Law is the only thing you remember from all the classes you took at the U, and you still know it is true.

The fundamentals are always in place for Mischa’s Law to take effect. Competition, limited resources, different social classes or groups, a limited number of individuals in power, etc. But we, in America, have lived in a society where checks and balances kept one ideology (including, sadly, my own!) from taking over for very long, and there is a certain amount of redistribution of wealth and power.

But over recent years, the rich and powerful have convinced the working class that the main way we distribute wealth, through taxes, is a bad thing, so that’s mostly over. Social welfare has become a dirty word. The rich are richer, the powerful more powerful, and those with little power now have almost no power at all. But we still had a governmental system of checks and balances, so that was good.

But then the system of checks and balances got broken. In fact, the entire system of government got broken. Did you notice this? What happened is, about half the elected officials in government stopped doing the number one thing they were supposed to do, and this ruined everything.

What was that one thing? This: play by the rules.

Playing by the rules requires both knowing the rules and then making an honest attempt to respect them. Not knowing the rules is widespread in our society. I’m sure the elected officials know the rules they are breaking, but increasingly, I think, the average person who votes for them has no clue what the rules are or how important it is that they be observed.

Imagine the following situation. You go to baseball games regularly, to see your team play. Let’s make this slightly more realistic and assume this is a Little League team.

One day a big scary kid who is a bully gets up to bat. The pitcher winds up, throws the ball. Strike one. It happens again. Strike two. One more time. Strike three.

But instead of leaving the batter’s box, the big bully kid says, “I’m not out, pitch it again.” The following several moments involve a bit of embarrassment, the coaches come out, some kids are yelling at the bully, one parent hits another parent, and finally, it settles down, but the game is ruined and everyone goes home.

Next game, same thing happens, but this time nobody wants a scene, so they let the pitcher pitch the ball until the bully hits a single. Then the game continues. But the next game, there are a few bullies, not just one, demanding that the rules be ignored for them, and some other players decide to ignore other rules as well, and pretty soon, there is nothing like baseball happening.

You see what happened here? I’m going to guess that you don’t quite see the key point yet. The reason you leave the plate and go back to the dugout when you get three strikes is NOT because of the properties of matter, gravity, magnetic attraction, the unstoppable flow of water or a strong wind. You are not blown, washed, pulled, pushed, or dropped by any force back into the dugout when you get three strikes. You go back into the dugout because you got three strikes, the rules say you are out, right?

No. Still not right. You go back into the dugout because you got three strikes, the rules say you are out, AND THEN YOU FOLLOW THE RULES.

The Republican party, about half the elected officials, have unilaterally decided, in state houses across the country and in the Federal government, to stop following the rules.

A few years ago, in the Minnesota State House, a Republican representative made the clear and bold statement that he represented only the voters in his district who voted for him, and not the other citizens. He was resoundingly condemned for doing this, and he backed off and stopped talking like that. But over time, in state houses across the country, and in congressional districts, this increasingly became the norm, for Republicans. The rule is, of course, that once elected you represent all the people of your district. But more and more Republicans decided that this rule did not apply to them. They only represent those who voted for them. Now, this is normal in the Republican Party, and the first Republican President to be elected after this change said during his first news conference after his election, prior to his inaugural, that blue states would suffer and red states would benefit from his presidency.

I’ll give you another quick example. In one of Minnesota’s legislative chambers, the chair, who is from the leading party, has the right to silence any legislature who gets up to speak if the topic being discussed is not related to the matter at hand on the floor. So, the legislature is debating a proposed law about bicycles. The Democrats are in charge. A Republican gets up and insists on talking about his horoscope. The Democratic chair of the chamber says something like, “Your remarks are not relevant to the matter at hand, sit down and be quiet.” Good rule.

Last time the Republicans were in charge in that Minnesota chamber, they did this to every single Democrat who stood to say anything about anything, including and especially the matter at hand. The Republicans disregarded the actual rule (that the chair can silence a member who is off topic) and misused the power (that the chair can silence any member) to their benefit.

Tump is not following the rules, the Republicans in Congress are not acting like a “check” on Trump, and we have seen government officials in the Executive branch, apparently, ignoring court orders.

Trump’s executive orders over the last few days have been an overreach of power. For example, in its initial and badly executed form, his “extreme vetting” plan removed the rights of green card holders. Two different court orders neutered at least parts of this executive order temporarily, but it is reported that some officials, working for the Executive branches, ignored the court order. Since these are basically cops ignoring an order from a judge, and judges don’t have a police force, there isn’t much that can be done about that. Cops are supposed to follow the orders of judges. That’s the rule. The only way the rule works is if the rule is followed. There is no other force that makes the rule work.

Trump’s apparent abrogation of previous decisions on major pipeline projects was done without reference of any kind to the regulatory process that had already been completed. Regulations are acted on by the Executive branch, but they come from laws passed by Congress, and the whole judiciary is involved whenever someone has a case that there is something amiss. Trump’s executive orders and memoranda related to the pipeline ignore all the different branches of government, departments, process, and rules of governing.

It would appear that Trump had brought together the two major changes in rule observation that have developed over the last 20 years in this country. First, like the average citizen (of all political stripes) he is ignorant of how anything works. Second, like the bully that stands by the batter’s box, he shall not observe any rule that he does happen to find out about.

You see, for a United States President to become a dictator, he has to do only one thing: Stop following the rules. The US Court System, the Congress, and the Executive exist in a system of checks and balances, and that is supposed to keep everybody, well, in check. And balanced. But the Executive is the branch of government with multiple police and security forces, an Army, a Navy, an Air Force, Marines, and a Coast Guard. There is a rule that only the Coast Guard can carry out military-esque activities on US soil. But there is a mechanism for putting that rule aside. The President puts the rule aside. That’s it.

We live in a world of limited resources, and a pre-existing system of inequity, class, and ethnic categorization that allows the powerful to exploit and control most everyone else. We live in a country in which a single individual can take over the government by getting elected president then ignoring the rules, whether or not he formally declares himself in charge of everything. There is no mechanism to stop this from happening. There are all sorts of rules in place to stop it, such as the political parties putting up qualified candidates, the electors making sure they elect a qualified candidate, the Congress certifying the election of qualified candidates. But those things did not happen, and we now have a man who by all indications intends to dictate, not lead, dictate not rule, dictate not represent. There is no indication of any kind whatsoever that we do NOT have an incipient dictatorship as our form of government right now, and there are strong indications that this is where Trump is going.

And this is where Mischa’s Law becomes a thing.

“Racism, left unchecked, will eventually lead to holocaust.”

The checks, they have been neutralized.

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2kjkFBx

The title of this post is based closely on the title of a statement posted by my friend Stephan Lewandowsky, representing the Psychonomic Society.

The post is the official statement by this scientific society responding to President Trump’s recent activities, and it begins,

Last Friday was Holocaust Memorial Day, which falls on the day of the liberation of the Auschwitz Death Camp by Soviet troops in 1945. U.S. President Trump marked the occasion with a statement, although it omitted any specific mention of the 6 million Jews who perished in the Holocaust.

On the same day, Trump also signed an executive order that banned citizens of 7 mainly Islamic countries from entering the United States.

This order—at least initially—also applied to legal permanent residents of the U.S. (“Green card” holders), thus barring them from re-entry to their country of residence after a visit abroad, as well as to dual nationals if one of their citizenships is from one of those 7 countries.

I’m going to use this as a starting point to discuss the most important thing you need to know about the situation in the United States right now.

You know most resources are limited. We can cook along ignoring this for long periods of time, ignoring a particular resource’s limitations, until one day something goes awry and that particular resource suddenly matters more and of it, we have less. So a competitive framework develops and then things happen.

It is the business of the rich and powerful to manipulate the world around them in such a way that when such a limitation occurs, they profit. Candidate Trump mentioned this a while back. A housing crisis is a good thing for a real estate developer. This is not because it is inherently good; a housing crisis can put a real estate developer out of business. But the developer who is positioned to exploit such a crisis, or any kind of economic or resource crisis, is in a good position when thing go badly for everyone else.

One of the long term goals of many powerful entities is to maintain working classes, or other lower classes of servitude, in order to have cheap labor and a market. This has been done in many ways, in many places, at many times. Much of our social history is about this. Many wars have been fought over this, and many social, cultural, and economic revolutions have occurred because of this.

And every now and then, a holocaust happens because of this. This is, in part, because of what I’ll term as Mischa’s Law. Mischa Penn is a friend and colleague who has studied race and racism across all its manifestations as represented in literature, but focusing on the Nazi Holocaust and the holocaust of Native Americans. Mishca’s Law is hard to understand, difficult to believe, enrages many when they hear it, and is often set aside as lunatic raving. Unless, of course, you take Mischa’s class on race and racism, get a few weeks into it, know enough about it. Then, he gives you the thing, the thing I call “Mischa’s Law” (he doesn’t call it that) and you go, “Oh, wait, of course, that’s totally true.” And then you get really depressed for a while, hate Mischa for a while, hate his class. Then, later, ten years later, a life time after you’ve taken the class, and you’ve graduated and moved on to other things, Misha’s Law is the only thing you remember from all the classes you took at the U, and you still know it is true.

The fundamentals are always in place for Mischa’s Law to take effect. Competition, limited resources, different social classes or groups, a limited number of individuals in power, etc. But we, in America, have lived in a society where checks and balances kept one ideology (including, sadly, my own!) from taking over for very long, and there is a certain amount of redistribution of wealth and power.

But over recent years, the rich and powerful have convinced the working class that the main way we distribute wealth, through taxes, is a bad thing, so that’s mostly over. Social welfare has become a dirty word. The rich are richer, the powerful more powerful, and those with little power now have almost no power at all. But we still had a governmental system of checks and balances, so that was good.

But then the system of checks and balances got broken. In fact, the entire system of government got broken. Did you notice this? What happened is, about half the elected officials in government stopped doing the number one thing they were supposed to do, and this ruined everything.

What was that one thing? This: play by the rules.

Playing by the rules requires both knowing the rules and then making an honest attempt to respect them. Not knowing the rules is widespread in our society. I’m sure the elected officials know the rules they are breaking, but increasingly, I think, the average person who votes for them has no clue what the rules are or how important it is that they be observed.

Imagine the following situation. You go to baseball games regularly, to see your team play. Let’s make this slightly more realistic and assume this is a Little League team.

One day a big scary kid who is a bully gets up to bat. The pitcher winds up, throws the ball. Strike one. It happens again. Strike two. One more time. Strike three.

But instead of leaving the batter’s box, the big bully kid says, “I’m not out, pitch it again.” The following several moments involve a bit of embarrassment, the coaches come out, some kids are yelling at the bully, one parent hits another parent, and finally, it settles down, but the game is ruined and everyone goes home.

Next game, same thing happens, but this time nobody wants a scene, so they let the pitcher pitch the ball until the bully hits a single. Then the game continues. But the next game, there are a few bullies, not just one, demanding that the rules be ignored for them, and some other players decide to ignore other rules as well, and pretty soon, there is nothing like baseball happening.

You see what happened here? I’m going to guess that you don’t quite see the key point yet. The reason you leave the plate and go back to the dugout when you get three strikes is NOT because of the properties of matter, gravity, magnetic attraction, the unstoppable flow of water or a strong wind. You are not blown, washed, pulled, pushed, or dropped by any force back into the dugout when you get three strikes. You go back into the dugout because you got three strikes, the rules say you are out, right?

No. Still not right. You go back into the dugout because you got three strikes, the rules say you are out, AND THEN YOU FOLLOW THE RULES.

The Republican party, about half the elected officials, have unilaterally decided, in state houses across the country and in the Federal government, to stop following the rules.

A few years ago, in the Minnesota State House, a Republican representative made the clear and bold statement that he represented only the voters in his district who voted for him, and not the other citizens. He was resoundingly condemned for doing this, and he backed off and stopped talking like that. But over time, in state houses across the country, and in congressional districts, this increasingly became the norm, for Republicans. The rule is, of course, that once elected you represent all the people of your district. But more and more Republicans decided that this rule did not apply to them. They only represent those who voted for them. Now, this is normal in the Republican Party, and the first Republican President to be elected after this change said during his first news conference after his election, prior to his inaugural, that blue states would suffer and red states would benefit from his presidency.

I’ll give you another quick example. In one of Minnesota’s legislative chambers, the chair, who is from the leading party, has the right to silence any legislature who gets up to speak if the topic being discussed is not related to the matter at hand on the floor. So, the legislature is debating a proposed law about bicycles. The Democrats are in charge. A Republican gets up and insists on talking about his horoscope. The Democratic chair of the chamber says something like, “Your remarks are not relevant to the matter at hand, sit down and be quiet.” Good rule.

Last time the Republicans were in charge in that Minnesota chamber, they did this to every single Democrat who stood to say anything about anything, including and especially the matter at hand. The Republicans disregarded the actual rule (that the chair can silence a member who is off topic) and misused the power (that the chair can silence any member) to their benefit.

Tump is not following the rules, the Republicans in Congress are not acting like a “check” on Trump, and we have seen government officials in the Executive branch, apparently, ignoring court orders.

Trump’s executive orders over the last few days have been an overreach of power. For example, in its initial and badly executed form, his “extreme vetting” plan removed the rights of green card holders. Two different court orders neutered at least parts of this executive order temporarily, but it is reported that some officials, working for the Executive branches, ignored the court order. Since these are basically cops ignoring an order from a judge, and judges don’t have a police force, there isn’t much that can be done about that. Cops are supposed to follow the orders of judges. That’s the rule. The only way the rule works is if the rule is followed. There is no other force that makes the rule work.

Trump’s apparent abrogation of previous decisions on major pipeline projects was done without reference of any kind to the regulatory process that had already been completed. Regulations are acted on by the Executive branch, but they come from laws passed by Congress, and the whole judiciary is involved whenever someone has a case that there is something amiss. Trump’s executive orders and memoranda related to the pipeline ignore all the different branches of government, departments, process, and rules of governing.

It would appear that Trump had brought together the two major changes in rule observation that have developed over the last 20 years in this country. First, like the average citizen (of all political stripes) he is ignorant of how anything works. Second, like the bully that stands by the batter’s box, he shall not observe any rule that he does happen to find out about.

You see, for a United States President to become a dictator, he has to do only one thing: Stop following the rules. The US Court System, the Congress, and the Executive exist in a system of checks and balances, and that is supposed to keep everybody, well, in check. And balanced. But the Executive is the branch of government with multiple police and security forces, an Army, a Navy, an Air Force, Marines, and a Coast Guard. There is a rule that only the Coast Guard can carry out military-esque activities on US soil. But there is a mechanism for putting that rule aside. The President puts the rule aside. That’s it.

We live in a world of limited resources, and a pre-existing system of inequity, class, and ethnic categorization that allows the powerful to exploit and control most everyone else. We live in a country in which a single individual can take over the government by getting elected president then ignoring the rules, whether or not he formally declares himself in charge of everything. There is no mechanism to stop this from happening. There are all sorts of rules in place to stop it, such as the political parties putting up qualified candidates, the electors making sure they elect a qualified candidate, the Congress certifying the election of qualified candidates. But those things did not happen, and we now have a man who by all indications intends to dictate, not lead, dictate not rule, dictate not represent. There is no indication of any kind whatsoever that we do NOT have an incipient dictatorship as our form of government right now, and there are strong indications that this is where Trump is going.

And this is where Mischa’s Law becomes a thing.

“Racism, left unchecked, will eventually lead to holocaust.”

The checks, they have been neutralized.

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2kjkFBx