The eyes have it

I hope I'm not stepping on Janie's post, I'm always grateful to her for keeping the home fires lit, but this article caught my eye as it were and I thought I'd put up, in large part because it lets me talk about what's ailing me (and maybe some of you?)

https://www.sciencealert.com/your-vision-can-predict-dementia-12-years-before-diagnosis-study-finds

Our research was based on 8,623 healthy people in Norfolk, England, who were followed up for many years. By the end of the study, 537 participants had developed dementia, so we could see what factors might have preceded this diagnosis.

 

At the start of the study, we asked participants to take a visual sensitivity test. For the test, they had to press a button as soon as they saw a triangle forming in a field of moving dots. People who would develop dementia were much slower to see this triangle on the screen than people who would remain without dementia.

 

So why might that be?

 

Visual issues may be an early indicator of cognitive decline as the toxic amyloid plaques associated with Alzheimer's disease may first affect areas of the brain associated with vision, with parts of the brain associated with memory becoming damaged as the disease progresses. So vision tests may find deficits before memory tests do.

I can't help but feel like there is a correlation/causation problem here. Couldn't it be that loss of visual acuity itself be a factor in Alzheimer's? The assumption is that the amyloid plaques are affecting visual acuity, which is taken as a sign, but it could be that if your eyes get worse, that might be the/a causative factor?

Cause as you get old, your vision certainly gets worse. This link has a useful list and it seems to me that rather than thinking that Alzheimer's is screwing up your eyes, it might be the other way around. Or at least enough to not make pronouncements about plaques and inhibitory controls.

I tend to think this cause I can feel that my worsening eyesight as well as my experiences with my vision suggest that the vision causes problems for memory.

I was the first kid to get glasses in my elementary school. My 2nd grade teacher told my mom at the end of the year conference that she thought I needed glasses because I was doing poorly on math tests not because my calculations were wrong but because I was writing down the wrong starting numbers. My mom thought that was crazy until one day during summer vacation, one of our neighbors, an officer in the Air Force, was coming to our house and I told my mom that the plumber was coming.

I got glasses and, in an experience common to people like me, it was astonishing because it was the first time I could see individual leaves on the tree. Another interesting thing was that my memories, for the most part, start when I got glasses. I can't do it now, but well into my 40's, I could remember everyone in my elementary school classes. Back then, glasses took you off the sports track, at least for contact sports like football. I did judo as a kid, and while not being able to see very well can help you with balance and being able to react, I was unable to visually learn, which seems to be a really important way for me. I got to be even more of a book worm, and could often remember where on the page a particular passage was.

Fast forward to language learning, I thought I was quite good at languages, doing French, Latin and Greek at uni and then going to Japan. I don't want to spend too much time in the weeds, but after 5 years in Japan, my Japanese was ok and I worked pretty hard on reading. It was just as the computer revolution was starting and I purchased a Fujitsu Oasys word processor because Japanese on the computer was rather tortured. I went to grad school and got interested in endangered languages, so took Thai, imagining I could do fieldwork in Thai. With grad school, I didn't do any Japanese reading, but when I got a job at Hokkaido University, I unboxed the stuff I had sent from Japan to rebox it to send back to Japan (Some of you may know this drill) and I came about my Fujitsu Oasys word processor. I plugged it in, opened it up and was greeted with a 3 page essay that I had written. I could remember typing it out, where I was sitting, a whole wealth of details, but I couldn't read what I had written. I could figure out characters, and piece it together, but I might have just been typing the Japanese equivalent of Redrum.

Getting back to Japan, I had a job with a fixed term and after three years, I again packed up my stuff to ship down to Southern Japan. At that time, I found my Thai notebooks and this time, it was even worse. I couldn't make heads or tails out of stuff that I had written. It made me realize that a lot of my language ability was tied up in roman letters. If I had gone with Vietnamese, I probably would have been a lot better off.

Fast forward to about 10 years ago when I had to have emergency surgery for a detached retina. It wasn't because of a punch or a car crash, apparently, the vitreous (the clear fluid that fills your eye) turns to a more gelatin like consistency and in shrinking, it can pull the retina from the back of the eye. I had the surgery, but afterwards, I found that I had lost about 10 or 20 meters off my vision in terms of recognizing faces. This wouldn't be a big deal, but before the operation, I could recognize someone who was my student and in the time that it would take to close the distance between us, I could dredge up their name. Losing that distance meant that I had less time to figure out who it was and would often draw a blank. In the past ten years, I can tell that this inability has impinged on me remembering student names and placing them in context.

Now, my father had alzheimer's, but his was probably because he was a college boxer (strangely enough, his eyesight was probably as bad as mine, but he still boxed) So I don't think these holes in my memory are because of some genetic disposition towards alzheimers, it is more having an increasing number of holes in my knowledge base and therefore, lose ground because of losing the context.

There is an interesting cultural aspect to this. Asians are known for having poor eyesight, and it is not just an ignorant trope from Breakfast at Tiffany's, but an actual issue for East Asian countries. I like this podcast, which I started watching because of the insights into TSMC, which is building two factories near me, and this episode about the issues with myopia in China and what they are doing to deal with it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YWbR8K0jT4&t=42s

While the push to deal with myopia in China is more because of the ocular health, but I wonder if people like me will decline more quickly because of this. At any rate, talk about your eyes or whatever else ails you.

 

Comments

[JanieM]

Lots of juicy stuff here, which I hope to come back to when I get some quiet time. But for now...

1. I read only the first bit of the first linked article, then skimmed the rest. There does seem to be a lot of almost-presuming-the-conclusion speculation. But in relation to lj's quoted passage, I don't read it as suggesting causation, but rather prediction, which is different.

2. A couple of years ago a friend sent me this article (sorry for not embedding):

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/7/22/2111914/-Two-decades-of-Alzheimer-s-research-may-be-based-on-deliberate-fraud-that-has-cost-millions-of-lives?utm_campaign=trending

Not surprisingly, it's a bit overblown in its own way in commenting on research described more thoroughly here:

https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabrication-research-images-threatens-key-theory-alzheimers-disease

Since those articles are from 2022, I went looking for later developments and found these write-ups:

https://www.alzheimers.org.uk/for-researchers/explaining-amyloid-research-study-controversy

https://www.alzheimers.org.uk/for-researchers/explaining-amyloid-research-study-controversy

Complicated stuff, obviously, and as a lay person with very little time to spend digging, I don't know if people are partly (or mostly) protecting turf and reputation, or what.

My dad was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in his late fifties. He died at 71 after several years in a nursing home. He couldn't sit up on his own, he couldn't speak, he had some strokes, he had a feeding tube.

His autopsy revealed that he didn't have any signs of Alzheimer's at all, he had MS (late onset). A correct diagnosis in the first place wouldn't have made much if any difference in the possibility of treatment, but the sequence of events does reveal -- again -- how complicated this topic is, and how fraught with uncertainties.

*****

I too am very visual. I take in information by reading, not by listening. Podcasts do nothing for me. Listening to someone read a card in Magic: The Gathering when I played with my kids did nothing for me; I had to read the card for myself. As to non-Roman alphabets, well....maybe later.

[Girl from the North Country]

I got glasses and, in an experience common to people like me, it was astonishing because it was the first time I could see individual leaves on the tree.

This made me smile sadly, because I remembered when my beloved father eventually succumbed to family pressure, and got a hearing aid (in his 70s, so really, too late in the long term - plus they weren't that good then), and when we went outside for the first time with him wearing it, he grabbed my arm in alarm, and said "What's that noise?!", and I had to say to him "Daddy, it's the wind..."

[wj]

I got glasses and, in an experience common to people like me, it was astonishing because it was the first time I could see individual leaves on the tree.

I was in high school when we realized I was near sighted (20/400 plus astigmatism). I had never been able to see the blackboard; didn't realize that wasn't normal. But I listen well. Got glasses in college -- couldn't skate on ears and brains there.

I do wonder why a simple vision test wasn't standard for first graders. Is it now?

[liberal japonicus]

thanks all and especially Janie. I may be reading into it too much, but there seemed to be this underlying assumption that vision is a constant. I can sadly assure you that it is not...

[JanieM]

Me: I take in information by reading, not by listening. Podcasts do nothing for me. Listening to someone read a card in Magic: The Gathering when I played with my kids did nothing for me; I had to read the card for myself.

This is exaggerated. In reality, it's just that I take in information more efficiently and reliably by reading/seeing than by listening/hearing.

*****

Agreed that vision is not a constant. If nothing else, I can measure that by the regularity with which my glasses prescriptions have changed as I've gotten older. And I too have a childhood story: I realized in fifth grade that if I closed one eye and then the other, one eye could see the blackboard okay, the other saw fuzz. I told my mother, who thought I just wanted glasses because my best friend had recently gotten them.

[Snarki, child of Loki]

GftNC: and I had to say to him "Daddy, it's the wind..."

very touching story. Thank you for sharing it.

[wj]

I take in information more efficiently and reliably by reading/seeing than by listening/hearing.

I find that I absorb details, and deep understanding, far better by reading.

But if I'm primarily looking to absorb general background, get familiar with terms (preparing to get their exact meaning later), etc. listening actually works somewhat better.

[wonkie]

I think humans are very oriented to visual learning, far me than listening. Perhaps this is part of our genetic history as pack-forming territorial hunter/gatherers. In any case, my observation of other people is they miss most of what they hear unless there is an accompanying visual.

Oddly, I am a very good listener. My only problem with listening is that I have little patience with presentations that don't get right to the point.

I have become less visually adept over time, and I seriously suck at recognizing people. I also have a strong disinclination to deal with complex and boring processes that I used to take care of pretty efficiently. I do wonder if there's something cognitive going on with me.

On the other hand, I just finished a novella and am nearly done with another one.

Old age sucks.

[Michael Cain]

I saw the ophthalmologist last month. When she asked how my vision was doing, I told her I thought things had sharpened up over the last year. When the examination was done she said I was right, both distant and near vision were about three letters better. Due to strabismus when I was young, I have biocular vision rather than binocular and switch back and forth between eyes depending on where I'm looking. My left eye has a measurable vertical deviation when my right eye is "in charge." She also said the deviation was smaller than a year ago and the switch occurred more quickly.

This seems like a peculiar thing to happen to a 70-year-old.

[Girl from the North Country]

Thank you, Snarki. He is 24 years dead, and not a day goes by without my thinking of him.

[Snarki, child of Loki]

Vision is your highest bandwidth input channel. Typing is your highest bandwidth output channel.

Accuracy and retention is more individual, but oh yeah, want that bandwidth.

[Michael Cain]

I do wonder why a simple vision test wasn't standard for first graders. Is it now?

The public school district where granddaughters #1 and #2 attend conduct basic vision and hearing exams at the start of the school year for every grade K-3, then grades 5, 7, and 9. The district provides free in-depth hearing evaluations for students that fail the basic. There are a number of state/charity programs available to get the proper glasses or hearing aids to kids from low-income families.

[Michael Cain]

Typing is your highest bandwidth output channel.

Citation? I would have guessed speaking.

[Snarki, child of Loki]

Yes, could be speech.
Unless you know how to use one of those fancy "chording" keyboards.

Ten fingers, ten output channels!

[liberal japonicus]

almost all of the Koreans I taught and a lot of the Japanese students are now using flicktyping

https://www.afb.org/aw/19/10/15155

Trying to get the students onboarded with various accounts, I sometimes have to ask them to let me do it on their phones and my speed at flicktyping is akin to a stone carver. What's worse, some of the students, because they do flick typing all the time, have really bad keyboard skills.

[Donald]

Speaking of bandwidth, I was rereading Vinge’s “ Fire upon the Deep”

( spoiler alert if you haven’t read it and ever plan to)

and was wondering if sound waves up to 200 kHz could carry enough info to keep a group consciousness going. No idea myself. My intuitive wild guess was “ no”, but Vinge probably thought about that and might have had some rationale for believing it could.

I am guessing that in a somewhat geekish crowd at least one other person here has read it.

[Snarki, child of Loki]

by amazing coincidence, rereading it currently.

I really don't know how much bandwidth is needed for "consciousness", but maybe not super-huge amounts, if the local processing fills in the gaps, like it does for vision and hearing.

200kHz is going to be pretty directional, and damp out quickly. Whether "quickly" means 2m, 2cm, or 2mm, I'm not sure. I do know that it's surprisingly difficult to get few Mhz frequency sound to travel efficiently even in hard alloys.

[Donald]

Bats have that problem. Some emit up to a freq of 212 kHz.

Just looked it up.

https://pubs.aip.org/asa/jasa/article-abstract/71/3/585/648391/Measurements-of-atmospheric-attenuation-at?redirectedFrom=fulltext

[Donald]

Vinge died recently, which triggered my reread. I think I will purchase the prequel— Deepness in the Sky. I have read it twice and loved it, but got from the library but now I want to own it. Not sure if I will go kindle or actual paper.

I read the third one and have it, but it was a letdown IMO. Also, it still leaves you with a cliffhanger which will never be resolved.

[Donald]

A bat article with no paywall. I only glanced at it. I might read it later.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1919403/#bib32

[wj]

Because eyes should have something nice to gaze at occasionally:
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap240418.html

[wj]

Bats have that problem. Some emit up to a freq of 212 kHz.

The article suggests that, given the severity of attenuation above 100 kHz, the bats must be under some serious ecological pressure to push them to use those higher frequencies.

Don't have time to read past the Abstract right now. But I do wonder what that ecological pressure might be? (A predator who can hear the lower frequency, perhaps. Or an issue with reflections, either from the bats' prey or from the physical obstacles they are navigating. Hmmm....)

[CharlesWT]

"The article suggests that, given the severity of attenuation above 100 kHz, the bats must be under some serious ecological pressure to push them to use those higher frequencies."

According to Claude-3-Sonnet:

Bat's Frequency

[nous]

Bats that use very high frequencies (100-200 kHz) appear to seek prey in cluttered situations 7'•'• or may be attempting to avoid being detected by insects that can hear ultrasonic sounds in the 30- to 100-kHz range. For these bats the disadvantages of severe atmospheric attenuation of their sonar signals may be offset by either the relatively lesser significance of long-range detection of target
or by the advantages of this same atmospheric attenuation in preventing some insects from hearing the bat unless it is very near.

Lawrence, B. D., & Simmons, J. A. (1982). Measurements of atmospheric attenuation at ultrasonic frequencies and the significance for echolocation by bats. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 71(3), 585-590.

[Cited in the article]

[CharlesWT]

The response to a new prompt created from the response to the previous prompt.

"What prompt should I give you for you to provide the response that you gave to my previous prompt?"

Bats' Ultrasonic Echolocation

[Snarki, child of Loki]

Ah, Acoustical Society of America.

Have their audio demonstration CDs. Amazing stuff.
400Hz in one ear, 402Hz in the other...do you hear 'beats'?

Backwards masking, subtle demonstration of nonlinearity.

Most of it would be ruined by MP3 compression, so CD is the way to go.

[GftNC]

On an entirely different subject, for some time I have been getting email posts from someone called Shalom Auslander, for which I never remember signing up. They're often pretty funny though, so I always read and sometimes share them. This came today. It's not long. I think there's a lot to it.

https://open.substack.com/pub/shalomauslander/p/pharaohs-arent-the-problem-we-are?r=w2vx&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

[nous]

I think the "banality of evil" that auslander contests there, and proposes replacing with pragmatism, is simply another perspective of how, exactly, that banality functions in society. Pharaohs and people are both problems because they are willing to externalize all of the ugliness. The people externalize their complicity in the atrocity onto the pharaohs. The pharaohs externalizes their complicity in the atrocity onto the underlings who execute their orders. The underlings are where Arendt's "banality" resides. They are faceless and instrumental. They are daemons in the Maxwell sense. As long as they stay out of view, then pharaohs and people need not ever come face to face with their complicity. Their evil was only aspirational and they did nothing, personally, to bring it to fruition.

Good morning so far - temperate with a marine layer that covered me in a fine mist on the morning ride and left my helmet visor dripping and the front of my riding pants covered in a layer of wet sand. Trails were open, but the weather was just gloomy enough that no one else was on them, just some rabbits to dodge. Managed to ascend a hill that I had never been able to clear without hike-a-biking as the extra 99 watts gave me just enough momentum to get over the rocks and the 17% grade.

A while back here we briefly discussed Lydia Polgreen's post that mused over a new Fanon bio that was just published. I haven't read the bio yet, but I did find a journal article that looks like an early version of the chapter being discussed by a couple reviewers. The hot question in this Israel/Palestine moment seems to be about how to understand Fanon's relationship to the anti-colonial violence that he writes about. Is he a problematic figure that romanticizes violence (https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2024/03/frantz-fanon-adam-shatz-the-rebels-clinic/677904/) or is he an ambivalent figure that is too caught up in his own context to make such a black-and-white determination (https://newrepublic.com/article/179420/frantz-fanon-wretched-earth-decolonization).

More food for thought.

[GftNC]

The underlings are where Arendt's "banality" resides. They are faceless and instrumental.

Yes indeed. I believe she coined it specifically when talking about Eichmann, a perfect personification of faceless instrumentality.

This piece of Auslander's, from Passover a couple of years ago puts the blame more squarely - I find it very impressive from someone who was raised the way he was:

I was raised strictly Orthodox. Old school. Shtetl fabulous. Every year, at the beginning of the Seder, we welcome in the hungry and poor Jews who can’t afford to have a Seder themselves. It’s a wonderfully human gesture. A few short hours of God later, at the end of the Seder, we open the front door and call out to him, “Pour out thy wrath upon the nations that did not know you!”

And God does. With plagues and floods, with fire and fury, on the young and old, the guilty and innocent.

And we humans, made in his image, do the same. With fixed-wing bombers and cluster bombs, with self-propelled mortars and thermobaric rocket launchers.

“Why did God kill the firstborn cattle?” my rabbi said. “Because the Egyptians believed they were gods.”

Killing gods is an idea I can get behind.

This year, at the end of the Seder, let’s indeed throw our doors open — to strangers. To people who aren’t our own. To the terrifying “them,” to the evil others, those people who seem so different from us, those we think are our enemies or who think us theirs but who, if they sat down around the table with us, we’d no doubt find despise the pharaohs of this world as much as we do and who dream of the same damned thing as us all:

Peace.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/15/opinion/passover-giving-up-god.html?unlocked_article_code=1.mU0.LsnS.3QhpfPT5B8z-&smid=url-share

[GftNC]

Well, I bow to no-one in my contempt for McConnell, but I guess even a stopped (12 hour) clock is right twice a day:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/24/us/politics/mitch-mcconnell-ukraine-aid-republicans.html?unlocked_article_code=1.m00.PrOY.6-XVgyuiaktf&smid=url-share

[GftNC]

And, since I seem to be simultaneously dominating and killing this thread, here's one last thing. I think this, by Naomi Klein in today's Guardian, is brave and morally impressive:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/24/zionism-seder-protest-new-york-gaza-israel

[Michael Cain]

Fine. Doing more cleaning out and found a pencil version of this cartoon. Drawn on the back of badly yellowed lineprinter computer paper that was timestamped "March 1978" on the printed side.

[nous]

Between the rollback of Roe v. Wade and the growing student protests in response to Israel/Palestine, it's beginning to feel a lot like 1968.

The Naomi Klein piece made me think of a few articles that I found recently that were discussing the tensions between liberalism and zionism, including a few that talk about "diaspora nationalism." They are intriguing, but well beyond my contextual background in terms of the various arguments and their overlaps. I don't have the chops to judge the articles, but they do seem to be addressing somewhat the same ambivalence that Klein is expressing.

My own campus has been quiet so far, but its early in the heavy handed, authoritarian crackdowns, so we'll have to wait and see.

[Donald]

I haven’t had time to post/rant the last several days but I liked the Klein piece. And to be fair, the whole idea of liberatory violence goes sour real fast. Zionism and Palestinian nationalism and maybe everyone’s nationalism easily slide into a justification for atrocities which are blamed entirely on the evils of the other side.

[JanieM]

Michael: nice cartoon. :-)

I like the Klein piece too.

[wj]

Between the rollback of Roe v. Wade and the growing student protests in response to Israel/Palestine, it's beginning to feel a lot like 1968.

Not to me. The protests feel very different. And Dobbs provides an overwhelming reason for college age protesters NOT to fall into the "both sides are equally bad" fallacy.

(Both sides aren't even close to equally bad on the immediate issue: the treatment of Gaza Palestinians. But the difference may not be obvious to someone who was barely in high school under TIFG. Dobbs hits home personally, and it's constantly being made clear how different the two parties are.)

[nous]

wj - it's not the protesters that feel the same, it's the heavy handed right wing response that feels like the return of the repressed.

The campus protesters feel more akin to the 1980s SA divestment protests, 1990s ACT UP type stuff, or Occupy.

[Donald]

Chicago will be a test of the 1968 analogy. I feel an intense loathing for Biden and his spokespeople— Kirby, Miller, Vedant. I need to watch videos of Trump supporters saying revolting things about everything to cancel it out.

On a related topic, cops seem to be branching out to beating up white female economics professors. CNN has the tape. The professor getting thrown to the ground is towards the end— the tape is just a few minutes long.

https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2024/04/26/pro-palestinian-protests-college-campus-usc-emory-columbia-watt-ebof-vpx.cnn

[Michael Cain]

Dobbs hits home personally...

I'm old enough to remember the draft hitting home for lots of people in 1968. My school brought in a Vietnam vet to talk and answer questions. I don't know what they were expecting. I'll never forget what they got. The young man had the smallest boy in my class stand up, and looked him over. "If they try to draft you," the vet said, "run for the border. No matter what they promise you, they're going to make you a tunnel rat. Life expectancy is about three months."

[Donald]

Trump’s future climate policies.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/26/climate/climate-policies-trump-would-reverse.html?unlocked_article_code=1.nU0.WhdB.htGCFPptjezN&smid=url-share

It should not come as a surprise that he is an idiot, We don’t have time for this.

[nous]

All of this is why I have no interest in anything but the GOTV effort. We have Biden vs Trump before us as our only choice. Nothing bad resulting from Biden being the winner is even close to being on the same disastrous scale as a Trump victory will be for the world at large.

If we get through this election with a Biden win then I'm willing to start talking about how to remediate whatever else needs fixing in Biden's approach. And I look forward to that possibility. But I don't think its an exaggeration to say that those considerations pale in comparison with the consequences of the immediate choice before us in November.

[CharlesWT]

The US could go carbon neutral tomorrow and it would likely be difficult to detect any difference it made in the climate by the end of the century.

China plans to build hundreds of coal power plants that will last about 40 years. India now has more people than China. And those people will want everything we in Western countries take for granted.

Energy use in parts of Africa is already 80% renewable. But the people there object to it being wood, charcoal, and cow dung. They want to develop their fossil fuel resources for domestic use instead of exporting them to other countries.

I don't want either Biden or Trump to be president. But, from my point of view, the article argues that I should root for Trump.

[Tony P.]

It's too bad our "conservative" friends have stopped commenting. They could surely tell us why The Second Coming of Orange Jesus would be a good thing.

As for "Trump supporters saying revolting things about everything", just listen to yesterday's SCOTUS hearing. Few MAGAts can match The Brethren for pernicious piffle.

--TP

[Tony P.]

CharlesWT seems to have posted while I was dutifully previewing. Not a conservative, he, but "root for Trump" is close enough.

So: increasing CO2 emissions would be one of the Good Things a Biden loss will bring about. We must close the Emissions Gap with China, says CharlesWT. If China and India are drilling holes at their end of the lifeboat, we should not bail harder at our end but drill our own hole instead. And our hole should be bigger, 'cause we're Number One.

Pernicious piffle.

--TP

[nous]

Hey, CharlesWT has pledged his faith to the Invisible Hand and its servants, the Summarizing Robots. You don't want to lead him into apostasy, do you?

[Donald]

Biden apparently sees supporting Israel as more important than anything else.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/biden-sanction-israeli-military-units-accused-human-rights/story?id=109651562

I was wondering how low he would sink. Putting sanctions on a few Israeli units would have been performative BS, a token gesture, but even that was too much for Biden and Blinken.

Maybe they want a Chicago riot. They sure act like it. I am starting to think that they have given up on anyone who sees Palestinian lives as important and will run as the law and order, sensible centrists. Screw the youth vote and the left— go for the Republican suburbanites.

[wj]

Biden apparently sees supporting Israel as more important than anything else.

More important than anything else??? How do you get there?

[Donald]

I get there by seeing that he supports Israel in a fanatical way, thereby risking his election, when we all agree it is important that Trump not win. Presumably Biden thinks that, but he persists in giving Israel 2000 lb bombs and blabbering about taking care to not hurt civilians while making it abundantly clear that he will not do a single thing in response if Bibi ignores him. He cuts finding to UNRWA in the midst of a famine based on the “ evidence” of a government that is constantly lying. He absolves the IDF of any war crimes in Gaza and when his State Dept finds some units guilty in the WB, they say nothing until Propublica publishes what some whistleblowers tell them. They then pretend to consider sanctioning them, but when Israeli officials have a temper tantrum and say they will discipline the guilty parties, he backs down. Sure, just a few bad apples in the most moral army in the world.

I can’t begin to express how much contempt I have for Biden and I am voting for him. It enrages me to say that. I would have more respect for him if he really were senile. His Administration is treating everyone who thinks Palestinian lives matter as fools, suckers, morons, that they can sway with words that mean nothing. He thinks he can fund mass slaughter and make up for it with expressions of concern and leaked news stories about how miffed he is with Netanyahu.

He really could have pushed for a more targeted war. He didn’t have to defund UNRWA. He didn’t have to keep giving weapons to Israel right after his fake concern. The airdrops were an obscene joke.

So yes, he places support for Israel over his own election. Or else he has utter contempt for the pro- Palestinian movement and expects us all to fall in line on November and those who don’t he can make up for by pulling in the suburban never Trumpers, or people who appreciate how he stood with Israel.

I will vote for him. But he is contemptible. And this is the flip side of lesser evil voting. You end up rewarding people like this. If Biden wins, he can tell himself he did the right thing in Gaza and others will praise his political savvy. People like Clinton say we should get over ourselves. It isn’t about ourselves. It is about moral blackmail and genocide. We should stop whining about our little pet issue, get over our moral purity, vote for the war criminal and save the planet from the grotesque freak the Republicans love so much. I know the argument.

If anyone in the WH has any sense, they know that people who call him Genocide Joe really mean it. But they think it is worth risking the election to support Israel.

[Girl from the North Country]

What nous said @01.04. Not that Donald @11.50 actually disagrees...

[Girl from the North Country]

What nous said @01.04. Not that Donald @11.50 actually disagrees...

[Donald]

I needed to vent, but yes, Trump is awful on many many things. And we have run out of time to waste on the climate. We have zero leverage on other countries if we don’t get serious ourselves. We need to be helping other countries transition to alternative energy as fast as possible, for instance. Trump wants to go full speed backwards.

[Snarki, child of Loki]

"Trump wants to go full speed backwards"

He should do that, in a Tesla, next to a deep pond. Blub blub blub.

[wj]

If anyone in the WH has any sense, they know that people who call him Genocide Joe really mean it. But they think it is worth risking the election to support Israel.

I am not an experienced politician. Perhaps you are.

But it occurs to me that Biden, who definitely is, might well have a different perspective on the situation. In particular, he and others in the White House may feel that the course of action he is taking minimizes the chances of Trump winning. They may be wrong in that perception, of course. But they do have expertise I lack.

I would also note the several times when many of us got really upset because it appeared that he was (or was not) doing something or other. And then it turned out he actually was doing rather a lot that we wished. He was just doing it out of the public eye, because that was the most effective way to get it done.

Is that the case this time? I don't know. But experience inclines me against the absolute certainty you have.

[wj]

Just to be clear, I'm not suggesting that what is happening in Gaza is anything but appalling. And characterizing it as genocide doesn't seem mistaken. (Whatever the technical legal definition of the term.) The entire Israeli government ought to be before the ICC on those charges.

[Donald]

It doesn’t matter what Biden thinks he is doing behind the scenes. I think Friedman, useless in other ways, is probably a conduit for what the Administration wants people to think. Biden and Tom Friedman are both in love with Trump’s idea of creating first recognition and then an alliance between Israel and the Gulf monarchies including the Saudis and so they were pushing hard for this before Oct 7, with Palestinians as an obstacle to be bought off with a few bones tossed their way, ( Mixed metaphor alert). There is a plausible theory held by many including Friedman that Hamas attacked in part because of that policy.

That is still the policy. Friedman portrays it as Rafah vs Riyadh. Bibi can have one or the other.

In the process of achieving this wonderful goal, where Palestinians are,promised some sort of state in exchange for Israel getting full recognition from the authoritarian governments of the Arab world, Biden has been willing to arm the Israelis and give them thousands of bombs which they have used to turn Gaza into a parking lot. Shower the Israelis with support and the Palestinians with tens of thousands of tons of high explosives.

He can’t make this right. He has the blood of thousands of children on his hands. You don’t do this and say, look at the new statelet I am working towards.

I read some of the pro Russian blogs and one of the weird things is how they see themselves as the brothers of the Ukrainians. I think a large number of Ukranians of Russian ethnicity in the east do support them, but as for the rest, the Russians who have this sentimental feeling for the people they are killing are living in an insane dreamworld. Biden claiming to want the best for Palestinians is like that. You don’t bomb and expect feelings of brotherhood. I sometimes see WW2 analogies used for destroying Hamas like we destroyed the Nazis or the Japanese imperialists and then rebuilt the countries.. I don’t think it is the same. Hamas is a nasty terrorist organization, but Palestinians have real reasons for hating the government that expelled them. And now there is Gaza as a parking lot, made that way with our weapons.

[nous]

It may be that Biden has that simplistic a view of the Middle East, Donald, but it could also be that there are counterbalancing concerns that make this not a simple matter of blood on Biden's hands, but having to choose which blood to have on one's hands in a moment when more blood sits in the wings. If Iran and Israel tip into war and the US finds itself committed there in support of Israel, then what happens in Ukraine if Putin believes that the US can't effectively support both allies and decides to push? And if that were to happen, then what does Xi choose to do with that moment vis a vis Taiwan and other contested parts of the South China Sea?

I won't claim that your read on Biden is wrong because I don't know, but I do know enough about the situation to think that there may be a lot more complexity to the decisions when considering the wider Great Game crap.

The French title of Derrida's book known in English as The Work of Mourning is Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde - every death is the end of a world. Gaza, and the Palestinians at large, are justified in their grief and rage. I resonate with their loss and their despair. I would stop the deaths and suffering if I could do so without causing greater harm in that intervention. But we may never know if our choices between evils in contingent situations was the correct one.

Whatever the case, that decision is not mine, so all I can do is offer my solidarity in their suffering and try to reduce the immediacy of the harm.

C'est la guerre.

[Girl from the North Country]

Unsurprisingly, nous @03.42 is humane and reasonable. The various strands of the knot are so badly tangled that it is very difficult to take a straight black and white view, no matter how tempting. It would be comforting to be able to condemn utterly, but some situations (perhaps many, in foreign relations) do not lend themselves to it once you pull back and focus on the larger context. For clarity's sake: this is not meant as a criticism of anybody here.

[nous]

I've been thinking a lot about the Kurds since writing my last comment. Both Bush Sr. and Clinton encouraged conflict between them and Hussein, and then watched as thousands of Kurds were killed. Both wanted, by many accounts, to lend aid to the Kurds, but did not for fear of a greater humanitarian crisis should Hussein have fallen and left behind a power vacuum for Iran to exploit.

W. is the only one that did right by the Kurds, but with disastrous results for the entire region, and repercussions that continue to trouble our current atrocities in Gaza.

I hate the CIA, and hate even worse when I am forced to agree with their cold-blooded assessments.

[wj]

but I do know enough about the situation to think that there may be a lot more complexity to the decisions when considering the wider Great Game crap.

There are those who are morally certain that everything is simple, black and white, independent of everything else, etc. I encountered lots of them in college. I can see why it's attractive; acknowledging complexity and tradeoffs means accepting that your perfect world is not only unattainable but flat impossible.

Besides, it removes so so many opportunities for outrage. As if there weren't plenty enough, even acknowledging complexity and tradeoffs.

[wj]

Both Bush Sr. and Clinton encouraged conflict between them and Hussein, and then watched as thousands of Kurds were killed. Both wanted, by many accounts, to lend aid to the Kurds, but did not for fear of a greater humanitarian crisis should Hussein have fallen and left behind a power vacuum for Iran to exploit.

W. is the only one that did right by the Kurds, but with disastrous results for the entire region

I'm told the Kurds have a saying: We have no friends but the mountains. Because the mountains have never betrayed them at the first opportunity.

[Tony P.]

The MAGAts and the RWNJs seem to take it for granted that He, Trump is an insurrectionist, and the only question for SCOTUS to decide is whether He is immune from prosecution for His insurrection. Which of course is the right and proper role for SCOTUS, because it must consider future former presidents! At least that's my impression from reading Rich Lowry's National Review article titled "Our Institutions Exist To Oppose Trump, Right?" (No link; look it up if you want.)

Am I wrong?

--TP

[Donald]

Sorry but no, I don’t think Biden is some deep complex thinker who is helping Bibi butcher Palestinians because in some convoluted way this will make a difference in the war in Ukraine. If anything, by supporting Israel to the extent he has he has increased the risk of instability in the Mideast.

Biden was also the deep thinker who favored the Iraq war. He has always been a fanatical supporter of Israel. I am not going to bother searching for links— they are out there in abundance.

And wj, it is also deeply comforting, I suppose, to tell yourself that life is complicated and only naive people in need of moral certainty think it wrong to give 2000 lb bombs to a country which drops them on refugee camps, but if you take that position I don’t know why anything matters. Putin defenders can make the same speech. Anyone can. One has to spell out why it is actually smart for Biden and his people to appear feckless in criticizing Bibi, then say Israel has done nothing illegal and then give more weapons. Over and over and over.

Biden is a blithering incompetent war criminal and a liar. If I wanted to spend hours collecting links backing this up I could do it, but I am not going to waste the time. He has, as much as Trump, demonstrated beyond doubt to the world that the US and to some degree the West in general does not stand for human rights and simply uses the idea as a cudgel to criticize its enemies. There is no world of democracies devoted to human rights vs authoritarian regimes that hate them. It is a childish fantasy.

I am voting for Biden precisely because I don’t live in some utopian dreamworld but recognize that the choice is between the stupid lying racist butcher currently in the WH and someone who is worse on every issue including this one. I don’t tell myself that Biden and Blinken are playing 11D chess. I didn’t know Oct 7 was coming— it should have been obvious to the Israelis who actually saw Hamas training exercises, but they missed it. But everyone paying attention knew an explosion was coming while Biden was fixated on the Trumpian dream of a relationship between Israel and the Saudis.

Btw, if there are trade offs they are domestic. If Biden starts acting like Palestinian lives matter he might lose votes and not pick up many that he has already lost. But in Biden’s case I think he is a true believer, exactly in the sense that wj uses for the college kids. He lives in a dream world.

[Girl from the North Country]

There is no world of democracies devoted to human rights vs authoritarian regimes that hate them. It is a childish fantasy.

I'm sad to say that this is absolutely true. But I don't think the scenario nous posits implies that people thinking about it are playing 11D chess. Just taking a long (or rather wide) view, which certainly with only one move backwards includes Iran, Lebanon etc.

And, Donald, I think you are very probably right about the fact that the result might be an increase of instability in the Middle East. It is the exact opposite of "cometh the hour, cometh the man": only with Netanyahu in power and in hock to his ghastly allies could such such an appalling, inhumane policy be being pursued at such length and relentlessness. It is sickening, all right.

it should have been obvious to the Israelis who actually saw Hamas training exercises, but they missed it

The female border guards watching from the towers saw it, and reported it up their chain of command, and were ignored. Many of them subsequently died and were raped in the October 7th attack. This is the kind of thing that is tormenting the 70% of Israelis who want Bibi out now: there is no doubt that he and his military intelligence people were incompetent, but there is no mechanism for getting rid of him. My lefty Israeli cousin tells me the theory is that he would resign if he were offered amnesty for his criminal offences, but that so far there is no majority in favour of it.

[Donald]

I think there was some wishful thinking in the Biden Administration as well. I know the people I read expected a third intifada, but were expecting t to start in the WB because of the settlers. And also there was this sense that the Palestinian issue was being left behind— it didn’t matter that much and the Gukf Arab states were beginning to have relations with Israel. That was a bipartisan view. It doesn’t justify Hamas’s terrorism— hopefully the Israeli concern and stories that the ICC might be about to put out warrants for both Hamas and Israeli leaders turns out to be true, They can’t arrest anyone, but it would be another argument for a ceasefire. And maybe if the nastiest people on both sides are discredited as leaders, there could be genuine progress.

[Marty]

The nastiest people on both sides aren't even directly involved.

Sorry to stick this in here but I saw it and needed a place to share it.
"What makes you think human beings are sentient and aware? There's no evidence for it. Human beings never think for themselves, they find it too uncomfortable. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told-and become upset if they are exposed to any different view. The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity, and the characteristic result is religious warfare. Other animals fight for territory or food; but, uniquely in the animal kingdom, human beings fight for their 'beliefs.' The reason is that beliefs guide behavior which has evolutionary importance among human beings. But at a time when our behavior may well lead us to extinction, I see no reason to assume we have any awareness at all. We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists.
Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion. Next question.

~Michael Crichton

(Book: The Lost World [ad]

[JanieM]

Hi Marty,

At last we agree on something. :-)

Or at least, though I wouldn't go as far as the Michael Crichton paragraph does, I think humans are far less "rational" and self-aware than we think we are. (Using "we" for pretty much all of us.) The older I get, the more I realize that my notions of who I am, how I fit into the world, what I should be doing with my time, and how other people see me are pretty sketchy.

I keep working on it.

Funny, my dissertation was about a play (really five plays joined together) by George Bernard Shaw called "Back to Methuselah (A Metabiological Pentateuch)."

Shaw's premise was that we don't live long enough to learn to be wise, so evolution would have to give us longer life if we were to survive. It's not one of his best plays by far, but it's interesting and fun in its way. The first play is a re-imagining of the Garden of Eden story that includes this line from the serpent as he's tempting Eve:

THE SERPENT. If I can do that, what can I not do? I tell you I am very subtle. When you and Adam talk, I hear you say 'Why?' Always 'Why?' You see things; and you say 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?' I made the word dead to describe my old skin that I cast when I am renewed. I call that renewal being born.

Bobby Kennedy massaged the quote and used it in a speech (attributing it to Shaw but not as far as I know to the serpent), and now it's associated more with RFK than with GBS.

Project Gutenberg is on the case:

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13084

[bobbyp]

At last we agree on something. :-)

Seconded-despite Mike Crichton's despicable views on, well, just about everything. Although the idea that something called "evolution" has something to do with it might rub some conservatives (to coin a phrase) the wrong way.

[Marty]

"The older I get, the more I realize that my notions of who I am, how I fit into the world, what I should be doing with my time, and how other people see me are pretty sketchy."

This. I do spend way less time trying to get people to see me.

[Nigel]

"..I don't read it as suggesting causation, but rather prediction, which is different..."

The discussion at the end if the linked paper is quite clear about that.
Their interest is in developing a simpler and more accurate diagnostic screening tool.

FWIW, I think that's quite likely to be overtaken by far more accurate blood biomarker tests within a few years.

[Nigel]

Latest state of play on coal.

China responsible for 95% of new coal power construction in 2023, report says
https://www.carbonbrief.org/china-responsible-for-95-of-new-coal-power-construction-in-2023-report-says/

Charles' idea that a rational response would be for the IS to start building new coal plants is plain nuts.
In any event, economics will probably prevent that, since new renewable capacity is already much cheaper.

One of the ironies is that China accounts for nearly 90% of global solar panel production, much of which production is underpinned by coal generated electricity.
They're also growing renewable generation at a very high rate, and at some point the economics will shit down their coal capacity too. But that's not fast enough.

[Nigel]

Apologies for the substitution of 'i' for 'o' or 'u'.
A regular typo on my mobile, I'm afraid, and no insult to the US intended.

[CharlesWT]

Charles' idea that a rational response would be for the IS to start building new coal plants is plain nuts.

Which I didn't suggest. But it wouldn't make much difference if it did.

The US has been replacing coal power plants with natural gas plants because natural gas is cheaper than coal. And NG plants are more efficient and are easier to ramp up and down to follow changes in demand and supply from other sources.

[Hartmut]

In any event, economics will probably prevent that, since new renewable capacity is already much cheaper.

Nothing that could not be solved with subsidies for fossil fuels and punitive taxation for renewables.
After all solar panels withdraw light from the surrounding areas and the sound of wind turbines causes cancer. And worst of all renewables cut into the profits of fossil fuel companies and thus distort the markets and the natural order of things.
At least that's what I hear from USian conservatives (or those who call themselves that).

[Nigel]

China’s share of global production capacity is now above 80% for 11 clean technologies
• Massive Chinese investments mean that China's clean tech rise may not be over
• Beijing also invested US$546bn in its own energy transition in 2022, around half of global financing
https://twitter.com/AgatheDemarais/status/1785202424908828998

[Snarki, child of Loki]

Wind turbines don't cause CANCER.

They cause INSANITY, in those who obsess about them.

TFG, case in point.

[nous]

Boy, that Time magazine interview with the Amber Seditionist is a doozy. In a sane world it would absolutely put to pasture any chance he had of being elected. Sadly, I think we have a sizable number of voters, inconveniently located, who want to opt out of continuing the republic.

They have to destroy the village in order to save it.

[Michael Cain]

Despite increased wind turbine capacity, total wind power output in the US in 2023 declined by 2% relative to 2022. The cause was lower average wind speeds in the Midwest.

[Girl from the North Country]

I couldn't finish the Trump Time interview. It is simply incredible to me that so many sane people think he might win. Two separate, politically savvy people have told me so this week. It is beyond belief. I am finding it unspeakably depressing.

[JanieM]

Several things have reminded me lately that it's not just, or maybe hardly at all beneath the horse race hype, Biden vs. Clickbait that we're choosing between. It's one vision of the world vs. another. That's maybe the most dismaying thing of all.

[Michael Cain]

USA Today's story from a Trump interview on Wednesday by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel used both "lie" and "falsehood" to describe Trump's claims about Wisconsin election fraud in 2020. Perhaps there is some hope for the media this year after all.

[Girl from the North Country]

It's one vision of the world vs. another. That's maybe the most dismaying thing of all.

Completely agree.

[GftNC]

Since the pronoun thread is not an open one, I am (in the interests of relieving the misery) linking here the inimitable Marina Hyde today, on what happened in yesterday's local elections now that the Tories have brought in the need for voter photo ID:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/may/03/tory-mps-voter-id-rules-rishi-sunak-boris-johnson-local-elections

It may be gallows humour, but at least it is grimly funny.

[liberal japonicus]

Good point, I'll put up an open thread now.

[wj]

I have to say that, gallows humor or not, I am snickering.

I would ask: how dumb do you have to be to vote for (never mind sponsoring) legislation like this, without first making sure you have the mandated ID? But I suppose the article answers that.