See you on the 18th

 

The iron curtain

It's re-drawn, now we're on the other side.

"…We were at war with a dictator," said French center-right politician Claude Malhuret of Europe's stand against Putin. "[N]ow we are at war with a dictator backed by a traitor."

HCR 

https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/march-5-2025?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

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How Covid Remade America

David Wallace-Wells

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/04/opinion/covid-impact-five-years-later.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

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Illegal impoundment

As seemed evident even at the time, the ambush of Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office on Friday was a setup to provide justification for cutting off congressionally approved aid to Ukraine as it tries to fight off Russia's invasion. That "impoundment" of funds Congress has determined should go to Ukraine is illegal under the terms of the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, and it is unconstitutional because the Constitution gives to Congress, not to the president, the power to set government spending and to make laws. The president's job is to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed."

It was for a similar impoundment of congressionally appropriated funds for Ukraine, holding them back until Zelensky agreed to tilt the 2020 election by smearing Joe Biden, that the House of Representatives impeached Trump in 2019. It is not hard to imagine that Trump chose to repeat that performance, in public this time, as a demonstration of his determination to act as he wishes regardless of laws and Constitution.

On Sunday, Nicholas Enrich, the acting assistant administrator for global health at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) released a series of memos he and other senior career officials had written, recording in detail how the cuts to "lifesaving humanitarian assistance" at the agency will lead to "preventable death" and make the U.S. less safe. 

The cuts will "no doubt result in preventable death, destabilization, and threats to national security on a massive scale," one memo read.

Enrich estimated that without USAID intervention, more than 16 million pregnant women and more than 11 million newborns would not get medical care; more than 14 million children would not get care for pneumonia and diarrhea (among the top causes of preventable deaths for children under the age of 5); 200,000 children would be paralyzed with polio; and 1 million children would not be treated for severe acute malnutrition. There would be an additional 12.5 million or more cases of malaria this year, meaning 71,000 to 166,000 deaths; a 28–32% increase in tuberculosis; as many as 775 million cases of avian flu; 2.3 million additional deaths a year in children who could not be vaccinated against diseases; additional cases of Ebola and mpox. The higher rates of illness will take a toll on economic development in developing countries, and both the diseases and the economic stagnation will spill over into the United States...

HCR https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/march-3-2025?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

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Lyceum

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

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Questions MAR 4

 Beyond 13-15; Code Breaker (CB) Intro & Part One-The Origins of Life

Presentation: Martha

Here's your AUDIO REVIEW for exam 1 on Thursday March 6...

Beyond

1. What do Athanasiou and Darnovsky fear we're at risk of losing, if the human genome is privatized?

2. What future social classes does Lee Silver predict will effectively become separate species? Who are some prominent figures who endorse his views?

3. What published opinion do our authors cite as committing a "naturalistic fallacy"?

4. Brave New World was what, "first of all"?

5. What practice continued into the 70s in "that liberal paragon Sweden"?

6. People with congenital disabilities typically feel ____.

7. What's the logical conclusion of the "Kinsley-Sullivan thesis" and what does it conflate?

8. CRISPR is an acronym for what?

9. What's needed most, to reduce the incidence of monogenic disease?

10. Scientists have a responsibility to debate _____.

DQs

• Do you agree with the "biotech boosters" that possible advances in medical science trump all other considerations, and that the prospect of progress is worth the risk of  inheritable genetic modification?
• "Designer babies": do you want one?
• "Post-humans": do you welcome them?
• Why don't techno-utopians like Lee Silver (et al) deplore the prospect of a social gap between those who've been genetically enhanced and those who haven't? Do you?
• Was James Watson right about "what the public actually wants"? 160
• Is it alarmist to invoke Huxley's dystopia as a harbinger of things to come? 
• Are there any spheres of medicine, or indeed of life, in which perfectionism is an appropriate state of mind and plan of action?
• Who has the right to decide when, whether, or how to edit a child's genome?
• How would you respond to any of the questions posed in the first paragraph on p.173?

Code Breaker (CB)

1. CRISPR is based on what kind of trick? xvi (And what does the acronym stand for? --see index)
2. What "joy" is this book about? xix
3. What did Jennifer Doudna first realize when she read The Double Helix? 8
4. Mendel's experiments revealed what momentous genetic facts? 14
5.  What was James Watson's "feeble attempt at graciousness"? 26
6. What revolutions coincided in the '50s? 28
7. What changed for Doudna after her junior year? 33
8. How did President Clinton announce the sequencing of the human genome? 40
9. What injunction became one of Doudna's guiding principles? 46
10. What was one of her father's "gifts" to Doudna? 60
11. What was the most exciting finding of the "Dicer" study? 66

Discussion Questions:

• What do you think are the likeliest potential applications of CRISPR? Are you more excited or worried about them?
• What do you think of the way Watson and Crick treated Franklin?
• Do you think the sciences of biology and chemistry, and the significance of their convergence, are adequately communicated in science classes at every level?
• Did President Clinton accurately represent the significance of the human genome project?
• Do science and humanities educators adequately understand one another, or is there still a "Two Cultures" schism (as C.P. Snow dubbed it long ago)? 
• Suggest your own DQs

Home invasion

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/3/3/2306833/-Cartoon-Home-invasion

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

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Truths to Remember in a Time of Lies

"…Truth matters. Rewriting American historywill not change American history. A law is still a law, even when a felon continues to flout the law. The truth is still the truth, even if you fire people working to combat your lies. Americans have always understood, if imperfectly at times, that truth matters. Even the Trump administration understands the power of truth. Why else would it be deleting data — on climate change, on police misconduct, on census numbers, on medical research and on gender, among others?

Republicans won't tell us the truth, and Democrats can't seem to rouse themselves into an organized effort to combat their lies. We must tell the truth ourselves. As unrelentingly as we can and in as many contexts as we can, we have no choice but to keep telling the truth until we have drowned out all the lies. Because the truth will always matter."

Margaret Renkl

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/03/opinion/trump-truth-lies.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

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Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World

The science journalist and author Ed Yong likes to joke that during the first wave of Covid-19 in 2020, the impact and reach of his reporting for The Atlantic turned him into "a character in the season of 'Pandemic.'" Indeed, his Covid journalism — which documented the earliest stages of the pandemic and made him one of the first chroniclers of long Covid — established Yong as a key and trusted public interpreter of the illness and its many ripples. It also won him a Pulitzer Prize. (Additionally, Yong's 2022 book about animal perception, "An Immense World," became a best seller. A young reader's edition will be published on May 13.)

But despite having achieved a level of success and attention that most writers can only dream of, Yong's immersion in Covid left him feeling as utterly depleted as many of the health care professionals and patients he was covering. So much so that in 2023, he decided to leave his prestigious perch at The Atlantic. Since then, in addition to working on a new book, he has found a measure of salvation, even transcendence, in birding, a pastime that he, like so many others, took up in the wake of those grim days of social distancing and time stuck inside.

So as we approach the fifth anniversary of the U.S. pandemic lockdowns, I wanted to talk with Yong about his Covid lows, his hopeful response to those struggles and his perspective on the lessons we learned — or maybe more accurate, didn't learn — from that strange and troubling time...

LISTEN-

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/22/magazine/ed-yong-interview.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude