Is the Middle East becoming a has-been?

The New Neo Posted on by

For the better part of a century the Middle East has been like a girl who was an ugly duckling turned into a swan, courted by all and sundry because of her newfound beauty and unaware that her looks might fade.

She can become accustomed to men fawning over her and tolerating her misbehavior, and get to thinking it’s not just her beauty that gives her such power. And yet her looks are her currency in the world, and as she ages she is likely to find to her surprise that the world no longer cares all that much about her.

That may be happening to the Middle East, according to Victor Davis Hanson. With relative rapidity the world has discovered ways to extract precious oil from more difficult-to-retrieve deposits in other parts of the globe, threatening Middle Eastern dominance of the market. The Middle Eastern (mostly Arab, but Iran is heavily involved as well) nations involved have never seemed to have much of a contingency plan for this eventuality (like the young beauty who fails to get her college degree or snag a rich husband), or if they have they failed to implement it.

One of the new kids on the block is, paradoxically enough, Israel, which has discovered its own vast gas and oil reserves and is poised to exploit them. Hanson believes that this will change Europe’s attitude:

Most likely, Europe’s past opportunistic disdain of Israel and fawning over Arab autocracies were based entirely on oil politics. In the future, the fair-weather European Union will as likely move away from the Middle East as it will pledge a newfound friendship with the once unpopular but now resource-rich Israel.

“Entirely”? I’m not so sure I agree with Hanson there; I think Europe’s hatred of Israel has been multiply-determined and has much deeper and wider roots than that. I’d like to be wrong and have him proven right, though. I do think, however, that there’s at least some truth to what he says, and that therefore the future may at least hold a chance for a change in Europe’s attitude towards Israel to a sort of grudgingly pragmatic peaceful co-existence.

Or, as post-WWII British Labour Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin once observed (1948), “The Kingdom of Heaven runs on righteousness, but the Kingdom of Earth runs on oil.” Is the oil scepter in the process of being passed?

If so, let’s hope the unforeseen consequences of that change do not include a paroxysm of rage in the Arab Middle East and Iran that ignites a new wave of terrorism at the prospect of being passed over in terms of influence and power.

And about that Medicaid expansion…

The New Neo Posted on by

The blogosphere is chattering about a study that purports to show that covering more people under Medicaid hasn’t resulted in any significant health benefits after all, or certainly only minor ones.

There was a small reduction in the incidence of depression among the new and randomly-selected Medicare recipients in the study, but that effect apparently occurred before the benefits were ever received. Apparently the mere news that they would be getting Medicaid brightened people’s lives—which makes sense if you think about it. Other measures such as blood pressure and cholesterol didn’t seem to change in a manner that was statistically significant.

Some people who seem eager to prove that expanding Medicaid benefits is a highly desirable thing are arguing that although the study’s results were indeed not as strong as they would have liked, they were still in the right direction. Well, that’s true, but it doesn’t mean a whole lot. After all, isn’t that what testing for statistical significance is about—to make sure we don’t come to unjustified conclusions based on figures that don’t necessarily indicate what they seem to?

And isn’t the real question whether the improved outcomes (that is, if there are any) are enough to justify the costs? That may sound harsh to liberal ears, and it can often be a very difficult and complex question to answer. But if we are going to make taxes more onerous for everyone, we better have a pretty good reason to do so in the form of results. Otherwise, we’re just making a show of the fact that we “care” without really helping anyone.

But maybe that’s what most Americans want these days.

Helping heart failure

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s an encouraging new possibility for heart failure patients:

Doctors will inject participants with harmless viruses that ferry a gene called SERCA2a into their heart muscle. The gene codes for a protein that recycles calcium within heart muscle cells, vital for driving each heartbeat and priming the next one.

In damaged cells, this recycling is impaired. By loading new copies of the gene the aim is to compensate for this decline. “The gene therapy will reset the calcium control,” says Lyon.

A preliminary trial of the same therapy three years ago in 39 people demonstrated that it is safe and delivers benefits. Those who got the highest dose of the virus, for example, spent only a tenth as long in hospital as those given a placebo.

Heart failure is a nasty disease, and one a lot of people misunderstand. It sounds a lot like other sorts of heart problems such as heart attacks or cardiac arrest, but it’s not. Heart failure is a longer slog in which the person gets weaker and weaker, and it’s more difficult to treat.

My father died of heart failure many many years ago, in the 1970s. He was not a very old man, and yet he was a very sick man. At the time there wasn’t a whole lot medical science could do for him. Now there’s a lot more that can be done for people with the same affliction. Perhaps soon there will be more.

Taking off: “what care I?”

The New Neo Posted on by

Brenda Heist vanished over ten years ago. Despite a huge search she was never found, and was finally presumed (and even legally declared) dead.

Brenda and her husband had been on the brink of divorce, and he remarried. Her two children, 8 and 12 at the time of her disappearance, grew up to be fine people. But the mystery haunted them all and was never cleared up—until now, when Heist has resurfaced.

Did I say “cleared up”? In one sense it has been, because Heist is alive and able to tell some sort of coherent story. But the story is merely descriptive and lacks explanation, and in some ways the mystery is deeper than ever:

Last week, Heist reappeared, a thin specter seemingly risen from the dead to family and police who never stopped searching for or thinking of her.

Heist surfaced in Florida, where she has been living under bridges and in tents, working day jobs, panhandling and eating food discarded from fast-food restaurants for more than a decade.

As for the “why” of the story, your guess is as good as hers. In the middle of a supposedly amicable divorce, feeling the financial pinch of wondering how she’d be able to survive economically, Heist went to a local park, sat down on a bench, and cried.

And then some people happened by:

Two men and a woman approached her and struck up a conversation.

“They said they were homeless, and leaving right then to go down to southern Florida,” he said. “This was Feb. 8. It was a cold time. They said, ‘You’re more than welcome to come with us, if you want.’

“She said she made a split-second decision. … She doesn’t know why she did it. She just left.”

Several theories come to mind. Was she mentally ill, despite no reports of such a history? Was/is she a sociopath, despite having been described as a good mother prior to her disappearance? Neither drugs nor alcohol seem to have been involved. She was in her early 40s at the time, not a young and irresponsible teen. And it’s unclear as well what made her finally identify herself to authorities and come back.

The story gave me a cold chill, and I almost immediately thought of a song I learned as a child which had attracted me because I found it both beautiful and mysterious, and yet simultaneously repellent because of the cold heart of the woman it described: “The Wraggle Taggle Gypsies O” (sometimes spelled “raggle”). You may know it too; it’s pretty famous.

In the song the lady is wealthy, unlike Heist. And gypsies at least sound (or sounded to me as a child) a lot more romantic than homeless people in Florida. But the parallels are clear—it’s even three gypsies who come to the lady’s door to entice her away, like the three people who approached Heist on the bench.

In the version of the song I knew as a very young child (learned from a large book of folk songs from which a talented piano-playing friend of mine used to sight-read while we both sang; that’s why a lot of old folk songs still sometimes rattle around in my head), my shiver was engendered by the repetition of the phrase “what care I?” from the lady—her utter absence of remorse or explanation or sense of loyalty, her ability to throw away everything for a life that seemed aimless and harsh and yet magnetic, at least to her.

My recollection is that there was also a verse in the version I knew about leaving some children behind, as in Heist’s case. That would have amplified the chill for me. But I can’t seem to find a lyric about that, although the Wiki entry mentions a variant in which her husband, on finding her, asks, “Would you forsake your husband and child?”

The tune is haunting, as befits the subject, and YouTube has many versions. Here are two I like very much that differ greatly from each other in tone and style. The first has a beautiful violin solo, and the second features a singer who does all the voices himself:

The Boston bomber and the death penalty

The New Neo Posted on by

Dzhohkar Tsarnaev didn’t just blow up hundreds of people in Boston. He also revived support for the death penalty (at least for himself), with 70% of Americans polling in favor of it in his particular case.

Republicans are most in favor, but in each group a majority supports it for Tsarnaev. And although there are some subgroups who are less supportive (blacks and Hispanics), it’s notable that in all these groups a majority is in favor of death if Tsarnaev is convicted, even if they don’t usually favor the death penalty for murderers:

The bigger divide on the death penalty is between whites and African Americans. While 75 percent of whites say they would back the use of the death penalty were Tsarnaev convicted, the support among African Americans barely goes past the midpoint: 52 percent of African Americans would support the death penalty, and 43 percent would oppose it.

Hispanics also are less likely than whites to support the death penalty in this instance: 62 percent would support it; 35 percent would oppose it.

The large gap between whites and blacks has probably more to do with the death penalty itself than this particular case. In a recent Washington Post Maryland poll, 63 percent of whites and only 37 percent of African Americans said they favor the death penalty for people convicted of murder.

No surprise there. If anyone is a poster child for the death penalty, it would be a guy who can place a backpack in front of a crowd of spectators at an athletic event—men, women, children—blow them up, and walk away without hardly blinking. And for most people, it doesn’t matter how “cute” he is, or what a “nice guy.”

The girlfriend is the last to know?

The New Neo Posted on by

To me the most interesting thing—and probably the only interesting thing—about NBA basketball player Jason Collins’ announcement that he’s gay, has been ex-fiance Carolyn Moos’ statement that she hadn’t a clue about it in the 8 years she’d dated (and presumably slept with) him—and the resultant mockery she’s received to the effect of what kind of idiot wouldn’t know a thing like that?

But it happens quite frequently, and it’s not always because the woman is stupid.

And no, I’m not saying that from personal experience—except the experience of friends. Some men who are primarily gay are quite capable of having normal sex with a woman, and even loving her. That was true for a friend of mine who married her college sweetheart and was divorced a couple of years later when he announced he was gay, something neither she—nor any of the rest of us, for that matter, although we lacked the inside info, as it were, that she possessed—had suspected for a moment.

His explanation? He loved her. Yes, he loved her, was attracted to her, and thought their marriage would be a successful one. But as time went on he realized that he wasn’t just bisexual, he was primarily gay, and felt he had to tell her and leave even though it would devastate her (they were quite young and had no children, by the way).

She went on to meet and marry someone else, quite happily, and have a family. And believe me, she’s never been a naive dummy about sex. There just was nothing to notice during the time she knew him, according to her, and I believe her.

Being gay is not a unitary thing. Some gay men never have sex with a woman in their entire lives and can’t even imagine doing it, it’s so repugnant to them. Some do it a few times and find it all right but not worth repeating. Others, like my friend’s husband, can have a meaningful and somewhat satisfying sexual relationship with a woman, and yet their strongest feelings are for men. My guess is that the latter was the deal with Collins.

People like to think they would know if it was their sexual partner; that they couldn’t be fooled. But as with a lot of other things, that’s often just wishful thinking.

“It started right there on the streets of Cambridge”

The New Neo Posted on by

Ruslan Tsarni, the Tsarnaevs’ uncle, gives an interview:

Unless the man is a consummate actor and dissembler, he seems to be just about the only member of the family who has some sort of conventional morality and sense of responsibility, and love of America (as well as no love lost for Islamicist terrorism). His compassion for the bombing victims sounds sincere. But he seems to have backed off considerably from assigning personal blame to Tamerlan and Dzhohkar, and has instead come to see them as pawns of others, and to view the older brother as a sort of evil Svengali to the younger one as well.

I don’t buy that concept, even though Tamerlan may have certainly had some sort of influence on Dzhohkar. When “boys” have reached the ages of 19 and 26 they’re not children, and they are both legally and morally responsible in full for their own decisions and their own actions. And in this case their decisions and actions were not just bad, they were heinous.

Ever hear of methane hydrate?

The New Neo Posted on by

You will:

Fracking has been attacked as an environmental menace to underground water supplies, and may eventually be greatly restricted. But it has also unleashed so much petroleum in North America that the International Energy Agency, a Paris-based consortium of energy-consuming nations, predicted in November that by 2035, the United States will become “all but self-sufficient in net terms.” If the Chikyu researchers are successful, methane hydrate could have similar effects in Japan. And not just in Japan: China, India, Korea, Taiwan, and Norway are looking to unlock these crystal cages, as are Canada and the United States.

The article goes on to discuss the arguments between those who think we’ll run out of these resources and those who think we won’t, and those who think the more new ones we find the more we’ll ignore whatever it is we should be doing to limit AGW (a position which in turn depends on the belief that climate change is human-induced, a discussion we’ve had enough times before that I’ll skip it for now).

Here are some of the possibilities for methane hydrate:

Estimates of the global supply of methane hydrate range from the equivalent of 100 times more than America’s current annual energy consumption to 3 million times more. A tiny fraction””1 percent or less””is buried in permafrost around the Arctic Circle, mostly in Alaska, Canada, and Siberia. The rest is beneath the waves, a reservoir so huge that some scientists believe sudden releases of undersea methane eons ago set off abrupt, catastrophic changes in climate. Humankind cannot tap into the bulk of these deep, vast deposits by any known means. But even a small proportion of a very big number is a very big number.

The article is long, complex, and technical. I have no idea whether it is correct, however; I just don’t have the technical expertise. But one thing of note is that it makes clear that a lot of environmentalists would rather we not find these new sources of energy. They seem to have the notion that if we finally run out of all non-renewable energy sources (a development they seem to be aching for) we’ll be forced to use wonderful things like solar power. But of course, if solar were a reliable, effective, and inexpensive way to generate power the entire country would be filled with solar panels already.

No, it’s not just our love affair with things like oil and gas and fracking that makes us ignore the wonders of solar power, it’s that solar power just won’t do the job. But:

For years, environmentalists have hoped that the imminent exhaustion of oil will, in effect, force us to undergo this virtuous transition; given a choice between no power and solar power, even the most shortsighted person would choose the latter. That hope seems likely to be denied. Cheap, abundant petroleum threw sand in the gears of solar power in the 1980s and stands ready to do it again. Plentiful natural gas, a geopolitical and economic boon, is a climatological shackle. To Vaclav Smil, the University of Manitoba environmental scientist, the notion that we can move so fast is naive, even preposterous. “Energy transitions are always slow,” he told me by e-mail. Modern energy infrastructures, assembled over decades, cannot be revamped overnight. Worse still, in his view, there is little public appetite for beginning the process, or even appreciating the magnitude of what lies ahead. “The world has been running into fossil fuels, not away from them.”

There is also little question in my mind that a certain segment of the environmental community—although I have no idea whether Smil is among them—would dearly love for this dilemma to cause us to ratchet down our energy use in a major way, and commence freezing in the winter, broiling in the summer, going to bed by candlelight, and walking everywhere.

Benghazi whistleblowers…

The New Neo Posted on by

…report having been threatened:

However, Toensing disclosed that her client has pertinent information on all three time periods investigators consider relevant to the attacks: the months that led up to the attack, when pleas by the ambassador and his staff for enhanced security in Benghazi were mostly rejected by senior officers at the State Department; the eight-hour time frame in which the attacks unfolded, and the eight-day period that followed the attacks, when Obama administration officials incorrectly described them as the result of a spontaneous protest over a video.

“It’s frightening, and they’re doing some very despicable threats to people,” she said. “Not ”˜we’re going to kill you,’ or not ”˜we’re going to prosecute you tomorrow,’ but they’re taking career people and making them well aware that their careers will be over [if they cooperate with congressional investigators].”

Segmented sleep

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve long been a natural night owl. Even as a child with an eight o’clock bedtime it just didn’t feel right to me, and as early as grade school I customarily went to bed as late as my parents would allow. When my high school held split sessions for a while, and I was assigned the morning session (I had to be in school around 7:30 AM), I could barely drag myself out of bed and it took hours to shake off the sleepiness.

Later, in college, I took care to avoid 8 and 9 o’clock classes if I possibly could. And as a young mother with an infant (and toddler!) who wasn’t at all keen on sleeping, I would almost start crying myself whenever I was awakened by that morning wail emanating from the crib—or even worse, in the wee hours of the morning.

For the last couple of years an odd pattern has emerged: every now and then I have a run of falling asleep a bit earlier than usual, waking around 2 AM, staying up for a few hours, and then going back to bed for a few more. At least I thought it was an odd pattern until I read this article, which explains that’s apparently the way it used to be:

Chief among Ekirch and Wolf-Meyer’s findings, discerned from meticulous searches through court records, letters, diaries, scientific tracts, and popular maxims, was that a sleep pattern known as segmented sleep was widely present in the United Kingdom and United States prior to the 20th century. Before artificial light was bent to our will, most people would retire shortly after dusk, sleep for four or five hours, awaken for an hour or two, then drift back to sleep again until sunrise. Our sleep patterns have only shifted to the current 8-hour consolidated pattern in the decades since electric light became readily available.

That’s similar to what sometimes happens to me, except for the “retiring shortly after dusk” part. The last time I did that I was either sick, or an infant in a crib myself.

The article goes on to say that people report feeling very good on this regimen, and say they’re especially wide awake during the day.

One of them apparently was Winston Churchill. He slept in segments—and seemed to function pretty darn well:

At his house at Chartwell, his routine was quite regular. He would wake at 8, spend the morning in bed reading papers, dictating letters, etc., take a long nap at tea time, and work till as late as 3 am. He averaged 5-6 hours of sleep per day. Those words are attributed to Churchill himself: “You must sleep sometime between lunch and dinner, and no halfway measures. Take off your clothes and get into bed. That’s what I always do. Don’t think you will be doing less work because you sleep during the day. That’s a foolish notion held by people who have no imaginations. You will be able to accomplish more. You get two days in one — well, at least one and a half.”

So Churchill was a segmented sleep advocate. I don’t think I’d recommend it, nor would I suggest other people become night owls. In fact, I’m always trying to turn things around and become more of a lark. My efforts so far have only lasted for very short periods, and then I revert to my natural proclivities.