Which Masks Are Most Effective Against The Coronavirus?

Reasonable people know we are in the midst of a serious pandemic -- a pandemic with a virus that has no cure and, as yet, cannot be protected by vaccination. The only tool we have right now against the virus (other than social distancing) is the wearing of a mask.

But wouldn't you like to know how effective the mask of your choice really is? Which mask is the most effective in stopping transmission of the virus?

Researchers at Duke University decided to find out. They tested 14 different kinds of masks, and you can go here to see how they conducted those tests.

Here are the results of the tests they conducted:

The study found that the most effective mask when it comes to reducing the transmission of respiratory droplets was the professionally fitted, non-valved N95. Three-layer surgical masks and cotton masks were quite effective as well. Surprisingly, a few masks were found to be quite ineffective, specifically folded bandanas and knitted masks. Valved N95 masks also “decrease protection of persons surrounding the wearer” because of “the exhalation valve, which opens for strong outwards airflow.”

Neck fleeces, also known as gaiter masks, were the least effective of all and were actually found to produce more respiratory droplets compared to not wearing a mask because they appeared to “disperse the largest droplets into a multitude of smaller droplets.” The study indicates that because they create more particles and smaller particles that are airborne longer than larger ones, these masks may actually be counterproductive. Fischer told CNN, “We were extremely surprised to find that the number of particles measured with the fleece actually exceeded the number of particles measured without wearing any mask. We want to emphasize that we really encourage people to wear masks, but we want them to wear masks that actually work.”

New Study Shows Racial Bias Against Blacks By Teachers

It is an indisputable fact that racism still exists in our society. And sadly, it exists in our education system. It's extremely important that we address this, because how a student is treated in those formative years can determine how successful they will be for the rest of their lives.

Some of this racism is intentional. The teachers and administrators that are racist need to be exposed and kicked out of the educational system. But too many times the racism is unintentional, and the teachers may not even realize that he/she is expressing bias. This also needs to be dealt with (possibly through better training), because unintentional bias can be just as destructive as intentional bias.

A new study has exposed this unintentional bias. Here is part of an excellent article on this by Sam Fulwood III at Think Progress:

Stories about black school children being more harshly treated or punished than white children has become an old and disturbing media staple, one that waxes and wanes with the frequency of its retelling, frequently featuring lurid and shocking details. But despite the popularity of this news trope, most reported accounts typically fail to offer much in the way of credible justification for why teachers might behave in such a racially-prejudiced way toward their students.

Now, in an effort to make sense of the incomprehensible, a recent study conducted by team of education researchers at several major U.S. universities offers an illuminating theory: many teachers harbor implicit biases against the black faces of their students.

According to a preliminary study published earlier this month in the journal Contemporary Education Psychology, prospective teachers are more likely to perceive the faces of black adults as being angry compared to the faces of white adults, even in instances where neither group is emotionally expressive. Similarly, the researchers found that the teachers-in-training viewed the behavior of black children as more hostile than similar behavior of white children.

This study adds to the scholarly heft of previous scholarly work, as well as countless anecdotes which suggest that white teachers and administrators discipline black students more harshly than white students. While such findings — and media accounts they generate — are disturbing to the point of alarm, they nevertheless contain a logic that is hard to deny. What’s more, these new findings help to explain the persistence of discrimination that follows black children into adulthood, as their lives move from classrooms to workplaces and other realities of American society.

Indeed, a teacher’s racially biased misperceptions are merely the start of a cascading series of negative consequences on students in their formative years. Far too many teachers have been found to underestimate the academic talent and learning capability of black students.  As early as preschool, these students tend to get railroaded disproportionately into the so-called school-to-prison pipeline.

Amy Halberstadt, a psychology professor at North Carolina State University and lead author of the Contemporary Education Psychology paper on the study, said in an interview with Science Daily that it’s well known black students are more likely to be suspended, expelled and disciplined than white students due to a disconnect between white teachers and black students.

“With this study, we wanted to explore whether people going into education showed indications of racialized anger bias — detecting anger where none exists,” said Halberstadt, who led the team of researchers from North Carolina State University, Northeastern University, the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, and Virginia Commonwealth University. “This is a first step toward understanding whether cultural mismatches and racial prejudice are playing a role in the disproportionate number of black students facing disciplinary action.”

To test their theory, the researchers showed 40 undergraduate students, all of whom planned to become K-12 teachers, photos of black and white men and women expressing emotions, and asked the participants to identify the relevant emotions the photos depicted. Additionally, they showed the prospective teachers videos of black and white boys engaged in inappropriate behavior for a school setting — such as tossing a classmate’s work in the trash or heckling another student’s presentation — and asked them to describe the relative hostility of those students.

According to the study’s findings, the future teachers were 1.5 times more likely to be accurate at interpreting emotions in the faces of white men and women compared to the faces of black men and women. Additionally, the participants demonstrated a higher propensity to misjudge non-angry black faces as angry than they did for non-angry white faces.

Most strikingly, the results were exaggerated in that the black adult faces were three times more likely to be judged as angry compared to the white adult faces, even when they were not. Similarly, the prospective teachers attributed significantly more hostility to the black boys in the videos than they did to the white boys. For example, on a 5-point scale ranging from 1 (not hostile at all) to 5 (very hostile), the respondents gave an average rating of 3.37 for black boys’ behaviors, while giving white boys a 2.12 rating for similar behaviors.

Could Marijuana Be Used To Stop Brain Aging ?

(Photo of marijuana plants is from The Daily Dot.)

Here's some exciting news about another possible medical use for marijuana. This
is part of article is from Forbes.com, and was written by David DiSalvo.

Since the legalization movement began hitting full stride, new research discoveries about marijuana’s potential health benefits have been surfacing with regularity. Among the most recent, a study shows that the psychoactive chemical in marijuana, THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), restores cognitive function in the brains of mice by rolling back the aging process.

The study builds from a theory that the brain’s endocannabinoid system (home of the receptors that THC binds to) is related to cognitive aging and decline. The older we get, the more the activity in this system slows down; our brains gradually produce fewer naturally occurring endocannabinoids. The outcomes from this slowdown aren’t entirely understood, but there’s enough evidence from animal models to suggest that it’s tied to memory loss and decreased learning ability.

"With increasing age, the quantity of the cannabinoids naturally formed in the brain reduces," quoting Professor Andreas Zimmer, one of the study’s authors. "When the activity of the cannabinoid system declines, we find rapid aging in the brain."

So, if it’s possible to somehow recharge the system, it could be possible to reverse or at least reduce the cognitive slowdown. That’s what the researchers tried with old mice, and the results were remarkable. When they studied the brain tissue and gene activity of the mice after a low-dose THC treatment, they found that the genetic signature no longer looked like that of old mice, but of very young mice. And they found increased nerve links in the brain tissue, which correlates with learning and thinking speed.

Again quoting Zimmer, “It looked as though the THC treatment turned back the molecular clock.”

Scapegoating The Mentally Ill Is NOT The Solution

After the recent school shooting, this time at a community college in Oregon, the Republicans (at the behest of the NRA) is once again floating the same old tired excuses and "solutions". They are calling for more guns (on campuses and everywhere else -- and they are again demonizing the mentally ill.

More guns is just stupid -- considering we already have more than 300 million guns floating around in our society (nearly enough for every man, woman, and child in this country to have a gun). And while I do believe we need to give the mentally ill more help in this country, it will not solve our epidemic of gun violence. We (actually the Republicans) have cut far too much from programs to help the mentally ill, but the truth is that very little of the gun violence in the U.S. is done by those with mental problems. Most are not violent -- and in fact, are more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators.

Consider the following article by Amy Wolf, writing for Vanderbilt University. She discusses research done by Jonathan Metzl (above left) and Kenneth MacLeish (above right) at Vanderbilt on this issue. Their article, "Mental Illness, Mass Shootings and the Politics of American Firearms", was published in the February edition of the American Journal of Public Health. Here is part of what Ms. Wolf writes:

Mentally ill not violent

In the article, “Mental Illness, Mass Shootings and the Politics of American Firearms,” Metzl and MacLeish analyze data and literature linking guns and mental illness over the past 40 years. They found that despite societal pre-conceived notions, most mentally ill people are not violent.

“Fewer than 5 percent of the 120,000 gun-related killings in the United States between 2001 and 2010 were perpetrated by people diagnosed with mental illness,” they write.

Four myths arise after mass shootings

Their research uncovered four central myths that arise in the aftermath of mass shootings:

• Mental illness causes gun violence.
• Psychiatric diagnosis can predict gun crime before it happens.
• U.S. mass shootings “prove” that we should fear mentally ill loners.
• Because of the complex psychiatric histories of mass shooters, gun control “won’t prevent” mass shootings.

They stress that all four of these are incorrect, though understandable, assumptions.

“Our research finds that across the board, the mentally ill are 60 to 120 percent more likely than the average person to be the victims of violent crime rather than the perpetrators.”

Misdirected blame

Metzl and MacLeish find that the focus on mental illness after horrific, yet statistically rare, mass shootings misdirects people from the bigger issues tied to preventing gun deaths in the United States.

“There are 32,000 gun deaths in the United States on average every year, and people are far more likely to be shot by relatives, friends or acquaintances than they are by lone violent psychopaths,” Metzl said.

“We should set our attention and gun policies on the everyday shootings, not on the sensational shootings, because there we will get much more traction in preventing gun crime.”

Mental health screening can’t prevent gun crime

The presumed link between mental illness and gun violence has led to calls for mental health screening for gun owners. But the authors find that psychiatric diagnosis is in and of itself not predictive of violence.

“Even the overwhelming majority of psychiatric patients who fit the profile of recent U.S. mass shooters – gun-owning, angry, paranoid white men – do not commit crimes,” Metzl and MacLeish write.

“Basing gun crime-prevention efforts on the mental health histories of mass shooters risks building ‘common evidence’ from ‘uncommon things,’ all while giving mental health providers the untenable responsibility of preventing the next massacre.”

Signs to predict gun violence

The authors detail how focusing solely on mental illness ignores those factors that do predict gun violence more broadly:

• Drug and alcohol use
• History of violence
• Access to firearms
• Personal relationship stress

“People are far more likely to be shot by relatives, friends, enemies or acquaintances than they are by lone violent psychopaths,” according to Metzl and MacLeish’s research.

New Cancer Breakthrough Stops Growth Of Cancer Cells

(This image of differing types of cancer cells is from MedicineNet.com.)

Researchers at Florida's Mayo Clinic has made an astounding discovery. They have discovered a way to stop the growth of cancer cells and turn them into harmless benign cells. Here is how Sarah Knapton, science editor of The Telegraph, describes the new discovery:

Cancer cells have been programmed back to normal by scientists in a breakthrough which could lead to new treatments and even reverse tumour growth. 

For the first time aggressive breast, lung and bladder cancer cells have been turned back into harmless benign cells by restoring the function which prevents them from multiplying excessively and forming dangerous growths. 

Scientists at the Mayo Clinic in Florida, US, said it was like applying the brakes to a speeding car. 

So far it has only been tested on human cells in the lab, but the researchers are hopeful that the technique could one day be used to target tumours so that cancer could be ‘switched off’ without the need for harsh chemotherapy or surgery. 

"We should be able to re-establish the brakes and restore normal cell function,” said Profesor Panos Anastasiadis, of the Department for Cancer Biology. 

“Initial experiments in some aggressive types of cancer are indeed very promising. 

“It represents an unexpected new biology that provides the code, the software for turning off cancer." 

Cells need to divide constantly to replace themselves. But in cancer the cells do not stop dividing leading to huge cell reproduction and tumour growth. 

The scientists discovered that the glue which holds cells together is regulated by biological microprocessors called microRNAs. When everything is working normally the microRNAs instruct the cells to stop dividing when they have replicated sufficiently. They do this by triggering production of a protein called PLEKHA7 which breaks the cell bonds. But in cancer that process does not work. 

Scientists discovered they could switch on cancer in cells by removing the microRNAs from cells and preventing them from producing the protein. 

And, crucially they found that they could reverse the process switching the brakes back on and stopping cancer. MicroRNAs are small molecules which can be delivered directly to cells or tumours so an injection to increase levels could switch off disease.

“We have now done this in very aggressive human cell lines from breast and bladder cancer,” added Dr Anastasiadis. 

“These cells are already missing PLEKHA7. Restoring either PLEKHA7 levels, or the levels of microRNAs in these cells turns them back to a benign state. We are now working on better delivery options.” 

Cancer experts in Britain said the research solved a riddle that biologists had puzzled over for decades, why cells did not naturally prevent the proliferation of cancer. 

“This is an unexpected finding,” said Dr Chris Bakal, a specialist in how cells change shape to become cancerous, at the Institute for Cancer Research in London. 

“We have been trying to work out how normal cells might be suppressing cancer, and stopping dividing when they form contacts with each other, which has been a big mystery. 

“Normal cells touch each other and form junctions then they shut down proliferation. If there is a way to turn that back on then that would be a way to stop tumours from growing. 

“I think in reality it is unlikely that you could reverse tumours by reversing just one mechanism, but it’s a very interesting finding.” 

Henry Scowcroft, Cancer Research UK’s senior science information manager, said: “This important study solves a long-standing biological mystery, but we mustn’t get ahead of ourselves. 

“There’s a long way to go before we know whether these findings, in cells grown in a laboratory, will help treat people with cancer. But it’s a significant step forward in understanding how certain cells in our body know when to grow, and when to stop. Understanding these key concepts is crucial to help continue the encouraging progress against cancer we’ve seen in recent years.” 

The research was published in the journal Nature Cell Biology.

Research Shows Marijuana Is The Least Dangerous Drug

I probably sound like a broken record talking about marijuana not being a dangerous drug. So today, I give you the words of Christopher Ingraham in The Washington Post. He says:

Compared with other recreational drugs — including alcohol — marijuana may be even safer than previously thought. And researchers may be systematically underestimating risks associated with alcohol use.

Those are the top-line findings of recent research published in the journal Scientific Reports, a subsidiary of Nature. Researchers sought to quantify the risk of death associated with the use of a variety of commonly used substances. They found that at the level of individual use, alcohol was the deadliest substance, followed by heroin and cocaine.

And all the way at the bottom of the list? Weed — roughly 114 times less deadly than booze, according to the authors, who ran calculations that compared lethal doses of a given substance with the amount that a typical person uses. Marijuana is also the only drug studied that posed a low mortality risk to its users.

These findings reinforce drug-safety rankings developed 10 years ago under a slightly different methodology. So in that respect, the study is more of a reaffirmation of previous findings than anything else. But given the current national and international debates over the legal status of marijuana and the risks associated with its use, the study arrives at a good time. . .

What is unique is how these substances are treated under the law, and particularly the way in which alcohol and nicotine essentially get a free pass under the Controlled Substances Act, the cornerstone of the nation's drug policy. This study's authors note that legislative classifications of psychoactive drugs often "lack a scientific basis," and their findings are confirmation of this fact.

Given the relative risks associated with marijuana and alcohol, the authors recommend "risk management prioritization towards alcohol and tobacco rather than illicit drugs." And they say that when it comes to marijuana, the low amounts of risk associated with the drug "suggest a strict legal regulatory approach rather than the current prohibition approach."

In other words, individuals and organizations up in arms over marijuana legalization could have a greater effect on the health and well-being of this country by shifting their attention to alcohol and cigarettes. It takes extraordinary chutzpah to rail against the dangers of marijuana use by day and then go home to unwind with a glass of far more lethal stuff in the evening.

Are Gun Owners Really Safer? Researchers Say No!

(The image above is from the website genius.com.)

One of the biggest ideas proposed by the NRA is that gun ownership will make a person safer -- and they even go so far as to say that the more guns there are in our society, the safer all Americans will be (because a "good guy" with a gun can protect us from a "bad guy" with a gun). That may sound logical to those who want to believe that, but research doesn't bear it out. The truth is that owning a gun makes your life more dangerous, not less dangerous. Here is how Amber Hall (of The Takeaway on PRI) puts it in an article for msn.com:

Back in the early 1990s, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control provided funding for studies on gun violence. The NRA was not pleased.

“[Our research] underwent peer review and was thought to be very solid and worthwhile research,” says Dr. Fred Rivara, who was part of the team that researched gun violence. “The CDC stood by our research — they had funded it and they stood by it. Unfortunately, it raised the attention of the National Rifle Association, who then worked with pro-gun members of Congress to essentially stop funding firearm research.”

Rivara, a professor of pediatrics and epidemiology at the University of Washington at Seattle Children's Hospital, discovered that having a gun in the home is associated with a threefold increase in the risk of a homicide.

“The most common reason that people have a gun is because they have it for home protection,” he says. “Unfortunately, the data indicates that having a gun is associated with both an increased risk of homicide, but even more importantly, an increased risk of suicide. We know that, for example, if there’s a gun in the home, the risk of suicide among adolescents and young adults increases tenfold.”

Back in 1993, Rivara and his colleagues released this information in a series of articlesthat appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the most highly respected medical journals in the world. The NRA quickly went after the research — as well as Rivara and his colleagues.

Rivara says 10 pro-gun senators worked to get the ear of Arlen Specter, then a senator from Pennsylvania and chairman of the Health and Human Services Committee.

“[Specter] approached the Centers for Disease and Control and discussed the idea that this research was biased,” says Rivara. Congress “ended up cutting the CDC budget by the exact amount of money that was used to fund the gun research. They had first threatened to cut all of the funding for injury research at the CDC. They didn’t do that, but they ended up cutting it by the exact amount that was spent on gun research.”

And that wasn't all. “More importantly, however, was that they put a clause for the appropriations of the CDC that essentially blocked all gun research for the next two decades," Rivara says.

The CDC budget cuts all but ended federal gun research. Dr. Arthur Kellerman, who also worked on the 1993 study, stated in a December 2012 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association that “no federal employee was willing to risk his or her career or the agency's funding to find out” if any gun research could be done. "Support for firearm injury prevention research quickly dried up.”

The NRA also wrote to the National Institutes of Health to request that the Office of Scientific Integrity review the research published by Rivara, Kellerman and their colleagues.

“That’s a big deal,” says Rivara. “There’s only two or three of these that are done each year, and it’s basically questioning our credentials as scientists and saying that we had lied or falsified our research. Fortunately, the NIH did not find any basis for that and the CDC backed us up. But it was really chilling in terms of our ability to conduct research on this very important problem.”

But while Rivara calls that period "a frightening time," he does admit it had a silver lining: “It was also good because it told us that we were doing important work."

Researchers Expose The Lies Of The NRA

The National Rifle Association (NRA) has been able to block any kind of reasonable gun legislation in this country. They have done it wit propaganda and outright lies (and by buying off enough members of Congress to block legislation).

The NRA wants Americans to believe that the more guns that are on the streets the safer our streets will be, and that having a gun in the home makes those living in that home safer. Neither of those two things is true. And neither are the myriad other lies being put forth by the NRA.

The charts above (from Mother Jones) expose those NRA lies. Those charts were made from a survey done by a Harvard University research group. The survey was not done of the general public, but of more than 100 researchers who have done studies on guns and their availability in this country, and the results of that availability. These researchers aren't giving their opinion, but what the results of their research has shown.

More than 30,000 people die a death from guns in this country every year -- and the sad fact is that many of those deaths could be prevented. And they could be prevented without violating the Constitution's Second Amendment. A good start would be to close the loopholes in the background check law. There is no reason for anyone to be able to buy a gun without first clearing a background check -- even at gun shows, on the internet, and in a private sale by an individual.

The NRA, once a proud organization representing honest and decent gun owners, has become nothing more than a mouthpiece and lobbyist for the gun manufacturers. They don't care about American lives, as long as they can increase gun sales for their masters. It is time to stop believing their outrageous lies -- and to pass some legislation to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and the dangerously mentally ill.

Study Shows Reasonable Gun Laws Prevent Gun Deaths

(This cartoon is from the blog called Nasty Jack.)

One would have thought the evidence was already clear. The United States has nearly one gun  for every man, woman, and child in the country -- far more than any other civilized nation. And the United States leads all other developed nations in the number of gun deaths each year, averaging more than 30,000 gun deaths a year. To a reasonable person, that first fact is obviously the cause of the second.

But the NRA, on behalf of the gun manufacturers, has spent millions of dollars to convince Americans that just the opposite is true -- that the more guns there are in a society, the safer that society is. It's a ridiculous argument and is not supported by any facts (but just the lies and propaganda of the NRA and right-wing gun lovers), but it has been effective -- probably because gun owners love their guns and are willing to accept any specious argument that justifies that love.

Now there is a new study that exposes the NRA lie. Researchers will soon public the study (regarding what happened in Missouri when restrictions on gun ownership were removed) in the Journal of Urban Health. Here is how the BBC describes the study:

Researchers claim a new study provides some of the most compelling evidence yet for tighter gun controls in the US.

The team followed the consequences of the State of Missouri repealing its permit-to-purchase handgun law in 2007.

The law had required purchasers to be vetted by the local sheriff and to receive a licence before buying a gun.

Reporting soon in the Journal of Urban Health, the researchers will say that the repeal resulted in an immediate spike in gun violence and murders.

The study links the abandonment of the background check to an additional 60 or so murders occurring per year in Missouri between 2008 and 2012.

"Coincident exactly with the policy change, there was an immediate upward trajectory to the homicide rates in Missouri," said Prof Daniel Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research.

"That upward trajectory did not happen with homicides that did not involve guns; it did not occur to any neighbouring state; the national trend was doing the opposite – it was trending downward; and it was not specific to one or two localities – it was, for the most part, state-wide," he told BBC News.

The team said it took account of changes that occurred in policing levels and incarceration rates, trends in burglaries, and statistically controlled for other possible confounding factors such as shifts in unemployment and poverty.

What was stark, added Prof Webster, was the rise in the number of handguns that subsequently found their way into the hands of criminals.

The team counted a doubling of handguns shortly after sale being recovered from scenes of crimes or from criminals.

The crazy part of all this is that no one in either party is advocating taking guns away from law-abiding citizens in this country. All that has been proposed is reasonable laws that will keep guns out of the hands of criminals (and others who have shown themselves to be dangerous). Laws that the Supreme Court have already ruled are constitutional, and not a violation of Second Amendment rights.

I am a progressive, but that does not mean I want guns banned, or taken away from law-abiding citizens. I support the Constitution, including the Second Amendment (which does gives individuals the right to own firearms). But the Second Amendment is not absolute (just like free speech and other rights are not necessarily absolutes). There are those in our society who have demonstrated they cannot be trusted to own a gun (criminals and the dangerously mentally ill). Can't we at least pass laws that won't allow these people to legally purchase a gun. As the study discussed above shows, these laws do work to save lives.

Having A Mother Using Cocaine Doesn't Hurt Kids Nearly As Much As Poverty & Violence

(This image is from the webpage of the Institute of Jewish Education.)

Back in the 1980's the use of cocaine, especially crack cocaine, was rampant (some even saying it was an epidemic). And one of the ways used to fight that drug use was to point out how bad the use of that drug was for women expecting a child. A whole mythology was built up around the idea of "crack babies" -- children born of mothers using cocaine, whose lives would be ruined because of that by having a lifetime of health and educational problems.

In 1989, Hallam Hurt, chair of neonatology at the Albert Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia, decided a scientific study was needed to define the risks of expectant mothers using cocaine. Hurt started a long-term study of this issue by choosing 224 near or full-term babies born in that hospital between 1989 and 1992. Half of those babies had mothers who had used cocaine while pregnant, and half had mothers who avoided drug use while pregnant.

Hurt had expected to find that the children born of cocaine users would exhibit significant problems in growing up. But an odd thing happened. Hurt found after studying those children for years that there was no significant difference between the children in the two different groups. The children with cocaine-using mothers showed no more health or educational problems than the children in the other group. The stories of "crack babies" having more problems turned out to be just a myth.

Now you may be thinking that this was just one study, and maybe that study had been flawed in one way or another. But two other similar studies were done -- one by Claire Coles, a psychiatry professor at Emory University, and the other by Deborah A Frank, a pediatrics professor at Boston University. And both those studies reached the same conclusion.

But this does not mean that nothing affects the health and education of children. All three of those studies found a couple of factors that significantly affected the well-being of children -- poverty and an early exposure to violence. These two problems affect the health and education of children more negatively than anything else.

Maybe it's time this nation stopped wasting huge amounts of money (more than a trillion dollars so far) on the failed "war on drugs", and start using that money to attack our real problems -- poverty and violence.

Marriage Equality Can't Be Stopped

The battle for same-sex marriage equality has been a long and hard one, and there are still battles to be waged on behalf of it -- but the war may already have been won. At least that's the opinion of a couple of respected pollsters (and a huge majority of Americans).

Jan van Lohuizen of Voter Consumer Research (pollster for George W. Bush) and Joel Benenson of Benenson Strategy Group (pollster for Barack Obama) conducted a study on the changing American attitudes toward same-sex marriage. They studied the exit polls from the 2012 election. In their report released on March 7th of this year, they concluded that the opponents of same-sex marriage are becoming "increasingly isolated within narrow demographic groups while a much broader and more diverse majority are ready to let same-sex couples marry."

While the support for same-sex marriage in the general public is only about 53% right now (with opposition to DOMA even higher at 59%), about 83% of the general public believes that it will be legal nationally in 5 to 10 years. And while most Republicans still oppose it, that opposition is dwindling, as a majority of Republicans under 30 years-old support the legalization of same-sex marriage (51% to 46%).

Here are the remaining groups still opposed to that legalization of same-sex marriage:

Republicans opposing teabaggers...............47% to 52%
Republicans neutral to teabaggers...............34% to 62%
Republicans supporting tea baggers...............13% to 84%
White non-college graduates...............40% to 56%
White evangelical christians...............24% to 73%
Voters over age 65...............37% to 58%

And here are the groups supporting legalization of same-sex marriage:

Voters under age 65...............52% to 44%
White non-evangelical protestants...............54% to 43%
White catholics...............53% to 43%
Hispanic catholics...............54% to 35%
African-American non-evangelical...............65% to 31%
Jewish...............78% to 21%
Non-white non-college graduates...............54% to 38%
White college graduates...............56% to 41%
Non-white college graduates...............58% to 35%
Democrats...............68% to 27%
Independents...............54% to 40%
Republicans under age 30...............51% to 46%
Whites under age 65...............50% to 46%
African-Americans under age 65...............51% to 40%
Hispanics under age 65...............60% to 31%
All voters except white evangelicals...............58% to 36%

Benenson and van Lohuizen then reach the following conclusion (which I wholeheartedly agree with):

Given all the above data, and other data and trends we've seen, it is clear that opponents of the freedom to marry are both on the wrong side of a majority of Americans and on the wrong side of history. 

New (And Scary) Global Warming Chart

Previous attempts to reconstruct global temperatures have only gone back a little over 1,500 years (illustrated by the gray areas on the chart above). The study could not go further back because it relied on a study of tree rings to study the climate change. It showed that global temperatures have risen very sharply in the last few decades. This was good evidence of global warming, but it was attacked by global warming deniers who said that the Earth had warmed before and this was a natural occurrence (not due to human over-consumption of fossil fuels).

But there is now a new study that was done on global temperatures in the past. Because it relies on studies of fossilized ocean shells (instead of tree rings), this study is able to document global temperatures for the last 11,500 years (the purple line on the chart). And this is far enough back to include the last time the Earth experienced a warming trend. That period started about 11,000 years ago, and began cooling back down about 5,000 years ago. It took at least 4,000 years for that warming trend to reach its peak temperature (around 7,000 years ago).

This does show that the Earth has warmed in the past, but that was never in dispute. But while the Earth took at least 4,000 years to warm in the past, we are now exceeding those past temperatures -- and we have done it in only a few decades. If the current warming trend was caused by natural forces, we could expect it to take many thousands of years. The fact that we have risen that same amount in only a few decades is pretty conclusive proof that the current warming trend has been caused by humans (who are rapidly increasing greenhouse gases through massive burning of fossil fuels producing massive amounts of CO2).

That's pretty scary. But even scarier is the fact that we, so far, have done nothing to stem the tide of greenhouse gas production -- or taken any other action to slow the warming. There is no doubt that we will exceed the previous level of warming (which took thousands of years) by a significant margin -- and we will do that before the year 2050. Without dramatic action to stop this warming, it is unimaginable to think how high this warming could get to by the end of this century.

The evidence is in. There is significant global warming, and it is man-made. The time for debate is over. The time for action is here.

A Gun In The Home Increases The Danger

(The cartoon above is by Steve Sack in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.)

Back in the early 1990s the Center for Disease Control (CDC) was conducting a study of gun violence in the United States. But that scared the hell out of the NRA, because the CDC was a respected organization and if they told the truth about guns the public might believe them. So the NRA lobbied their friends in Congress (the ones they had bought), and in 1996 all the funds were cut off for the CDC study by Congress.

What was scaring the NRA. Well, some preliminary findings had been discovered, and it didn't support what the NRA was preaching -- that more guns mean more safety. The folks over at The Raw Story decided to find out what the CDC had discovered before their funds were cut off. They talked with Dr. Mark Rosenberg, who had led the research on gun violence back in the 1990s. Here is some of what Dr. Rosenberg had to say:

One of the critical studies that we supported was looking at the question of whether having a firearm in your home protects you or puts you at increased risk. This was a very important question because people who want to sell more guns say that having a gun in your home is the way to protect your family.

What the research showed was not only did having a firearm in your home not protect you, but it hugely increased the risk that someone in your family would die from a firearm homicide. It increased the risk almost 300 percent, almost three times as high.

It also showed that the risk that someone in your home would commit suicide went up. It went up five-fold if you had a gun in the home. These are huge, huge risks, and to just put that in perspective, we look at a risk that someone might get a heart attack or that they might get a certain type of cancer, and if that risk might be 20 percent greater, that may be enough to ban a certain drug or a certain product.

But in this case, we’re talking about a risk not 20 percent, not 100 percent, not 200 percent, but almost 300 percent or 500 percent. These are huge, huge risks.

The Truth About Marijuana

If you've read this blog for very long, then you will know that I firmly believe marijuana is a harmless drug that should be legalized -- both for medical and for recreational use by adults. It makes no sense that we should continue to make criminals of people simply for possessing or smoking marijuana -- an action that doesn't hurt them or anyone else. In addition, legalizing marijuana would create jobs, spur the economy, and give a new and very lucrative tax opportunity for all levels of government.

In other words, there is no downside to legalizing marijuana. But that is not what the government wants us to believe. Our government has been lying to us for decades to try and justify keeping marijuana illegal, when the truth is that there is no rational justification for it. In an effort to get some ammunition for their criminalization of marijuana, the government has even funded several studies on marijuana. But you probably haven't heard the results of those studies, because the government didn't publicize the results.

That was because the results of those studies didn't show what the government had hoped they would show. Instead, they showed that pot is not addictive, does not lead to the use of other drugs, and is not dangerous to the user. Some of the studies have shown that marijuana does have valid medical uses -- and at least three show that marijuana could even prevent or cure cancer!

Now, a reasonable government that cared about its citizens would have expanded and publicized these studies. Our government has not done that. It continues to spread lies about marijuana to justify its own misguided and failed policy criminalizing that harmless herb. I think these days there is just too much money invested in the war on marijuana -- and too many people are making money off that ridiculous war. They don't want to give up their money-making war (including many police agencies in this country) and will fight to see that the money keeps coming.

It is time to expose the lies, and fight for a reasonable drug policy -- by legalizing marijuana (and designating the use of other drugs as the medical problem that it really is). I urge you to read the truth about marijuana, and a good place to start is with this article on the Top 10 Cannabis Studies The Government Wishes It Had Never Funded.

More Guns Just Means More Death

(The cartoon above is by David Fitzsimmons in the Arizona Daily Star.)

We haven't heard a peep out of the NRA since the murder of 20 school children and six school employees. They've even taken their Facebook page down. Maybe they know there is no way to defend some of the positions they've taken, or maybe they're just too embarrassed at the outcome of their policies. But some of their friends on the gun-loving right have spoken up, and they don't seem to mind dishonoring those killed with one of the biggest lies of all time -- that all we need to stop the mass shootings is more guns in our society (like 270 million guns aren't enough in the USA).

It's people like Rep. Louie Gohmert (Texas' resident idiot) who are trying to spread this nonsense. He seems to think the answer is to arm principles and teachers. And he and his friends want everyone to know that the places with the most guns are the safest places. That obviously doesn't work on a national scale, since the United States has more guns than any other country -- and also the most gun deaths. And according to a recent review of several studies on this, it doesn't work on the state level either.

That review was done by the Harvard University School of Public Health's Injury Control Research Center. Basically, they found that the more guns there are, the more homicides there will be. Here are the four conclusions they reached:

1. Where there are more guns there is more homicide (literature review).

Our review of the academic literature found that a broad array of evidence indicates that gun availability is a risk factor for homicide, both in the United States and across high-income countries.  Case-control studies, ecological time-series and cross-sectional studies indicate that in homes, cities, states and regions in the US, where there are more guns, both men and women are at higher risk for homicide, particularly firearm homicide.

Hepburn, Lisa; Hemenway, David. Firearm availability and homicide: A review of the literature. Aggression and Violent Behavior: A Review Journal. 2004; 9:417-40. 

2. Across high-income nations, more guns = more homicide.

We analyzed the relationship between homicide and gun availability using data from 26 developed countries from the early 1990s.  We found that across developed countries, where guns are more available, there are more homicides. These results often hold even when the United States is excluded.

Hemenway, David; Miller, Matthew. Firearm availability and homicide rates across 26 high income countries.Journal of Trauma. 2000; 49:985-88.

3. Across states, more guns = more homicide

Using a validated proxy for firearm ownership, we analyzed the relationship between firearm availability and homicide across 50 states over a ten year period (1988-1997).

After controlling for poverty and urbanization, for every age group, people in states with many guns have elevated rates of homicide, particularly firearm homicide.

Miller, Matthew; Azrael, Deborah; Hemenway, David. Household firearm ownership levels and homicide rates across U.S. regions and states, 1988-1997. American Journal of Public Health. 2002: 92:1988-1993.

4. Across states, more guns = more homicide (2)

Using survey data on rates of household gun ownership, we examined the association between gun availability and homicide across states, 2001-2003. We found that states with higher levels of household gun ownership had higher rates of firearm homicide and overall homicide.  This relationship held for both genders and all age groups, after accounting for rates of aggravated assault, robbery, unemployment, urbanization, alcohol consumption, and resource deprivation (e.g., poverty). There was no association between gun prevalence and non-firearm homicide. 

Miller, Matthew; Azrael, Deborah; Hemenway, David. State-level homicide victimization rates in the U.S. in relation to survey measures of household firearm ownership, 2001-2003. Social Science and Medicine. 2007; 64:656-64.