tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-77641673498567532402024-03-17T20:03:41.192-07:00Firefighter Challenge®Timely thoughts and relevant information for fire-athletes...©, 2023Paul O. Davis, Ph.D.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01467526468422745403noreply@blogger.comBlogger543125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7764167349856753240.post-4042571981274524112023-10-31T10:10:00.000-07:002023-10-31T10:10:52.237-07:00JUST 22 Minutes of Walking Can Offset Health Risks of All-Day Sitting BY Lisa O'Mary<br /><br /> Oct. 25, 2023 – To combat the health risks of sitting at a desk all day or indulging in an all-day Netflix binge, head out for a brisk 22-minute walk. <br /><br />New research shows that people who do at least 22 minutes of physical activity daily reduce their risk of early death. The findings were published Tuesday in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.<br /><br />Most people in Western countries spend between 9 and 10 hours being sedentary when they're not sleeping, most of which occurs during a person’s workday, the researchers noted. Sedentary time is linked to early death, while it is well-established that physical activity has wide-ranging health benefits. This latest study sought to examine just how much sedentary time it takes to trigger the risk of early death, and just how much physical activity it takes to reduce that risk. The researchers examined physical activity level that is, at a minimum, equal to a brisk walk or gardening.<br /><br />For the analysis, the researchers in Norway combined data from four previous studies of 12,000 people who were age 50 or older who wore hip-mounted fitness trackers to measure their active and sedentary time. Data was excluded from midnight to 6 a.m. when people usually sleep.<br /><br />The analysis showed that having more than 12 daily sedentary hours was linked to a 38% higher risk of early death only among people who had less than 22 minutes per day of moderate to vigorous physical activity. <br /><br />There was no cutoff for the amount of sedentary time that triggers health risks, but any increase in moderate physical activity translated to a reduced risk of early death. The study also showed that increasing physical activity was more protective than reducing sedentary time.<div><br /></div>The results are similar to the CDC’s physical activity <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/physicalactivity/basics/adults/index.htm#:~:text=Each%20week%20adults%20need%20150,Physical%20Activity%20Guidelines%20for%20Americans.">recommendation for adults</a>, which advises 150 minutes per week of moderate aerobic activity like walking. Divided among 7 days, 150 minutes in a week equals just over 21 minutes daily. The CDC also says adults should do muscle strengthening activities at least two times per week for the major muscle groups, which are the legs, hips, back, belly, chest, shoulders, and arms.Paul O. Davis, Ph.D.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01467526468422745403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7764167349856753240.post-17826840408920479872023-10-07T09:42:00.000-07:002023-10-07T09:42:41.771-07:00The Ethos, Short History and Relevance of the Firefighter Challenge® The Firefighter Challenge® is a content-valid physical ability test based upon the empirical research of Dr. Paul O. Davis, and his team of Exercise Scientists and a Cardiologist in the 1970s at the University of Maryland, Human Performance Laboratory, School of Public Health, Department of Kinesiology, in cooperation with the Washington, DC, Council of Governments Fire Training Officers subcommittee and the participation of five career firefighting jurisdictions who provided 100 veteran firefighters as test subjects. The results of the study were published in the peer-reviewed journal of the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM)*. <br /><br />[[*] Davis, Paul O., Charles O. Dotson, and D. Laine Santa Maria. “Relationship Between Simulated Firefighting Tasks and Physical Performance Measures.” Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 65-71, 1982.}<br /><br />When I joined the local Montgomery County Fire Department in 1966, there wasn’t the body of knowledge like the current compendium of occupational or sports physiology. Job-relatedness was a term on the horizon.<br /><br />In the United States, the federal government got involved in the passage of Employment Opportunity Laws. Physical ability tests (PATs) were seen by some as artificial barriers to employment of otherwise qualified people, based on the misguided notion that anybody could do any job if they just tried harder. Or, if you work with any candidate long enough, they could “do the job.”<br /><br />We now have protections for age, sex, disabilities, national origin, religion, and race. In the US, if you can’t get a job because you can’t pass the selection criteria based upon your natural abilities, then try legal fiat: i.e., you file suit in federal or local court, claiming “discrimination.” <br /><br />While well-intentioned, these laws launched my career, as Science is the basis for the BFOQ (bona fide occupational qualification) exception: i.e., the actual essential functional requirements of the job. Gravity is the great equalizer, exerting a downward force of 32ft per second squared the World around. And water weighs 8.3 pounds per gallon for everyone. So, you don’t get a pass because of your age or sex. The patient or victim must be moved. And people keep getting heavier.ª<br /><br />[[ª] Bryan Stierman, M.D., M.P.H.; Joseph Afful, M.S.; Margaret D. Carroll, M.S.P.H.; Te-Ching Chen, Ph.D.; Orlando Davy, M.P.H.; Steven Fink, M.A.; Cheryl D. Fryar, M.S.P.H.; Qiuping Gu, Ph.D.; Craig M. Hales, M.D., M.P.H.; Jeffery P. Hughes, M.P.H.; Yechiam Ostchega, Ph.D., R.N.; Renee J. Storandt, M.T.(A.S.C.P.), M.S.P.H.; and Lara J. Akinbami, M.D. National Health Statistics Reports: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Center for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics.] <br /><br />Your basic “go to work uniform” or “business suit” imposes a severe metabolic cost and depending upon your physical size and the tools of the trade you may already be handicapped with 50 to 100 pounds of gear (22-45kg) that must be carried up flights of stairs, and then used once you’ve climbed to your objective.<br /><br />We have measured with scientific certainty what the job requires. My job as a faculty member in the Kinesiology Department of the School of Public Health at the University of Maryland, funded by a federal grant from the US Fire Administration, delved into the morass of essential functions and quantified the physiological human demands of the job. I’ve been retained in ≈72 legal actions where medical and physical standards or issues brought the warring parties into the courtroom.<br /><br />When in 1975, 100 randomly selected Greater Washington, DC area firefighters visited our Human Performance Laboratory, we met the scientific rigor to conduct a study published in the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) peer-reviewed journal. But the real validation was in the hearts and minds of firefighters everywhere, who gave us two thumbs up because the Challenge resonates in the hearts and minds of firefighters around the globe because the physical demands are identical to what they do on the job.<br /><br />In the late 1970s and Early 1900’s we were delivering a 40-hour certification course for fire department Fitness Coordinators (CFCs) all over the US. We had introduced into the curriculum the “Combat Test” when the host department had the resources. The course is described thusly:<br /><br /><b>The Challenge Course</b><br /><br />Wearing NFPA 1971-compliant Personal Protective Ensemble (PPE) of helmet, turnout coat and trousers, boots, gloves and breathing compressed air from a Self-Contained Breathing Apparatus (SCBA) The five-linked tasks, in order are: <br /><br />1. Climb a five-story tower to the top deck (41 feet, 12.5m from the ground) with a standard High-rise bundle of attack hose (32 pounds, 15.5 kg); at the top of the tower place the high-rise bundle in the box, <br /><br />2. Then hoist the 42-pound (19kg) LDH donut roll up and over the railing and place it in the box. Descend the tower touching every step, <br /><br />3. Walk 20’ (≈6m) to the Keiser Forcible Entry simulator and drive the ≈160lb (72.5kg) beam a distance of 5 feet (1.5m), by striking the trailing end with the Trusty Cook shot mallet. Place the hammer on the mat and move to...<br /><br />4. Negotiate the delineators, 140’ (42.7m), to the far end of the course; Pick up the 1.5” (mm) smooth bore, ballcock nozzle and advance the charged 1.75” attack line a distance of 75’ (m), go through the saloon doors, open the nozzle, striking the target and place the nozzle on the pad. <br /><br />5. Walk 20’ to the 170lb (≈79kg) (NascoHealthcare Rescue Randy® mannequin, lift the head and shoulders, causing the dummy to flex at the waist, then keeping the vertebral column stabilized, lift and drag the dummy a distance of ≈100ft (47.2m), crossing the finish line, thereby stopping the timing system. <br /><br /><div>While there may be some “knockoffs” of the only real Firefighter Challenge, what differentiates us is we have an audit trail back to the laboratory. There is no form of climbing under load, hoisting with a gloved hand, simulating forcible entry with a hand tool, advancing a charged hose line, opening a nozzle with control and using proper biomechanics to move a simulated adult victim that is not a derivative of my original Intellectual Property (IP). <br /><br />This hyperlink: <a href="https://vimeo.com/205602154">https://vimeo.com/205602154</a>, created and produced by Jordan Caskey of the Spokane NBC affiliate SWX-TV from the Silverwood ID Challenge, is one of the better descriptions of the course.<br /><br />It’s easy to copy when you can go to a website and steal the Intellectual Property (IP) of the original scientist. The value of the Challenge is its objectivity because of the precision and attention given to the course. Times are comparable to the World around because of the attention to detail. That’s the basis for sport. We’re all playing on the same field with the same set of conditions. <br /><br />We continue to cross-validate the Challenge Course with incumbent firefighters who show a post-participation concordance of agreement coefficient with Real Life with greater than 90% agreement.<br /><br />Think of a run through the course as a “check ride.” It instantly gives you feedback about where you are on the gut check. Are you “Good to Go?” Firefighting is about turning over lactate because everything is heavy, and you’re racing against the clock. Whether it’s a patient who stopped breathing or the fire that doubles in size every 45 seconds, Time is your enemy,<br /><br />When a firefighter steps out on the course, bunkered up and breathing from their SCBA, it’s “Go Time.” Sometimes, you are in front of hundreds or thousands of your peers or the adoring public. Yes, the pressure is on. But it can be just like another day on the job. There’s no better platform than the Firefighter Challenge to demonstrate to our stakeholders and yourself why the job exists, the objects of our preparedness, training, and focus that you have what it takes. Firefighters tend to be competitive, and the Challenge is the perfect outlet and the proof of the pudding. It’s where training is validated over a course that spans the full range of motion, energy metabolism and oxygen-lactate kinetics. <br /><br />Every firefighter will have what is about as close as you can get to the real world to analyze every aspect of the climbing, hauling, lifting, slamming, and hoisting against the template in their mind in the after-action analysis of their run. And that is how we improve; “next time, better time.” <br /><br />In our infancy, circa 1990, Combat, as used in fire station lingo differentiated “Line” guys from “Staff” as in upper management. There’s always been a certain pecking order between the guys who put the wet stuff on the “hot stuff” and the “bean counters” at headquarters. <br /><br />Ergo the title “Combat’. We don’t fight people, we’re “firefighters” adding Combat is sort of redundant. So, we’ve moved on and dropped the title “Combat” in a lot of cases so as not to confuse the public or infer a likeness to the military’s use of the term. <br /><br />The immediate response from veteran firefighters across the country told us we had hit the “sweat spot” in fitness testing. As one Fitness Coordinator told me in a phone call, “guys were coming to the academy to run the course on their day off. That never happened when the standard push-ups or 1.5mile run was a requirement.” <br /><br />Our first Challenge was back to the University of Maryland’s Fire and Rescue Institute in May 1991. CBS’s local affiliate WUSA covered the event and DuPont’s aramid fibers division that makes Kevlar and Nomex jumped on board as Title Sponsor and the first US Championship was held coincidental with the annual meeting of the International Association of Fire Chiefs in Anaheim, California. <br /><br />Now spanning the globe affiliate licensees hold competitions in New Zealand, Slovenia, Berlin, and Ukraine. <br /><br />Our Watchword is “Safety First Always”. These are “Industrial Athletes” in the same sense as organized sports, they make their living using their fitness-related skills. Injury prevention is always a consideration. One of the classic occupational medicine studies has demonstrated a quadratic function between muscular strength and back injuries. Meaning, the higher the strength level, the lower the incidence of back injuries.🅧<br /><br />🅧Cady, Lee D. MD, Dr. P.H. Bischoff, David Strength and Fitness and Subsequent Back Injuries in Firefighters, Journal of Occupational Medicine, Volume 21, Issue 4, April 1979<br /><br />Challenge Demographics <br />Years of operations 32<br />Number of Events in US & Canada: 594<br /><br /><br /> <style class="WebKit-mso-list-quirks-style">
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</style></div>Paul O. Davis, Ph.D.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01467526468422745403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7764167349856753240.post-37821826930509962912023-09-07T07:42:00.001-07:002023-09-07T07:49:30.243-07:0017th Annual Firefighter Challenge - Berlin at the Mercedes Benz Arena Plaza<p>As per usual, Mike Weikamm and company host one of the most professional of Challenge events every year. </p><p>Moving from Potzdamer Platz, the new venue is impressive!</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwJ0qpWmiTdvdrlrbLc6C9ZEvZnAMDPsMPNTsNAo6tnU5VJtiFe_D_zPXhMh4SX9Ts8cXYIddjsWaAZnA59wfNO1ABOqYrBii1KpD-mAr3bs9DBnSmNNWRd1BztlNosdaTDPdK7rJbbg1ZI-jEHNes-yhyKihbfryTSsBBwwYbb4_ww4AhSOKjWqPD4zA/s1280/IMAGE.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="960" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwJ0qpWmiTdvdrlrbLc6C9ZEvZnAMDPsMPNTsNAo6tnU5VJtiFe_D_zPXhMh4SX9Ts8cXYIddjsWaAZnA59wfNO1ABOqYrBii1KpD-mAr3bs9DBnSmNNWRd1BztlNosdaTDPdK7rJbbg1ZI-jEHNes-yhyKihbfryTSsBBwwYbb4_ww4AhSOKjWqPD4zA/w480-h640/IMAGE.jpeg" width="480" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Here's the Traditional Group Photo at the base of the Tower</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjefgJXg987iiT7UupCjuljlMwwabHuYJoxd4RoXq7WVfFvLnBFXgdXdaeoP7xJwo_5dT85zH4kf6eEO7mCeblcpEUR85m5uF6lY0zcKc1HJANIAZE6SYAJCO6YfSZhzh3MSbKUh4Q1QfvNP5yFOGO4GuEjYn64Bbgf5thgKbOBiwsZE1X0EkEr30jJSB8/s4032/Foto1%2019.08.23,%2018%2010%2042.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2500" data-original-width="4032" height="396" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjefgJXg987iiT7UupCjuljlMwwabHuYJoxd4RoXq7WVfFvLnBFXgdXdaeoP7xJwo_5dT85zH4kf6eEO7mCeblcpEUR85m5uF6lY0zcKc1HJANIAZE6SYAJCO6YfSZhzh3MSbKUh4Q1QfvNP5yFOGO4GuEjYn64Bbgf5thgKbOBiwsZE1X0EkEr30jJSB8/w640-h396/Foto1%2019.08.23,%2018%2010%2042.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">The Final Race: Relay Championship Poland versus Slovenia</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Hosted by YouTube</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://youtu.be/mnXZFg5gE-Q?si=eeFRp2IJ1GCx23UW">YouTube Video: SLOVENIA vs POLAND</a><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://youtu.be/mnXZFg5gE-Q?si=eeFRp2IJ1GCx23UW" target="_blank">https://youtu.be/mnXZFg5gE-Q?si=eeFRp2IJ1GCx23UW</a><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><p><br /></p>Paul O. Davis, Ph.D.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01467526468422745403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7764167349856753240.post-63515877839336595712023-07-31T03:43:00.000-07:002023-07-31T03:43:05.075-07:00Open Letter to Congress from over 200 Retired Flag Rank Officers <p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">We respectfully request that Congress, pursuant to its constitutional powers "…to raise and support Armies…" and "… to provide and maintain a Navy…," take legislative action to remove all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs from the Department of Defense (DoD).</span></p>
<p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 17px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p>
<p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">Additionally, we ask that you ensure no DEI-related policies, programs, or funding are included in the 2024 NDAA. As our Nation faces looming threats from "foreign" adversaries/enemies, our military is under assault from a culture war stemming from "domestic" ideologically inspired political policies and practices. If not stopped now, they will forever change the military's warrior ethos essential to performing its mission of deterring aggression and failing that, to fight and win our Nation's wars.</span></p>
<p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 17px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p>
<p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">Our military must be laser-focused on one mission—readiness, undiminished by the culture war engulfing our country. For generations, our military was a meritocracy, which simply defined means selection and advancement based solely on merit and ability. Service Members (SMs) were judged not by the color of their skin but by their character, duty performance, and potential. Meritocracy, coupled with equal opportunity, created conditions for all to advance and excel, which stimulates healthy competition, thereby raising standards. Historically, our military has been one of, if not the most, diverse and inclusive institution in America.</span></p>
<p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 17px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p>
<p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">The domestic cultural threat has an innocuous name: "diversity, equity, and inclusion" (DEI). But, in reality, DEI is dividing, not uniting, our military and society. DEI's principles derive from critical race theory, which is rooted in cultural Marxism, where people are grouped into identity classes (typically by race), labeled as "oppressed" or "oppressors," and pitted against each other. Under the guise of DEI, some people are selected for career-enhancing opportunities and advancement based on preferences given to identity groups based on race, gender, ethnic background, sexual orientation, etc. For example, the DoD twice admitted to using race in service academy admissions in its 2022 amicus brief in the pending Supreme Court college admissions cases.</span></p>
<p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 17px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p>
<p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">Our military has practiced "equality" by giving equal opportunities for all to achieve. The equality approach ignores skin color, gender, or ethnicity seeing all SMs as equal, with a common set of values and mission. This does not diminish their individuality but rather celebrates their dedication to duty and a higher noble calling of selfless service to our Nation.</span></p>
<p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 17px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p>
<p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">DEI's "Equity" sounds benign, but in practice, it lowers standards. While equality provides equal opportunities, equity's goal is equal outcomes. To achieve equal outcomes using identity group characteristics, standards must be lowered to accommodate the desired equity outcomes. Lower standards reduce performance where even slight differences in capability impact readiness and can determine war-fighting mission success or failure.</span></p>
<p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 17px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p>
<p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) practices use identity-based preferences in selections for career schools and promotions. As with equity, D&I lowers standards by not always selecting the best qualified to become pilots, academy cadets, leaders at all ranks, etc. Identity-based preferences create friction and distrust in the ranks, damaging unit cohesion, teamwork and unity of effort, further degrading readiness.</span></p>
<p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 17px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p>
<p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">The "One Team, One Fight" battle motto describes a meritocracy-based military characterized by: • a common mission and purpose; • unqualified loyalty to the team and not to an individual's identity group; • total trust and confidence in each other for their very lives from the foxhole to the highest level; • teamwork/camaraderie resulting in the unit cohesion essential for warfighting readiness.</span></p>
<p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 17px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p>
<p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">Meritocracy is essential for winning. In professional sports - where the mission is to win games - the best players are fielded to win, no matter their skin color. If meritocracy is used in sports where the consequence of losing a game is minor, why is it not essential in the military where the worst-case consequences of losing a major war are unimaginable losses of life, destruction, and perhaps our Nation? To win, the best-qualified SMs must be selected to lead America's sons and daughters into life-and-death situations. Meritocracy wins games and it wins wars!</span></p>
<p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 17px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p>
<p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">We have fought for our Nation and are sounding the alarm that DEI poses a grave danger to our military warfighting ethos and is degrading warfighting readiness. Social engineering, commonly called "wokeism," has no place in our military. China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea are not distracted by DEI programs; no doubt they are watching us. Equal opportunity and merit-based performance has been battle tested for generations and proven essential for success. DEI policies and practices must be eliminated from the DoD to protect our critical warfighting readiness.</span></p>
<p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 17px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p>
<p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">Respectfully submitted,</span></p>Paul O. Davis, Ph.D.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01467526468422745403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7764167349856753240.post-35407859122013165252023-07-25T02:10:00.000-07:002023-07-25T02:10:22.883-07:00These 8 habits could add up to 24 years to your life, study findsJuly 24, 2023 / 10:45 AM<br /><br />Want to add years to your life? Following a few healthy habits could do just that, according to a new study.<br /><br />The observational study presented Monday at the <a href="https://nutrition.org/N23/">American Society for Nutrition's</a> annual meeting in Boston examined data on more than 700,000 U.S. veterans and how their life expectancy shifted based on the number of healthy habits followed. <br /><br />The findings? Adopting eight healthy lifestyle habits by middle age can result in a substantially longer life than those with few or none of the habits. Those habits include: Being physically active<br />• Being free from opioid addiction<br />• Not smoking<br />• <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/stress-relieving-tips-relax-chill-out/">Managing stress</a><br />• Having a <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/heart-healthy-diets-mediterranean-keto-paleo-american-heart-association/">good diet</a><br />• Not regularly <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/whats-a-borg-college-drinking-trend-explained/">binge drinking</a><br />• Having good <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sleep-hygiene-tips/">sleep hygiene</a><br />• Having positive social relationships<br /><br />While the habits aren't groundbreaking — you've likely heard health experts advise similar wellness practices — the amount of lifespan expected to be gained from them is impressive.<br /><br />According to the results, men with all eight habits at age 40 are expected to live 24 years longer on average compared with those with none. Women with all eight habits are predicted to live an 21 additional years.<br /><br />"We were really surprised by just how much could be gained with the adoption of one, two, three, or all eight lifestyle factors," Xuan-Mai T. Nguyen, health science specialist at the Department of Veterans Affairs and rising fourth-year medical student at Carle Illinois College of Medicine, said in a <a href="https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/995553">news release</a>. "Our research findings suggest that adopting a healthy lifestyle is important for both public health and personal wellness."<br /><br />Low physical activity, opioid use and smoking had the biggest impact on lifespan, according to the release, with a 30-45% higher risk of death during the study period.<br /><br />"Stress, binge drinking, poor diet, and poor sleep hygiene were each associated with around a 20% increase in the risk of death, and a lack of positive social relationships was associated with a 5% increased risk of death," the release added.<br /><br />In terms of when to take action, "the earlier the better," Nguyen noted, "but even if you only make a small change in your 40s, 50s, or 60s, it still is beneficial."<br /><br />That's because adopting healthier habits at an older age can still help you live longer, researchers found, even if the life expectancy gain grew slightly smaller with age.<br /><br />"It is never too late to adopt a healthy lifestyle," Nguyen said.<br /><br />This study has not yet been published by a peer-reviewed publication but was evaluated and selected by a committee of experts to be presented at the meeting.<br /><br /><br />Paul O. Davis, Ph.D.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01467526468422745403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7764167349856753240.post-44545187265556122712023-07-22T01:54:00.000-07:002023-07-22T01:54:38.892-07:00It's (mostly) about the Nozzle<p>The Five Essential Funtions™that comprise the "engine" of the Firefighter Challenge have their origin in the original JTA (job task analysis) that I conducted as a part of our FEMA-funded research while a faculty member of the University of Maryland. </p><p>The criteria for inclusion were: 1. Frequently Performed Tasks; 2. Arduous, and 3. Critical. Anything to do with hydraulics was axiomatically inclusive as an "Essential Function" of fire suppression. I knew from experience that with water weighing 8.3 pounds per gallon, moving supply or attack lines was hard work. </p><p>We measured the physical requirements of moving an attack line to full extension (say 150 feet) in a drag would require an ability to pull ≈240 pounds (as measured by a dynamometer). But, you wanted to have some defining activity to validate that you were "there." Ergo: opening the bale and squirting some water defined the task. </p><p>Nominally, for a straight bore nozzle, with 125psi, you get some kickback, so again, there's a built-in physical demand that requires a combination of dynamic and static strength. Getting up a good head of steam before the looped sections are pulled into the equation was an excellent way to keep up the momentum. </p><p>Initially, we didn't have a target; that will come later. But, what to do with the nozzle once the task was accomplished? Squirt water. That's what. </p><p>With the first Challenge event held at the University of Maryland's Fire Rescue Institute, we used appliances and hose provided by MFRI. The following year we began to assemble our own assets. At FDIC held in Cincinnatti, the representative of Akron demonstrated the ruggedness of their straight bore nozzle by spiking it on the concrete floor. He said, "you can do that all day long." I was impressed. </p><p>In our first formative years, Task Force Tips (TFT) approached us and offered to become the "Official Nozzle" of the Challenge. Doug McMillian, brother of Stewart, had a pair of targets designed for our application. It had a strobe on top and a horn powered by a Scott air bottle that would sound when the guillotine fell. This ingenious design, weighing about 300 pounds, would have to be reduced in weight and complexity when used on tour. </p><p>Doug wanted us to use their Automatic Nozzle; I suggested that this was the bridge too far in that I had been taught in basic school that you treated these appliances with care; not dropping them on the ground or using them for forcible entry. Our trademark, the "Hose Dragging Man," was a posterized image created by George Eade, our commercial artist, who designed the stylized and trademarked "Firefighter Challenge" with the Fruiter font. </p><p>Not unexpectantly, the nozzles began to break. Doug asked that I explain to the Competitors that they had to gently place the nozzles on the ground before advancing. I said, "I'll be glad to explain that the TFT nozzles required special handling." He got it immediately and said, "We'll make them tougher." And he did. </p><p>Shortly after this solution, Doug and Stewart had a falling out, and the sponsorship was collateral damage. </p><p>Enter Elkhart Brass. Danny Brogden, who I had known prior to his becoming the marketing guy for Elkart. He proffered that their fog nozzle would be up to the Challenge. As you know, you can dial in a number of patterns, but he locked in the straight stream function. The nozzle came with a chrome bale. I said, "I think that's going to be a problem." He differed and as it turned out, was correct. </p><p>Then came POK, a French manufacturer of a whole line of firefighting appliances. Jean-Marc Tassé was the North American marketing manager and wanted to make a statement about their presence in the business. So, POK paid for the 700-pound scoreboard and provided the smoothbore, straight stream nozzle that went into use for the next 20 years. </p><p>The scoreboard, made by Colorado Timing, turned out to be an albatross. The display was better suited for indoor applications and was a constant headache requiring maintenance and power supply replacements. Jay Staeden, our then-Operations Manager, could be seen hanging from a rope with a broomstick in his hand, banging the back of the panels to get bulky displays to light up. Colorado Timing never completed the specifications and kept screaming to get paid. </p><p>We ended up dumping off the whole pile of junk in their parking lot. But, true to his word, Jean-Marc continued to work on improving the nozzles. By rev 4.0, he had it mil-spec'd and nuclear-hardened. Until: </p><p>When Jean-marc disappeared to Costa Rica, leaving the entire Maryland Warehouse on Maryland's Eastern Shore abandoned, we thought we might return to the original Akron Brass product. We purchased (against our religion) two of their straight bore nozzles and were sorely disappointed that they failed almost immediately. So, scratch that idea. </p><p>Since we conducted a couple of events in Elkhart, IN, and they provided us with nozzles for that event, we thought exploring a partnership was worth pursuing. For WCXXX two beautiful nozzles were produced and put into service. Regrettably, they did not survive. </p><p>We have made entreaties to POK through three emails, alerting them that the decision to go to a metal bale was a mistake. Of course, for the preponderance of fire fighting organizations, they never approach their end of life since no one abuses equipment like we do. In fact, we lay claim to being the "Aberdeen Proving Ground" of the fire service. If you want to have your stuff tested, we run "Four Alarm Fires" every weekend. </p><p>The clear value to any company that wishes to associate their equipment with the very rugged nature of the Challenge is an imprimatur. </p><p>While in Fort Pierce, Captain-Paramedic John Tillett (ret) pointed out to me the major differences between the POK product and what Elkhart had produced. The POK nozzle is machined from a solid block of a metal composite. The handle is a brass frame, covered by a rubberized material and secured with taps, drilled into the body. </p><p>One note: way back, Clint Lamb and I got the idea of inserting a quarter-inch washer into the smooth bore of the nozzle. This reduced the flow, since we have a finite amount of water (250gal) onboard our Semi trailer. </p><p>The really fast guys can knock down the target with as little as a liter of water. </p><p>So, what's next? </p><p>If we can't find a suitable replacement to the handle issues on the POK nozzle, we may be forced to add a requirement that after knocking the target down, the nozzle has to be hung on a hook. I know that there will be push-back since this added step will take additional time. But, we simply can't be at the mercy of equipment that is no longer up to the Challenge. </p><p>Parenthetically, I must mention that while in Paris, a few years back, POK funded my trip to their factory at Nogent-sur-Seine. I was very impressed with their operations and their CEO Dr. Alexandra Grandpierre. </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Paul O. Davis, Ph.D.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01467526468422745403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7764167349856753240.post-56042256319469707362023-07-17T19:12:00.001-07:002023-07-17T19:12:29.551-07:00Weighting game<p style="text-align: center;"><br />Weighting game</p><br />While there’s nothing particularly new about people trying to manage and keep their weight down, the number of people who may be tempted to experiment with medical remedies like Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro is higher than ever as obesity rates have risen in the US. <br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoyj1y3oSh3-IXPNty0oW47--BiXzYJM8vFLLn5mPqrsST4YLWpCdgvHbdJ0aWQiyEmojP5joFbOg9mkzrjik-03kKgn9mGelTBFO1iCIOUZe6ylM2SEAVBgsWYCDbNarKX5Rukngz6W8y4JH9mPRaiUGKDpyAVLrTHKYITduT3lpGKD6Q_RYFykQEbKI/s3300/Obesity%20over%20Time.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3300" data-original-width="2550" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoyj1y3oSh3-IXPNty0oW47--BiXzYJM8vFLLn5mPqrsST4YLWpCdgvHbdJ0aWQiyEmojP5joFbOg9mkzrjik-03kKgn9mGelTBFO1iCIOUZe6ylM2SEAVBgsWYCDbNarKX5Rukngz6W8y4JH9mPRaiUGKDpyAVLrTHKYITduT3lpGKD6Q_RYFykQEbKI/w494-h640/Obesity%20over%20Time.jpg" width="494" /></a></div><br />The CDC has been taking periodic surveys of the nation’s health since 1960, when the overall share of obese US adults (those whose Body Mass Index exceeded 30) was just 13%. That figure, as well as the number of Americans who are severely obese (BMI at or over 40), has soared in the years since, hitting 43%, according to the latest survey in 2018. The rises have affected men and women similarly, too, with male obesity rising ~4x from 1962-2018 and the share of severely obese women in the US soaring more than 10x across the same period. <br /><br /><a href="https://chartr.us20.list-manage.com/track/click?u=05dafa9b4317774547b114632&id=d300b06646&e=07e8f60c71">Some experts</a> suggest the late 1970s and early 1980s as points at which the obesity epidemic picked up in the US, with many nodding to increasing levels of dietary fat, sugar, and ultra-processed foods as possible causes. However, even with that backdrop, the acceleration in obesity rates in recent years has been stark — and the full effects are being felt today. Indeed, obesity in America costs an estimated $260 billion each year in inpatient and outpatient care and causes thousands of preventable illnesses and deaths annually, according to <a href="https://chartr.us20.list-manage.com/track/click?u=05dafa9b4317774547b114632&id=aa9a285ecd&e=07e8f60c71">the National Institute of Health</a>. Given the scale of the issue, many have been waiting for a “magic solution” for years.Paul O. Davis, Ph.D.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01467526468422745403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7764167349856753240.post-89235153714611246062023-07-16T02:40:00.001-07:002023-07-16T02:40:49.195-07:00Woke U.S. Military Crisis: What’s Behind the Recruiting Declines?<p>Brutal Honesty: Spend 25 minutes watching this video on the sorry state of our military recruiting <a href="https://www.facebook.com/PatrickBetDavid.Valuetainment/videos/1446982916079928/?mibextid=rS40aB7S9Ucbxw6v" target="_blank">crises</a> </p>Paul O. Davis, Ph.D.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01467526468422745403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7764167349856753240.post-91272186039344044212023-07-06T19:59:00.000-07:002023-07-06T19:59:54.697-07:00The 15 Principles Upon Which the Country Was Founded1. That man is created equal under God, and, as such, human life is a sacred gift of God.<br /><br />2. That the Natural rights of the individual are inalienable and superior to the will of the state.<br /><br />3. That government exists to protect the Natural rights and liberties of man, not to provide man with public benefits and favors.<br /><br />4. That a man is innocent until proven guilty, that he has the Natural right to a trial by jury and the right to a defense attorney.<br /><br />5. That people have a Natural right to choose their own form of government.<br /><br />6. That individuals have a Natural right and duty to bear arms for their own protection and the protection of their communities.<br /><br />7. That the power and reach of the central government needs to be limited, being held in check by independent sovereign states, free, independent juries and state citizen militias.<br /><br />8. That religious liberty is the core of America’s freedoms.<br /><br />9. That the people have a Natural right and duty to alter or abolish any government that has become tyrannical.<br /><br />10. That America would always be a constitutional republic.<br /><br />11. That only sound money would be used as legal tender so as to keep the federal government from amassing excessive debt.<br /><br />12. That America would always promote and protect a free market economy with limited governmental interference.<br /><br />13. That a man’s home is his castle and his personal property can never be seized except by arduous due process.<br /><br />14. That a free society depends upon the acceptance and application of God’s Natural Laws relating to the pursuit of happiness and peace, upon governmental adherence to the Law of Nations and upon the promotion of our Creator’s foundational moral code of human conduct.<br /><br />15. That liberty depends upon the unfettered exercise of the Christian faith, including strong, uninhibited preaching from America’s pulpits. Paul O. Davis, Ph.D.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01467526468422745403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7764167349856753240.post-46676677062244036122023-06-29T06:47:00.000-07:002023-06-29T06:47:13.672-07:00The Transgender Athlete Debate and the Limits of Inclusion in Sports<span style="font-size: large;">Should governing bodies bear the burden of proof when determining who is eligible to compete in women’s sports?</span><br /><a href="https://www.outsideonline.com/byline/martin-fritz-huber/">Martin Fritz Huber </a>Jun 28, 2022<br /><img height="400" src="https://cdn.outsideonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/womens-sports-debate_s.jpg" width="400" /><br /><br />A few years ago, the journalist Michael Lewis started a podcast called “<a href="https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/against-the-rules">Against the Rules</a>.” The first episode had the promising title “Ref, you suck!” and began with the simple observation that animosity towards NBA referees seemed to be at an all-time high. This, Lewis eventually argues, is consistent with a larger trend of distrust and anger towards individuals and institutions who are supposed to be the arbitrators of fairness in our society. Imagine that.<br /><br />I was reminded of Lewis’s premise earlier this month after the UCI, cycling’s global governing body, <a href="https://www.velonews.com/news/uci-changes-transgender-participation-rules/">announced</a> that it would be adopting a more stringent policy for transgender participation. Beginning July 1, transgender athletes wishing to compete in the female category will need to have testosterone levels of 2.5 nmol/L or lower (down from the previous 5 nmol/L), and have undergone at least 24 months of medical transitioning (up from the previous 12 months). In response, Emily Bridges, the trans rider whose prospective participation in the British National Omnium Championships was blocked by the UCI at the last minute back in March, <a href="https://www.itv.com/news/2022-06-17/cyclist-emily-bridges-speaks-out-on-uci-toughening-trans-participation-rules">accused</a> the governing body of “moving the goalposts” on trans inclusion. Meanwhile, the sports scientist <a href="https://sportsscientists.com/who-are-we/">Ross Tucker</a>, who has argued that the physical advantages of going through male puberty can never be entirely erased through testosterone suppression, <a href="https://twitter.com/Scienceofsport/status/1537693539819200515">blasted the UCI</a> for being too lenient and ignoring the <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/nine-tenths-of-female-cyclists-dont-want-to-race-against-trans-women-according-to-survey-d2nhxkn9v">wishes of cisgender female cyclists</a>. The critical response from both sides of the debate recalled the old axiom that a compromise is sure to make everyone unhappy. Ref, you suck!<br /><br />Of course, such an outcome might be inevitable in a matter where sports governing bodies might ultimately need to decide whether to prioritize fairness at the expense of inclusivity, or vice versa. If we accept at the outset that a perfect resolution does not exist, the best we can do is to hone in on a particular aspect of the discussion. One place to start is the issue of who should hold the burden of proof when it comes to proving an unfair advantage.<br /><br />At the risk of oversimplification, the question is as follows: If sports governing bodies have a restrictive policy vis-a-vis transgender athlete participation in the female category, is it their responsibility to prove that transgender women have an unfair competitive advantage over cisgender women? Or, conversely, do transgender women who wish to compete in the female category need to prove that they do not have such an advantage?<br /><br />“The Court of Arbitration for Sport has made it very clear that the burden of proof lies with sports-governing bodies that attempt to introduce rules restricting, let alone banning, women from the women’s category,” says <a href="https://www.science.org/content/article/scientist-racing-discover-how-gender-transitions-alter-athletic-performance-including">Joanna Harper</a>, a trans woman, master’s runner, and medical physicist who has consistently held the position that trans women should be allowed to compete in the women’s category in elite-level sports after undergoing a period of testosterone suppression. Harper was referring in part to the <a href="https://www.doping.nl/media/kb/3317/CAS%202014_A_3759%20Dutee%20Chand%20vs.%20AFI%20%26%20IAAF%20%28S%29.pdf">Court of Arbitration for Sport’s 2015 decision</a> in favor of the Indian sprinter Dutee Chand, whose natural testosterone levels were unusually high—a condition that World Athletics refers to as a “difference of sexual development,” or DSD. The court ultimately ruled to suspend the World Athletics regulations that barred women from competing if their testosterone levels were above 10 nmol/L. At the time, the CAS decision noted that WA “has not discharged its onus of establishing that the Hyperandrogenism Regulations are necessary and proportionate to pursue the legitimate objective of organizing competitive female athletics to ensure fairness in athletic competition.”<br /><br />In a similar vein, last November, the International Olympic Committee <a href="https://stillmed.olympics.com/media/Documents/News/2021/11/IOC-Framework-Fairness-Inclusion-Non-discrimination-2021.pdf?_ga=2.56495211.1560876467.1642745279-1258333344.1642131641">issued a document</a> asserting that it would no longer be involved in setting eligibility regulations for trans women athletes and that individual sports governing bodies needed to set their own standards. (The previous IOC policy had mandated one year of testosterone suppression and maximum T levels of 10 nmol/L across the board.) Instead, the IOC offered a framework for how governing bodies should approach the issue, which stipulates that, unless peer-reviewed evidence determines otherwise, “athletes should not be deemed to have an unfair or disproportionate competitive advantage due to their sex variations, physical appearance, and/or transgender status.”<br /><br />Tucker has been one of the more outspoken critics of this approach. In a recent <a href="https://www.bbc.com/sport/61346517">interview</a> with the BBC, he argues that the IOC’s trans policy “got it backwards” by starting from a position of inclusion. When I reached out to him to elaborate, he made the point that the principle of exclusion is a prerequisite for a category to function as a category in the first place. His argument is that there is a logical fallacy in simultaneously holding that a separate women’s category is necessary and assuming that trans women have no advantage until it is proven otherwise. Or, as Tucker put it to me: “To argue that inclusion should be the default for people who wish to enter the category despite having the very attribute that the category exists to exclude, is basically to argue that the category purpose and necessity are not ‘real,’ or should be dismissed in importance.” Hence: “it should be incumbent upon those who are necessarily excluded to show why and how they don’t violate that category’s existence.”<br /><br />Here, Tucker is essentially echoing the argument for “necessary discrimination” that the Court of Arbitration for Sport <a href="https://www.outsideonline.com/health/running/caster-semenya-verdict/">cited to uphold</a> WA’s updated testosterone regulations for DSD women in 2019 when they were challenged by the South African 800-meter runner Caster Semenya. As Tucker explained it to me, the reason why WA was able to win a dispute similar to the one that they had lost several years earlier was that they had successfully (<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/18/sports/track-officials-called-caster-semenya-biologically-male-newly-released-documents-show.html#:~:text=Semenya%20was%20legally%20identified%20as,typical%20male%20XY%20chromosome%20pattern.">albeit controversially</a>) reframed their case; rather than arguing that women with naturally high testosterone had an unfair advantage over other female athletes, they changed tack to argue that DSD athletes were “biologically male athletes with female gender identifies” and that, in the context of elite sport, a binary male-female divide was essential to ensure meaningful competition.<br /><br />It’s worth noting here that Tucker was actually an expert witness testifying on Semenya’s team in the 2019 CAS case. Before the trial commenced, he <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40318-019-00143-w">co-authored a paper</a> in the International Sports Law Journal which skewered a 2017 <a href="https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/52/23/1531">WA-funded study</a> that purported to prove that female athletes with high testosterone levels had a significant competitive advantage. The study was so rife with errors and bogus data points that not to challenge it would have been “an abdication of knowledge,” as Tucker put it to me. But in changing their fundamental argument, WA effectively downplayed the relevance of their own crappy evidence. (Although that crappy evidence is why we currently have the absurd situation where the DSD T-regulations in women’s athletics only apply to track events from the 400-meters to the mile.) Of course, and as Harper emphasized to me, WA ultimately still bore the burden of proof in the Semenya case—but they were able to win by changing the terms of the debate. The burden of proof, in other words, can be a slippery concept.<br /><br />For now, the <a href="https://www.outsideonline.com/health/running/caster-semenya-christine-mboma-beatrice-masilingi-testosterone/">controversy over DSD athletes</a>, which was largely specific to the world of professional track and field, has been subsumed by the broader debate around transgender athletes. Last week, after the news broke that swimming’s global governing body FINA had unveiled a new policy that effectively banned transgender women from elite female competition, WA’s president Seb Coe praised the move as being “in the best interest of its sport.” There has since <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/jun/20/sebastian-coe-hints-athletics-may-bar-transgender-women-from-female-competition">been speculation</a> that WA could soon follow suit by scrapping its hard-won testosterone regulations in favor of a similar blanket ban. Meanwhile, Harper told me that she “assumes that there will be a CAS case involving a trans woman and a sports governing body in the near future.” I wouldn’t bet against it.Paul O. Davis, Ph.D.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01467526468422745403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7764167349856753240.post-14194280013162064422023-06-28T16:02:00.000-07:002023-06-28T16:02:19.032-07:00The Myth That May Have Doomed the Titan<br /><br /> June 28, 2023<br /><br /><img src="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2023/06/29/multimedia/00oreskes/fmvg-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale" />OceanGate Expeditions’ Titan submersible.OceanGate Expeditions, via Associated Press<br /><br />By Naomi Oreskes<br />Dr. Oreskes is a professor of the history of science at Harvard and the author of “Science on a Mission: How Military Funding Shaped What We Do and Don’t Know About the Ocean.<br /><br />As details emerged about the implosion last week of the Titan submersible in its descent to the wreck of the Titanic nearly two and a half miles below the surface of the North Atlantic, there was widespread anger that its owner and pilot knowingly took civilians on an uncertified vessel to a depth of crushing pressure.<br /><br />The billionaire investor Ray Dalio, who founded the ocean exploration company OceanX with his son, Mark, <a href="https://twitter.com/RayDalio/status/1672295942425391104">expressed</a> what he described on Twitter as his “great anger.” He accused Stockton Rush, the chief executive of OceanGate, who was piloting the Titan, of “reckless disregard for tried-and-true safety protocols that have made manned submersible exploration extremely safe.” Within the oceanography community, that view was widely held.<br /><br />Mr. Rush, trained as an aerospace engineer, had justified his decision not to have his vessel certified for safety by arguing that the regulatory process <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/worlds-first-deep-diving-submarine-plans-tourists-see-titanic-180972179/">stifled growth and innovation</a>.<br /><br />“At some point, safety just is pure waste,” Mr. Rush <a href="https://unsungscience.com/news/back-to-titanic-part-1/">said</a> in an interview with David Pogue of CBS. He even <a href="https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/06/23/1833244/titan-sub-ceo-dismissed-safety-warnings-as-baseless-cries-emails-show">suggested</a> that safety was used as an excuse by “industry players who try to use a safety argument to stop innovation.” OceanGate put it this way on its website: “By definition, innovation is outside of an already accepted system.”<br /><br /><br />In Mr. Rush’s telling, innovation was the province of maverick individuals, not stodgy legacy players and certainly not cumbersome government bureaucracies. Mr. Rush was perpetuating a myth — one that is particularly popular in Silicon Valley and among technology start-ups — that governments are just an obstacle and that innovation comes from bold trailblazers moving fast and breaking things.<br /><br />That story is often wrong, and it was 100 percent wrong in this case.<br /><br />The first two deep-diving submersibles built in America were developed by the United States government and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to assist in salvage operations at sea and to install and monitor Cold War underwater listening systems, including the <a href="https://www.csp.navy.mil/cus/About-IUSS/Origins-of-SOSUS/">original version of the system</a> that <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/titanic-titan-implosion-secret-military-technology-8c020e7b">detected the implosion</a> of the Titan.<br /><br />In the 1930s, civilian oceanographers were studying a layer in the ocean where temperatures and pressures channeled sound in a way that enabled it to travel very far. Realizing this could be a powerful military communications tool, they worked with the U.S. Navy to develop technologies that exploited this sound channel. The most important of these technologies was SOSUS — the Sound Surveillance System — a complex network of listening devices called hydrophones on the sea floor designed to detect prowling Soviet submarines.<br /><br />By the late 1950s, SOSUS encompassed more than 1,000 hydrophones and 30,000 miles of undersea cables and could detect sounds hundreds of miles away. But this network required monitoring, inspections and repairs. In the early 1960s, scientists and engineers at Woods Hole collaborated with the U.S. Office of Naval Research and the U.S. Navy Bureau of Ships to conceptualize and commission two radically innovative vessels to do that work: Aluminaut and Alvin.<br /><br />As its name suggests, Aluminaut was developed with the Reynolds Metals Company, one of the largest aluminum companies in the world. It was expensive — the original expected cost was $3 million for construction and two years of operation — but the Navy was willing to take the risk, given the potential rewards. What the Navy and Woods Hole were not willing to do, however, was to risk lives. A Woods Hole engineer, James Mavor Jr., stressed that while Aluminaut was experimental, it still needed to be designed and tested as a “future operating vehicle.” No one wanted an experiment once people were in it underwater.<br /><br /><br />Aluminaut was not a success; the parties involved in its development could not agree on terms and parted ways. But a different submersible, Alvin, did succeed. In 1962, Woods Hole put out a call for bids for a titanium-hulled submersible; the winner was the electronics division of General Mills. Mostly known as a cereal maker, General Mills was in fact a highly innovative company. Among its developments was a <a href="https://www.generalmills.com/about-us/our-history">black box</a> flight data recorder in partnership with the University of Minnesota. <br /><br />The contract called for Alvin to be built in less than a year so that it could be used in the scheduled installation of a new underwater listening system in Bermuda, but a scientific advisory committee warned about the risks of rushing: “While the delivery date is important for the accomplishment of a particular mission, failure to meet the time requirement will not prejudice the general usefulness of the vehicle.”<br /><br />The committee was right. General Mills missed the deadline for the Bermuda project, but Alvin went on to play leading roles in the agonizing effort in 1966 to recover a <a href="https://www.atomicarchive.com/media/photographs/nuclear-journeys/nmnsh/nmnsh-37.html">lost H-bomb</a> from the Mediterranean Sea and the scientific discovery of complex biological communities at deep-sea hydrothermal vents. While Alvin has endured various <a href="https://www.whoi.edu/what-we-do/explore/underwater-vehicles/hov-alvin/history-of-alvin/">accidents and incidents</a> over its long career, no one has ever died in it.<br /><br />Like the internet, submersible technology was commercialized in the private sector, but it was the government, not the private sector, that took the initial risks. The key participants were not disrupters; they were seasoned professionals working inside established institutions, including the industrial giants Reynolds Metals and General Mills, and the giant government bureaucracy that was the <a href="https://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/research-guides/lists-of-senior-officers-and-civilian-officials-of-the-us-navy/bureau-of-ships.html">U.S. Navy Bureau of Ships</a>, now called the Naval Sea Systems Command.<br /><br />Critics may argue that regulations have of late become more cumbersome, which may be true. But the history of submersibles proves that innovation can develop in many contexts and without putting lives at risk. And the loss of the Titan proves that even in a mature industry, you still need regulation. Regulation may slow things down, but it also saves lives. Sometimes slowing down is a good thing.<br /><br />Naomi Oreskes is a professor of the history of science at Harvard and the author of numerous books, including “Science on a Mission: How Military Funding Shaped What We Do and Don’t Know About the Ocean” and “The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market.”She is also a visiting fellow at the Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles.<br /><br />Paul O. Davis, Ph.D.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01467526468422745403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7764167349856753240.post-58522788951522214272023-06-18T07:13:00.004-07:002023-06-18T07:13:53.903-07:00Victor Davis Hanson, Ph.D.Part One - June 6, 2023<br /><br /><br />We can calibrate the decline in the quality of American life by comparisons to both societies of the past and contemporary civilization elsewhere. And the result is not encouraging for Americans.<br /><br /><br />I believe I may have visited 80 percent of the so-called first world countries in Europe and the Middle East, and in most of the major capitals and large cities—Amsterdam, Athens, Berlin, Brussels, Budapest, Lisbon, London, Madrid, Nicosia, Paris, Prague, Rome, Warsaw, etc., as well as the first-, second-, and third-world non-European cities of Algiers, Amman, Ankara, Baghdad, Beirut, Cairo, Damascus, Istanbul, Jerusalem, Kuwait City, Riyadh, Tel Aviv, and Tripoli.<br /><br /><br />Over the last 40 years, I have had major surgeries in these cities, stayed in “bad areas,” lived for nearly three years abroad, and traveled to their hinterlands. I have been a journalist who visited Iraq twice during the surge of 2006–07, was in Israel during the worst of the suicide bombings, lived in Athens during the 1973 coup and 1974 war in Cyprus, and visited for two weeks Egypt just after the Yom Kippur War. I have seen firsthand the toxic work of dictators like Khadafi, the violence of the PLO, the changes in Erdogan’s Turkey, and the incompetence of socialists in Europe.<br /><br /><br />And yet, I never saw in the slums of old Cairo or in the worst environs of Brussels and Naples, or amid the poverty of 1970s rural Turkey anything like what I saw in San Francisco this year and last. The undressed on Market Street and near Union Square were routinely smoking dope, injecting drugs, defecating, urinating, and in various states of pre-civilized behavior. The homeless enclaves of Los Angeles are worse. Were these scenes being filmed for The Last of Us?<br /><br /><br />Beautiful office buildings were empty. Former stores were shuttered.<br /><br /><br />I don’t think in the dark days of the Iraq surge, I saw routine smash-and-grab or carjacking to the extent of what routinely goes on in our major cities. I wore body armor in Iraq each day and evening when on patrols with soldiers, and felt much safer than I would after hours on the weekends in Chicago, Baltimore, Memphis, or Detroit.<br /><br /><br />I was operated on for a ruptured appendix and peritonitis on a wooden table with only an ether fix in a Red Crescent clinic in Khadafi’s Libya, and yet I felt the third-world clinic care in terms of the clientele and fellow patients was less scary than what I have witnessed in ER rooms in the Central Valley of California or in Tucson or Washington, D.C.<br /><br /><br />I used to define America as hyper-civilized by the courtesy and professionalism of its drivers—not far behind those in Canada, the UK, and Australia—especially in comparison to the road madness in Rome or Athens, or Cairo.<br /><br /><br />But no longer. The daily fare of the Fresno Bee is a recitation of high-speed wrecks, carjackings, fatal DUIs, and hit-and-run smash-ups. When I drive rural roads in central California, I expect that one out of five cars coming in my direction will be drifting into my lane, either due to incompetence, unfamiliarity with U.S. traffic laws (27 percent of Californians were not born in the U.S.), intoxication or drug euphoria—or texting.<br /><br /><br />Walking in downtown or midtown New York, or in Washington, or Seattle stinks more than I remember of the corniche in Beirut or the harbor promenade in Alexandria. I am much more likely to be accosted by an obnoxious stranger, homeless person, or would-be criminal in downtown LA, San Francisco, or Portland than in Brussels or Naples—and that is saying something given the latter two disasters. I do not think in Paris or Amman people walk into stores, rob them, and walk out with impunity, with the knowledge that clerks will be fired for reporting their thefts.<br /><br /><br />Part Two - June 7, 2023<br /><br /><br />When I drive in rural California and see the shacks, trailers, and compounds of 30-40 persons living in ad hoc shelters with Romex wire and water hoses attached to a small farmhouse, I conclude that this poverty is much more a third-world scene than I remember of Tunisia, Algeria, or Turkey.<br /><br /><br />Or for that matter, the countryside of northern Mexico seems less impoverished than life outside Mendota, San Joaquin, Orange Cove, or Parlier, California. I would take my chances walking at night in Kuwait City over Minneapolis and would likely find a public restroom on California’s I-5 or the 99 dirtier than its counterpart in rural Greece.<br /><br /><br />Students that I have met in rural Greece were far better educated than their age counterparts in California. Spaniards in the countryside seemed to know more about America than American teens in New York or Philadelphia.<br /><br /><br />Japanese or Kuwaiti exchange students I had in college were far better educated than most of my own CSU (California State University) students. When I taught at Pepperdine, I explained to Chinese students why they rightly seemed afraid to drive alone into most areas of Los Angeles after hours.<br /><br /><br />My point? The basics of life, especially in our major cities—health care, safety, cleanliness—have reached medieval proportions.<br /><br /><br />Or to put it more accurately, there are very different Americas. A sophisticated successful suburban America maintains more or less life as unchanged from the 1970s or 1980s and remains comparable to or better than what is found in Europe.<br /><br /><br />And then there are red-state rural countryside and small towns that likewise are still civilized.<br /><br /><br />But in a third of America in parts of the suburbs surrounding the major cities and the cores of almost all our major cities, life is truly third or fourth-world. The ERs are dirty, broke, and mostly exist to attend to evening gunshot wounds and other sorts of inner-city violence.<br /><br /><br />Garbage piles up on sidewalks around stuffed cans and bins. It is hard to judge whether the smell of marijuana or feces is the stronger odor.<br /><br /><br />I lost my wallet once in Athens, and it was returned in two hours. I have lost glasses, wallet, and cell phones in my hometown of Selma and usually, they were never returned, or within hours I had thefts show up on my credit cards.<br /><br /><br />If my car broke down on the side of a freeway, I would prefer it happened in Israel, Germany, or Portugal than in California. There are more broken appliances and wet garbage tossed along the roads of Fresno County than there are in supposedly ragtag Italy.<br /><br /><br />None of this was true just 20 years ago. When I meet a teen or 20-something person today, I assume he is poorly educated and knows almost nothing about his own country, Gettysburg, World War I, or the Supreme Court. I can be assured only that he is programmed to have the correct ideas about diversity, transgenderism, or the pathologies of his country.<br /><br /><br />Ignorance and arrogance are a fatal combination, especially when combined with a therapeutic society that has abandoned meritocracy and feels social acceptance and career advantage are found in trashing one’s own culture.<br /><br /><br />What explains this decline, a decay so rapid that it seems surreal, fantasy-like? How did slow erosion accelerate to produce an unrecognizable country, in which nothing is secure, nothing reliable, nothing predictable anymore?<br /><br /><br />Part Three - June 9, 2023<br /><br /><br />Another sign of decline is the weaponization and politicization of institutions. Decadent societies indict their former leaders upon leaving offices. Those in power sic federal agencies on their opponents.<br /><br /><br />In turn, bureaucrats become agents of those in power, as if in private service—like laptop suppression, diary retrieval, performance-art raiding and arresting, or finding a presidential son’s missing gun.<br /><br /><br />The Biden family may well have pulled off the greatest pay-for-play grifting scam in presidential history, one that encompassed a decade of selling access to Vice President Biden and supposedly someday President Biden. That the entire kleptocracy will likely only be prosecuted if a Republican administration returns to power is again proof of our third-worldism.<br /><br /><br />The careers of John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Anthony Fauci, Lois Lerner, Andrew McCabe, Lisa Page, Peter Strzok, and Christopher Wray were weaponized. The above either lied under oath when pressed, suppressed an email trail that exposed their culpability or worked hard to discredit or destroy a political candidate they opposed, or simply stonewalled when asked under oath for accountability.<br /><br /><br />In third-world America, Matt Taibbi testifies about the abuse and politicization of federal agencies and upon return to his home finds an IRS note requesting a meeting. An Alvin Bragg finds no actionable writ of “falsifying business records” to lodge against private citizen and ex-president Trump but mysteriously does rediscover grounds for a 34-felony-count indictment on now presidential candidate Donald Trump.<br /><br /><br />When the FBI shows up at school board meeting on the prompt of the teachers’ union hierarchy, or Hillary Clinton destroys with impunity thousands of email records under court subpoena, or during the Roe versus Wade controversies, the FBI starts monitoring traditional Latin-mass Catholic services, or the U.S. military begins sponsoring drag queen shows on military bases, or the President and the Homeland Security secretary condemn as guilty border patrol agents for the fantasy crime of “whipping” illegal alien border crossings as preludes to an announced “investigation,” then we know the U.S. has gone full Brazil, Lebanon, or Congo.<br /><br /><br />There used to be far more accidents, crashes, mayhem, and chaos in the third world than in America because of an absence of meritocracy. Things break and never get repaired or were substandard to begin with.<br /><br /><br />I once took a taxi from the airport into Tripoli, Libya, one of the world’s greatest oil exporters. We hit a pothole that swallowed our small Russian car. Then matter-of-factly we both got out to lift the rear of the tiny car out. I asked the driver how such gargantuan road holes could be possible in a nation blessed with limitless oil reserves. His answer was, “We hire our first cousins.”<br /><br /><br />Translated? “We are tribal people who abhor meritocracy.” During the 1973 Greek dictatorship, my mom sent a pair of $10 Levi’s to me in Athens. They arrived at “customs” which sent me a note to pick them up. I went to the central Athens postal customs office and was told I could have them for $25!<br /><br /><br />I complained to my Greek professor at the college there. She said, “Give them $5 along with the name of our college director.” I did, and the next day the customs supervisor apologized but still asked for $10, which I happily handed over.<br /><br /><br />So too with wokeness.<br /><br /><br />The old joke that affirmative action was just desserts for the mediocre politicized English or sociology department, but would never be applied to air traffic controllers, pilots, brain surgeons, or nuclear plant operators is no longer jest.<br /><br /><br />Non-meritocratic hiring now encompasses every profession. And like the Libyan taxi, we will soon see what filters down when our elite is put in positions of enormous clout and power, largely on the basis of ideological, racial, gender, or ethnic considerations.<br /><br /><br />If you doubt, remember that a non-compos mentis Biden is one more fall away from Kamala Harris, selected entirely based on her race and sex, and who seems to have a vocabulary smaller than her menu of various chuckles.<br /><br /><br />Her presidency really would prove that anyone at all can be president.<br /><br /><br />Opportunity for ALL, but favoritism for NONE!<br /><br /><br />*** Victor Davis Hanson (born September 5, 1953) is an American classicist, military historian, and political commentator. He has been a commentator on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_warfare">modern</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_warfare">ancient warfare</a> and contemporary politics for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times">The New York Times</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Street_Journal">Wall Street Journal</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Review">National Review</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Times">The Washington Times</a> and other media outlets. He is a professor <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emeritus">emeritus</a> of Classics at <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_State_University,_Fresno">California State University, Fresno</a>, the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in classics and military history at the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Institution">Hoover Institution</a>, and visiting professor at <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillsdale_College">Hillsdale College</a>. Hanson was awarded the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Humanities_Medal">National Humanities Medal</a> in 2007 by President <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_W._Bush">George W. Bush</a> and was a presidential appointee in 2007–2008 on the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Battle_Monuments_Commission">American Battle Monuments Commission</a>.Paul O. Davis, Ph.D.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01467526468422745403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7764167349856753240.post-18017097999131677152023-06-15T05:59:00.001-07:002023-06-15T06:00:20.929-07:00From Seth Goden's column Jun 19, 2022<br /><br /> By every geologic measure, modern human life is a tiny blip, a spark of static on a very long-playing record.<br /><br />For most of the time that life has existed on Earth, there were no humans. And when there were human-like creatures, they spent much of their time doing not much. Nomads eat when they need to, move around and hang out. It’s not an easy life, but there are none of the modern distractions or problems that urban culture presents.<br /><br />Grain began to change things, because agriculture produces far more calories per acre, allowing populations to grow… and to store the results of our labor. Stored grain, though, is easier to steal and to tax than something that must be eaten fresh off the tree or harvested.<br /><br />And so you get markets and wars and governments and the rise of a group of people wealthier than any individual farmer or nomad could be.<br /><br />This is all mostly irrelevant. It’s irrelevant in the way that understanding how Edison made movies or sound recordings is irrelevant. It’s nice to know the history, but it doesn’t help you win an Oscar or a Grammy.<br /><br />The two most relevant forces are in a powerful dance right now:<br /><br />• The carbon-fueled growth of industry.<br /><br />• The information-fueled growth of ideas and connection.<br /><br />Industry changed the way the Earth looks from space, it enriched billions of people and it has driven our species to the brink of extinction due to our impact on the climate. It has often been based on caste and coercion, and created both opportunities and problems.<br /><br />Connection has enabled culture to thrive, and in recent years, amplified by the noise of the internet, it’s also made many people miserable in the short run.<br /><br />As we slog through another long, challenging year, one in which these two forces conflict, amplify and engage with each other, I’m remembering what Theodore Parker said more than 150 years ago:<br /><br />I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.<br /><br />We really don’t have a lot of choice about yesterday. Here we are, many of us with more leverage and power than any human on Earth had just a hundred years ago. <br /><br />In the last few decades, so many areas of culture have moved forward that defenders of the status quo are becoming exhausted trying to defend what was. And they sometimes express that exhaustion through anger, division and vitriol.<br /><br />The good news is that we have exactly what we need to make things better. If enough of us stand up and lead and connect, we’ll continue to get closer to what’s possible.<br /><br />Here’s to peace of mind and possibility. They go together.Paul O. Davis, Ph.D.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01467526468422745403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7764167349856753240.post-47618465524639148832023-05-25T01:55:00.000-07:002023-05-25T01:55:16.894-07:00This article on the death penalty might change your mind; it did mine.<p> <i data-reader-unique-id="77" style="caret-color: rgb(27, 27, 27); color: #1b1b1b; font-family: -apple-system-font; font-size: 18px; max-width: 100%;">Robert Bentley, a Republican, served as governor of Alabama from 2011 to 2017. Don Siegelman, a Democrat, was governor of Alabama from 1999 to 2003.</i></p><div data-reader-unique-id="70" style="caret-color: rgb(27, 27, 27); color: #1b1b1b; font-family: -apple-system-font; font-size: 18px; max-width: 100%;"><div data-qa="article-body" data-reader-unique-id="78" style="max-width: 100%;"><p data-el="text" data-reader-unique-id="79" data-testid="drop-cap-letter" dir="null" style="max-width: 100%;">Alabama has 167 people on death row, a greater number per capita than in any other state. As far as the two of us are concerned, that is at least 146 people too many. Here’s why.</p></div></div><div data-qa="article-body" data-reader-unique-id="82" style="caret-color: rgb(27, 27, 27); color: #1b1b1b; font-family: -apple-system-font; font-size: 18px; max-width: 100%;"><p data-el="text" data-reader-unique-id="83" data-testid="drop-cap-letter" dir="null" style="max-width: 100%;">As former Alabama governors, we have come over time to see the flaws in our nation’s justice system and to view the state’s death penalty laws in particular, as legally and morally troubling. We both presided over executions while in office, but if we had known then what we know now about prosecutorial misconduct, we would have exercised our constitutional authority to commute death sentences to life.</p></div><div data-qa="article-body" data-reader-unique-id="85" style="caret-color: rgb(27, 27, 27); color: #1b1b1b; font-family: -apple-system-font; font-size: 18px; max-width: 100%;"><p data-el="text" data-reader-unique-id="86" data-testid="drop-cap-letter" dir="null" style="max-width: 100%;">According to the Death Penalty Information Center, since 1976, nationwide, 1 person on death row has been exonerated for every 8.3 executions. That means we have been getting it wrong about 12 percent of the time. If we apply those statistics to the 167 people on Alabama’s death row, it means that as many as 20 could have been wrongfully charged and convicted.</p></div><div data-qa="article-body" data-reader-unique-id="97" style="caret-color: rgb(27, 27, 27); color: #1b1b1b; font-family: -apple-system-font; font-size: 18px; max-width: 100%;"><p data-el="text" data-reader-unique-id="98" data-testid="drop-cap-letter" dir="null" style="max-width: 100%;"><a data-reader-unique-id="99" href="https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/facts-and-research/dpic-reports/dpic-special-reports/dpic-special-report-the-innocence-epidemic" style="color: #416ed2; max-width: 100%; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">The center has found</a> that wrongful convictions are “overwhelmingly the product of police or prosecutorial misconduct or the presentation of knowingly false testimony.” Judge Alex Kozinski, former chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, <a data-reader-unique-id="100" href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/blistering-9th-circuit-di_n_4426802" style="color: #416ed2; max-width: 100%; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">has said the withholding of exculpatory evidence</a> by prosecutors is an “epidemic” in the United States. Shamefully, such misconduct most frequently involves Black defendants (87 percent).</p></div><div data-qa="article-body" data-reader-unique-id="102" style="caret-color: rgb(27, 27, 27); color: #1b1b1b; font-family: -apple-system-font; font-size: 18px; max-width: 100%;"><p data-el="text" data-reader-unique-id="103" data-testid="drop-cap-letter" dir="null" style="max-width: 100%;">Alabama has not been spared miscarriages of justice. The first known exoneration from the state’s death row was of <a data-reader-unique-id="104" href="https://eji.org/cases/walter-mcmillian/" style="color: #416ed2; max-width: 100%; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Walter McMillian</a>, whose case was highlighted by Equal Justice Initiative founder Bryan Stevenson in his book “<a data-reader-unique-id="105" href="https://amzn.to/430zfzs" style="color: #416ed2; max-width: 100%; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Just Mercy</a>.” But there are other death row convictions that should haunt Alabama’s leaders.</p></div><div data-qa="article-body" data-reader-unique-id="107" style="caret-color: rgb(27, 27, 27); color: #1b1b1b; font-family: -apple-system-font; font-size: 18px; max-width: 100%;"><p data-el="text" data-reader-unique-id="108" data-testid="drop-cap-letter" dir="null" style="max-width: 100%;">In 1998, a non-unanimous jury recommended death for <a data-reader-unique-id="109" href="https://www.themarshallproject.org/records/7657-toforest-johnson" style="color: #416ed2; max-width: 100%; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Toforest Johnson</a> for the killing of an off-duty sheriff’s deputy based on the testimony of someone who, unknown to the defense, was later paid a $5,000 reward. The case of <a data-reader-unique-id="110" href="https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/resources/podcasts/discussions-with-dpic/he-may-be-innocent-and-intellectually-disabled-but-rocky-myers-faces-execution-in-alabama" style="color: #416ed2; max-width: 100%; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Rocky Myers</a>, convicted of murdering his neighbor, is even more disturbing. Myers was never connected to the murder scene, and even though the jury recommended life without parole, the judge overrode the recommendation and ordered his execution.</p></div><div data-qa="article-body" data-reader-unique-id="121" style="caret-color: rgb(27, 27, 27); color: #1b1b1b; font-family: -apple-system-font; font-size: 18px; max-width: 100%;"><p data-el="text" data-reader-unique-id="122" data-testid="drop-cap-letter" dir="null" style="max-width: 100%;">One of us, Don Siegelman, is personally haunted by the case of Freddie Wright, whose execution he could have commuted but did not in 2000. Twenty-three years later, Siegelman believes Wright was wrongfully charged, prosecuted and convicted for a murder he most likely did not commit.</p></div><div data-qa="article-body" data-reader-unique-id="126" style="caret-color: rgb(27, 27, 27); color: #1b1b1b; font-family: -apple-system-font; font-size: 18px; max-width: 100%;"><p data-el="text" data-reader-unique-id="127" dir="null" style="max-width: 100%;">Since 1976, when the <a data-reader-unique-id="128" href="https://www.oyez.org/cases/1975/74-5435" style="color: #416ed2; max-width: 100%; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Supreme Court granted</a> prosecutors immunity from civil liability, it has been common for prosecutors to get <a data-reader-unique-id="129" href="https://ronaldwchapman.com/federal-indictments" style="color: #416ed2; max-width: 100%; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">close to 99 percent</a> of the indictments they seek from grand juries. One reason for this is that grand juries are secret proceedings, with no lawyers present and no judge to oversee what prosecutors are doing. In this stealth setting, prosecutors have free rein to present false testimony or false evidence or to withhold exculpatory evidence to get the outcome they want.</p></div><div data-qa="article-body" data-reader-unique-id="131" style="caret-color: rgb(27, 27, 27); color: #1b1b1b; font-family: -apple-system-font; font-size: 18px; max-width: 100%;"><p data-el="text" data-reader-unique-id="132" data-testid="drop-cap-letter" dir="null" style="max-width: 100%;">Before 1976, <a data-reader-unique-id="133" href="https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/history-mass-incarceration" style="color: #416ed2; max-width: 100%; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">the U.S. incarceration figure</a> hovered around 200,000 people. After 1976, the number skyrocketed to more than 1.6 million. With the legal cover of the 1976 decision, President Barack Obama’s solicitor general <a data-reader-unique-id="134" href="https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2010-jan-05-la-na-court-framed5-2010jan05-story.html" style="color: #416ed2; max-width: 100%; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">argued to the Supreme Court</a> in January 2010 that “U.S. citizens do not have a constitutional right not to be framed<i data-reader-unique-id="135" style="max-width: 100%;">.</i>” Ending unjust convictions will involve rethinking prosecutorial immunity.</p></div><div data-qa="article-body" data-reader-unique-id="146" style="caret-color: rgb(27, 27, 27); color: #1b1b1b; font-family: -apple-system-font; font-size: 18px; max-width: 100%;"><p data-el="text" data-reader-unique-id="147" data-testid="drop-cap-letter" dir="null" style="max-width: 100%;">In 2020, the Supreme Court ruled that a unanimous verdict is required to convict someone of a capital crime warranting death. The court highlighted the racist underpinnings of non-unanimous verdicts as a Jim Crow practice dating from the 1870s. Alabama had been the only state to allow a person to be sentenced to death by this legal relic and has 115 people scheduled to die based on non-unanimous jury verdicts. Because the court’s ruling didn’t explicitly extend to the sentencing phase, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), using “tough on crime” rhetoric, <a data-reader-unique-id="148" href="https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/20/desantis-signs-bill-to-end-unanimous-death-sentence-requirement-00093095" style="color: #416ed2; max-width: 100%; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">recently signed a law</a> that now allows a jury to recommend a death sentence on an 8-4 vote.</p></div><div data-qa="article-body" data-reader-unique-id="149" style="caret-color: rgb(27, 27, 27); color: #1b1b1b; font-family: -apple-system-font; font-size: 18px; max-width: 100%;"><p data-el="text" data-reader-unique-id="150" data-testid="drop-cap-letter" dir="null" style="max-width: 100%;">Alabama was also the last state to ban judicial overrides, a practice whereby judges were able to overrule jury verdicts of life without parole and order death. The Equal Justice Initiative had raised a concern about this practice, finding that “the proportion of death sentences imposed by override had often been elevated in election years.” <a data-reader-unique-id="151" href="https://www.npr.org/2014/07/25/335418230/with-judges-overriding-death-penalty-cases-alabama-is-an-outlier" style="color: #416ed2; max-width: 100%; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Judicial overrides accounted</a> for 7 percent of death sentences in a nonelection year but rose to 30 percent when Alabama judges ran for reelection.</p></div><div data-qa="article-body" data-reader-unique-id="153" style="caret-color: rgb(27, 27, 27); color: #1b1b1b; font-family: -apple-system-font; font-size: 18px; max-width: 100%;"><p data-el="text" data-reader-unique-id="154" data-testid="drop-cap-letter" dir="null" style="max-width: 100%;">In 2017, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, a Republican, signed a law banning judicial overrides. But it was not applied retroactively, so 31 Alabamans, including Myers, are still scheduled to die based on this outlawed practice.</p></div><div data-qa="article-body" data-reader-unique-id="165" style="caret-color: rgb(27, 27, 27); color: #1b1b1b; font-family: -apple-system-font; font-size: 18px; max-width: 100%;"><p data-el="text" data-reader-unique-id="166" data-testid="drop-cap-letter" dir="null" style="max-width: 100%;">Alabama is one of 27 states that retain the death penalty. Of those, <a data-reader-unique-id="167" href="https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/executions/executions-overview/states-with-no-recent-executions" style="color: #416ed2; max-width: 100%; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">14 have not conducted</a> an execution in 10 years, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, and the governors of five states (Arizona, California, Ohio, Oregon and Pennsylvania) have said they will not oversee an execution during their terms.</p></div><div data-qa="article-body" data-reader-unique-id="168" style="caret-color: rgb(27, 27, 27); color: #1b1b1b; font-family: -apple-system-font; font-size: 18px; max-width: 100%;"><p data-el="text" data-reader-unique-id="169" data-testid="drop-cap-letter" dir="null" style="max-width: 100%;">As governors, we had the power to commute the sentences of all those on Alabama’s death row to life in prison. We no longer have that constitutional power, but we feel that careful consideration calls for commuting the sentences of the 146 prisoners who were sentenced by non-unanimous juries or judicial override and that an independent review unit should be established to examine all capital murder convictions.</p></div><div data-qa="article-body" data-reader-unique-id="170" style="caret-color: rgb(27, 27, 27); color: #1b1b1b; font-family: -apple-system-font; font-size: 18px; max-width: 100%;"><p data-el="text" data-reader-unique-id="171" data-testid="drop-cap-letter" dir="null" style="max-width: 100%;">We missed our chance to confront the death penalty and have lived to regret it, but it is not too late for today’s elected officials to do the morally right thing.</p></div><div data-reader-unique-id="175" style="caret-color: rgb(27, 27, 27); color: #1b1b1b; font-family: -apple-system-font; font-size: 18px; max-width: 100%;"><div data-reader-unique-id="176" data-testid="collections__wrapper" style="max-width: 100%;"><div data-reader-unique-id="177" style="max-width: 100%;"><div data-reader-unique-id="178" style="max-width: 100%;"><div data-qa="styled-package-label" data-reader-unique-id="179" style="max-width: 100%;"><label data-reader-unique-id="181" style="max-width: 100%;"><p data-reader-unique-id="182" style="max-width: 100%;">From the Washington Post</p></label></div></div></div></div></div>Paul O. Davis, Ph.D.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01467526468422745403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7764167349856753240.post-47907990956186054882023-05-21T01:07:00.000-07:002023-05-21T01:07:15.427-07:00The Three Tasks of Government<p><b style="font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">By Bing West </span></b><b style="font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">May 17, 2026</span></b></p><span style="font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">“There are three tasks,” the renowned historian </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Art-New-History-Paul-Johnson/dp/0060530758/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3KO93S6J28MQU&keywords=paul+johnson+art+a+new+history&qid=1683659308&sprefix=paul+johnson+art%2Caps%2C111&sr=8-1&ufe=app_do%3Aamzn1.fos.18ed3cb5-28d5-4975-8bc7-93deae8f9840" moz-do-not-send="true" rel="nofollow" style="font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;" target="_blank">Paul Johnson wrote,</a><span style="font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;"> “which any government must perform: external security, internal order and maintenance of an honest currency.”</span><div><span style="font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">The United States is failing at all three tasks. Concerning security, the 2021 chaotic desertion of Afghanistan undermined America’s global credibility and military status. Leading NATO in giving arms to Ukraine brought partial redemption. However, this is eroding as the war drags on and President Biden refuses to send offensive weapons because he openly fears Putin. In the Middle East, America’s influence is crumbling. China negotiated a resumption of diplomatic relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Iran sponsors repeated missile attacks upon U.S. ground forces and, in acts of defiant piracy, has seized three oil supertankers. The U.S. Navy did nothing except video the pirate boats. Iran gleefully showed that video on its TV stations. Led by Saudi Arabia, the Arab League readmitted the bloody Syrian regime. While China ratchets up pressure upon Taiwan, the administration’s budget for our navy and for the military, in general, does not keep pace with the inflation caused by the administration’s massive transfer payments.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">Concerning internal order, social media has stunted the natural social interactions of our adolescents and spawned spiteful divisiveness among the adult population. Crime in most cities is both pervasive and brazen. More than 100,000 Americans die annually from fentanyl entering via the open southern border, along with two million illegal immigrants. The Democratic Party believes the swelling Hispanic vote will eventually ensure permanent majority rule by the Democrats. So, the human flood will continue unabated as long as President Biden is in office.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">He has based his reelection upon arguing that anyone voting for Trump is an extremist. </span><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/03/06/trumps-dark-i-am-your-retribution-pledge-how-gop-enabled-it/" moz-do-not-send="true" rel="nofollow" style="font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;" target="_blank">Trump responds</a><span style="font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;"> in kind, touting “I am your retribution.” Both our leading politicians are driving Americans farther apart.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">The third task of government is “maintenance of an honest currency.” No reasonable observer can repute honesty to the crass selfishness of the administration and Congress. It is impossible to sustain today’s generous social security, health benefits, multitudinous transfer payments, and the military without devaluing the dollar and insuring roughly four percent inflation for the next decade. With productivity growth of an anemic one percent versus inflation at four percent, every year the situation worsens. Our profligacy has bequeathed to our grandchildren a crushing debt burden.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">The Roman Empire endured for 500 years. It disintegrated when its currency depreciation made it worthless to the legions. The soldiers walked off the job and the authority of Rome collapsed along with its borders.</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">To sum up: Government’s three basic tasks of external security, internal order, and maintenance of an honest currency are intertwined. Currently, America is failing at all three tasks. Facts, however, don’t change attitudes. The attitudes in our beloved country are internally poisonous. The forthcoming election is not about moving our country forward; it is about demonizing the opponent. This election is all about yelling, “The other guy is worse than I am!”</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><i style="font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">Military historian West, a former assistant secretary of defense, has written a dozen books about America’s recent wars.</i></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;"><i><br /></i></span><a href="https://www.hoover.org/research/three-tasks-government" moz-do-not-send="true" rel="nofollow" style="font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;" target="_blank">The Three Tasks of Government</a><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="color: #5856d6; font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></span><a href="https://www.hoover.org/research/three-tasks-government" moz-do-not-send="true" rel="nofollow" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0) !important; font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; text-decoration-color: currentcolor !important; text-decoration-style: solid !important; text-decoration: none !important;" target="_blank"><table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="max-width: 400px;"><tbody><tr><td width="400"><table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="border-color: rgb(224, 228, 233); border-radius: 2px; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px; max-width: 400px; width: 100%;"><tbody><tr><td background="https://s.yimg.com/lo/api/res/1.2/8oRDXGpef58Q5rWGDq1Kvg--~A/Zmk9ZmlsbDt3PTQwMDtoPTIwMDthcHBpZD1pZXh0cmFjdA--/https://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/styles/facebook/public/2023-05/poster_us_06089.jpg?h=97ee7179&itok=LpPiRjv2.cf.jpg" bgcolor="#000000" height="175" style="background-color: black; background-repeat: no-repeat; background-size: cover; border-radius: 2px 2px 0px 0px; min-height: 175px;" valign="top"><table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="width: 398px;"><tbody><tr><td background="https://s.yimg.com/cv/ae/nq/storm/assets/enhancrV21/1/enhancr_gradient-400x175.png" bgcolor="transparent" style="border-radius: 2px 2px 0px 0px; min-height: 175px;" valign="top"><table border="0" style="height: 175px; min-height: 175px; width: 398px;"><tbody><tr><td style="padding: 15px 0px 0px 15px; vertical-align: top;"><br /></td><td style="padding: 15px 15px 0px 0px; text-align: right; vertical-align: top;"><br /></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr><tr><td><table align="center" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="background-color: white; background-image: none; background-repeat: repeat; background-size: auto; border-radius: 0px 0px 2px 2px; border-top-color: rgb(224, 228, 233); border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 1px; max-width: 400px; width: 398px;"><tbody><tr><td style="border-radius: 0px 0px 0px 2px; padding: 16px 0px 16px 12px; vertical-align: top;"><br /></td><td style="padding: 12px 24px 16px 12px; vertical-align: middle; width: 350px;"><h2 style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px; margin: 0px 0px 6px;">The Three Tasks of Government</h2><div style="color: #979ea8; font-size: 12px; line-height: 16px; margin: 0px;">“There are three tasks,” the renowned historian Paul Johnson wrote, “which any government must perform: external.</div></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table></a><span style="color: #5856d6; font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></span><i style="font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;"> </i><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;"> </span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;"> </span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;"> </span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" /><blockquote cite="mid:4AE505AB-E029-4E13-A721-3A5BA1216E44@mac.com" style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;" type="cite"><div class="gmail_quote"><div style="font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;"><div dir="ltr"><div id="m_5233533580235057826ydp5cebf029enhancr_card_4753592969" style="max-width: 400px;"><a href="https://www.hoover.org/research/three-tasks-government" moz-do-not-send="true" rel="nofollow" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0) !important; text-decoration-color: currentcolor !important; text-decoration-style: solid !important; text-decoration: none !important;" target="_blank"></a></div></div></div></div></blockquote><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" /></div>Paul O. Davis, Ph.D.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01467526468422745403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7764167349856753240.post-31441041099437439852023-05-07T01:38:00.001-07:002023-05-07T01:38:18.067-07:00FOR YEARS, WE HAVE GONE FROM TEACHING LATIN AND GREEK IN HIGH SCHOOL TO TEACHING REMEDIAL ENGLISH IN COLLEGE!" This 1967 true story is of an experience by a young 12-year-old lad in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. <div><br /></div><div>It is about the vivid memory of a privately rebuilt P-51 from WWII and its famous owner/pilot.
In the morning sun, I could not believe my eyes. There, in our little airport, sat a majestic P-51. They said it had flown in during the night from some US airport on its way to an air show. The pilot had been tired, so he just happened to choose Kingston for his stopover. </div><div><br /></div><div> It was to take to the air very soon. I marveled at the size of the plane, dwarfing the Pipers and Canucks tied down by her. It was much larger than in the movies. She glistened in the sun like a bulwark of security from days gone by. </div><div><br /></div><div>The pilot arrived by cab, paid the driver, and then stepped into the pilot's lounge. He was an older man; his wavy hair was gray and tossed. It looked like it might have been combed, say, around the turn of the century. His flight jacket was checked, creased, and worn - it smelled old and genuine. Old Glory was prominently sewn to its shoulders. He projected a quiet air of proficiency and pride devoid of arrogance. </div><div><br /></div><div> He filed a quick flight plan to Montreal ("Expo-67 Air Show") and then walked across the tarmac.
After taking several minutes to perform his walk-around check, the tall, lanky man returned to the flight lounge to ask if anyone would be available to stand by with fire extinguishers while he "flashed the old bird up, just to be safe." </div><div><br /></div><div>Though only 12 at the time, I was allowed to stand by with an extinguisher after brief instruction on its use -- "If you see a fire, point, then pull this lever!" he said. (I later became a firefighter, but that's another story.)</div><div><br /></div><div>The air around the exhaust manifolds shimmered like a mirror from fuel fumes as the huge prop started to rotate. One manifold, then another, and yet another barked -- I stepped back with the others. In moments, the Packard-built Merlin engine came to life with a thunderous roar. Blue flames knifed from her manifolds with an arrogant snarl. </div><div><br /></div><div>I looked at the others' faces; there was no concern. I lowered the bell of my extinguisher. One of the guys signaled to walk back to the lounge. We did.
Several minutes later we could hear the pilot doing his pre-flight run-up. He'd taxied to the end of runway 19, out of sight. All went quiet for several seconds. We ran to the second-story deck to see if we could catch a glimpse of the P-51 as she started down the runway. We could not. There we stood; eyes fixed on a spot halfway down 19. </div><div><br /></div><div>Then a roar ripped across the field, much louder than before. Like a furious hell spawn set loose -- something mighty this way was coming. "Listen to that thing!" said the controller.
In seconds, the Mustang burst into our line of sight. Its tail was already off the runway, and it was moving faster than anything I'd ever seen by that point on 19. </div><div><br /></div><div>Two-thirds the way down 19 the Mustang was airborne with her gear going up. The prop tips were supersonic. We clasped our ears as the Mustang climbed hellishly fast into the circuit to be eaten up by the dog-day haze. We stood for a few moments in stunned silence, trying to digest what we'd just seen.</div><div><br /></div><div>The radio controller rushed by me to the radio. "Kingston tower calling Mustang?" He looked back to us as he waited for an acknowledgment. The radio crackled, "Go ahead, Kingston." "Roger, Mustang. Kingston Tower would like to advise the circuit is clear for a low-level pass." I stood in shock because the controller had just, more or less, asked the pilot to return for an impromptu air show! The controller looked at us. "Well, What?" he asked. "I can't let that guy go without asking. I couldn't forgive myself!"
</div><div><br /></div><div>The radio crackled once again, "Kingston, do I have permission for a low-level pass, east to west, across the field?" "Roger, Mustang, the circuit is clear for an east-to-west pass." "Roger, Kingston, I'm coming out of 3,000 feet, stand by." </div><div><br /></div><div>We rushed back onto the second-story deck, eyes fixed toward the eastern haze. The sound was subtle at first, a high-pitched whine, a muffled screech, a distant scream. Moments later the P-51 burst through the haze. Her airframe straining against positive G's and gravity. Her wing tips spilling contrails of condensed air, prop-tips again supersonic. The burnished bird blasted across the eastern margin of the field shredding and tearing the air. At about 500 mph and 150 yards from where we stood, she passed with the old American pilot saluting. Imagine. A salute! </div><div><br /></div><div>I felt like laughing; I felt like crying; she glistened; she screamed; the building shook; my heart pounded. Then the old pilot pulled her up and rolled, and rolled, and rolled out of sight into the broken clouds and indelible into my memory. </div><div><br /></div><div>I've never wanted to be an American more than on that day! It was a time when many nations in the world looked to America as their big brother. A steady and even-handed beacon of security who navigated difficult political water with grace and style; not unlike the old American pilot who'd just flown into my memory. He was proud, not arrogant, humble, not a braggart, old and honest, projecting an aura of America at its best.
That America will return one day! I know it will!</div><div><br /></div><div>Until that time, I'll just send off this story. Call it a loving reciprocal salute to a Country, and especially to that old American pilot: the late JIMMY STEWART (1908-1997), Actor, real WWII Hero (Commander of a US Army Air Force Bomber Wing stationed in England), and a USAF Reserve Brigadier General, who wove a wonderfully fantastic memory for a young Canadian boy that's lasted a lifetime. </div><div><br /></div><div>PLEASE GOD, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN….AS SOON AS YOU CAN!
"A veteran, whether active duty, or retired, is someone who, at one point in his or her life, wrote a blank check made payable to "The United States of America," for an amount of "up to, and including their life." That is Honor, and there are way too many people in this country who no longer understand that.</div><div><br /></div><div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://www.aerotechnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/bob1-1-602x400.jpg" style="display: block; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="602" src="https://www.aerotechnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/bob1-1-602x400.jpg" width="320" /></a></div></div>Paul O. Davis, Ph.D.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01467526468422745403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7764167349856753240.post-14129272957937282582023-04-30T08:51:00.003-07:002023-05-07T01:42:48.812-07:00The Opening of the 2023 SeasonNumber 33 (Year) got started this past week at FDIC. I was honored by attendees such as Steve Schwartz, CEO and co-owner of Lion Protects, the longest sponsor of the Firefighter Challenge. He was followed by John Granby, who recently retired from Lion.
Over the next couple of months, you will get the inside scoop on the origins of the Challenge. There’s some background on Wikipedia - and that post needs updating and more accuracy. I don’t know who started that thread, but it was a good start. <div><br /></div><div> The Challenge got its start when Chief David Gratz and Dr. Leonard Marks walked into the Human Performance Lab at the Sports Medicine Center at the University of Maryland and asked, “Can you determine what it takes to climb a ladder and ventilate a roof with an axe?”
The answer was “Yes.” </div><div><br /></div><div> Back to Indy, 49 years later.
Here are Steve Schwartz’s remarks on the Firefighter Challenge course Wednesday, April 25, 2023: </div><div><br /></div><div> Steve:
Lion and I have had the honor and privilege of supporting the Challenge since its inception. My uncle Richard Lapedes, Lion’s previous CEO, believed in honoring Firefighters’ toughness and bravery while encouraging them to possess athletic strength and agility. </div><div><br /></div><div> At first, LION was a sponsor, but it soon became apparent that LION should step up to the plate and be more than “a sponsor” because the Challenge’s purpose was consistent with LION’s purpose to keep firefighters ready for action.
In the late 90s, I became involved in the LION fire service business, and the story begins for me and my relationship with the Challenge and Paul. </div><div><br /></div><div> I committed LION to transform our relationship from a sponsor to a true partner of On Target and helped to add stability to the Challenge as it grew to what it is today. The five evolutions that Paul created for the Challenge replicate the physical and mental demands of daily firefighting and, in some cases, the extreme extra efforts required to be a firefighter performing at the highest level. </div><div><br /></div><div> We took the extra step to create the LION’s Den to honor the highest performers who complete the Challenge in less than 3 minutes.
We are proud of our exceptional commitment to the Challenge. We are thrilled that, as we stand here today, we see a new, invigorated, and, we believe, even more exciting, competitor-friendly course set inside the LION Arena of the Brave. </div><div><br /></div><div> So let me conclude my remarks by honoring Paul. I have seen Paul 2-3 times a year for the last 23 years, with some phone calls between personal visits. Since the Challenge started coming to Indy, I always saw him here. Paul’s enthusiasm for the Challenge was always so vibrant it felt like a crusade. That enthusiasm was so infectious. Paul had such a single-minded focus on the Challenge. </div><div><br /></div><div> Every time we met, he shared his latest ideas on how to market it and new ways to attract more participants. He was never ready to give up or lose hope in spreading the challenging gospel. He is a man of great integrity who has faced challenges in his own life that give him the humility all great leaders possess.</div><div><br /></div><div> Thank you, Paul, for the Challenge, your life’s work. As Theodore Roosevelt said, “Far and away, the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing. “Paul you have lived that life to the fullest.
</div><div><br /></div><div> John Granby:
It was only fitting that LION became part of this incredible and grand Challenge as, at its core, LION has always believed in showcasing the physical and mental demands of the Firefighter as well as promoting the health and safety of the Firefighter. Being physically fit is one of the 16 core life initiatives of the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation. This event helps to highlight the need for all firefighters to be physically fit and healthy. </div><div><br /></div><div> It is a way for LION to “give back” to the fire service and its 1.1 million active firefighters, to help them become even better physically and mentally and, in turn, help protect the communities they serve and promote the value of the fire service.
LION has always been at the forefront of the health and safety of Firefighters. He has always tried to develop the lightest, safest, and most functional Turnout gear, station uniforms, and training equipment for the fire service. </div><div><br /></div><div> Talk about stories about Paul – what Paul meant to you-
As we stand here today and introduce everyone to the improved Challenge course, we are sure that a new chapter has begun. We believe that the new look of the system and the new direction that it has taken will only enhance and increase the legacy that Paul created in the 30-plus years that proceeded this new and improved course. We know that the look, energy and direction we propel this fantastic event well into the future. We hope that with all that is being done, this event will further the health and safety of all firefighters.
</div>Paul O. Davis, Ph.D.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01467526468422745403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7764167349856753240.post-85263050991569731872023-04-07T08:59:00.003-07:002023-04-07T08:59:29.413-07:00Sometimes it's interesting to go back in time and look at the news...<p> <span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Poppins, sans-serif; font-size: 16.5px; font-style: inherit; text-align: justify;">“Yet for a variety of reasons, both personal and civic, their characters not only should not be altered, but could not be, even if the tragic hero wished to change, given his megalomania and absolutist views of the human experience. In the classical tragic sense, Trump likely will end in one of two fashions, both not particularly good: either spectacular but unacknowledged accomplishments followed by ostracism when he is out of office and no longer useful, or, less likely, a single term due to the eventual embarrassment of his beneficiaries, as if his utility is no longer worth the wages of his perceived crudity.”</span><span style="font-family: Poppins, sans-serif; font-size: 16.5px; font-style: inherit; text-align: justify;"> —</span><a href="https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-case-for-trump-victor-davis-hanson/1129245186?ean=9781541673557" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: black; font-family: Poppins, sans-serif; font-size: 16.5px; font-style: inherit; text-align: justify; transition: all 0.2s linear 0s;"><span style="box-sizing: inherit;">The Case for Trump</span></a><span style="font-family: Poppins, sans-serif; font-size: 16.5px; font-style: inherit; text-align: justify;"> (2019)</span></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Poppins, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;">After the midterms, the Republican Party and half of the conservative movement are now furious with Donald Trump. Their writs are many—even though the party establishment shares much of the blame. More importantly still, American elections have radically shifted to mail-in/early/absentee voting rendering Election Day a minor event. The predictable result is that any close race undecided on Election Day in subsequent days usually is won by the Democrats.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Poppins, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;">On the eve of the midterm, Trump gratuitously attacked Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who was up for reelection, while all but announcing he would run for president.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Poppins, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;">That preview could have waited until the elections had passed. The pizzazz may have galvanized some Trump-haters to go to the polls. It might even have alienated perhaps a few thousand DeSantis Republicans who were not thus inclined to vote for Trump-stamped candidates.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Poppins, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;">Trump’s frantic fundraising efforts had amassed a huge sum in his PAC, geared to his future primary fights. But many felt he was far too parsimonious in spreading his largess to his own cash-strapped and outspent MAGA candidates. That stinginess might have helped contribute to their defeats in close House and Senate elections.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Poppins, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;">Those earlier rumblings were only amplified after the unexpectedly anemic Republican midterm performance. Trump sent out a disjointed, almost unhinged letter damning DeSantis as disloyal, without gratitude (to Trump), mediocre, and overrated.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Poppins, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;">The indictment was ill-timed to DeSantis’ landslide victory over Charlie Crist. DeSantis’ long Florida coattails fueled the only red tsunami of the entire evening. If Trump thought he would employ the battering-ram tactics of his first presidential debate of 2020, then he should remember they failed (in contrast to his effective second debate against Biden). And in reaction, DeSantis’ rope-a-dope silence is effectively designed to let Trump punch his way out and down to the low 30s in approval.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Poppins, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;">Trump further blamed some of the losses of his endorsed candidates on either their own shortcomings and lack of loyalty, or the bad advice from those who had persuaded him to back losers. New Hampshire U.S. Senate candidate Don Bolduc was deemed insufficiently denialist and so, according to Trump, was crushed in the New Hampshire race.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Poppins, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;">Former First Lady Melania Trump, of all people, was reportedly to blame for convincing the ex-president to back Mehmet Oz in the Pennsylvania U.S. Senate race.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Poppins, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;">Yet Oz turned out to be a tireless worker and a rookie but solid candidate. Still, he was easily outspent—and was fatally injured by the balloting blowback against the mediocre Trump-supported gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano. The latter’s wipeout injured Oz and Republican congressional candidates once thought likely to win.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Poppins, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;">Worse still, Trump highlighted his self-obsession over party concerns by weirdly celebrating the loss of fellow Republican senatorial candidate Joe O’Dea of Colorado. His RINO crime was spurning Trump’s support. Stranger still, Trump attacked popular Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin for supposedly having a “Chinese”-sounding name.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Poppins, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;">But these were sins of commission. There were also those of omission. Trump had not issued an ecumenical call to head to Georgia, to forget intramural squabbles, and to rally money and time on behalf of Herschel Walker—Trump’s own endorsed candidate.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Poppins, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;">Even if the Senate is now lost, Trump should issue such a call—if keeping his person clear of the Georgia mess. In 2021 his loud whines to supporters that Georgia’s voting was rigged kept his base home, while offending swing independents.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Poppins, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;">That one-two punch ensured the surreal victories of <span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-style: italic;">two</span> neo-socialist Democratic senators, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff. The duo ensured Democratic control of the entire Congress, guaranteeing the disastrous first two years of the Biden Administration. It takes effort to ensure that Georgia now hosts the two most radically left-wing senators in the entire Senate.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Poppins, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;">Even before the midterms, there was a latent feeling among half of Republicans that Trump, given his age, and the animus he incurs among the rich Left and touchy independents, might retire to the role of kingmaker, rather than try a third presidential election. Trump’s eruptions, coupled with DeSantis’ stunning and singular midterm success, ensured that such prior latent conservative unease is now overt.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Poppins, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;">Indeed, in near hysterical fashion, Trump became stigmatized and scapegoated as the culprit for nearly every Republican race lost. Yet many of his endorsed candidates won. And some who lost did so quite independently of anything Trump said or did. Tiffany Smiley, Tudor Dixon and Lee Zeldin were good candidates and their opponents feeble. But not even Abraham Lincoln could have gotten them elected in bright blue Washington, Michigan, and New York.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Poppins, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;">On the other hand, there were also lots of RNC-approved candidates who likewise lost narrow races. And Senator Mitch McConnell sent millions of dollars to RINO Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) to defeat fellow Republican and genuine conservative Kelly Tshibaka, more to protect McConnell’s own leadership role than to ensure a more reliable Republican vote in the Senate.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Poppins, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;">As the disappointment over a red ripple began to subside, many found some long-term good: the winner Ron DeSantis was empowered. The now cocky but still demented Joe Biden is delusional, convinced he could be a winner in 2024, And Donald Trump now must either settle down or settle up.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Poppins, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;">An unspoken paradox arose among many that Trump’s vital MAGA agenda might be better continued and advanced by those others than its creator—even as Trump insisted that there can no more be a MAGA party without him than there could be sunshine without the sun.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Poppins, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;"><strong style="box-sizing: inherit;">Trump Considered</strong></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Poppins, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;">One explanation of the Trump dilemma is that like all classical tragic heroes and western gunslingers, Trump solved problems through means unpalatable to those in need of solutions beyond their own refinement. It is the lot of such tragic figures to grate and wear out their welcome with their beneficiaries—but only after their service is increasingly deemed no longer needed.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Poppins, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;">In this moment of wishing the wounded Shane would ride off into the Tetons and leave the more civilized alone, we should remember Trump’s four historical accomplishments that will only grow in light of Biden’s subsequent disastrous four years.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Poppins, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;">One is partisan. Trump utterly destroyed the 30-year Clinton grifting and <span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-style: italic;">quid pro quo</span> machine in general, and Hillary Clinton’s endless and often toxic political career in particular. It was characterized by the despicable Uranium One sale, the foreign shake-down contributions to the Clinton Foundation, her destruction of subpoenaed emails and devices, and her blatant violation of State Department rules of personal communications.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Poppins, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;">Clinton’s failing campaign and eventual collapse in 2016 was so shocking that it all but crushed her very psyche—to the point that she had funded a foreign ex-spy to systematically and illegally destroy her political opponent. She ended up denying the very legitimacy of the election she lost. Then she topped that off by urging Joe Biden not to accept the 2020 verdict should he lose the popular vote.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Poppins, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;">Hillary Clinton is physically, psychologically, and spiritually spent—and never recovered from her ill-fated collisions with Donald Trump.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Poppins, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;">Two, Donald Trump recalibrated the Republican Party to become more populist and nationalist. Previously it was shrinking and offered the Left an easy stereotype of a small club of aristocratic white corporate elites.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Poppins, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;">Yet Trumpism did not renounce prior Republicanism, at least not entirely. Rather, Trump sought to save it by recalibrating the party. He demanded toughness with China, attacked illegal immigration, addressed the crisis of the deindustrialized American interior, and adopted a Jacksonian foreign policy. That was all in addition to embracing Republican policies of low-taxes, small-government, deregulation, traditional values, and originalist justices.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Poppins, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;">Three, Trump’s actual four years of governance were characterized, before the advent of the pandemic, by robust growth, low inflation, energy independence, low unemployment, a rebuilding of the U.S. military, eventual curbing of illegal immigration, the Abraham Accords, and forcing NATO to spend far more on defense. Trump saved the Supreme Court and lower federal courts for a generation.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Poppins, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;">Four, in his furious counterassault against a vicious administrative state, bankrupt media, and crazed elite bicoastal class, Trump survived and ended up exposing and discrediting them all. Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, which monitors media coverage, found that after just a few months in office, Trump was the subject of the most biased coverage in modern presidential history.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Poppins, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;">While the media both thrived on him and yet sought to ruin their greatest source of income, it committed suicide through its hysteria and fixations. Trump’s “fake news” attacks were crude. But they resonated precisely because he was correct that the media had become utterly corrupt and a mere extension of the progressive project.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Poppins, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;">Trump in his current state is an object of derision. But that he is still standing is a miracle in itself, given the abuse he endured that was predicated on lies, myths, and venom. In the first year of his presidency, partisan House members filed articles of impeachment. <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/01/30/3-ways-to-get-rid-of-president-trump-before-2020-impeach-25th-amendment-coup/" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: black; transition: all 0.2s linear 0s;"><span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-style: italic;">Foreign Policy</span></a> printed an essay 11 days after his inauguration calling for his removal through either impeachment, the 25th Amendment, or a military coup.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Poppins, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;">It became a progressive parlor game to publicly dream of his assassination by explosion, decapitation, stabbing, incineration, hanging, or shooting. Joe Biden <span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-style: italic;">on three occasions</span> bragged of his desire to physically beat him up.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Poppins, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;">That fisticuffs trope was amplified by everyone from Cory Booker to Robert De Niro. His National Security designate, General Michael Flynn, was framed by the efforts of the FBI and remnants of the Obama Justice Department through an ambush interrogation aimed at reviving the ossified Logan Act.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Poppins, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;">For nearly three years he was smeared and slurred as a Russian collaborator. That was a false charge and it devoured 22 months of his presidency, until the Mueller investigation imploded. Frenzied leftist hysterics followed this implosion. His first impeachment remains a stain on democracy.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Poppins, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;">Trump, remember, did not cancel aid to Ukraine. He was prescient in warning about the serial corruption of Hunter Biden and his father’s family syndicate. He was far tougher on Vladimir Putin (greater sanctions, flooding the world with cheap oil, leaving a flawed missile treaty, hammering Russian mercenaries in Syria, sending offensive weapons to Ukraine that Obama-Biden had forbidden, beefing up military spending, etc.) than his predecessor. Putin did not invade other countries under Trump’s tenure, unlike during prior and subsequent administrations.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Poppins, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;">In its politicized efforts to get Trump, the FBI blew up its reputation as a competent, professional, and disinterested investigatory bureau. A good argument can be made that three consecutive directors, Mueller, Comey, and McCabe, either under oath misled a House Intelligence Committee inquiry or simply flat-out lied. Retired four-star generals systematically violated the Uniform Code of Military Justice with impunity as they slandered their commander-in-chief variously as Nazi-like, a Mussolini, or analogous to the architects of Nazi death camps.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Poppins, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;">Congressional representatives grew so desperate to end Trump’s presidency that they called in a hack Yale psychiatrist to declare him, quite unprofessionally and without an examination, <span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-style: italic;">non compos mentis</span> and deserving of forced removal from office. Do we remember “Anonymous” who bragged in the <span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-style: italic;">New York Times</span> of a covert and concerted effort inside his administration to destroy it?</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Poppins, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;">A common denominator with all his critics—Hillary Clinton, James Comey, Dr. Bandy X. Lee, the CNN cadre, Andrew McCabe, Robert De Niro, Adam Schiff, Howard Stern, Peter Strzok, and a host of others—was that their anti-Trump obsessions either diminished their careers or empowered Trump, or both.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Poppins, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;">In response to all this, and often in preemptive fashion, Trump became obsessed with the historic injustice of it all. He yelled to high heaven that the Russian collusion charge was an utter hoax. He hammered the message that the COVID pandemic never originated naturally in a wet market but was birthed in a Wuhan virology lab. He screamed that the Hunter Biden laptop was authentic and a window into the Biden family’s systemic and lucrative corruption. Trump was right on all these counts, but, like mythical Cassandra, the more he rattled off the truth, the less likely he was to be believed given the coarseness of his protestations.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Poppins, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;">To push through his agenda, and to strike back at the Democratic-media fusion, Trump stooped to battle nonstop with minor and irrelevant enemies—and often his own allies. He wrongly encouraged January 6 demonstrations at the Capitol at a time of volatile passions—missing the story of the 2020 election that was lost far earlier in the spring through altered voting laws.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Poppins, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;">We will never quite know why the media became obsessed with Trump to the point that it is now a mere caricature of its former self. Was it Trump’s supposed crudity, both physical and vocal, that so shocked their sensibilities, from his orange hue and combover flop to his Queens accent? Was it MAGA estrangement from both Republican and Democratic hierarchies? Was it his deplorable base that had earned an entire vocabulary of hatred from the Obama-Clinton-Biden nexus (clingers, deplorables, dregs, chumps)? Or was it Trump’s own <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049730/characters/nm0000078" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: black; transition: all 0.2s linear 0s;">Ethan Edwards</a>-like 360-degree, 24/7 constant obsessive combativeness?</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Poppins, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;">After all, it was not Trump but his enemies who weaponized the CIA, FBI, and Justice Department. Trump, unlike Obama, did not spy on journalists. And unlike Biden, he created no ministry of truth. His supporters did not call to junk the Electoral College, pack the court, destroy the filibuster, or opportunistically add two new states. They did not radically change the voting laws through means that undermined the authority of state legislatures to end Election Day as we had known it for over three centuries. They did not turn balloting into mostly a mail-in/early voting phenomena that saw the usual rejection rate of ballots plummet even as the number of non-Election Day ballots soared.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Poppins, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;"><strong style="box-sizing: inherit;">So, Kingmaker, Scapegoat, or Outlaw?</strong></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Poppins, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;">A good argument of “ifs” concerning Trump and the recent Republican midterms can be made: if he had stayed out of picking candidates; if he had helped all Republican candidates including those who opposed him; if at his rallies he had advanced positive “Commitment to America” solutions rather than litanies of his own past hurts and grievances; and if he now pivoted and raised money for the conservative agenda rather than having trashed rivals who nonetheless have advanced his shared cause.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Poppins, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;">By 2022 even hard conservatives thought Trump was expendable, his liabilities growing larger than his assets, his future potential deemed less than his past achievements, his don’t tread-on-me pushbacks to the Left overshadowed by his cul-de-sac and gratuitous spats with irrelevancies, and his former remarkable perseverance in the face of historic and unjust attacks overshadowed by his current preemptive squabbles.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Poppins, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;">So, will Trump rest on his considerable laurels and ride out gracefully to Mar-a-Lago? And there, as a kingmaker/elder statesman, will he work to institutionalize his MAGA agendas while raising money for any presidential candidate who embraces it?</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Poppins, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;">Or will a subdued candidate Trump now pivot, grow quieter, and let the people vote in the primaries to decide whether they want him anymore—and whether Ron DeSantis sinks as a 2016 Scott Walker on the national stage (a similarly talented and successful governor), or assumes the mythical status of Ronald Reagan?</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Poppins, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 1.6em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; vertical-align: baseline;">Or will an unapologetic Trump instead now escalate his slurs, bray at the moon, play out his current angry Ajax role to the bitter end, and thus himself end up a tragic hero<span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-style: italic;">—</span>appreciated for past service but deemed too toxic for present company?</p><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" />Paul O. Davis, Ph.D.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01467526468422745403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7764167349856753240.post-42466989842438161142023-03-03T01:49:00.001-08:002023-03-03T01:52:35.415-08:00How exercise can help you build resilience at any ageIntentionally stressing our bodies through exercise can make us more resilient to a variety of stressors
By Kelyn Soong
February 3, 2023 at 2:28 p.m. EST
(Rose Jaffe for The Washington Post)
Stress surrounds us every day in subtle and substantial ways. Although we can’t eliminate stress from daily life, research shows that by intentionally stressing our bodies through exercise, we can change how we respond to stress and boost our resilience.
Resilience is the ability to bounce back from adversity — a career setback, a relationship breakup or any of the big and small disappointments of daily life — and grow from the experience so that we handle difficult situations even better the next time. Much of the research on resilience focuses on building the skill in childhood, but resilience can be strengthened at any age.
Resilience is essentially an emotional muscle, but a growing body of research shows that stressing our physical muscles by exercise is one way to increase our capacity to cope with daily stress.
“We want to experience manageable stressors so that we can develop stress resilience and not react with a big stress response every time something unexpected happens,” said Elissa Epel, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California at San Francisco and the author of “The Stress Prescription: Seven Days to More Joy and Ease.” “Our body not only can handle acute stress but loves it, and expects it when it’s short-term and manageable.”
The amount and intensity of exercise needed to improve stress resilience depends on the person, according to Tinna Traustadóttir, an associate professor of biological sciences at Northern Arizona University and the senior author of a 2021 study on the effects of exercise training on physiological stress resilience in adults.
In the study, the researchers randomly assigned 40 sedentary women and men, about half of them young adults and the rest aged 60 and older, to either eight-weeks of aerobic exercise training or a non-exercise control group.
Three times a week for eight weeks, the exercising volunteers pedaled, jogged or stair-climbed at a gym, their workouts focusing on prolonged, moderate intensity sessions on some days and shorter, high-intensity intervals on others. Intensity was based on heart rate relative to each person. The sessions progressively lengthened, from 30 minutes at the start of the study to 50 minutes by the end.
The goal of the study was to test whether regular exercise improved the individual’s response to stress, so the researchers had to come up with a way to re-create stress. They settled on a physiological stressor, inflating a blood pressure cuff to restrict blood flow in the forearm, which is considered a mild stressor mimicking what happens during a heart attack. Blood tests measuring the oxidative stress response followed.
At the end of the study, not surprisingly, the exercisers had improved their fitness, including a 15 percent gain, on average, in their aerobic capacity.
“This is just an eight-week, not a very long exercise intervention,” Traustadóttir said. “And we were able to show differences that after the exercise training, there was less of an oxidative stress.”
Traustadóttir also found that those in the exercise group had less oxidative stress than those in the control group who were not exercising. And the more a person had improved their fitness, the lower the stress response, whatever someone’s age.
One of Traustadóttir’s takeaways is that to build resilience, it’s not so much about what particular exercises are done, but doing them consistently.
“It’s whatever people will enjoy and will therefore do on a regular basis,” she said.
Why exercise can boost resilience
Studies of stressed-out mice offer clues to why exercise can help us cope better with stress and become more resilient.
In one series of experiments, researchers at Emory University studied the stress response in mice, some of which were allowed to run to their heart’s content on exercise wheels while others were kept inactive.
After three weeks, the scientists checked for markers of a brain chemical called galanin, which is known to increase with exercise and is associated with mental health. (People with variants in galanin-related genes are at higher risk for depression and anxiety disorders.)
As expected, the running mice showed higher levels of galanin. In fact, the more a mouse had run, the more of the brain chemical it had.
To induce stress, the researchers subjected the mice to mild shocks on their paws. All the mice were stressed by the experience, but the running mice bounced back sooner, returning to normal mouse behavior. Meanwhile, the non-running rodents continued to cower, still overwhelmed by stress.
The study suggested that for the running mice, exercise had increased galanin levels and helped them become more resilient.
Exercise “has profound effects on the way that your brain functions and how the neurons function,” said David Weinshenker, a professor of human genetics at Emory University and the senior author of the study. “It can actually change the neurochemistry in your brain and promote general brain health.”
Even walking can change the brain
Philip Holmes, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Georgia, defines stress resilience as the “ability to adapt to stress in a way that’s not deleterious.”
Part of his research deals with the neurobiological mechanisms responsible for stress resilience and the neurobiological effects of exercise. The most significant impact that exercise has on brain function is to promote neuroplasticity, Holmes said.
“That really just means changeability, literally a building of connections in the brain,” he said. “And one thing that we found that exercise does is it promotes these connections in the prefrontal cortex, which is a critical area for emotion regulation.”
Holmes’s research on rats and mice shows that even moderate exercise can activate the locus coeruleus, a small brainstem nucleus that is important for attention, arousal, motivation and cognitive function.
The exercise Holmes studied in rodents is analogous to brisk walking by humans. The locus coeruleus neurons make substances called trophic factors, which promote the building of neural circuits. The stress-resilient parts of the brain get better, healthier circuits while activated, Holmes said.
“So, every time we walk around the neighborhood, you’re making more of these trophic factors, building more of these circuits,” he said. “It may just be a little bit, but that will be beneficial.”
Weinshenker agrees that moderate exercise can change the neurochemistry in our brains and says any aerobic exercise that gets your heart rate up can be beneficial for stress resilience.
“It doesn’t even have to be vigorous exercise. It could be something just as simple as walking for 20 or 30 minutes a day,” he said. “It could be walking, running, biking, swimming. People play a lot of pickleball now.”
Epel calls the short, concentrated bursts of acute stress to our bodies, such as the stress we experience during exercise, “hormetic stress.”
The term hormetic, she explains in her book, refers to “something that in a larger dose would be harmful, but in a smaller dose is quite beneficial.”
“Hormetic stress works almost like a vaccine,” Epel writes. “You receive a micro-dose of the ‘virus’ (stress), and then, later, when you face a large, intense similar stressor, you’re essentially inoculated against it.”Paul O. Davis, Ph.D.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01467526468422745403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7764167349856753240.post-89228162269556480152023-02-25T04:02:00.000-08:002023-02-25T04:02:07.391-08:00Is air pollution causing us to lose our sense of smell?
Our sense of smell is one of our richest and wide-ranging windows into the world around us, but a threat in the air we breathe may be eroding our olfactory powers.
For many people, a bout of Covid-19 gave a first taste (or rather a lack of it) of what it is like to lose their sense of smell. Known as "anosmia", loss of smell can have a substantial effect on our overall wellbeing and quality of life. But while a sudden respiratory infection might lead to a temporary loss of this important sense, your sense of smell may well have been gradually eroding away for years due to something else – air pollution.
Exposure to PM2.5 – the collective name for small airborne pollution particles, largely from the combustion of fuels in vehicles, power stations and our homes – has previously been linked with "olfactory dysfunction", but typically only in occupational or industrial settings. But new research is now starting to reveal the true scale – and the potential damage caused by – the pollution we breathe in every day. And their findings have relevance for us all.
On the underside of our brains, just above our nasal cavities, lies the olfactory bulb. This sensitive bit of tissue bristles with nerve endings and is essential for the enormously varied picture of the world we get from our sense of smell. It's also our first line of defence against viruses and pollutants entering the brain. But, with repeated exposure, these defences slowly get worn down – or breached.
"Our data show there's a 1.6 to 1.7-fold increased [risk of] developing anosmia with sustained particulate pollution," says Murugappan Ramanathan Jr, a rhinologist at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Baltimore. He has become one of the few experts in this field after he started to wonder if there was a link between the large numbers of patients he was seeing with anosmia and the environmental conditions where they lived.
The simple question he wanted to answer was this: were a disproportionate number of anosmia patients living in areas of higher PM2.5 pollution? Until recently, the little scientific research on this topic included one Mexican study in 2006, which used strong coffee and orange odours to show that residents of Mexico City – which often struggles with air pollution – tended to have a poorer sense of smell on average than people living in rural areas of the country.
With the help of colleagues – including environmental epidemiologist Zhenyu Zhang who created a map of historic air pollution data in the Baltimore area – Ramanathan set up a case-control study of data from 2,690 patients who had attended Johns Hopkins Hospital over a four year period. Around 20% had anosmia and most didn't smoke – a habit that is known to affect the sense of smell.
Sure enough, the levels of PM2.5 were found to be "significantly higher" in the neighbourhoods where patients with anosmia lived compared to healthy control participants. Even when adjusted for age, sex, race/ethnicity, body mass index, alcohol or tobacco use, the findings came up the same: "Even small increases in ambient PM2.5 exposure may be associated with anosmia".
The finding has been echoed in other parts of the world in studies published this year. One recent study in Brescia, northern Italy, for example, found the noses of teenagers and young adults became less sensitive to smells the more nitrogen dioxide – another pollutant produced when fossil fuels are burned, in particular from vehicle engines – they were exposed to. Another year-long study in São Paulo, Brazil, also indicated that people living in areas with higher particulate pollution had an impaired sense of smell.
But exactly how is pollution wrecking our ability to smell?
According to Ramanathan there are two potential routes. One is that some of the pollution particles are passing through the olfactory bulb and getting directly into the brain, causing inflammation. "Olfactory nerves are in the brain but they have little holes at the base of skull where little fibres go into the nose, [looking] almost like little pieces of angel hair pasta," says Ramanathan. "They are exposed."
In 2016, a team of British researchers found tiny metal particles in human brain tissue that appeared to have passed through the olfactory bulb. Barbara Maher, a professor of environmental science at Lancaster University in the UK who led the study, said at the time that the particles were "strikingly similar" to those found in airborne pollution next to busy roads (domestic fireplaces and log stoves were another possible source). Maher's study suggests that these nanoscale metal particles could, once in the brain, become toxic, contributing to oxidative brain damage that damages the neural pathways, although it still remains a theory.
The other potential mechanism, says Ramanathan, may not even require pollution particles getting into the brain. By hitting the olfactory bulb on an almost daily basis, they cause inflammation and damage to the nerves directly, slowly wearing them away. Think of it almost like coastal erosion, where sandy, salty waves eat away at the shoreline; substitute waves with pollution-filled air, and shoreline with our nasal nerves.
‟ Modern combustion methods can create nanoparticles so fine that they are small enough to directly enter our bloodstream and brain tissue
Unsurprisingly then, anosmia disproportionately affects older people, whose noses have been assaulted by air pollution for longer. More surprisingly, none of the Johns Hopkins patients lived in areas with excessively high air pollution – many lived in leafy areas of Maryland, and none were from pollution hotspots. It suggests that even low levels of air pollution could cause problems over a long enough period.
A similar recent study has separately been carried out by the Aging Research Center at the Karolinska Institute, in Stockholm. Postdoctoral researcher Ingrid Ekström was puzzled by findings from the early 2000s that showed more than 5.8% of adults in Sweden had anosmia, and 19.1% had some form of olfactory dysfunction. Knowing that anosmia rates were higher in older people, Ekström and colleagues designed a study using 3,363 patients aged 60 and over. Using strongly scented "sniffing sticks" of 16 common household smells, participants received a score depending on the number they could correctly identify. As with the Baltimore study, the participants' home addresses were mapped and analysed according to municipal air pollution readings. And as in Baltimore, there was a strong correlation between higher pollution levels and poorer smelling ability.
"They have been subjected to pollution throughout their lives," says Ekström. "We don't know exactly when their olfactory impairments started to decline.” But she is “confident” that long-term exposure to pollution was the cause, even at low levels.
In 2021, The World Health Organization (WHO) changed its health-based guidelines for a maximum annual average exposure to PM2.5, reducing it from 10 to 5 micrograms per cubic metre (µg/m3). Stockholm, Sweden's capital, is one of the few major cities in the world that manages to stay below this level with an annual average of 4.2µg/m3. By comparison, Islamabad, in Pakistan, has an annual average PM2.5 levels of 41.1µg/m3 while it is 42.3µg/m3 in Bloemfontein, South Africa.
This arguably makes the Stockholm findings even more relevant – if even Stockholm residents are having their senses eroded by low levels of pollution, then how much worse will it be in regions with high levels?
It is also a reminder of how highly localised pollution can be, both outdoors and indoors. People's cooking methods and heating choices may be exposing them to higher levels than their neighbours. (Listen to learn how effective air purifiers are.)
Meanwhile modern combustion methods from vehicle engines to the latest 'eco' wood stoves can create nanoparticles so fine that they barely register on PM2.5 readings, but are small enough to directly enter our bloodstream and brain tissue.
Air pollution is known to cause a quarter of all deaths from heart disease and stroke, and nearly half of all deaths from lung disease. By comparison, perhaps, our sense of smell seems low down the list of concerns. But both Ramanathan and Ekström warn that we underestimate the importance of smell at our peril.
Ekström's research speciality is dementia. And anosmia may be an early warning sign.
"With dementia and especially with Alzheimer's Disease, we assume that [the] disease progression is actually starting several decades before we can see the first symptoms," says Ekström.
Anosmia is one of the first symptoms. By the time Alzheimer's is diagnosed, "almost 90% of patients have anosmia", says Ekström. The exact link remains unknown, but one theory is that "environmental toxins enter the central nervous system via the olfactory bulb and cause damage, triggering this cascade effect that may ultimately lead to neuro-degeneration". The Maher Lancaster study, for example, found that metal nanoparticles were directly associated with the formation of 'senile plaques' – lesions on the brain and one of the neuropathological hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease and dementia.
Despite such strong links, Ekström argues it is only recently that researchers have "opened their eyes to the olfactory sense" and its role in disease.
Loss of smell has bee
n linked to increased likelihood of depression and anxiety in various studies, and is known to play a role in obesity, weight loss, malnutrition and cases of food poisoning. The reasons are perhaps obvious – our noses play a key role in our experience of the world around us, affect our ability to taste food and help us avoid meals that have gone off.
A poor sense of smell may mean that sufferers are likely to seek out stronger tasting food, which is very often salty and fatty. By contrast, a total loss of smell can put people off food and lose enjoyment from it, ultimately becoming underweight – a particular problem amongst the elderly.
Ramanathan has seen many patients who "can't taste food, can't smell their wine, the things that gave them pleasure in life". He recalls one patient who was a professional sommelier, for whom developing anosmia was both personally and professionally devastating.
Smell and taste are also linked to memory. "People don't remember what that pastry looked like that they ate in France, but they remember what the shop smelled like", says Ramanathan. Re-experiencing a particular smell can transport our memories straight back to that moment in pastry shop. This raises the question – albeit yet to be properly studied – whether the inverse could also true, and no longer being able to smell could impair our ability to create new memories in the same way.
Anosmia could also be an indicator of other, wider health issues. Numerous studies, typically of smokers – for whom smell impairment persists even 15 years after quitting – have shown that olfactory dysfunction is significantly associated with increased mortality among older adults. One particular study even hypothesised that anosmia could be used as a predicator for greater likelihood to die – from any cause – amongst older adults over a five-year-period. In a study of 3,005 US adults aged 57 to 85, those with anosmia were found to be four times more likely to die than their peers five years later. The researchers concluded that deteriorating sense of smell could be a "bellwether" for the accumulation of toxins from the environment or slowed regeneration of cells.
So, should we care that air pollution – to which we are all exposed – is impairing our sense of smell and causing anosmia? Clearly, the answer lies somewhere between "yes" and "hell yes".
Ramanathan, for whom traffic pollution and waste incinerators top the local pollution concerns in Baltimore, says "air quality matters". "I think we need tight regulations and control," he says. Many people may not even realise the pollution they are exposed to, so they rely on politicians regulating it to protect the populations in the surrounding areas.
"This is one of many [pollution-related] conditions," adds Ramanathan. "But this is kind of a special one, right? If you have COPD [chronic obstructive pulmonary disease] you could probably still enjoy your glass of wine. But not with this one."
Ekström says tackling air pollution is not simple. World events can also cause unexpected shifts in behaviour – Ekström mentions anecdotally that winter wood burning has been on the rise in Stockholm as worried residents wean themselves off Russian gas. But even the every-day, low-level air pollution we are exposed to “should be taken more seriously", she says. And what's more, “olfactory impairment should definitely be taken more seriously”, too.
* Tim Smedley is author of Clearing The Air: the Beginning and the End of Air Pollution, published by Bloomsbury.
Paul O. Davis, Ph.D.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01467526468422745403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7764167349856753240.post-547818048398727242023-02-03T05:45:00.000-08:002023-02-03T05:45:07.012-08:00Want to live to be 100? Here’s what experts recommend.Want to live to be 100? Here’s what experts recommend.
The recent death of the world’s oldest person at age 118 highlights the growing number of centenarians around the world
Teddy AmenabarJanuary 25, 2023 at 12:50 p.m. EST
A woman turning 100 blows out her birthday candles. (iStock)
Experts predict that the number of centenarians — people who live to be at least 100 years old — will continue to rise in the coming decades. While genetics play a large role in healthy aging, physical activity, social support and where you live also can influence your chances for living a very long life.
Sister André, a French Catholic nun born Lucile Randon, who was the world’s oldest living person, recently died at the age of 118. Now the two oldest living people are believed to be María Branyas Morera, a 115-year-old Spanish woman born in the United States, and Fusa Tatsumi, who lives in Osaka, Japan, who is also 115 but 52 days younger than Morera, according to a database by the Gerontology Research Group.
Based on a 2022 estimate by the United Nations, there are 593,000 centenarians around the world. It’s a fast-growing age group. The United Nations projects there will be 3.7 million centenarians alive by 2050.
Did you win the genetic lottery?
Experts who study the expanding human life span say the reason someone may live beyond 100 years starts with their DNA — the genes they’ve inherited from their parents.
“You can’t make it out that far without having already won the genetic lottery at birth,” said S. Jay Olshansky, a professor of public health at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “So, rule number one is going to be genetics.”
The longer your parents live, the more likely you’ll live a healthier, longer life, experts say. Luigi Ferrucci, the scientific director at the National Institute on Aging, said the children of centenarians typically live healthier, longer lives than their peers.
“It’s probably not one single gene but a profile, a combination of genes,” Ferrucci said.
Living to 100 complicates retirement
Nir Barzilai, the director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, has studied the lives of hundreds of centenarians, the people they’ve married and their kids. The children of centenarians are “about 10 years healthier” than their peers, Barzilai said.
Barzilai is working with others to enroll 10,000 centenarians, their children and a control group from the general population to identify the different genes that contribute to a long life. People who have a certain mutation on their growth hormone, for example, are “very likely to live longer” because their cells spend more energy on maintaining existing cells, not growing new ones, Barzilai said.
The plan is to use artificial intelligence to help find the genes and develop drugs from them, he said.
“We really want to find all the longevity genes,” Barzilai said.
Olshansky said he and his colleagues are preparing to launch a platform in February where people can upload data from a genetic testing service to identify whether they have genes “associated with exceptional longevity,” so they can plan financially for retirement.
“I’m a carrier, for example, of two sets of genes that are associated with longevity,” Olshansky said. “For planning purposes, I probably need to delay retirement.”
Environment and lifestyle count
Experts disagree on how much genetics influence a person’s life span vs. their lifestyle. But most experts say that good genes will only get you so far.
Jamie Justice, an assistant professor of gerontology at Wake Forest University, says some research has suggested that genetics account for around 25 percent of longevity. The other 75 percent relates to your environment — where you live, what you eat, how often you exercise and your support system through friends or family.
For those of us who are not endowed with a set of promising genes, the goal isn’t to push the boundaries of human life expectancy, Justice said. Instead, researchers want to figure out how people can have full, healthy lives with the time they have.
“The goal isn’t necessarily to live to 118 years. It’s to live well within those years,” Justice said. “What individual things do we do that we can really harness our health and live healthier within the years given?”
And, Justice said, a good public health system “can’t be undersold.” If you have a better health-care system, you’re going to have a higher life expectancy, she said.
The world’s oldest person record stood for decades. Then came a Russian conspiracy theory.
And location matters, too
The United States and Japan have the most confirmed centenarians and supercentenarians, people who live to be 110 years old or older; and, Japan has the most per capita, according to Robert Young, the director of supercentenarian research at the Gerontology Research Group.
But, there are probably more centenarians and supercentenarians we don’t know about. More than 110 years ago, certain countries were better at creating and preserving birth certificates or hospital records, Young said. A country’s record-keeping a century ago is often the factor determining where confirmed supercentenarians are reported across the world, he said.
“People need to remember that when we’re looking at human longevity today, we’re actually looking more at the state of the world 110-plus years ago,” Young said.
Beyond record-keeping, where someone lives — a war zone, a place with access to quality health care, a country with a lot of pollution, a developed nation where people sit a lot — probably plays a significant role in longevity.
Researchers have recently found “the stress of life directly affects some of the biological mechanisms of aging,” said Ferrucci, adding that our exposure to various types of pollution can harm our overall health, as well. He called the topic an “expanding area of research” that could revolutionize how we approach public health.
“We are discovering that the secret of good health is not only in our behavior but it’s also in what our society does to enhance the health of our population,” Ferrucci said.
And, from studying centenarians, Ferrucci said researchers have found that healthy older adults tend to be remain physically active, spend time outside and have strong connections with their friends and family.
“Just walking outside,” makes an enormous difference, Ferrucci said.
“If I had a jewel to give to people who want to live long and well, I would tell them to get up early in the morning and go out,” Ferrucci said. “That is really the best gift that you can give yourself if you want to achieve longevity.”
Still, Ferrucci said centenarians and especially supercentenarians are often “unique.” Some people have this “biological resilience” to live a long life despite everything going against them.
“There’s the curve of mortality that characterizes the general population and then there are these individuals that are unique singularities,” Ferrucci said. “We don’t know how and that is the great secret.”
Experts say the usual advice of regular exercise and eating healthy food applies generally to all aging adults, but for a few centenarians, there are exceptions to the rule. Barzilai once visited a centenarian, and when she opened the door, she was smoking a cigarette.
“I said, ‘Helen, nobody told you to stop smoking?’ ” Barzilai said. “And she said, ‘You know, the four doctors who told me to stop smoking? They all died.”Paul O. Davis, Ph.D.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01467526468422745403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7764167349856753240.post-73360589647511461922023-01-31T12:55:00.001-08:002023-01-31T12:55:46.821-08:00For longevity, muscle strength may be as important as aerobic exerciseWashington Post January 31, 2023 - Ian McHanan
While aerobic exercise has long taken the lead in physical activity guidelines, researchers are finding that biceps curls and bench presses might be equally important for health and longevity.
Strength training — exercise that increases muscle strength by making muscles work against a weight or force (such as gravity) — was added to the 2010 Global Recommendations on Physical Activity for Health.
In a recent meta-analysis combining 16 studies and data from over 1.5 million subjects, muscle-strengthening activities were associated with almost a 20 percent lower risk of cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, lung cancer and all-cause mortality.
“Strength training confers a host of health benefits independent of aerobic exercise,” said Daniel J. McDonough, a researcher at the University of Minnesota’s School of Public Health and co-author of a large study that looked at the effect of aerobic and muscle-strengthening exercise on mortality. Adding some muscle also improves physical fitness and bone mineral density and reduces the risk of musculoskeletal injury.
Running, swimming, playing soccer and other aerobic exercise do a lot for the cardiovascular system — our heart and blood vessels — but they don’t do much for overall muscle mass or strength.
Perhaps most important for health, studies have found that strength training improves the body’s response to insulin and, therefore, leads to better control of blood sugar after meals — which means a reduced risk of diabetes or insulin resistance, conditions that can harm the heart and cardiovascular system by thickening the heart wall and increasing arterial plaque formation.
Also, emerging evidence shows contracting skeletal muscles produce myokines, which are small strings of amino acids existing between muscles and the rest of the body that can help regulate various metabolic processes conducive to better cardiometabolic health, McDonough says. German researchers last spring reported that “by stimulating the skeletal muscle in a certain way, we can make use of this cross talk and improve health.”
Because aging and inactivity tend to reduce muscle mass, resistance training is even more crucial for older adults as it helps slow the natural loss of muscle mass with age, McDonough says. Reducing muscle loss with advanced age is crucial to maintaining independence and helping older adults stay active. This also lowers the risk of chronic disease from disability and inactivity.
Strength training appears to have positive effects on brain health and function, perhaps decreasing the risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, experts say.
Michael Valenzuela is a researcher at the University of New South Wales and one of the leaders of a study that looked at the effect of resistance exercise on cognitive function and brain structure in 100 subjects with mild cognitive impairment. He found that strength training appeared to protect areas of the brain, specifically the hippocampus, normally targeted by Alzheimer’s.
That may give strength training a potential role in prevention of the disease, Valenzuela says. “We also found these changes mediated better general cognitive performance in those older people that did the training, so it was not just an incidental finding,” he says.
A 2022 study in JAMA Network Open based on the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging found that the presence of low muscle mass was associated with faster future cognitive function decline in adults at least 65 years old. The researchers theorized that greater muscle mass may result in more physical activity and cardiorespiratory fitness, which leads to more blood flow to the brain.
So how much strength training is enough?
The federal Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans recommends two or more strength-training sessions each week. Ideally, the sessions should include four to six different exercises that use as many muscle groups as possible (legs, hips, back, abdomen, chest, shoulders and arms). For each exercise, complete 10 to 12 repetitions two to three times.
"We found that just 1-3 hours per week of moderate exercise — brisk walking and/or vigorous aerobic exercise such as [high intensity interval training] training — and just 1-2 times per week of strength exercise substantially reduced the risk of death by all-causes,” McDonough says.
Given that walking to the bus or store counts, most people should be able to get in 60 minutes a week of aerobic exercise, McDonough says. And the two sessions of strength training doesn’t have to be at the gym, he adds. They can be with any form of resistance, such as gravity, hand weights, resistance bands, or even water bottles or cans from the cupboard, or hefting grocery bags.
So cardio or weights or both? If you’re looking to live longer, doing both is your best bet, experts say.
“We consistently found that the greatest health benefits, whether it was reduced risk of death or chronic diseases or improvement in risk factors like blood pressure or cholesterol, were seen among people who performed both types of exercise rather than one or the other,” said Angelique Brellenthin, an assistant professor of kinesiology at Iowa State University and co-author of a recent review article titled “Aerobic or Muscle-Strengthening Exercise: Which is Better for Health?”
The review found that while aerobic and muscle-strengthening exercise independently reduced the risk of death by all causes, people who hit the cardio and the weights realized the largest benefit, including an approximately 40 percent reduced risk of all-cause mortality and 50 percent reduced risk of cardiovascular disease mortality.Paul O. Davis, Ph.D.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01467526468422745403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7764167349856753240.post-60024235389693886322023-01-17T06:59:00.000-08:002023-01-17T06:59:49.092-08:00Ukraine’s resilience sets a global standardTHE Washington Post<br /><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/ishaan-tharoor?utm_campaign=wp_todays_worldview&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_todayworld&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F360a437%2F639959daef9bf67b231dcaee%2F596bd165ade4e24119baa6b2%2F8%2F64%2F639959daef9bf67b231dcaee&wp_cu=2075e1e911ea6fe406d277c2b0b67f37%7CC0D746B4F01D4A74E0430100007FCAA2"><img src="https://palomaimages.washingtonpost.com/pr2/6997e69a31cf94353ed69a3c3a4a2ae6-Ishaan_hdsht_9-17-140-137.png" /></a> By <a href="mailto:ishaan.tharoor@washpost.com?subject=Today">Ishaan Tharoor</a><br />with Sammy Westfall <br /><br /><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com//world/2022/12/14/ukraine-resilience-global-standard/?utm_campaign=wp_todays_worldview&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_todayworld&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F3891052%2F639959daef9bf67b231dcaee%2F596bd165ade4e24119baa6b2%2F11%2F64%2F639959daef9bf67b231dcaee&wp_cu=2075e1e911ea6fe406d277c2b0b67f37%7CC0D746B4F01D4A74E0430100007FCAA2">Ukraine’s resilience sets a global standard</a><br /><img height="222" src="https://palomaimages.washingtonpost.com/pr2/b0de782df7c6f8abf1ccfc76cc8fecd0-MXJHBICJ5WDGVB6LXGURJWHYRE-3500-2426.JPG" width="320" /><br /><br />A Ukrainian service member smokes next to an armored personnel carrier on a road in Kherson region, Ukraine, on Friday. (Anna Voitenko/Reuters)<br /><br />A year ago, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was a somewhat unpopular leader in Kyiv, viewed by his critics as a lightweight jokester. Now, in the wake of Russia’s February invasion, the wartime president is a global icon, a Ukrainian national hero, the world’s prolific video-conferencer and, yes, the least surprising figure in recent memory to receive the designation of <a href="https://s2.washingtonpost.com/3891053/639959daef9bf67b231dcaee/596bd165ade4e24119baa6b2/12/64/639959daef9bf67b231dcaee">Time’s Person of the Year</a>.<br /><br />The international admiration for Zelensky is ultimately about much more than the man himself. His stoicism and courage seem to project the spirit of a nation that has withstood the Russian onslaught for close to 10 months at a hideous cost in lives and resources. It’s now hunkering down for a possibly punishing winter, as Russia has carried out targeted strikes on the country’s energy infrastructure. At any given moment, <a href="https://s2.washingtonpost.com/3891054/639959daef9bf67b231dcaee/596bd165ade4e24119baa6b2/13/64/639959daef9bf67b231dcaee">by some measures</a>, at least 2 million and as many as 10 million Ukrainians are living without electricity, plunged in a cold, enveloping darkness. As <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/12/01/kyiv-mood-airstrikes-war-ukraine/?utm_campaign=wp_todays_worldview&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_todayworld&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F3891055%2F639959daef9bf67b231dcaee%2F596bd165ade4e24119baa6b2%2F14%2F64%2F639959daef9bf67b231dcaee&wp_cu=2075e1e911ea6fe406d277c2b0b67f37%7CC0D746B4F01D4A74E0430100007FCAA2">my colleagues reported</a>, even then, many Ukrainians are not letting their Kremlin-inflicted woes darken their moods.<br /><br />Since the conflict flared, Zelensky and his allies have insisted their battle is not simply a defense of their own territory, but of a larger civilizational struggle, pitting their liberal aspirations and fledgling democracy against the tyranny and authoritarianism embodied by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Russia.<br /><br />“We are dealing with a powerful state that is pathologically unwilling to let Ukraine go,” <a href="https://s2.washingtonpost.com/3891054/639959daef9bf67b231dcaee/596bd165ade4e24119baa6b2/18/64/639959daef9bf67b231dcaee">Zelensky told Time’s Simon Shuster</a>, suggesting that the Kremlin could not countenance a Ukraine that rejected its sphere of influence. “They see the democracy and freedom of Ukraine as a question of their own survival.”<br /><br />Zelensky echoed what he and many other Ukrainians have been saying for months, that they were fighting on the behalf of other democracies vulnerable to Russia’s predations: “If they devour us, the sun in your sky will get dimmer.”<br /><br />On Tuesday, dozens of nations at an international conference in Paris rallied around Ukraine. They pledged more than $1 billion in additional aid to support Ukraine in the near term, including to help boost its battered energy grid and other aspects of its civilian infrastructure.<br /><br /><a href="https://sli.washingtonpost.com/click?s=220950&li=todayworld&m=1e1b0a119787d7c5951215b5330efd17&p=639959daef9bf67b231dcaee"><img border="0" src="https://sli.washingtonpost.com/imp?s=220950&li=todayworld&m=1e1b0a119787d7c5951215b5330efd17&p=639959daef9bf67b231dcaee" /></a><br />“Over $440 million of the total aid pledged is expected to be directed to Ukraine’s energy network. French officials said the final amount would likely rise,” <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/12/13/russia-ukraine-war-latest-updates/?utm_campaign=wp_todays_worldview&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_todayworld&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F3891056%2F639959daef9bf67b231dcaee%2F596bd165ade4e24119baa6b2%2F22%2F64%2F639959daef9bf67b231dcaee&wp_cu=2075e1e911ea6fe406d277c2b0b67f37%7CC0D746B4F01D4A74E0430100007FCAA2">my colleagues reported</a>. “In a video address earlier on Tuesday, Zelensky urged the international community to make maintaining the country’s energy supply a priority, calling for over at least $850 million in aid for the sector.”<br /><br />French President Emmanuel Macron hailed Ukraine’s “bravery and determination,” and said that the work of the conference in the French capital is “tangible evidence that Ukraine is not alone.”<br /><br />Kyiv is still adamant that it needs more arms and weapons to repel Russia’s offensives and reclaim more of its lost territory. “Given the scale of the war and Russia’s unwillingness to accept the reality and withdraw from Ukraine, we will need to fight through the winter,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba told reporters. He added that Russia’s strikes on civilian targets and Ukraine’s energy infrastructure were a mark of its broader military failure.<br /><br />“Such barbarism is Russia’s response to losing the war on the battleground,” Kuleba said. “They have suffered a number of humiliating defeats.”<br /><br />Ukraine has also been on the receiving end of a mammoth flow of Western weapons and military aid. On Tuesday, my colleagues reported that the Biden administration was <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/12/13/patriot-missile-defense-ukraine/?utm_campaign=wp_todays_worldview&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_todayworld&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F3891057%2F639959daef9bf67b231dcaee%2F596bd165ade4e24119baa6b2%2F23%2F64%2F639959daef9bf67b231dcaee&wp_cu=2075e1e911ea6fe406d277c2b0b67f37%7CC0D746B4F01D4A74E0430100007FCAA2">preparing to send the Patriot missile system</a> — its most sophisticated air defense technology — to Ukraine.<br /><br />Western support for Kyiv is holding, no matter the fears over war fatigue of many countries that were deepened by the wider economic impact of the war and the energy sanctions placed on Russia’s economy.<br /><br />“Among the many miscalculations that Putin has made is his bet that the invasion of Ukraine would strain relations among his adversaries,” wrote German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in <a href="https://s2.washingtonpost.com/3891058/639959daef9bf67b231dcaee/596bd165ade4e24119baa6b2/24/64/639959daef9bf67b231dcaee">a recent op-ed for Foreign Affairs</a>. “In fact, the reverse has happened: the EU and the transatlantic alliance are stronger than ever before.”<br /><br />Thousands of miles away, officials from another country facing up to a revanchist neighbor are taking notes. The war in Ukraine has echoed in the island state of Taiwan, which is constantly in the shadow of China and subject to an escalating series of provocations from the mainland. The leadership in Beijing, not dissimilarly from Putin’s stance on Ukraine, views Taiwan as an illegitimate state bound to return to the Chinese fold.<br /><br />To Taiwan, Ukraine’s defiance of Russia is a source of inspiration and a template for their own survival. “Ukraine showed very great determination to defend their territory and it’s clear that Ukrainians have a very resilient civil society, which helped resist invasion,” Taiwanese Deputy Foreign Minister Ming-Yen Tsai told me on the sidelines of a major international security conference in Halifax, Canada, last month. He added that watching Ukraine’s struggle has inspired Taiwan to implement major long-term military reforms, including <a href="https://s2.washingtonpost.com/3891059/639959daef9bf67b231dcaee/596bd165ade4e24119baa6b2/25/64/639959daef9bf67b231dcaee">extending the period of compulsory military service</a> expected of its citizens.<br /><br />While a Chinese maritime invasion of Taiwan would look very different than Russia’s land campaigns in Ukraine, Taiwanese officials have seized the moment as one to galvanize international support for their cause and sound the alarm over the challenges confronting them.<br /><br />“We are already facing warfare without gun smoke on a daily basis,” Tsai said, pointing to China’s “hybrid warfare” tactics, its use of escalating forms of military intimidation through naval exercises and aerial incursions, as well as cyberstrikes and online disinformation campaigns.<br /><br />“If we do not hold ground at this point,” Tsai said, “China will test the bottom line, step by step, to create a new normal, and step by step, keep changing the status quo” until Taiwan’s sovereignty will be all the more fragile.<br /><br />The experience of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Tsai said, “shows that authoritarian countries have no qualms invading other countries’ territory, revising national borders and challenging the rules-based international order.” He added that, for Taiwan, the lesson is to prepare now for an invasion rather than when it’s too late.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><table align="center" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" role="presentation" style="color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 18px; width: 92%px;"><tbody><tr><td></td></tr><tr><td height="20" style="font-size: 20px; line-height: 20px;"></td></tr><tr><td></td></tr></tbody></table>Paul O. Davis, Ph.D.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01467526468422745403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7764167349856753240.post-54287366502364482872023-01-04T01:40:00.000-08:002023-01-04T01:40:00.981-08:00HARRISON BERGERON- a classic satireby Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.<br /><br />THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.<br /><br />Some things about living still weren't quite right, though. April for instance, still drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy month that the H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron's fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, away.<br /><br />It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn't think about it very hard. Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn't think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.<br /><br />George and Hazel were watching television. There were tears on Hazel's cheeks, but she'd forgotten for the moment what they were about.<br /><br />On the television screen were ballerinas.<br /><br />A buzzer sounded in George's head. His thoughts fled in panic, like bandits from a burglar alarm.<br /><br />"That was a real pretty dance, that dance they just did," said Hazel.<br /><br />"Huh" said George.<br /><br />"That dance-it was nice," said Hazel.<br /><br />"Yup," said George. He tried to think a little about the ballerinas. They weren't really very good-no better than anybody else would have been, anyway. They were burdened with sashweights and bags of birdshot, and their faces were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in. George was toying with the vague notion that maybe dancers shouldn't be handicapped. But he didn't get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts.<br /><br />George winced. So did two out of the eight ballerinas.<br /><br />Hazel saw him wince. Having no mental handicap herself, she had to ask George what the latest sound had been.<br /><br />"Sounded like somebody hitting a milk bottle with a ball peen hammer," said George.<br /><br />"I'd think it would be real interesting, hearing all the different sounds," said Hazel a little envious. "All the things they think up."<br /><br />"Um," said George.<br /><br />"Only, if I was Handicapper General, you know what I would do?" said Hazel. Hazel, as a matter of fact, bore a strong resemblance to the Handicapper General, a woman named Diana Moon Glampers. "If I was Diana Moon Glampers," said Hazel, "I'd have chimes on Sunday-just chimes. Kind of in honor of religion."<br /><br />"I could think, if it was just chimes," said George.<br /><br />"Well-maybe make 'em real loud," said Hazel. "I think I'd make a good Handicapper General."<br /><br />"Good as anybody else," said George.<br /><br />"Who knows better than I do what normal is?" said Hazel.<br /><br />"Right," said George. He began to think glimmeringly about his abnormal son who was now in jail, about Harrison, but a twenty-one-gun salute in his head stopped that.<br /><br />"Boy!" said Hazel, "that was a doozy, wasn't it?"<br /><br />It was such a doozy that George was white and trembling, and tears stood on the rims of his red eyes. Two of the eight ballerinas had collapsed to the studio floor, and were holding their temples.<br /><br />"All of a sudden you look so tired," said Hazel. "Why don't you stretch out on the sofa, so's you can rest your handicap bag on the pillows, honeybunch." She was referring to the forty-seven pounds of birdshot in a canvas bag, which was padlocked around George's neck. "Go on and rest the bag for a little while," she said. "I don't care if you're not equal to me for a while."<br /><br />George weighed the bag with his hands. "I don't mind it," he said. "I don't notice it anymore. It's just a part of me."<br /><br />"You been so tired lately-kind of wore out," said Hazel. "If there was just some way we could make a little hole in the bottom of the bag, and just take out a few of them lead balls. Just a few."<br /><br />"Two years in prison and two thousand dollars fine for every ball I took out," said George. "I don't call that a bargain."<br /><br />"If you could just take a few out when you came home from work," said Hazel. "I mean-you don't compete with anybody around here. You just sit around."<br /><br />"If I tried to get away with it," said George, "then other people'd get away with it-and pretty soon we'd be right back to the dark ages again, with everybody competing against everybody else. You wouldn't like that, would you?"<br /><br />"I'd hate it," said Hazel.<br /><br />"There you are," said George. The minute people start cheating on laws, what do you think happens to society?"<br /><br />If Hazel hadn't been able to come up with an answer to this question, George couldn't have supplied one. A siren was going off in his head.<br /><br />"Reckon it'd fall all apart," said Hazel.<br /><br />"What would?" said George blankly.<br /><br />"Society," said Hazel uncertainly. "Wasn't that what you just said?<br /><br />"Who knows?" said George.<br /><br />The television program was suddenly interrupted for a news bulletin. It wasn't clear at first as to what the bulletin was about, since the announcer, like all announcers, had a serious speech impediment. For about half a minute, and in a state of high excitement, the announcer tried to say, "Ladies and Gentlemen."<br /><br />He finally gave up, handed the bulletin to a ballerina to read.<br /><br />"That's all right-" Hazel said of the announcer, "he tried. That's the big thing. He tried to do the best he could with what God gave him. He should get a nice raise for trying so hard."<br /><br />"Ladies and Gentlemen," said the ballerina, reading the bulletin. She must have been extraordinarily beautiful, because the mask she wore was hideous. And it was easy to see that she was the strongest and most graceful of all the dancers, for her handicap bags were as big as those worn by two-hundred pound men.<br /><br />And she had to apologize at once for her voice, which was a very unfair voice for a woman to use. Her voice was a warm, luminous, timeless melody. "Excuse me-" she said, and she began again, making her voice absolutely uncompetitive.<br /><br />"Harrison Bergeron, age fourteen," she said in a grackle squawk, "has just escaped from jail, where he was held on suspicion of plotting to overthrow the government. He is a genius and an athlete, is under-handicapped, and should be regarded as extremely dangerous."<br /><br />A police photograph of Harrison Bergeron was flashed on the screen-upside down, then sideways, upside down again, then right side up. The picture showed the full length of Harrison against a background calibrated in feet and inches. He was exactly seven feet tall.<br /><br />The rest of Harrison's appearance was Halloween and hardware. Nobody had ever born heavier handicaps. He had outgrown hindrances faster than the H-G men could think them up. Instead of a little ear radio for a mental handicap, he wore a tremendous pair of earphones, and spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides.<br /><br />Scrap metal was hung all over him. Ordinarily, there was a certain symmetry, a military neatness to the handicaps issued to strong people, but Harrison looked like a walking junkyard. In the race of life, Harrison carried three hundred pounds.<br /><br />And to offset his good looks, the H-G men required that he wear at all times a red rubber ball for a nose, keep his eyebrows shaved off, and cover his even white teeth with black caps at snaggle-tooth random.<br /><br />"If you see this boy," said the ballerina, "do not - I repeat, do not - try to reason with him."<br /><br />There was the shriek of a door being torn from its hinges.<br /><br />Screams and barking cries of consternation came from the television set. The photograph of Harrison Bergeron on the screen jumped again and again, as though dancing to the tune of an earthquake.<br /><br />George Bergeron correctly identified the earthquake, and well he might have - for many was the time his own home had danced to the same crashing tune. "My God-" said George, "that must be Harrison!"<br /><br />The realization was blasted from his mind instantly by the sound of an automobile collision in his head.<br /><br />When George could open his eyes again, the photograph of Harrison was gone. A living, breathing Harrison filled the screen.<br /><br />Clanking, clownish, and huge, Harrison stood - in the center of the studio. The knob of the uprooted studio door was still in his hand. Ballerinas, technicians, musicians, and announcers cowered on their knees before him, expecting to die.<br /><br />"I am the Emperor!" cried Harrison. "Do you hear? I am the Emperor! Everybody must do what I say at once!" He stamped his foot and the studio shook.<br /><br />"Even as I stand here" he bellowed, "crippled, hobbled, sickened - I am a greater ruler than any man who ever lived! Now watch me become what I can become!"<br /><br />Harrison tore the straps of his handicap harness like wet tissue paper, tore straps guaranteed to support five thousand pounds.<br /><br />Harrison's scrap-iron handicaps crashed to the floor.<br /><br />Harrison thrust his thumbs under the bar of the padlock that secured his head harness. The bar snapped like celery. Harrison smashed his headphones and spectacles against the wall.<br /><br />He flung away his rubber-ball nose, revealed a man that would have awed Thor, the god of thunder.<br /><br />"I shall now select my Empress!" he said, looking down on the cowering people. "Let the first woman who dares rise to her feet claim her mate and her throne!"<br /><br />A moment passed, and then a ballerina arose, swaying like a willow.<br /><br />Harrison plucked the mental handicap from her ear, snapped off her physical handicaps with marvelous delicacy. Last of all he removed her mask.<br /><br />She was blindingly beautiful.<br /><br />"Now-" said Harrison, taking her hand, "shall we show the people the meaning of the word dance? Music!" he commanded.<br /><br />The musicians scrambled back into their chairs, and Harrison stripped them of their handicaps, too. "Play your best," he told them, "and I'll make you barons and dukes and earls."<br /><br />The music began. It was normal at first-cheap, silly, false. But Harrison snatched two musicians from their chairs, waved them like batons as he sang the music as he wanted it played. He slammed them back into their chairs.<br /><br />The music began again and was much improved.<br /><br />Harrison and his Empress merely listened to the music for a while-listened gravely, as though synchronizing their heartbeats with it.<br /><br />They shifted their weights to their toes.<br /><br />Harrison placed his big hands on the girls tiny waist, letting her sense the weightlessness that would soon be hers.<br /><br />And then, in an explosion of joy and grace, into the air they sprang!<br /><br />Not only were the laws of the land abandoned, but the law of gravity and the laws of motion as well.<br /><br />They reeled, whirled, swiveled, flounced, capered, gamboled, and spun.<br /><br />They leaped like deer on the moon.<br /><br />The studio ceiling was thirty feet high, but each leap brought the dancers nearer to it.<br /><br />It became their obvious intention to kiss the ceiling. They kissed it.<br /><br />And then, neutraling gravity with love and pure will, they remained suspended in air inches below the ceiling, and they kissed each other for a long, long time.<br /><br />It was then that Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General, came into the studio with a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun. She fired twice, and the Emperor and the Empress were dead before they hit the floor. <br /><br />Diana Moon Glampers loaded the gun again. She aimed it at the musicians and told them they had ten seconds to get their handicaps back on.<br /><br />It was then that the Bergerons' television tube burned out.<br /><br />Hazel turned to comment about the blackout to George. But George had gone out into the kitchen for a can of beer.<br /><br />George came back in with the beer, paused while a handicap signal shook him up. And then he sat down again. "You been crying" he said to Hazel.<br /><br />"Yup," she said.<br /><br />"What about?" he said.<br /><br />"I forget," she said. "Something real sad on television."<br /><br />"What was it?" he said.<br /><br />"It's all kind of mixed up in my mind," said Hazel.<br /><br />"Forget sad things," said George.<br /><br />"I always do," said Hazel.<br /><br />"That's my girl," said George. He winced. There was the sound of a rivetting gun in his head.<br /><br />"Gee - I could tell that one was a doozy," said Hazel.<br /><br />"You can say that again," said George.<br /><br />"Gee-" said Hazel, "I could tell that one was a doozy."<br /><br />"Harrison Bergeron" is copyrighted by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., 1961.Paul O. Davis, Ph.D.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01467526468422745403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7764167349856753240.post-46000201525846684272022-12-27T01:30:00.003-08:002022-12-27T01:30:52.921-08:00Dr. Richard A. Schwartz, MD, F.A.C.P., F.A.C.C.<img height="320" src="https://www.cardiologyspecialistsofvirginia.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/RAS-mug-IMG_2720.jpg" style="-webkit-user-select: none; cursor: zoom-in; display: block; margin: auto;" width="228" />Dick Schwartz entered my life as an adjunct professor at the University of Maryland. I signed up for the six credit hour course- Cardiovascular Physiology and Pathology. From that stepping stone he was a member of our FEMA-funded, ground-breaking research tesm, conducting the first-ever study of the metabolic demands of structuiral fire suppression. We identified the aerobic and anaerobic constructs and contributions to working encumbered with SCBA and the PPE. <div><br /></div><div>Our friendship with Dick and his wife grew through life events including his marriage, his professional advancemet and later in setting up an Occupational Medicine practice in the Greater Washington, DC area. </div><div><br /></div><div>I was honored to serve as a pallbearer and call him friend. The official obituary follows. </div><div><br />It is with great sadness and regrets that the physicians and staff of Cardiology Specialists of Virginia note the passing of Dr. Schwartz on December 20, 2022. Dr. Schwartz was a dedicated physician who dearly cared for his patients and loved his profession; he was our colleague and friend. <br /><br />Dr. Schwartz began his private practice in the Northern Virginia area in 1974. He was the founder and medical director of a group cardiology practice in Arlington and Alexandria, VA. from 1974 to 2000. Dr. Schwartz received his medical degree from Cornell University in 1965. He served his Internship at Philadelphia General Hospital. His residency training was done in the Georgetown University Hospital program at D.C. General Hospital. Cardiology Fellowships were completed at Georgetown University Hospital and the Washington Center Hospital. He was Board Certified in Internal Medicine and Cardiovascular Disease. Dr. Schwartz held the rank of Lieutenant Commander during his military service in the U.S. Public Health Service. He was a Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine at Georgetown University Hospital of Medicine. At the University of Maryland, he served as a consultant in cardiology, sports medicine and physical fitness. He was a Director of the Northern Virginia Institute for Continuing Education, Chairman of the Board for the Medical Society Services and Treasurer of the Medical Society of the District of Columbia. Dr. Schwartz was past Chairman of the D.C. Medical Society Committee on Physical Fitness and a charter member and past President of the Sports Medicine Association of Greater Washington. He was a frequent guest speaker and author on various healthcare and fitness topics. Active in rowing for over 30 years, Dr. Schwartz was a senior master sculler and has participated in the sport as a crew member, coach, and team physician. He was a member of national championship crews and rowed on the 1963 Pan American team.</div>Paul O. Davis, Ph.D.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01467526468422745403noreply@blogger.com0