I never thought I’d write this. The best analysis of both Republicans and Democrats I’ve read in a long time comes from AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, reported here at the Daily Beast by Michael Tomasky:

His posture toward Trump is not one of total opposition. He’s skeptical and suspicious, certainly. In addition to thinking Trump has gone Wall Street as president, Trumka fears that Trump will gut labor safety regulations and thinks he probably can’t bring jobs back to the coal fields in huge numbers. That said, he’s mindful of the fact that Trump spoke compellingly to a portion of his rank and file, so he’s keeping a semi-open mind. “We’re just telling [members] every day what he’s doing to help them or hurt them,” he says. “If he does something to help ’em I say it. If he does something to hurt ’em I say it. They can decide for themselves who’s friend and who’s foe.”

and

“The Democratic Party quite frankly had no coherent economic message,” he said. “Workers have been facing stagnant wages, dropping benefits, and economic security being taken away from them over a 40-year period. Trump said a lot of stuff—hasn’t followed through on it, but said it, and they were willing to take a chance.”

The problems, he said, started under Bill Clinton. “I think that was the beginning of the schizophrenic days, when they needed workers’ votes but wanted Wall Street money, so they tried to serve two masters but were successful at neither,” says Trumka.
But didn’t Bill Clinton do a number of good things? I mean, 22 million jobs?
“People still weren’t getting wage increases,” he says. “The economy was still moving away from us.”

Read the whole thing. And I fully endorse this:

“The economic message should hold everybody together,” he says, “so that when you say ‘this person’s a Democrat,’ three or four things come to mind. And it shouldn’t be this or that social issue, it should be economics.”

I strongly suspect that he and I would differ on what those “three or four things” should be but I agree that they should all be economic policies.

My single greatest dissatisfaction with the Democrats under Barack Obama is that by March 2009 they had turned their focus away from the economy, never to return.

That the Democratic leadership has made some errors is a matter of empirical fact. It can be measured in the number of Senate seats held, the number of House seats held, the number of state legislative houses with Democratic majorities, and the number of Democratic governors. I think the gravest error is not focusing on the economy.

Sci-News reports on a pair of studies that may have implications for a number of chronic auto-immune conditions, especially chronic pain conditions. It may be that some people have a heightened ability to remember “negative images” and there may be a connection between that ability and the immune system:

Researchers from the University of Basel, ETH Zurich, Ulm University, Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry, German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, and Universities of Konstanz, Cologne, Bonn and Leipzig, have now carried out two studies that demonstrate that this link between the immune system and brain is more significant than previously believed.

In the first study, reported in the journal Nature Communication, the researchers searched for epigenetic profiles, i.e. regulatory patterns, in the blood of 533 healthy young adults.

In their genome-wide search, the authors identified an epigenetic profile that is strongly correlated with the thickness of the cerebral cortex, in particular in a region of the brain that is important for memory functions.

This finding was replicated in a sample comprising 596 participants. It also showed that it is specifically those genes that are responsible for the regulation of important immune functions in the blood that explain the link between the epigenetic profile and the properties of the brain.

In the second study, published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, the team studied the genomes of healthy participants who remembered negative images particularly well or particularly poorly.

A variant of the TROVE2 gene, whose role in immunological diseases is currently being investigated, was linked to participants’ ability to remember a particularly high number of negative images, while their general memory remained unaffected.

This variant also led to increased activity in specific regions of the brain that are important for the memory of emotional experiences.

The researchers also discovered that the TROVE2 gene is linked to the strength of traumatic memories.

I’ve explained my own circumstances to people as remembering every injury I’ve ever received and it sounds like it’s possible that characterization isn’t far from the truth.

I have been asked to grade President Trump’s first 100 days as president. Most such assessments are the opposite of analysis. They take a gut feeling and back analysis out of it.

What criteria should I use in making my evaluation and how should I weight them? The criteria that occur to me immediately are foreign policy, domestic policy, managing the transition, unifying the country, more or less in order of weight.

What else should I take into account? And what should their relative weights be?

There has been almost no end of complaints about how awful a president Donald Trump is. Unqualified. An oaf. Conflicts of interest. Nepotism. Russian influence. He didn’t release his tax returns. At Bloomberg View, in his catalogue of how bad the first 100 days of the Trump presidency has been, Jonathan Bernstein includes an insightful observation:

Republican party actors should have done whatever it took to defeat his nomination when they had the chance. Nominations matter, and none more so than the presidential nomination, and they are worth fighting — hard — over.

I would agree with it except for one thing. Is there actually anything that Republican party leaders could have done to prevent Trump’s securing the nomination?

I think they could have dissuaded any of the members of the very large field of candidates they cared to. That would have required them to unify behind one candidate early on. Who?

More than any president of my memory, Trump has been a self-made candidate. He was largely self-financing. There was no rallying ’round by Republican leaders, many of whom openly disdained him. They didn’t “fall in line” as Bill Clinton put it.

What steps on the part of the RNC could have prevented Donald Trump from securing the nominations? What could have prevented him from being elected president?

Here’s an interesting story from Nature. Apparently, researchers are beginning to mine the dirt of ancient caves for human DNA:

Bones and teeth aren’t the only ways to learn about extinct human relatives. For the first time, researchers have recovered ancient-human DNA without having obvious remains — just dirt from the caves the hominins lived in. The technique opens up a new way to probe prehistory.

From sediments in European and Asian caves, a team led by geneticist Viviane Slon and molecular biologist Matthias Meyer, both at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, sequenced genomes of cell structures called mitochondria from Neanderthals and another hominin group, the Denisovans. Their work is published in Science.

That highlights a point I think I’ve made before about treasure-hunters. Schliemann wasn’t a scientist or a hero. He was a vandal.

In his column today in the Washington Post David Ignatius considers the case of Gen. Michael Flynn, presently being investigated for accepting payments from foreign companies closely tied with their governments and lying about it. Basically, my take on it conforms with his: spooks and generals don’t know how to behave when they come out in in the light of day.

Senior command is a world unto itself. The tribal culture that envelops all our military and intelligence personnel is especially tight for our most secret warriors. They sometimes miss the signals that life outside will be different.

Flynn certainly got a clear warning when he left the military after serving as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. On Thursday, the Pentagon released a letter he received Oct. 8, 2014, about “the ethics restrictions that apply to you after your retirement.” The instructions listed eight areas of “post-employment restrictions,” including an obligation to get approval for any foreign compensation.

Flynn apparently cruised through that red light when he accepted $45,000 for speaking to the Russian government’s television-propaganda channel in 2015, and when he received more than $500,000 in 2016 from a firm with close ties to the Turkish government. Flynn retroactively registered as a foreign-government representative for work on behalf of Turkey that occurred on the eve of Donald Trump’s election and Flynn’s selection as national security adviser.

It’s unclear whether Flynn disclosed these foreign-government payments and other foreign contacts, as required, in renewing his security clearances at the White House, where he oversaw the nation’s most sensitive, compartmented programs. Failure to reveal such information can sometimes violate Section 1001 of the U.S. criminal code, known as the “false statements” provision.

As well as I can tell it’s being dealt with appropriately. It’s being investigated and the investigation may well lead to legal action.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal pervert the language to describe a laissez-faire approach to major carriers as “net neutrality”:

One of President Trump’s more ambitious appointees is Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai, who on Wednesday unveiled an outline for rolling back Obama Administration rules that regulated the web like a 1890s railroad. Mr. Pai will be maligned by the left for undermining the “open internet,” but his plan would restore freedom and innovation that the federal government disrupted.

Mr. Pai in a speech at Washington’s Newseum sketched out a plan to untangle the 2015 “net neutrality” rules that classified the internet as a public utility under the Communications Act, a law carbon-dated to the 1930s. The rules give the FCC broad authority to dictate whether broadband practices are “reasonable.” Liberal pressure groups like Public Knowledge and Free Press said that nefarious cable companies might someday, somewhere block websites or slow browsing. Years later, no one can drum up an example.

That last sentence is untrue. Comcast is known to have throttled its customers’ access to certain sites. It was sued for it in Comcast Corp. v. FCC. Verizon has also done so but hasn’t been sued.

“Net neutrality” means that all traffic on the Internet is treated the same. There are several things that Internet service providers do to violate net neutrality: throttling and capping. “Throttling” mean a restriction on the speed of transfers including by site. “Capping” means setting limits on the amount of data that can be transferred also including on a by site basis.

Throttling or capping or the fear of them allows Internet service providers to sit athwart their Internet connections like the robber barons of old extracting tolls from content providers. When not prevented from doing so we can be confident they will because that’s what has happened in other countries. In Canada and many other countries around the world service providers both throttle and cap because they can.

I have no problem with either practice when they’re written into service contracts. I do when they aren’t. Internet service providers should provide the services they have contracted to provide.

Thirty years ago and more attempt after attempt at developing proprietary nationwide networks failed because they were proprietary. The Internet succeeded because it was open. Yes, that open quality helps big companies like Google, Facebook, or Netflix. Without an open Internet Google, Facebook, or Netflix would never have gotten big. The Internet service providers should not be allowed to determine what content you are able to access or what its cost should be.

Panera Bread has announced that it will be hiring an additional 10,000 delivery driver and in-store jobs as a consequence of something that some people might find surprising—automation:

ST. LOUIS, April 24, 2017 – Panera Bread (NASDAQ: PNRA) expects to add more than 10,000 new in-cafe and delivery driver jobs system-wide by the end of 2017 as it expands delivery service to 35-40 percent of its cafes by year end. Panera Delivery is the latest way Panera is meeting consumer demand for high quality food people can trust. Panera Delivery even further enhances the guest experience through industry-leading technology and Panera’s new delivery driver team.

“Panera is doing for delivery what we did for quick service – creating an elevated guest experience endto-end,” Ron Shaich, Panera founder, Chairman and CEO said. “In many places across the country, all that’s available for delivery is pizza or Chinese food. We’re closing the gap in delivery alternatives and creating a way for people to have more options for real food delivered to their homes and workplaces.”

That’s not exactly what I’ve had in mind when I’ve pointed out that automation has always resulted in an increase in jobs rather than a decrease but I’ll take it.

At Live Science Rachael Rettner has an article presenting the evidence that chronic fatigue syndrome is caused by an imbalance in gut bacteria:

People with chronic fatigue syndrome may have imbalances in their gut bacteria, a new study suggests.

The study found that people with chronic fatigue syndrome had higher levels of certain gut bacteria and lower levels of others compared to healthy people who didn’t have the condition.

The researchers then checked to see if these imbalances also characterized the subset of patients in the study who had irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), an intestinal disorder that is common in people with chronic fatigue syndrome. Results showed that patients did indeed have different patterns of gut bacteria disturbances depending on whether they had only chronic fatigue syndrome or both chronic fatigue syndrome and IBS.

There’s a lengthy list of conditions including chronic fatigue, irritable bowel syndrome, and fibromyalgia in which the patients experience more than one and possibly all of the symptoms for all of the conditions, there are no clinical signs, and the diagnosis frequently depends on what the patient is complaining of. If the patient complains about fatigue, he is diagnosed with CFS. If the patient complains of abdominal distress, she is diagnosed with IBS. And if the patient complains of pain, he or she is diagnosed with fibromyalgia. Despite the patient actually experiencing fatigue, abdominal distress, and pain.

In the 1940s through the 1950s Baby Boomers were given enormous doses of antibiotics. Just about any time they were sick they were given antibiotics. Under the circumstances what would be surprising is if they hadn’t experienced an upset in the balance of their intestinal flora.

Lately I’m seeing everything from obesity to Parkinson’s Disease being blamed on gut bacteria. Although that’s an improvement over blaming disease on sin (malingering, overeating, eating the wrong thing, etc.), there’s a risk of gut bacteria becoming the explanation du jour. The balance is probably somewhere in the middle.