Fish for Friday

By Morris Dean

Edited by Morris Dean

[Anonymous selections from recent correspondence]

Is it any surprise that "In Black Men, Internalized Racism Speeds Up Aging"? Excerpt:

Racism is a powerful enough force that it can wear down a man’s body. Those are the findings, at once common-sense and groundbreaking, in a study led by University of Maryland epidemiologist David Chae which examines the relationship between white blood cell telomere lengths and experiences with racism.
   The study, “Discrimination, Racial Bias, and Telomere Length in African-American Men,” to be published in the February 2014 issue of the American Journal of Preventative Medicine, is the first of its kind to explicitly measure the role that racism-related factors play in the aging process.

A moral imperative

I watched Al Gore's film, "An Inconvenient Truth," last night. I knew what was in it, but I hadn't expected to be moved the way I was by actually watching it. I was moved by Gore's conclusion that it's a moral imperative to do something to try to avert the environmental cataclysm threatening Planet Earth. This means, among other things, that it's a matter of conscience that I go back to commuting to work by way of the local transit system. I'd commuted by bus for some months before my vacation in California in October, but I haven't ridden the bus since.

I'm going to start again on Tuesday. (I'm off for MLK's birthday.)

And, if I intend to continue to blog politically occasionally, it is more important to talk about this issue than about Iraq. Alas, Bush will still be part of the discussion, since the Busheviks have been largely successful at misleading people through their comprehensive campaign to hide the truth—such as a White House official's distorting government climate reports:

In handwritten notes on drafts of several reports issued in 2002 and 2003, the official, Philip A. Cooney, removed or adjusted descriptions of climate research that government scientists and their supervisors, including some senior Bush administration officials, had already approved. In many cases, the changes appeared in the final reports.

The dozens of changes, while sometimes as subtle as the insertion of the phrase "significant and fundamental" before the word "uncertainties," tend to produce an air of doubt about findings that most climate experts say are robust.

Mr. Cooney is chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the office that helps devise and promote administration policies on environmental issues.

Before going to the White House in 2001, he was the "climate team leader" and a lobbyist at the American Petroleum Institute, the largest trade group representing the interests of the oil industry. A lawyer with a bachelor's degree in economics, he has no scientific training. [The New York Times, June 8, 2005]