Zucotti Park First Aid

Last weekend, November 12th and 13th, my son and I went to Zucotti Park in lower Manhattan New York,  where the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement had established its epicenter. We were lucky to get a hotel room just around the corner from the park and spent a good part of two days mingling among the occupiers, talking to them about the movement and learning more about the people involved. The first thing you noticed when you came around the corner from Nassau Street towards Broadway and Zucotti  was the huge array of police that surrounded the park. It seemed likely that there were more police than park mainstream OWS residents, though by then the resident population of the park had reached about 1600 (see Jeff Sharlet below). The police had huge communication trucks and many different kinds of squad cars; I couldn’t  tell if Homeland Security was there, and while I didn’t see any cars bearing that label, there were many unmarked cars in the police car mix. In the post-9/11 world, getting Homeland Security involved means that the movement (like the events we saw for the Republican National Convention in St. Paul in 2008) had reached threshold for a national security threat, but so far, it didn’t seem like that had happened. Of course, as we know, Homeland Security funds and trains police departments to serve as their proxy and many police departments have paramilitary squads that are prepared to carry out lethal assaults.  It was clear that the huge police presence surrounding the park was not going to allow the OWS movement to get up and walk towards Wall Street without a serious confrontation.  Two days after our visit, the police shut the park down, evicted the occupiers and confiscated or destroyed their belongings. Last night (Thursday, November 17) a crowd estimated at 32,500 by the NYPD occupied major blocks of the city, including the Brooklyn Bridge and simply overwhelmed the police. This morning Mayor Michael Bloomberg might be wishing he had left the movement in Zucotti Park where it seemed joyfully contained and a picture of industry.

I had a hard time thinking of Zucotti Park as a park when I first saw it–it is tiny. Located one block from the World Trade Center, it is currently owned by Brookfield Office Properties, a commercial real estate firm, headquartered in New York. When the building was first constructed in the 1960s by US Steel, they built a 50 + story structure at One Liberty Plaza.  They agreed with the city to provide a publicly accessible space, available 24/7  (this was one of those trades where the corporation gets to add more floors to a building and create a park to compensate the city).  Originally it was named Liberty Plaza Park, but later renamed Zucotti Park after John Zucotti, former chair of the City Planning Commission and current chair of  Brookfield Properties. It was badly damaged in the 9/11 attack and served as a launching site for the cleanup.  The renaming came after they remodeled the park, post-9/11. But because it is not actually a public park, it doesn’t carry with it the restrictions of public parks in New York, one of which bans tents without a permit. You can read more about the history and dilemma of Zucotti Park here.

How it all began: Jeff Sharlet of Rolling Stonehas written a fascinating account of the OWS movement and its early history. From the first paragraph of his article:

• “It started with a Tweet – “Dear Americans, this July 4th, dream of insurrection against corporate rule” – and a hashtag: #occupywallstreet. It showed up again as a headline posted online on July 13th by Adbusters, a sleek, satirical Canadian magazine known for its mockery of consumer culture. Beneath it was a date, September 17th, along with a hard-to-say slogan that never took off, “Democracy, not corporatocracy,” and some advice that did: “Bring tent.“”

The OWS movement members often refer to this space as “Liberty Park.” At first glance, the park looks like a wall to wall space of a crowded  tents,  some of which were made by joining colored plastic sheets, while others were of the small conventional variety that you use for backpacking or camping.  Many people stay all night and some people are invited to spend the night, either as a small group or as individuals.  At the time of our visit, many were talking about the need for a well-insulated winter sleeping bag and a much better tent to replace their makeshift plastic sheets;  most were confident that public donations would solve that problem (the site where I donated had already raised over $500,000 for the cause). Police did not allow generators to be used, claiming that the noise level would be too high. But, to charge batteries, the Zucotti Park residents used stationary bicycles connected to an electronic arrangement that allowed recharging of computer and cell phone  batteries and those willing to peddle for a while for their contribution to the workload were always welcome.  In general, it was a very friendly environment and if you entered the park with some apprehension about your compatibility with the protestors, you could immediately relax. After all, just about everyone is a member of the 99 per cent and thus a colleague to those in the movement. And you are generally treated in that way. This group wants to grow.

Around the periphery of Zucotti, there were a few quacks, hyping some distorted vision of the World, but they were not members of the OWS movement.  I stopped to talk to one person who seemed very bright and articulate, but when he started advocating that the people in Zucotti were too lazy to work and then began quoting from the Bible, swearing that the earth was only 6000 years old and that evolution couldn’t be true because turtles always seemed to be turtles and if anyone needed to evolve it was surely turtles. As I politely parted company with the young man, it occurred to me that he was a victim of Ronald Reagan, or Reaganism, because it was Reagan who first advocated that creationism should be taught alongside science in the public school system (OK, we have the Scopes trial, but that was long ago and culturally far away: Reagan brought the issue back into our living rooms).  Our culture has been dogged by this creationism/intelligent design/science dilemma ever since and this young man sounded like an unfortunate victim, not unlike what’s still going on in much of the country. Education is critical for a modern, civilized society and we seem to be losing our grip on this requirement. This too is part of the neoliberal plan designed to reduce the cost of labor, but it has reached a runaway toxic level of intrusion.

Library in Zucotti Park

Once you begin to move from the outside periphery to a more central region of Zucotti, you are more likely to run into people who have stories to tell and sensible solutions to propose. The OWS movement has been criticized for not articulating a set of demands and many within the group have tried to inject a demand strategy. But the movement has rejected such pleas and prefers to remain a group that is growing and is certainly content to say “hey if you want to announce your objections to the system, go ahead, you are part of the 99 per cent and we don’t intend to speak for you. We encourage you to speak for yourself.” It is a group that largely emerged from the arts and communications fields rather than from progressive academics or union types. In that sense they do not carry the traditional leftist point of view, though some individuals do harbor that sentiment. The OWS movement represents, in effect, a perfect democracy where everyone has a legitimate view and the right to express it. There are many who feel that the lack of a cohesive set of demands by the group will eventually be their undoing, but right now, they have a growing sense of confidence that they have tapped into a vein running through America and they intend to pursue what has so far been a successful strategy. It is quite astonishing to recognize that the movement is only two months old.  Every person is allowed and even encouraged to express themselves. I saw one sign denouncing the communications giant Verizon for its corporate practices, but in Zucotti, there is more of a focus on Wall Street and the banks. Many in the park had signs specifying specific reasons for change and some cited historical events to make their point. Those that made specific points (the need for a constitutional amendment to declare that corporations are not people–surprisingly I think that that one might actually get through) are generally well informed about the subject and eager to converse. And everyone is talking and communicating and arguing. Virtually everyone was approachable and polite. I found that a common theme among those that have attended college is a heavy debt from student loans. In this respect, they have all been victims of corporate greed. But this is a group that has respect for education and many want to return to complete their degrees or get into graduate school. This is especially evident if you go to the wearethe99percent website and read the statements submitted by individuals. Members of the movement have also started a newspaper, The Occupied Wall Street Journal, which has received high marks for its journalistic quality.

A few paths through the park interior allow people to move through in single file, but most of the paths are all so narrow, that to me, they looked more like a  representation of the extracellular space of the brain. In the middle of the park, there was a big food line. Food is free for anyone who enters the park and it mostly comes from donated food sources, manned by dedicated volunteers, many of whom have just arrived and are anxious to contribute. There was a library at the Broadway end of the park, consisting of a large tent with plastic boxes filled with donated books. You can check a book out and don’t need a library card. And because the area has no real public library facility nearby, neighborhood parents came to the library and checked out books for their children. It was a picture of industry and the OWS movement was proud of this additional effort for the cause. When the police came in and destroyed the Zucotti camp, early Tuesday morning (November 15 at 1:00 AM)  the library books were confiscated or destroyed and the OWS movement is trying to get them back, as they look for a place where a new library facility can be established.

RFM in Zucotti: proof of presence

At the other side of the park, but still on the Broadway end, meetings are held in which discussions take place on matters brought up in the General Assembly of OWS, where meetings take place regularly, at which time they try to resolve issues about the focus and direction of the movement. They are also very big on behavior and want this movement to be non-violent. Once the General Assembly meetings are over, people gather in the park to deliberate on the issues that have been raised in the meetings.  The police did not allow the protestors to have microphones and loud speakers, so they developed the art of the “people’s mic,”  which is that when a single person raises an issue, they speak in short segments of a sentence and then wait until the entire group repeats the words, so that everyone understands what is being said. Very good if you’re hard of hearing. It works very effectively, with a couple of moderators standing in front of the crowd to help coordinate the effort. It’s a mechanism that seems to provide a bonding experience and errors for complex statements that were hard to repeat generally evoked laughter. It is through the General Assembly meetings and discussion of the ideas through the “people’s mic” where deliberations are made; anyone can speak, though it generally makes sense that you already attended the General Assembly meeting. They have hand position rules to reject, accept and listen to a speaker who has the floor. Sometimes contentious issues come up and various suggestions made at the Assembly are rejected by the group. The interior also has a First Aid tent and has some internal security. In addition, there was a large blue plastic tent that served as the communications center where people were broadcasting live feeds that you can watch on the OWS site.

Originally, the group only numbered about 60 people when they first met on September 17, 2011 and it was hard to see that they were going to get anywhere. V for Vendetta masks  were quite popular but seemed to convey a more violent confrontation when what the protestors wanted was a non-violent beginning. Drugs and alcohol were not allowed in the park, though you certainly knew that pot was on the menu. Today the OWS movement has spread not only in America, but throughout the World. About 1600 different OWS movements are flourishing globally. By the time we went, OWS was serving more than 3000 meals a day and something like 1600 people were bedding down in the park each night.

The 99 percent versus the 1 percent is a very catchy and simple phrase. It also has meaning in terms of wealth distribution. According to Joseph Stiglitz, published in his article in Vanity Fair, the top 1 percent of our society bring in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year and in  terms of wealth, they own 40 percent of the nation’s wealth. Twenty-five years ago, the numbers were 12 and 33 percent, respectively. Few would deny that we have a wealth distribution that is completely out of control and the neoliberal system we have been living under for the past forty years has proven to be too toxic and too radical for our cultural survival, and it is incompatible with the mounting threats we face for a healthy future for the planet we live on.

Tent City in Zucotti Park, November 12, 2011

After being evicted from Zucotti Park, the OWS movement in New York and many other cities, created a massive turnout that overwhelmed the police, whose intentions were to brutally block the demonstrators from taking over things like the Brooklyn Bridge. I have heard a rumor that the OWS library was re-established on the Brooklyn Bridge, though it’s unlikely to have permanent residence there. This movement is strikingly different than anything I have ever seen. Though they do not have demands per se, there is little doubt that they will have an impact on the coming election of 2012 and they already have sent both political parties scrambling to come up with approaches that might ameliorate them and that, in and of itself, could have a powerful transforming effect on the future direction of our economic policies and our social safety net. These are people who shun the neoliberal emphasis on individual liberties and instead promote the idea that we are all in this together–we must create an interdependent society and move away from what imprisoned and impoverished most of us for the last forty years. It will get worse before it gets better, but the OWS movement has started the spirit of revolutionary excitement that may now be impossible to contain. That is what many of us are hoping for.

RFM

Vision rules! We are overwhelmingly visual animals, with a visual brain that developed so much power, we eventually learned how to read and through that medium, we began to change the world we live in. Except for hurricanes, volcanoes, tornadoes and the coming global climate change and mass species extinction, we learned to rule the world and turn the tables on the remaining species that had previously hoped to dine on us. Vision controls our brain, even though it tells lies about the visible world around us, through mechanisms such color-constancy, Mach Bands for enhancing edges, contrast gain, chromatic adaption and movement distortion to name just a few deceptive tactics of our visual apparatus. The brain is a plastic organ, waiting to change and develop according to the experiences we present to it. The “lies” are actually generated by the retina’s commitment to improve our edge detection, recognizes boundaries and colors and detect the movement and project the estimated arrival times of moving objects. From stationary retinal inputs, the cortex begins to build larger regions of visual field receptivity. From small circular receptive fields, larger regions of light sensitivity are constructed that are made of lines of different orientation covering a larger retinal region and these respond preferentially to movement in one direction, as well as prefer information from one eye over the other in an organized set of repeated columns. All of the processing that takes place within the visual cortex, with multiple parallel streams of Lego block construction, still represents early coding for some of our most important visually related events.
Brain imaging studies have revealed that a “letterbox” region lies, on the left side of the brain, near the occipito-temporal border that is associated with the identification of letters of the alphabet and words we have learned. It’s estimated that the human word capacity is somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 words accomplished when we are adults, through the repetitive, daily act of reading and challenging our brain with new words and their meaning. Written language has fundamentally changed the world and contributed substantially to the growth in intellect and the recognition that reading and writing are fundamental to progress. In the hundred years between the 20th and the 21st century, the percentage of people who are literate has increased dramatically and will continue to grow, given the essential entree it provides into advanced cultures.
Outside of the visual cortex per se, in the medial temporal inferior  lobes, close to the hippocampus that plays a big role in laying down memories that are eventually stored in the cerebral cortex, memories of the declarative type, available to our verbal recall, researchers have determined the encoding properties of single brain cells which turn out to display surprisingly specialized and unique properties. In the less than 1% of epileptics that do not respond to the litany of antileptic medications, removing the localized offending tissue is the only way to reduce or eliminate seizure activity. But since the legendary patient H.M., neurosurgeons carefully explore an epileptic focus with recording electrodes to make sure they don’t remove essential structures committed to the patient’s memory. At the cellular level, no two brains are wired alike, so one has to be careful and record from the cells near the lesion and avoid removing brain tissue that has stored or can store part of the human engram. These studies, which often require hours with a patient’s brain exposed and recording electrodes inserted into brain structures to explore single cell properties near the epileptogenic site, have revealed surprising properties of human neurons that contain memory information about people. One such cell recently described (Quiroga et al., Invariant visual representation by single neurons in the human brain, Nature, 435,1102-1107,2005) in a patient was the “Jennifer Aniston Cell.” This cell responded to images of Jennifer Aniston very distinctly; it did not require her face in any particular position or special clothing. An image of Jennifer Aniston in any position or posture fired the cell vigorously, whereas other similar images of famous people did not.  Interestingly, when the image of Jennifer Aniston was coupled with Brad Pitt, the cell was silent. Not only did the cell respond to an image of Jennifer Aniston, but it responded as well to the auditory or written form of her name. Was this then the long lost grandmother cell we had been searching for during the last 50 years? If you destroyed that single cell, would the patient lose all memory of Jennifer Aniston? Naturally, it was unethical to do something like that, but the authors did feel that their results, with included 993 units, with about 14% of cells committed to human identities (Halle Berry was also popular, as was Bill Clinton, the Beatles and cartoons from The Simpsons and Michael Jordan); to qualify as a human identity cell the cellular response to the picture had to equal to the mean plus five standard deviations of the baseline, with a least two spikes in the post-stimulus time interval.  Repetition is the means we have for forming strong, long-term memories. So perhaps all of us have Jennifer Aniston, Halle Berry and Bill Clinton cells. Since the study was done in 2005, the experimenters did not have a chance to look for Obama cells, but by now they are probably there, perhaps in all of us, maybe even more strongly integrated into the brains of tea baggers. The authors argue that their findings favor the interpretation that the cells from which they recorded are in fact, the missing grandmother cells that were postulated to exist, but have never really been found until now.  The  obvious question that comes up is whether there is more than one representation of Jennifer Aniston? And if one Jennifer Aniston cell is knocked out, will another one quickly takes its place through the methods of laying down a new long-term memory from the background neural engram already active in the brain? One of the most riveting of all issues related to brain function involves the question about the grandmother cell, or in this case the Jennifer Aniston cell. The fact that such a cell exists, when the theory to which I ascribed for many years held that Jennifer Aniston was represented by an overlapping population of cells, so that her identity was determined by a network, not a single, cell has been seemingly shattered by this report. Thus we must now acknowledge the likely fact that we store images of people we know or have seen enough times and encode the representation of these individuals into the discharge properties of a single cell. That cell is so sophisticated that it responds to Jennifer Aniston independent of position, expression, hair style, clothing or facial expression. But, do we have one or many Jennifer Aniston cells in our brain and can those cells be recalled for updating to new folks, once we lose interest in Jennifer Aniston? Of greater relevance is the question about who or what is it that reads the Jennifer Aniston cell to report it to our consciousness? Is the Jennifer Aniston cell one cell removed from our conscious identity? Is consciousness the readout of our cortex, with specialized Jennifer Aniston cells making the task more simplified? Stay tuned! There’s a notable human issue residing in these discoveries. Recordings from awake humans during surgical exploration for epilepsy-related surgery is about the only way we can get at this question and the results of Quiroga et al., have come down pretty hard in favor of us having brains with grandmother cells! But what if we find the same cells in the Chimpanzee? Will that give us pause? Do Chimps care about Jennifer Aniston if they see her on TV enough times? Do we also need language, both written and verbal to even form a Jennifer Aniston cell? All these questions remain in the future, but we can no longer deny the grandmother cells of our present and future brain.

RFM

Almost discounted out of hand in many of the HuffPo articles on health, is evidence-based science and medicine: for many articles, the assumption is that traditional medicine  got it all wrong, or is covering up the truth in a kind of CIA-like conspiracy, probably involving the drug companies. A common theme on HuffPo is that vaccination causes autism; an example of an article promoting this view (though by no means the only one) was written by comedian/actor Jim Carrey, wherein he promotes the now disproven relationship between vaccination and autism. The Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) reviewed the issue of vaccinations (mostly the MMR vaccine for measles-mumps and rubella) and autism very thoroughly in 2001 and 2004, with a separate 2001 study on the vaccine carrier thimerosal; this work strongly endorsed prior conclusions that no causal relationship existed between vaccination or the carrier thimerosal and autism. Another good summary, in addition to the NAS publications, about the lack of a relationship between vaccination and autism can be found here. Nevertheless, all recommended children’s vaccines are now available in thimerosal-free delivery systems [thimerosal is an organic mercury compound that is metabolized to ethylmercury and thiosalicylate; it was used beginning in the 1930s to protect vaccines from bacterial infection, but,  largely because of consumer complaints, it was removed from all required children's vaccines]. In February of this year, the U.S. Court of Claims (the “people’s Court”) ruled on an autism case by stating: “The evidence is weak, contradictory and unpersuasive,” concluded Special Master Denise Vowell. “Sadly, the petitioners in this litigation have been the victims of bad science conducted to support litigation rather than to advance medical and scientific understanding” of autism. In addition to the courts, The American Academy of Pediatrics, the Center for Disease Control (CDC), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the Institute of Medicine in the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) all agree that there is no demonstrable relationship between autism and vaccines. Does anyone believe that any or all of these organizations would form a conspiracy of obfuscation about vaccinations that would eventually have to come out if at all true? Vaccinations have been one of the great hallmarks of life-expectancy advancement throughout the world and if something is wrong with the procedure or its actions, these organizations would be the first to reveal it, not the last–it’s called evidence-based medicine and institutional self-survival.

So, why are people still pursuing the vaccine-autism connection? Although these aforementioned studies were thorough and disproved a relationship between vaccination and autism, the devastating nature of autism and the fact that there is no cure or recognized treatment available, means that parents with autistic children fall easy prey to extravagant claims and conspiracy theories that remain, despite all the evidence to the contrary, for a relationship between vaccination and autism. There are still physicians out there who continue to promote the vaccination connection, without heeding the extensive analysis that says otherwise. One outcome of the NAS studies was to call for a dramatic increase in funding for autism, as the lack of a robust research program has limited good, rational  theories from gaining foothold within the community of autistic victims and their families. In 2006, the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC) was formed as a national government advisory panel to propose research strategies for ASD (ASD is the entire spectrum of autistic diseases and includes the milder form of autism known as Asperger’s).  Their home page can be viewed at this site; their recently released national plan for addressing ASD can be viewed at this website. The IACC is seeking input from the public, as the incidence of ASD has increased more than tenfold over the past decade. The main conclusion with respect to autism and thimerosal, is that the latter has been removed from children’s vaccines years ago (and earlier in other countries) but, tragically,  the rates of autism continue to rise at an alarming rate and no one knows why.

Many of the medical articles that appear in HuffPo use reasoning that reminds one of the ideological bias that is used to promote Creationism–they can’t let it go, no matter what the evidence or the arguments, despite the fact that evolution is not a theory, but an established fact. Indeed we probably know more about evolution than we do about the structure of the atom. At one level, all science is a theory, including I might add, the structure of the atom, for which our current level of uncertainty still awaits detection of important subatomic constituents, like the Higgs boson, before a better account of atomic structure can be accepted (and the dark matter of the universe perhaps partially resolved).  But, for devout Creationists, it would not be possible to prove that evolution, through natural selection, really did get humans to where they are today.  Medicine, like Creationism or Intelligent Design (two peas in the same pod), has always had its fringe deniers, those for whom a more intuitive grasp of illness and its causes leads to self-illumination on new theories and cures for medical diseases, while raising doubts about commonly accepted and proven explanations for them. America is still wild and her people still generate wild ideas. We are regularly inundated with a mistrust of science, such that it is not difficult to find diversionary support for just about any claims made under the banner of science and evidence-based medicine, the hallmark of which are concepts derived from reproducible observations.

Recent breakthroughs in the genetics of risk factors related to ASD increasingly support a genetic predisposition for autism and many investigators now refer to ASD as a heritable neuropsychiatric or neurodevelopmental disorder. Common genes suspected in ASD include those that form “cell-adhesion” molecules that are important in the development of the nervous system. It is the location and timing of appearance of such molecules that serve to guide neurons to make their complex and often distant connections with other regions of the brain. Abnormalities in cell-adhesion molecules can prevent normal brain connections from getting made, or generate neuronal connections that are abnormal. Although this work remains at a very early stage of recognition, the genetic data in so far suggests heritable risk factors, not a simple Mendelian form of transmission, so the question then becomes given the risk factors that are heritable, what other factors are required to trigger the onset of ASD? While preliminary, the new genetic data does serve to bring ASD into a much more contemporary focus, similar to what now exists for schizophrenia and bipolar disorders (the most current theory for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder is a deficiency in glutamate neurotransmission in the brain, mediated by NMDA receptors, causing “NMDA receptor hypofunction”). Shizophrenia also has heritable risk factors, some of which relate to NMDA receptor function. Science does best when it has an animal model to work with and the identification of risk factor genes will help focus work on how these genes work and how abnormalities in gene function can be corrected. Going down the autism-vaccination road has been a huge diversionary trip that could have been avoided in most countries other than America. The current theory that schizophrenia is related to hypofunction of synaptic glutamate receptors (NMDA receptors) required the combination of a single observation on humans with the disorder (low levels of D-serine in their cerebrospinal fluid), extensive basic science knowledge of glutamate receptors and animal models manipulated such that they show characteristics similar to those seen in schizophrenic patients, aided by a little extrapolation from mice and rats to humans.  An early clue was the drugs which tended to make people somewhat schizophrenic, such as “Angel Dust” (PCP) or MK-801, turned out to be antagonists to NMDA receptors. Despite this new direction for research into schizophrenia,  there is no cure for this disease, and the causal factors remain more than that of a single deficiency, with a likely genetic contribution for at least some forms of schizophrenia.

As contemporary medical doubters demonstrate a deep mistrust of modern medicine, they often follow a pattern of behavior that puts their own children at risk of serious illness, or worse, by denying them proven public health safety measures, such as vaccination. Furthermore, significant numbers of unvaccinated children create a public health hazard, escalating risk for every child, and unvaccinated adult in the community. But, in America, you can only wonder how many wild theories get started because so many of our citizens lack access to medical care? It’s one thing to decry fringe medical ideas, but quite another to acknowledge their origins as a result of limited access to modern medical procedures. Do these strange articles in the HuffPo, reflect the uninsured trying to access medical cures in the absence of a decent health care plan? Don’t physicians have a historic blame component for creating our current system of high profits for some and complete lack of health care for others? The NAS has estimated that more than 18,000 people die in America every year because they do not have access to health care and many experts believe this is an underestimate. Celebrated cases of these hard reality stories are now abundant in the news, but somehow Americans seem numb to this broken system that we call health care. Maybe that’s what the HuffPo articles reflect.

The confident state of ignorance displayed by the misinformed reminds me of the Civil War surgeons working on the wounded and carrying out one amputation after another in relatively quick succession. In those days, medicine in America was still mired in its primitive colonial practices, including that of blood-letting. The surgeons, who knew very little about aseptic techniques at the time, kept blood-stained aprons on through multiple operations, unaware that they served as a primary source of bacterial infestation which they passed on to their patients: disease-causing bacteria were unknown at the time, but the advantages of aseptic surgical practices were widely appreciated and applied in European medical centers at the time. The result of these barbaric colonial practices during the Civil War was to help generate the most costly war in our history in terms of human lives lost, yet the majority of soldiers that died, did so under the care of a physician many of whome died from the aseptic conditions of the surgical environment. Not until the American medical revolution began at Harvard University and later helped to establish the gold standard for American medical schools at Johns Hopkins University in the late 19th century, did American medicine begin to slowly extricate itself from the colonial practices that led to the medical disaster of the Civil War. Unfortunately, not everyone, including many of those writing on health issues at the HuffPo, got on board that train that led to the fusion of science and medicine. There are still people out there who need to get a ticket.

Other fringe ideas that have appeared in the HuffPo, include the concept that cancers are all caused by fungus infections created by the use of antibiotics. At times, it seems that because the “journal of medical pseudoscience” doesn’t yet exist, the HuffPo has substituted its website to feature bizarre articles on health, until the hoped-for journal gets underway. The result of these utterly strange articles on health and medicine, is to cast something of a pall on the objectivity of the entire HuffPo, and like a cancer, with or without fungus, the more articles you read on quack medicine and bizarre therapies from people with “star” names, such as Don Imus and Jim Carrey, the more you wonder about the objectivity of other articles on more political issues, for which the blog is well respected, or at least read. The progressives I know and respect also have a healthy understanding for the importance of science and the critical role that the concept of reproducibility has had on the advancement of our culture, technology and medicine. Without science, the industrial revolution would have us choking in its fumes, with a shortened lifespan and a higher level of shared human misery. So detracting from evidence-based medicine principals and promoting fringe medical ideas through publicly well-known figures doesn’t really help anyone and promoting diversionary ideas certainly doesn’t advance the drive to find the cause for our major health problems of today. Autism is almost surely a disorder that involves heritable, developmental mechanisms of the human nervous system and these kinds of issues are among the most challenging that we face, primarily because we are still in a period of flourishing new discoveries about development of the brain and the neurochemical and environmental mechanisms that determine brain connectivity and normal development. At least a few more Nobel Prizes will be awarded before we understand human brain development and its relationship to human diseases such as autism. Confounding issues like this, is the very real possibility that man-made chemical contamination of the environment could be responsible some of the developmentally related disorders that we see so much of in our society today. In that sense, the idea that something like a vaccination that could trigger an autoimmune response is perfectly rational, but it’s one that has been disproven. Time to move on.

To give another example of the quackery found on HuffPo, you can check out the article by Kim Evans entitled “Swine Flu: Protect Yourself and Loved Ones.” In this incredulous article, Evans suggests that cleansing your bowel with enemas is the way to get rid of excess bacteria and protect yourself from the flu. She even goes so far to say that those who went through the 1918 flu epidemic using enemas had better survival outcomes than those who received the vaccine. This is especially interesting when you consider that vaccines were not developed for the 1918 flu epidemic and that the disease was transmitted by aerosol. Is there anyone at HuffPost who vets these articles or should this article cast a pall on the HuffPo in general? Information is valuable, but misinformation out of ignorance is inexcusable. Fortunately, others have responded to the bogus medical ideas frequently found in  the HuffPost and the Science-Based Medicine site has articles challenging the HuffPo quackery written by Steven Novella and David Gorski. It seems that HuffPo is increasingly known for its misinformation on medical issues and personal health. This is not to say however that American medicine gets a completely free pass for its performance on issues of health care. Physicians in general, but especially those belonging to the AMA, must be given a big lion’s share of the health insurance crisis we find ourselves in today. From the get-go, going all the way back to FDR’s administration, the AMA was successful in fending off national health insurance plans, by labeling them “socialized medicine,” a term still used as a rallying cry to the doubting Republicans. Harry Truman had hoped to make a national health insurance plan the signature of his domestic program, but with the rising tide of anticommunism (which he himself helped put in motion), the label of “socialized medicine” killed the program, which only resurfaced in the form of Medicare and Medicaid, nearly twenty years later. Had physicians endorsed a national health insurance plan out of their commitment to the social good, they would be better off financially today, than many of them are, especially those living under the medical tyranny of for-profit health insurance companies. That’s why some doctors consider an MBA to be an essential, secondary degree. The profits in medicine these days are made at the top, while there is a modern form of enslavement at the bottom, where many doctors and nurses work.  If you want to get rich as a medical doctor, you still stand a chance by going into surgery and practicing in a southern state.

RFM

You can appreciate how much we have retreated towards conditions La Follette addressed in his first newsletter, where he wrote the following: “In the course of every attempt to establish or develop free government, a struggle between Special Privilege and Equal Rights is inevitable. Our great industrial organizations [are] in control of politics, government, and natural resources. They manage conventions, make platforms, dictate legislation. They rule through the very men elected to represent them.”

During the first years of the publication, it included a strong emphasis on women’s rights issues, as Belle Case La Follette wrote often in the magazine and was a leading advocate for women’s suffrage; she was also an early advocate of civil rights for African Americans. When Robert La Follette died, she continued with the publication. There was a little hiccup in the magazine’s history when the publication became the leading advocate of isolationism in 1940 and 1941, when the two La Follette sons were running the magazine (Robert La Follette had also been against U.S. entry into WW I). This opposition for American entry into what was looming as WW II by many progressives and socialists (Norman Thomas incuded), was based on the unnecessary entry of the United States into WW I, which progressives viewed as war profiteering. But After Pearl Harbor, most progressives and socialists were staunchly supportive of the war effort.  But, before Pearl Harbor, the La Follette sons opened up the pages of The Progressive to pro-Nazis figure Charles Lindbergh.

What comes through in the anniversary edition is the long list of liberals and progressives who wrote articles in the magazine, which steadfastly  opposed war, opposed the military buildup, spoke out against American corporatism, denounced war profiteering and favored human dignity at all levels of society. In 1917 for example, Irving Fisher (an influential Yale economist) wrote an article in the magazine pointing out how every American should be entitled to health insurance. “Health insurance,” he wrote, “is like elementary education. To function properly, it must be universal and to be universal, it must be obligatory.”

La Follette always expressed himself coherently through the  use of  simple language applied in a foreful way.  When the publication ran into financial stress, he supported it from his own personal resources. Before we entered WW I, against La Follette’s strong opposition, he wrote, “over and over again, we have heard the special interests making their hypocritical appeals on the ground of patriotism, urging that thorough preparation for war is always a sure guarantee of peace. It has but one purpose and that is to sacrifice human life for private gain.” Here, here!

In the centennial edition, I was struck by a note from Helen Keller to Robert La Follette in 1924, when she declared “I am for you because you stand for liberal and progressive government. I am for you because you believe the people should rule. I am for you because you believe that labor should participate in public life.”

Progressives always have some difficulty getting their publications funded and securely situated because they are generally opposed to the corruption of government by business, so, right off the bat,  there go the deep pockets people. All publications like this are financially hurting these days.  If you share in the philosophy of progressivism, then you might want to visit the website of The Progressive and make a donation or subscribe to the magazine, or both. You won’t be disappointed in the monthly content, unless you voted one or more times for G.W. Bush.
RFM

Four major themes of this meeting united most of those in attendance and the proposed solutions largely center around implementing regulatory reform, and reducing corporate control, including i) changing the broadcasting regulations so that the corporate news media are held accountable for the content of their programs; ii) keep the internet free from corporate intrusions; iii) restrict corporate ownership of mass media so that more independent news organizations can be revived and iv) through activist demands, force the major news media to cover issues such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and global warming. The meeting was also attended by the two current members of the FCC who are in the Democratic column, Johnathan Adelstein and Michael Copps, who will be the new FCC chairman if Obama is elected President. He talked about immediate reforms he plans to put into place, including a return to a three year review of broadcast licensing (it is now 8 years and virtually automatic) with a more strict enforcement of the old standard that broadcast licenses are given to serve a public function and need to uphold those values. He talked about probationary status if these changes are not adhered to and the prospect of losing a broadcasting license if things don’t change. It would be a very enjoyable outcome to see Fox lose their broadcasting license. Is that why Rupert Murdoch says he supports Obama?

The quality of this meeting was extremely high and most of the speakers were excellent and inspiring to those in attendance. In going to the meeting, I expected to see the attendance biased towards those with gray hair like me. But, in fact, as I surveyed the crowd, there were many young people in attendance and many middle aged adults. You came to appreciate it, if it wasn’t immediately obvious, that quality journalists are being terminated from major papers and news media in favor of softer journalism of the type that supports the current administration and blurs the line between pop culture and journalistic standards. Let’s face it, we have national news system that serves as apologists for the Republican Party and its policies. Until that changes, there is little chance that news can ever be educational. Where have you heard that Iraq is now so unsafe that journalists do not go outside of the Green Zone?

Bill Moyers gave an excellent speech on the freedom of the press and the current reform movement. He is truly the guru of the free press movement. You also came to appreciate that if we didn’t have PBS, we would not have any access to accurate reporting, except for what we get through the internet and C-Span. But, as Moyers pointed out, PBS, due to political pressure, has decided time and again not to produce or air things that are too controversial and they frequently program apology news for events such as 9/11. Dan Rather gave a good talk and admitted the complicity of the major news media in hyping the buildup to the war. He has his own program and has repented from his past sins.

Phil Donahue showed his riveting film "A Body of War" a story of a young US solider (Thomas Young) wounded and paralyzed in Iraq, who joined the Winter Soldier movement as a fierce critic of the war and our sitting president. The last scene in the movie, when the young soldier meets with Senator Robert Byrd, who led the fight against the declaration of war for invading Iraq (bet you never saw his speeches on TV–they were fabulous), and Byrd takes down a large plaque from his office wall, as his own greatest political challenge to the government and reading from the plaque, Byrd and Young read the names of the senators who voted against the war, after which they get up and walk side by side down the senate office building hall as they discuss their daily problems, having clearly formed a common bond. Try viewing that scene without tearing. Donahue was unable to sell his movie to any distribution system, but finally Landmark films stepped in and will show it in their theaters. So if you want to see a riveting film about the lives of our soldiers that we send to an illegal war, go see that one. It probably won’t stay long in any theater, but it was masterfully filmed and covers nearly three years of a soldier’s post-injury life and his activities as an antiwar Winter Soldier. I noticed and commented on the fact that when the credits to this movie were given, Donahue cited the figure of Iraqi citizen deaths at more than 1 million which reflects the best estimate available from the cluster survey and analysis reported in The Lancet a few years ago. That is the first time I have seen these more accurate figures be cited in any theater experience.

There was an opportunity to hear from Phil Donahue about his firing from MSNBC just as the Iraq invasion build-up was underway. He had the top-rated program on MSNBC, but he was fired because he was too liberal and a threat to the morale of the invasionary hype. But, before he was he fired, he had to have two conservatives on his show for every liberal, and, as prescribed by MSNBC, he had to count himself as already having two liberals on the show if no one else showed up. So, I guess by the math done at MSNBC, adding one liberal to his program meant a total of three, so having two conservatives to one liberal as guests, still meant that the liberals outnumbered the conservatives or neoconservatives. Does that give you some indication about the corruption and distortion of our television programming?

All of us can participate in helping the free press movement. If you go to the Free Press website, you can sign up for news alerts and other information. I would urge you to watch the video of Senator Dorgan’s speech and also that of Bill Moyers. When the news alerts come out, respond by signing the letters/emails that will be sent to your congressional leaders. It was that influx of demands (1.5 million) that forced the Senate to rescind the recent FCC ruling to give more expansionary communication acquisitions to newspapers, further enhancing giant corporate control over our news. Write-ins work! We just need more of them and they need to get bigger and bigger in volume. If I was disappointed about anything with the meeting, it was the complete lack of any attention given to the other dimension of this information suppression, which is the administration’s suppression of science information and their purge of scientists through the elimination of their funding. That is not just destructive, it is destroying our future.