The Strange Case of Rachel Dolezal

It seems like all the  media is interested in these days is the fact that Rachel Dolezal said she is black and her parents disagreed. I first thought, who cares! If she wants to be black let her be black. After all, what is "being black"? Is there a genetic test that would settle the question and if so, so what!

It got me to thinking of  what really is meant by "race" in this country, especially after spending some time working and being a tourist in Brazil and marrying  into a Brazilian family. I grew up in Philadelphia where I was the only Jew and a friend named Vernon was the only black person in my elementary school. Vernon had had polio and had problems walking normally so I actually thought black people had trouble walking. Yes, I was a  real dickhead. I hate to say it but my grandparents were somewhat racist, as many old Russian  Jews were at that time. I suddenly realized that this was wrong and I spent more than a few hours arguing futilely with my grandparents and even with my Mother and Uncle. I finally decided to really spook my Mother by saying that I would never marry a Jew but would marry a black woman when I grew up. And then came the 60's with flower power and free love and the fight for civil rights. I did my share of marching for civil rights and against the Vietnam war, but most of my energy was spent in studying and deciding what I wanted to do research on for my life's work.

I spent a lot of time in Brazil at that time and  quickly learned that  Brazil had tremendous intermixture, due mainly to the fact that the Portuguese who colonized Brazil were the world's greatest fornicators. In fact more  than 50% of the population was considered "pardo" or "mixed  race" by the Census. And there are a multitude of Portuguese words for different "racial" mixtures - e.g. mulatto, mestizo, caboclo, etc. And the absence of Jim Crow segregation in Brazil also indicated the concept of race differed greatly  from that in the US. I thought that this was fantastic and showed that Brazil had no race problem as in the US. But I soon learned that most rich people in Brazil were white and most poor people were black. And that 4.8 million Africans were imported as slaves and that Brazil did not stop slavery until 1888. But race itself in Brazil in fact seems to be a Rachel-like decision. For example there were politicians who had very black skin color but who considered  themselves white. In the US of course this type of cultural decision is difficult due to our fossilized racism.

Being a scientist, I decided to do some literature research and learn what was really known about race. I quickly learned that the very concept of race is not understood and not defined. Pigliucci has proposed that human races are actually geographical "ecotypes" not genotypes. And most scientists believe that this meaning of race is very different from the usual meaning of folk races. In fact studies of genetic variation provided no evidence for the existence of  genetic subspecies in modern humans that could correspond to separate white, African American, East Asian and Hispanic populations.

 So there we are, as confused as when we started. I personally conclude that believing you are black means that you are for all  intents and purposes black.I think we should admire and even honor Rachel for her courage and convictions. So more power to Rachel and may she long be black.

The Way Things Were

Even though my favorite sandwich was and is the classic Philadelphia cheese steak, I used to really like the  Arby's steak sandwich. And the barbeque sauce Arby's had was fantastic. Every time I entered Arby's and saw the large chunk of meat roasting, I would start salivating. Agda and I got married in Santa Monica City Hall many years ago and afterwards she, I and Sergio, Agda's brother, who was our Best Man, took my jeep for service at the Toyota place in Santa Monica and went across the street to Arby's for our honeymoon lunch. Those were the days!

And  growing up in Upper Darby, a suburb of Philadelphia, I loved going to the pre-MacDonald White Castle at 69th St. for their tiny little burgers. You could eat 5-10 of them and not get filled up.

But then the unthinkable happened - Arby's stopped using real meat and (I think) began using "pink slime" molded to look like real meat. And White Castles essentially disappeared and their tiny little burgers became known as "sliders", which are these days available at every bar for Happy Hour. What an ugly word for a divine little hamburger.

But all was not lost - the Arby's barbeque sauce has remained! And so did the only thing I like at MacDonald's - the HiC orange drink. And the White Castle restaurant was immortalized in the 2004 mind-bending movie, "Howard and Kumar go to White Castle".

Yes, those were the days!

The Best Invitation Yet

Look at this fantastic invitation I received  to be an Editorial Board member of that prestigious scientific journal entitled Journal of Bioterrorism and Biosafety. I don't know how  many of these pseudo invitations to pseudo journals I and I am sure many other academics have received. However, this one wins the prize. It seems to be the form letter to be sent to everyone but someone forgot to fill out the "tokens". I am not sure even if the journals actually exist. They appear to be mainly from China and India. 

I also get an enormous number of  invitations to be a major speaker at scientific meetings in China. They usually mention an old publication of mine and frequently the field of the meeting has no relation to the paper or to my real field of research. The list of people who are speaking is impressive and frequently has some Nobel prize winners.The email writer's name is usually something like "Judy" and she has the chutzpah to complain that I have not responded to her previous emails of invitation. 

I read recently that someone actually submitted a paper for publication in one of these predatory journals (International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology) in which every sentence was "Get me off Your Fucking Mailing List". An anonymous reviewer actually rated it as "Excellent" and they requested a $150 fee for publication. I copy a portion of this paper together with  a "Figure" below:

Enough said.

There is no Middle Ground

In an article today on climate change (http://tinyurl.com/pfmw6ke) by Christina Nunez, a figure is reprinted which shows our problem with horrifying detail:



These are the reserves of fossil fuel that must be left in the ground by 2050 if we want to stay at the warming of 2 degrees C.already pre-determined by inaction.  And then, to get a feeling for the idiocy out there, look at the Comments on  this article. My God. As the writer stated: "Your friends are not climate scientists, they are weathermen".

 So is this at all possible and if so how can it be done? My answer to the first question is simply "no" and that makes  meaningless the second question. But my friends tell me that I am too pessimistic, so lets explore this a little. First of all, the response must involve every country on earth and I do not believe that this can  be accomplished for anything, not to speak of an action that will cause enormous problems for most countries, especially when there are a large  number of people who deny that the problem actually exists.

An anecdotal personal story illustrates the problem in a small way: I decided to disinvest my retirement accounts from fossil fuel stocks, which would crash all at once when they could not be removed from the earth and lost all value. When I asked my financial advisor, he looked incredulous and then laughed, saying it was not possible since my retirement accounts were mainly in mutual funds which contained multiple types of stocks and bonds and on which the solitary investor has no influence at all. And  he said "We are out to make money, not to save the world". There are a very few "green" mutuals but they are only tokens.

Some obvious  possible answers would be to immediately mandate solar power on every roof of every house world-wide, to begin government sponsored  mega-projects to recover wind energy, tidal energy and thermal energy and to construct "smart" electric grids to handle this type of distributed energy. Combined with these projects would be government mandates to immediately stop exploring for new fossil fuels and to stop using existing ones and completely move over to renewables.  And finally comes the ultimate undoable project - to immediately stop population increase in every country on earth by controlling the number of offspring. Otherwise no matter what is done, the exponentially  increasing number of people will just eat it up.

And there is no middle  ground. That would be the same as not doing anything, it will just postpone the horror by a little. Bioengineering is currently not feasible. Of course the warming might be slowed down by increasing light-blocking aerosols in the atmosphere or by doing what I suggested in my Blog - of bringing a asteroid into the Lagrange Point between the earth and the sun, large enough to block only around 5% of the sunlight which is enough to prevent warming. But neither would prevent the ongoing CO2-caused acidification of  the world's oceans which would kill the food chain and thereby cause enormous starvation and mass migrations.

As it is, we are heading towards  a runaway warming leading to a Venus-like planet which can not sustain any life at all.
          No there is just no middle ground.

Requiem to a Country (and perhaps the World)

Forget the zombie apocolypse and the rapture to heaven, the Republican crazies have taken control of the US Senate and the House. This could be the worst thing that has ever  happened to this country in its not so long history. The American Taliban will do real damage. Ironically it was coincident with the IPCC Report that  use of fossil fuel must drop to "0" by 2100 or there will be devastating irreversible changes. And  now the great denier from Oklahoma, Senator Jim Inhofe himself,  will be Chairman of the Environment Committee. It would be an insult to a doorknob to compare Inhofe to a doorknob and he is on a crusade against climate change. Unfortunately the sun will rise and the the climate will change no matter what Jim Inhofe thinks or does. Combine that with the five Republican Supreme Court Justices who decimated the Voting Rights Act and let Millionaires decide elections. And since Supreme Court Justices are essentially immortal, the damage they do will last a long time.

Just to give a flavor of the newly elected crazies, there is the pig castration woman, Joni Ernst, who wants to do away with the EPA and worse.

Here is one of her conspiracy theories:

All of us agreed that Agenda 21 is a horrible idea. One of those implications to Americans, again, going back to what did it does do to the individual family here in the state of Iowa, and what I've seen, the implications that it has here is moving people off of their agricultural land and consolidating them into city centers, and then telling them that you don't have property rights anymore. These are all things that the UN is behind, and it's bad for the United States and bad for families here in the state of Iowa.

Another:State nullification of federal laws:

You know we have talked about this at the state legislature before, nullification. But, bottom line is, as U.S. senator, why should we be passing laws that the states are considering nullifying? Bottom line: our legislators at the federal level should not be passing those laws. We’re right ... we’ve gone 200-plus years of federal legislators going against the 10th Amendment’s states’ rights. We are way overstepping bounds as federal legislators. So, bottom line, no we should not be passing laws as federal legislators -- as senators or congressman -- that the states would even consider nullifying. Bottom line.

Another: Climate change is not man-made:

Yes, we do see climates change, but I have not seen proven proof that it is entirely man-made. I think we do have cyclic changes in weather, and I think that's been throughout the course of history. What impact is man-made. ... but I do think we can educate people to make good choices.

She loves her beautiful little Smith and Wesson:

I have a beautiful little Smith & Wesson, 9 millimeter, and it goes with me virtually everywhere. But I do believe in the right to carry, and I believe in the right to defend myself and my family -- whether it’s from an intruder, or whether it’s from the government, should they decide that my rights are no longer important.

And Joni Ernst is just one crazy among the many that were elected.

And now I just heard the new Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell,
(don't look at this before you go to sleep at night!)

say that he will stop the gridlock in the Senate, which is amazing considering that he himself blocked every piece of legislation President Obama tried to introduce and was proud of this.

I had told friends that if the crazies took over, we would move to another country. Canada was the obvious choice, until I discovered that their Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, is anti-science, pro-fossil fuels, anti-environment and is just as crazy as any Republican in this country. Australia looked attractive until I discovered that their Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, is as bad as Stephen Harper and that Australia is the major exporter of climate-destroying coal in the world. What is left? New Zealand does have a certain far away charm and gentility, but I refuse to live in any country where they drive on the left. 

Ah well, I will probably just stay here and fight off the zombies.

Existential Angst

I have always been fascinated by Cosmology, the origin and nature of the Universe. To me these are the most significant questions in science (please to pardon me, my fellow Parasitologists!). Every time I looked at the night sky and saw the multitudes of stars and even our Milky Way galaxy, if I was lucky and could get out of Los Angeles for a while,  I was awe struck. And then when I realized that what I was looking at was a panorama of ancient history of the Universe where the light from each star began its journey from a few years to millions of years ago, my level of awe got even higher. This fascination led directly to Amateur Astronomy. However, being a professional scientist in another field I realize that it is really presumptuous of   me to try to do Astronomy at this time in my life in the absence of any formal training, but I have never led not being presumptuous run my life. And it is only money, so I bought a 10 inch Meade telescope with all the goodies - CCD camera, rotator, adaptive optics, etc. And I dug a hole in my back yard and embedded a concrete pier to hold the scope and then built a shed with a sliding roof to hold the scope et al. And finally after several years of learning my way around the sky and learning to use the software for imaging and processing the images, I finally was able to create a plan and tell the scope to automatically find the star, galaxy or nebula and  image it, and then to close the roof and park the scope.

Then came the Cobe and WMap satellite experiments and arose my existential angst. I learned that most of the Universe is a mysterious anti-gravity stuff called dark energy and that a large chunk is also a still mysterious dark matter, and finally only around 5% is what I like to look at and image. I almost went into a deep depression realizing that what I do is a total waste of time and energy. And then I read some current cosmology books (written for parasitologists of course) and learned that there may be a multitude of other Universes out there in addition to our Universe. Wow!!! and double wow!!!  I actually stopped imaging for a while until I could think of a rationale to do it at all. The angst was truly existential.

Finally I retired this year from UCLA and stopped doing  research and teaching, and I decided that even though it was meaningless and climate change was certainly more important and meaningful, I enjoyed it , so I would once again take up imaging the heavens for a few years. So here I am back in my back yard with my new dome and the old telescope imaging my old friends. Life is like that sometimes.

Supreme Court judge is a priest in disguise

I copy below a really interesting article in a series from the people currently making "Citizens United,the Movie".

We have already discussed at modest length why the Hobby Lobby decision is so wrong, just in terms of the reading of previous legal precedents and their definitional terms. So if Alito has no real supporting authority in the the history of legal jurisprudence, from where exactly is he deriving his authority?

The sad answer is found in footnote 34 of the Hobby Lobby opinion, where he cites as a reference a religious tract from 1935, "Moral and Pastoral Theology," for the proposition that when one person helps another to commit a sin in any way, even by a non-sinful act, even if no approval of the sin is implied, is comprises "cooperation" in that sinning. Indeed, Alito unquestionably believes that any ruling contrary to his would be precisely such a sin enabling act.

And this, standing alone, is Alito's sole and naked support for the whole basis for the ruling, that if a corporation provides comprehensive health care, and if some aspect of that health care offends the moral precepts of the owners of the corporation, that those precepts can be imposed on employees of the corporation who do NOT share those precepts.

Leaving aside the fact that a corporation is not a real person in the first place (itself a perverted reading of the constitution), capable of committing a sin in a theological sense, what is a secular law judge doing founding his legal opinion on a religious reference?

And the sad answer to that is that Alito is no justice. He is a religious ringer, put on the bench to impose his moral precepts on the rest of us, just exactly as he would have the corporate board of Hobby Lobby impose their dogma on their helpless employees.

Alito ought to show up for work, not in a judge's robe, but in the ecclesiastical garments of a priest. Because that is what he is, handing down his rulings by divine revelation, immaculate of any actual sensible legal precedent.

And what makes this all so transparently clear is that when challenged by the dissent of Justice Ginsberg as to why other religious objections could not be made as to vaccines, blood transfusions, etc, Alito confesses that his decision "is concerned SOLELY with the contraceptive mandate." (His actual words, opinion p. 46, emphasis supplied.) ONLY when it offends HIS religious beliefs, then secular law must fall that way also, otherwise he'll find some equally ad hoc pretext to rule the other way.

If you happen to agree with his religious result on this one moral issue, you may applaud this decision on that basis as much as you like. Just clearly understand and acknowledge the stark fact that it is NOT a legal decision. It is one strictly from one particular clergy.