April 2, 2013

April 2 is World Autism Awareness Day

http://www.autismspeaks.org/what-autism/world-autism-awareness-day

As some of you know, my elder daughter is afflicted with autism. She was born March 31st, not quite an April Fool for us...so the choice of April 2 is painfully ironic. But any other day of the year would cause similar pain for someone else, I suppose.

There are many theories, but I have empirical evidence that the genetics of too many copies of "logic" genes is the prime reason for the condition. There are some that try to guilt us with "environmental triggers", "diet", "vaccines" and "heavy metal poisoning", but I give them as much credence as that old fraud Bettelheim's "refrigerator mother" theory. If it can be "cured", it wasn't autism.

In meiosis, the genes, by and for which we all exist to serve and mix and propagate, get wild and crazy. They turn each other on and off, add or delete copies, producing the incremental changes that lead to genetic drift, evolution, and birth defects. Sometimes they have help: genetic disruptors like chemicals, radiation, or disease. And sometimes there are social factors: the near genocide of the Ashkenazim, coupled with their desire to intermarry, collected and reinforced a number of genetic traits that make some individuals of that heritage prone to cancer, for example. Ditto the sickle cell anemia.

Another, more recent social factor has been feminism. The freedom granted to girls to study at the peak of their abilities as engineers, lawyers, scientists, and other highly logical endeavors, instead of being shuffled into the ranks of grade school teachers and nurses, or randomly-matched housewives and spouses, also meant that they would meet and most likely marry men of similarly constructed minds and genetics. The lesson here is that you can have too much of a good thing. Humans are not going to evolve into Vulcans by genetic drift... instead, they will produce a generation of children with autism.

The science is still in its formative stages, the cure is non-existent. There is only prevention, by genetic counselling, when a sufficient number of the relevant genes have been identified, on the foreseeable horizon.

While the species needs its logicians and scientists, it treats them with scorn...perhaps because of the shadow of autism that can be detected in the parents of the generation that has the fully-developed syndrome. The autistically afflicted are different in behavior and so many other things that the neurotypical can only, through long-term exposure, exercise of great patience and the gift of bottomless empathy, get a peek into such a differently-organized mind.

So while some may take the Jerry Lewis approach, I will instead take the scientific one: now that you are aware, you must take some preventative action!

April 1, 2013

Free trade and unrestricted capital flow: How billionaires get rich and destroy the rest of us

http://americablog.com/2013/03/free-trade-and-unrestricted-capital-flow-how-billionaires-get-rich-and-destroy-the-rest-of-us.html

Paul Krugman makes a point in this post about Cyprus that I’d like use to make a broader and more important point. His point is that Cyprus is already off the euro and has created its own currency, the Cyprus Euro, which at the moment is pegged to the other euro at 1:1. Why is a euro in a Cyprus bank different from other euros? Because you can’t move it freely, so it has less real value...My point, though, is a little different. My point is about unrestricted free trade and capital flow in general and why understanding both is crucial to understanding:

▪ The neoliberal free-trade project, and
▪ Wealth inequality in America

...There’s a straight line between “free-trade” — a prime tenet of both right-wing Milton Friedman thinking and left-wing Bill Clinton–Robert Rubin neoliberalism — and wealth inequality in America. In fact, if the billionaires didn’t have the one (a global free-trade regime) they couldn’t have the other (your money in their pocket). And the whole global “all your money are belong to us” process has only three moving parts. Read on to see them. Once you “get it,” you’ll get it for a long time.

What does “free trade” mean?

In its simplest terms, “free trade” means one thing only — the ability of people with capital to move that capital freely, anywhere in the world, seeking the highest profit. It’s been said of Bush II, for example, that “when Bush talks of ‘freedom’, he doesn’t mean human freedom, he means freedom to move money.” At its heart, free trade doesn’t mean the ability to trade freely per se; that’s just a byproduct. It means the ability to invest freely without governmental constraint. Free trade is why factories in China have American investors and partners — because you can’t bring down manufacturing wages in Michigan and Alabama if you can’t set up slave factories somewhere else and get your government to make that capital move cost-free, or even tax-incentivized, out of your supposed home country and into a place ripe for predation.

Can you see why both right-wing kings (Koch Bros, Walmart-heir dukes and earls, Reagan I, Bush I and II) and left-wing honchos (Bill Clinton, Robert Rubin, Barack Obama) make “free trade” the cornerstone of each of their economic policies? It’s the song of the rich, and they all sing it. I’ve shown this video before, but it bears repeating. When you think about “free trade,” you probably think of the Walmart heirs (or Apple owners) wallowing in wealth from the world’s slave factories. But it’s a joint project by all of our owners (sorry, major left- and right-wing campaign contributors and job creators).





SEE THIS LINK FOR SENATOR OBAMA'S "AUDITION SPEECH" TO RUBIN AND FRIENDS FOR THE PRESIDENCY, AND ANALYSIS OF HIS SPEECH....SHOCKING!