…to be “homeless.”
To be slim, you need to change your—gut microbiota?
This may seem like science fiction stuff, but it may be true nonetheless:
Not only are the “gut microbiota” different in lean people and obese people, but the mix of microbes changes after an obese patient undergoes gastric bypass and becomes more like the microbiota in lean people…
[The experiment described in the article] is the first experimental evidence that changes in the gut microbiota cause the weight loss after gastric bypass, and that the new, post-bypass mix of microbes can cause weight loss in animals that did not have surgery…
Slimming bacteria work their magic in either of two ways, studies of gut microbiota show. They seem to raise metabolism, allowing people to burn off a 630-calorie chocolate chip muffin more easily.
They also extract fewer calories from the muffin in the first place. In contrast, fattening bacteria wrest every last calorie from food.
Transferring slimming bacteria into obese people might be one way to give them the benefits of weight-loss surgery without an operation. It might also be possible to devise a menu that encourages the proliferation of slimming bacteria and reduces the population of fattening bacteria.
This information harks back to our recent very contentious discussion about weight-loss and willpower, the one that pretty much caused me to swear off writing about weight loss, a vow I broke almost instantly.
But to revisit (I’m a glutton for punishment, as well as pectin jelly beans), the argument centered on my contention that a significant number of overweight people do not eat more (or exercise less) than a significant number of thin people. Of course, many do, but I’m not sure what the breakdown is.
That’s why the above study interests me. As much as I’ve read about diet and weight, I don’t think I’ve ever read anything about these magic bacteria. But it’s not new; see this for another study, this time one in which naturally obese-resistant mice (bred for the ability to eat all they want, be kept from exercising, and still not gain weight) became obese when the human bacterium enterobacter was introduced into their guts.
I’d like a lot more research before I come to any conclusions, but it certainly supports my previous observations. It also makes me wonder, though, if introducing these bacteria into heavy people’s guts would ultimately be good for their health. I suspect it has something to do with how much extra weight they already carry and how much their health has suffered from it, because there is plenty of evidence (see this, for example) that being underweight is more destructive to health than being mildly overweight. Could it be that slimming bacteria, or the lack of food absorption they foster, impairs health in some way over time?
And of course, if famine comes, the slim people will be out of luck. Then they’ll wish they’d kept their old gut flora and fauna.
The SSM slippery slope?
What slippery slope?
See this:
Above, you’ll find a short video composed of the floor speeches some top Democrats made about SSM. At the time, Republicans wanted to block gay marriage in Massachusetts by amending the constitution with an official marriage definition. Democrats argued against that, but they didn’t argue in favor of gay marriage. They argued that DOMA made such an amendment unneccessary. They assured people like Rick Santorum that the slippery slope case for gay marriage was bogus.
The new Democratic advocates for SSM fall into two camps. The first consists of people who always liked the idea of this but worried about losing national elections. In his memoir, Democratic consultant Bob Shrum remembers John Kerry fretting that the Massachusetts Supreme Court had forced Democrats to talk about gay marriage before they were ready to. “Why couldn’t they just wait a year?” he asked Shrum, mournfully. The second camp consists of people who really do oppose the idea of gay people getting married. Republicans argued that this second camp was tiny, and that liberals were hiding behind it. They were right!
Yes, Republicans were right. But that and a dime will get them almost nothing these days.
Other Republicans are saying we’ve not heard the end of this issue even if SSM becomes the law of the land:
Any Christian who refuses to recognize that man wants to upend God’s order [through same sex marriage] will have to be driven from the national conversation. They will be labeled bigots and ultimately criminals.
Already we have seen florists, bakers, and photographers suffer because they have refused to go along with the cultural shift toward gay marriage. There will be more.
Once the world decides that real marriage is something other than natural or Godly, those who would point it out must be silenced and, if not, punished. The state must be used to do this. Consequently, the libertarian pipe dream of getting government out of marriage can never ever be possible.
My understanding of the underpinnings of the religious attitude towards marriage (that it should be limited to one man and one woman—an attitude that used to include all the major religions in this country except the Church of Latter Day Saints, and they came on board quite some time ago too) was the idea that the sexual impulse was sacred when channeled towards an institution that favored procreative sex. Whether or not some marriages (the elderly, the infertile) did not yield children was considered irrelevant; it was the institution of marriage with that particular structure that was sacred, favored, and also protected by law because it encouraged reproduction and a stable environment in which to raise children.
Religion, society, and law had an interest in furthering all of that. And religion, society, and law (which were more unified back then, despite the official separation of church and state in terms of forbidding state-established religions) also had an interest in discouraging types of sex that channeled the all-powerful and easily-distracted sexual impulse into avenues that could never lead to procreation, or that potentially wreaked some sort of havoc with the stability of marriage and the raising of children. To further support those ends, society passed laws (which I’m old enough to remember) that forbid not only homosexual acts, but also laws that banned the sale of contraception even to married couples, or that forbid sodomy even to heterosexuals (see this for a relevant chart of how recently many of these laws were repealed). The forbidden practices continued, of course—under the table, as it were—but they were not sanctioned and celebrated.
So it wasn’t just an anti-gay vendetta. It was a fairly seamless religious/societal/legal consensus on what was approved and what was disapproved, and why. Remember Sodom and Gomorrah? The people of yesteryear did.
I’m not personally a follower of a religion or religious subdivision that still subscribes to such beliefs in the literal sense. But I respect religious people and think I understand the reasons for their objections to same sex marriage. I believe that Eric Erickson’s cautions that I quoted above are extremely valid, and that SSM is merely one step in a long “progressive” march towards the eradication of religion and/or its demonization (a word that has an ironic twist in this context, does it not?).
And I see the story of Sodom and Gomorrah as expressing a cultural truth about anything-goes societies, which is that unbridled sexual license is part and parcel of a spiraling multifaceted decline in that society as a whole into more general chaos and amorality, especially as regards the rearing of the next generation. Which comes first—the specifically sexual license or the more generalized decline—is unclear, although I happen to think it’s the latter, and that each feeds into and amplifies the other.
And that, if one looks at the family today in the US, it’s fairly obvious that we’ve been sliding down that slippery slope for quite some time now.
[NOTE: As for the specific question of what effect same sex marriage has on all this, my honest answer is that I don’t know and I don’t think anyone knows. That’s one of the many reasons—federalism being another—that I think it should be left to the states. There’s even an argument to be made that, once homosexual behavior and homosexual couples are accepted in a society (something that’s already occurred), the institution of gay marriage helps to stabilize their behavior and to create less promiscuity and sexual license, not more. But being pretty much of a libertarian and federalist on this issue does not stop me from recognizing the potential dangers to religious freedom, which concern me very much.]
DOMA unconstitutional?
Signs may be pointing to the idea that SCOTUS will strike down Congress’s 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) as unconstitutionally exceeding federal power.
That’s because Justice Kennedy (who may be the only one who counts) appears to be leaning that way. Then again, we’ve learned from the Obamacare SCOTUS hearings that we can’t tell all that much from the questions justices ask under those circumstances. Perhaps they are playing devil’s advocate.
Because I believe in federalism, my opinion is that DOMA actually is unconstitutional. I also think California’s Proposition 8 is constitutional, because the issue should be left to the states and banning same sex marriage (as opposed to same sex civil unions) does not violate the 14th Amendment.
So, in the first case federalism would cut in favor of allowing SSM if a state so desires, and of applying that state law to federal rules affecting marriage (such as those involving federal tax breaks). In the second it would cut in favor of defending a ban on SSM if a state so desires.
If the nation wants to pass something like DOMA, the proper path would be an amendment to the federal Constitution. I’m not at all sure that route would have succeeded had they tried that in 1996. But instead they went the shorter, more simple, more achievable—and more vulnerable—way of working through Congress. At present a DOMA-type amendment would have no chance of passing. I don’t foresee that changing, either.
[NOTE: It will be interesting if DOMA is struck down by SCOTUS as unconstitutional. I believe that the same Court found Obamacare constitutional in part because the justices were reluctant to declare a major act of Congress unconstitutional. In DOMA is struck down, they will be doing just that.]
RIP Rabbi Herschel Schacter
[NOTE: The following article actually appeared in the NY Times. But since the Times is behind a firewall, I’m linking instead to this copy of the piece. Note also that it is about Rabbi Herschel Schacter, whose last name has only one “h,” and who died recently at the age of 95. There is another very prominent Rabbi Herschel Schachter, whose last name has two “h”s.]
The story of Rabbi Herschel Schacter is well worth reading. Here’s one of the more interesting excerpts:
It was April 11, 1945, and Gen. George S. Patton’s Third Army had liberated the concentration camp scarcely an hour before. Rabbi Schacter, who was attached to the Third Army’s VIII Corps, was the first Jewish chaplain to enter in its wake…
He was led to the Kleine Lager, or Little Camp, a smaller camp within the larger one. There, in filthy barracks, men lay on raw wooden planks stacked from floor to ceiling. They stared down at the rabbi, in his unfamiliar military uniform, with unmistakable fright.
“Shalom Aleichem, Yidden,” Rabbi Schacter cried in Yiddish, “ihr zint frei!” ”” “Peace be upon you, Jews, you are free!” He ran from barracks to barracks, repeating those words. He was joined by those Jews who could walk, until a stream of people swelled behind him.
As he passed a mound of corpses, Rabbi Schacter spied a flicker of movement. Drawing closer, he saw a small boy, Prisoner 17030, hiding in terror behind the mound.
“I was afraid of him,” the child would recall long afterward in an interview with The New York Times. “I knew all the uniforms of SS and Gestapo and Wehrmacht, and all of a sudden, a new kind of uniform. I thought, ”˜A new kind of enemy.’ ”
With tears streaming down his face, Rabbi Schacter picked the boy up. “What’s your name, my child?” he asked in Yiddish.
“Lulek,” the child replied.
“How old are you?” the rabbi asked.
“What difference does it make?” Lulek, who was 7, said. “I’m older than you, anyway.”
“Why do you think you’re older?” Rabbi Schacter asked, smiling.
“Because you cry and laugh like a child,” Lulek replied. “I haven’t laughed in a long time, and I don’t even cry anymore. So which one of us is older?”…
Please read the whole thing. If you do, you’ll find out what eventually happened to Lulek.
[NOTE: Much more about Lulek here. Quite an extraordinary child from an extraordinary family.]
More on same-sex marriage and the law
Because of the current SCOTUS hearings on two cases involving the legality of same-sex marriage, you can read thousands of new articles about it, discussing the social science aspects (see this, for example, about that dubious data), the cultural ramifications, and of course the legal issues.
It’s an enormous amount to wade through, and perhaps that’s why so much commentary on it is muddled (present company excluded, of course :-)). Few people understand the rather complex legal issues involved, and most of the opinion I’ve read comes down to “I think SSM is the right thing to do” or “I think it’s the wrong thing to do.” But the Court is supposed to decide its cases based on whether it’s the legal thing to do under the Constitution, and what role federal vs. state government has in the regulation of marriage.
This post would be book-length if I tried to explain all of the legal issues, and it would probably take me at least six months more research to delve into the details and speak intelligibly about them. I’m not about to do that. But whether you think that the case for SSM is self-evidently progress in the cause of liberty, or whether you think it represents the further precipitous decline of Western culture into immorality and chaos, the Court’s charge is much narrower: the law on the subject. Questions as to whether the federal government (Congress, in the case of DOMA) can regulate marriage or whether that function is relegated to the states, and whether (in the Proposition 8 case) a state ban on SSM violates the Fourteenth Amendment protections that apply to states as well as the federal government, are the essential ones before the Court.
I make no predictions about how the Court will go on this. I don’t have a gut sense of it, the way I did with the Obamacare case (where I correctly predicted Obamacare would be found constitutional, although I did not foresee the exact reasons Roberts would cite). I have to say that since most experts were wrong on their predictions about Obamacare, I don’t trust their prognostications on the SSM cases either (the questions the justices ask during oral arguments are a far from infallible indication of anything about the final decision).
I will say this, though: not only do the justices have their own prejudices and biases which are hard to weed out (assuming that they’re trying), but it seems to me that in recent years SCOTUS decisions have more and more reflected justices’ concerns with public opinion and trends, and a desire to move with the times.
In both of the cases now before the Supreme Court the law offers the justices a way out, which is to punt (as I wrote yesterday about the first one, which deals with California’s Proposition 8). Punting would have the advantage of letting the times (rather than the Court) move with the times. But that may involve too much waiting and watching for the more eagerly activist members of the Court to bear.
Why government won’t leave us alone
For all you libertarians out there (and I pretty much include myself in that group, although I’m not of the most extreme Ron Paulish type)—this is why you’ve got a very difficult task in bucking the government-intervention tide:
Let’s take a step back for a moment first. Many prominent conservatives, like anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, argue that conservatives just want to be left alone. In fact, Norquist has dubbed conservatism the “leave us alone” coalition.
Cultural conservatives see this as naé¯ve. The state, they reason, will never leave us alone. We either win or we lose the culture war, but you can’t opt out. In this regard, they are like Winston Churchill, who said of his predecessor: “Mr. Chamberlain can’t seem to understand that we live in a very wicked world ”¦ English people want to be left alone, and I daresay a great many other people want to be left alone too. But the world is like a tired old horse plodding down a long road. Every time it strays off and tries to graze peacefully in some nice green pasture, along comes a new master to flog it a bit further along.’”
Since the state will never really leave us alone, social conservatives reason that the state should encourage ordered liberty. That means that the state should incentivize behavior that has served Western Civilization well over the years. In other words, as Dylan said, “you’re gonna have to serve somebody,” so social conservatives reason that a virtuous society should encourage behavior deemed virtuous by traditional Judeo-Christian culture, and discourage behavior at odds with that.
This, of course, is unpopular in the modern world ”” not just amongst liberals, but also with libertarian-leaning conservatives, and the general public.
This doesn’t mean libertarianism should be abandoned; not at all. But it does explain quite succinctly why it often seems to be a losing battle.
And sometimes I think Churchill could trot out a brilliant comment on just about anything.
Three faces, two movies, and a TV show
When I was very young I was fascinated by the book The Three Faces of Eve, one of the first accounts of multiple personality. Let’s put aside for a moment whether some skepticism about the disorder is sometimes warranted (it is, although the “Eve” case is not thought to be bogus) and just focus on the fact that it was a fascinating story that was made into a movie starring Joanne Woodward, who received the Oscar for the role.
Here she is in clips from the 1957 film, going from one personality to the other. Watch a couple of minutes:
When I was in college I became a psych major. One day in class they were planning to show us some film of the original Eve (whose name had not yet been divulged at the time, but who is Chris Costner Sizemore), made by her psychiatrists to present the case to other professionals. I was very much looking forward to seeing it, but unfortunately I had the flu and was very ill that day and had to miss it.
I figured that I’d never have another chance to see it. And I never have seen it—until last night, when for some reason it suddenly occurred to me that it’s probably on YouTube, along with nearly everything else.
And indeed it is. You may notice as you watch this that although Joanne Woodward is an attractive woman, Chris Sizemore is at least as attractive if not more so (especially as Eve Black, of whom the doctor is clearly rather fond). You may decide she’s acting, too, but her case is such that, as I mentioned earlier, she is generally considered to have credibility. And if she’s an actress, she’s an even better (and more subtle) one than the Oscar-recipient Woodward. This movie was made fairly late in Sizemore’s therapy with the doctor to whom she’s talking (who smokes, just like the one in the Hollywood movie but unlike doctors nowadays), at a point at which her personalities were close to being integrated (for the first time; there were several subsequent shatterings and re-integrations), and she already was used to answering to the “Eve” pseudonyms:
Chris Sizemore is still alive at 85, and has been doing very well for over thirty years. YouTube has a fairly recent video of her from an interview in 2009. Unfortunately it can’t be embedded, but if you go to YouTube to watch it I think you’ll find it rewarding. It starts with a discussion about the fact that some supposed multiples (including “Sybil”) may be fakes.
You’ll also see that even Chris herself misses everybody’s favorite, Eve Black.
Coolidge: man of the hour
First Shlaes.
Now Charles C. Johnson (no, not that one; this one).
Will SCOTUS punt on gay marriage?
Tom Goldstein at SCOTUSblog thinks so:
The bottom line, in my opinion, is that the Court probably will not have the five votes necessary to get to any result at all, and almost certainly will not have five votes to decide the merits of whether Proposition 8 is constitutional.
Several Justices seriously doubt whether the petitioners defending Proposition 8 have “standing” to appeal the district court ruling invalidating the measure. These likely include not only more liberal members but also the Chief Justice. If standing is lacking, the Court would vacate the Ninth Circuit’s decision.
That would be just fine with me. I have written before at some length about the legal issues in gay marriage (and I probably will again), but right now suffice to say that even though I believe that public opinion has been going (and will continue to go) in the direction of extending the right to marry to gay couples, that has nothing to do with what the Court should do on the issue.
SCOTUS should not operate as a public referendum, although it certainly sometimes does. SCOTUS should interpret the law and the Constitution and apply it. If the Consitution should be interpreted to guarantee that gay people have a universal right to marriage regardless of what the people of a state say they want, that’s what SCOTUS should rule. If the Constitution (and its amendments) does not guarantee such a universal right, and the people of a state want to regulate the practice of gay marriage in either direction, then they should be allowed to do so. If the people of a state want a change of some sort, the proper forum would be the state legislature and/or a state referendum. If the people want a national change and wish to create a new right to marriage for gay people where none existed before, the proper forum would be a constitutional amendment.
But SCOTUS previously had no trouble creating a new constitutionally-protected right (to privacy) in Roe v. Wade, and now (or in a little while, if not now) it may have no trouble creating a similar right to marriage that is protected from discrimination on the basis of the gender of both participants. If so, I am extremely concerned about the preservation of the right to religious freedom for those who have differing views. And of course there are also the slippery slope arguments (concerning polygamy, for example)
I tend strongly toward the libertarian point of view myself on this issue, which is fairly well-stated here by Richard A. Epstein of the Hoover Institute, and contains its own inherent dilemmas in regard to gay marriage. I differ with Epstein in that I am much more at peace with the idea of leaving the question to the states.
In the larger sense, I also think that our society has embarked (no, more than embarked; it’s actually quite far along on the journey) on a dangerous experiment in throwing out a great many time-honored values regarding marriage, the jettisoning of which has had an effect on children and families that is quite pernicious. And I’m not interested in social science research on the subject; I know social science research intimately, and I’m not especially impressed by either its validity or its objectivity on this subject or nearly any other subject that could be called political in nature—which turns out to be most subjects.
[NOTE: I have written before about the relation between gay marriage laws and those on miscegenation, here.]
Cyprus and the EU: nobody seems to know…
…what to do about Cyprus. And yet today something—that is, the seizing of a certain percentage of the assets of depositors who have put more than 100 thousand Euros in Cypriot banks—has been decided on:
European leaders reached an agreement with Cyprus early on Monday morning that closes down the island’s second-largest bank and inflicts huge losses on wealthy savers.
Those with deposits of less than €100,000 (£85,000) will be spared, but those with more than €100,000 ”“ many of them Russian ”“ will lose billions of euros under draconian terms aimed at preventing the Mediterranean tax haven becoming the first country forced out of the single currency.
The deal is expected to wreak lasting damage on the Cypriot economy, which has grown reliant on offshore banking and Russian money. Analysts said Cyprus could see its economy contract by 10% or more in the years ahead.
“On the Cypriot economy”? I don’t see how this isolates the damage to that arena. As I wrote at the very beginning of my very first post on the Cyprus crisis:
To save the Cyprus banking system, they have to destroy people’s faith in it.
Of course, they think they are saving their own political skins, and the glorious experiment that is the EU (sarcasm intended).
Merkel said that although smaller accounts should have been excluded from that proposed “one time tax”:
On Friday morning, Merkel defended the levy once again, saying that interest rates on savings accounts are much higher in Cyprus than they are in Germany and that such a one-time tax was thus acceptable.
Oh, so now it’s okay to rob from a bank depositor because he/she is rich and is also earning good interest? I wonder; is it okay because the person has deep pockets and can afford it? Or is it okay because the interest it is earning in this case is “unfairly” high, because other people elsewhere are earning less? Or is it okay because people think the rich should be handing over their money to the rest of us on moral grounds? Or okay because most of these particular rich people are Russians, and some of them have even made their money doing something shady?
I’d love to hear a reason—other than the pragmatic “because the money’s there and we want it and we need it and because we can”—why this should be okay.
Merkel said something else interesting:
Europe, she said, must not abandon its principles, otherwise “the whole thing” will be in doubt. She was referring to the principle that she has followed as the euro crisis has progressed: Europe will offer countries solidarity and aid, but only in exchange for efforts to improve fiscal responsibility.
How about the principle of preserving the trust that underlies the entire banking system? Bankers seem aware of that:
A Paris-based trader said: “The loss of confidence in the European banking system stemming from the Cypriot crisis will not only weigh on the banks but also on the economy of the region.”
So, what about the Cyprus legislature, which nixed an earlier scheme to take everyone’s money no matter how modest? The legislature was finessed this time:
The bailout deal does not need approval from the Cypriot parliament because it has been achieved by restructuring the country’s two largest banks, rather than levying a new tax on citizens.
Clever, eh?
One of the many motivations for these moves is to preserve the EU and keep Cyprus from leaving it:
The ECB had threatened to cut off funds propping up Cypriot banks on Monday, which would have precipitated the island’s exit from the euro if the emergency meeting had not reached an agreement.
Cyprus politicians had thought Russia would bail them out, but talks last week with Moscow failed to yield a solution, and Cypriots were left holding the (mostly Russian?) bag:
Alexandra Salmani, 32, moved to Cyprus eight months ago to escape the financial crisis in Greece. She said: “We came here to find a better life, and it’s exactly the same thing as in Greece. Everywhere I go there’s crisis ”“ I’m telling all my friends that I’ll go to Germany next. Someone has to learn to say no to Merkel. They saw a rich country, decided to take their money, and destroy them. They are not human.”
I beg to differ: they are all too human.
[NOTE: I’ve written before about the EU and its origins (see this, this, this, and this).]
Moonwalker
There’s a big discussion in this yahoo article about who invented the moonwalk, and the answer isn’t Michael Jackson.
I can’t say I much care, although I always thought Jackson’s dance moves were his greatest talent. But the article included this amazing video of Cab Calloway that I’d never seen before, although I’m familiar with Calloway’s singing:
Wow, just wow.
And here’s another video from the article that has a lot of proto-moonwalking on it. But I still think that of all the segments, Calloway’s is the most idiosyncratically impressive: