Marat

Lemur raises a very interesting question with the case of the man who is misled into becoming involved in sexual relations by the promise that these will be continued to completion, but who is then frustrated when the promised completion is denied. He has been induced into allowing intimate contact on false pretenses, so his situation seems analogous to that of the woman who has been induced into permitting a man to have sex with her on the implied understanding that he does not have AIDS when in fact he does. But by the rules now generally used in common law jurisdictions, sex is only rape if the consenting but duped partner is induced to consent to the act on the basis of mistaken information about something which is physically harmful. But how much physical harm does there have to be? Does it have to be the physical harm of getting AIDS, getting a treatable STD, or just being severely sexually frustrated? This is a genuine gray area of the law.

There's an interesting borderline case between contract law and slavery in Warner Brothers v. Nelson (Bette Davis appeared before the court under her given surname in the hopes of protecting her anonymity). If a film company has a contract for the services of a particular person with irreplaceable characteristics, can it seek as a remedy for breach of contract to compel the actress to perform her personal services whether she wants to or not, or would this compulsion of work against a person's will amount to a form of slavery? In theory law seeks to compensate for damages only "insofar as money may do," but in breach of contract, where the labor services of someone are still available and no amount of money can really replicate the special value of the contract worker, the situation seems to demand some service more than money. And it seems not to be true slavery to compel those services, since they are owed only for the breach of a contract which the worker has voluntarily entered into prior to his or her breach.

There already exists a legal mechanism in common law jurisdictions for controlling campaigns like this to drive a bank out of business by calling for concerted withdrawal of funds on deposit with it. The so-called 'economic torts' allow companies to sue people who act to injure them merely out of malice and with no competitive business interest motivating their attacks. Thus if I open a shoe store next to yours and drive you out of business by selling shoes more cheaply than you do, that is fair competition and you can't sue me for it. But if I open a shoe store next to yours and give away shoes at great loss to myself for no other purpose than just to injure you financially out of spite then you can sue me for damages under the claim of an economic tort. So unless the person calling for a run on the bank is operating a competing bank, he would be committing an economic tort if he were making his statement in a common law jurisdiction. How a civil law jurisdiction like the Netherlands would handle this may be different, however.

In law any application of physical force or touching to another person without that person's consent is an assault, and if sexual, it is sexual assault or rape. At any point when one person in a continuing sexual interaction withdraws consent, if the other persists then the other person is committing rape. However, there are interesting ambiguous cases. In the 19th century a woman having sex with a man attempted to sue him for giving her a sexually transmitted disease, arguing that while she consented to having sex with him, she did not consent to getting an STD from him, which he knew he had but did not warn her about. The case failed on the legal principle of 'ex turpi causa non oritur actio,' or 'from an immoral cause no legal action can arise,' since the court would not allow the woman to use its aid to win a law suit given that she was committing adultery with the man, which was immoral. More recent cases have involved women consenting to sex with men who were suffering from AIDS but said nothing about that fact to their partners. The legal question was: Was the woman consenting to sex with the particular man or implicitly only to sex with a man who did not have AIDS? If you extend the latter point, what do you do about a situation in which a man meets a woman at a bar and tells her he is a wealthy heart surgeon and she consents to have sex with him, but he is in fact an unemployed house painter? Was her consent to sex with this particular man, whatever his profession, or to this man if and only if he is in fact a wealthy heart surgeon? This raises the question, do you have to be 100% honest with your sexual partners about everything and if not, is their consent to sex with you negated? The solution now adopted in some jurisdictions is to say that consent to sex is vitiated only if one partner conceals something essential about himself/herself which is potentially physically harmful to the other. The test has to be this strict since otherwise you would have absurdities like consent to sex being vitiated if you say you graduated from Princeton when in fact you only graduated from Rutgers.

The problem with setting the target to that of producing 'clean, cheap power' is that clean and cheap are typically mutually inconsistent. Nothing is cheaper than taking all the pollution generated from energy production and dumping it unprocessed into the environment where it is socially regarded for economic purposes as 'off the balance sheet' and thus has no assigned cost. Of course it does have a real cost in damaging the environment, increasing medically significant toxins, etc., but as long as these are not acknowledged, not paid for at all (by just letting the quality of the environment decline), or are paid for off the balance sheets (in terms of loss of health quality for which no medical care is ever purchased), the cheapness of the energy supply within the explicit economy is preserved. Capitalism constantly generates profits which must be reinvested to make more profits, in an endless, upwardly moving spiral. As capital accumulates, the opportunities for profitable investment of capital become tapped out, and already in the 1990s profit margins on invested capital had begun to decline. The long-term cause of recessions such as we have just experienced is the reduction of profit margins for surplus capital. But if we now have to start investing capital massively in things which do not themselves produce any marketable commodities, such as things which merely 'clearn up' after industrial enterprises operate, the total profit margin of capital investment in the economy will fall even lower, since so much of it will be soaked up by things which do not generate saleable and thus profit-making goods. Thus welcome to a new, never-ending recession.

This is the general problem with all efforts to achieve social justice by redistributing resources according to some principle of just desert or reparations for unfair distribution principles in the past. Since it would be administratively impossible to make the redistribution absolutely fair for everyone affected by it, absent a full-scale trial to determine the justice of each case, more injustice may be done by the redistribution than by leaving things alone. For example, in the case of reparations for slavery, how do we treat Caucasions who can demonstrate that one or more of their ancestors were seized by the Black Barbary Pirates and sold into slavery in the slave markets of Oran or Constantinople in the 17th century? Ten percent as many Whites were seized from Europe and enslaved by Blacks as were Blacks seized and enslaved by Whites. Even for those Caucasions who had no relatives enslaved by Blacks, how many suffered by having to take precautions to protect themselves against the risks of being seized? What about Whites whose ancesters helped slaves escape through the Underground Railroad or who preached against slavery from the pulpits of New England? What about those whose ancesters died in the Civil War after the Emancipation Proclamation? What about the Black descendents of Blacks who served in the Confederate Army to help sustain the slavery system, as many (surprisingly!) did? All historical interactions are infinitely complex after so much time has passed that you could never unravel all the skeins of responsibility to identify how much anyone now alive owed to whom. History abounds in examples of wealthy and successful families completely losing their fame and fortune in a single generation due to the misbehavior of the children, so if so much can change in one generation, how much unfair historical disadvantage or advantage can anyone really inherit after 150 years?

Although St. Nicholas actually existed, he was nothing like the Thomas Nast cartoon figure he is usually presented as being today. I remember my mother once ridiculing me when I was still rather young for continuing to believe in Santa Claus. She said, "How could it be possible for one person to get to every house in the world in one night to deliver presents?" I then countered (though not in so many words), "But he is called Saint Nicholas, so he is part of the world of religious powers, at the pinnacle of which stands a miracle-performing Deity, so why shouldn't Santa Claus similarly be able to perform miracles?" I then naturally continued by reasoning that if Santa Claus didn't exist, then neither did the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, the Holy Spirit, Christ, or God, but for some reason no one ever managed to explain to my satisfaction, believing in the former set of miraculous beings was a symptom of infantile stupidity, while believing in the latter set was the mark of piety and pre-destination for heavenly rewards.

I think the original proposal has essentially been adopted, though few admit it. Ancient cultures had a midwinter light/greenery/fertility festival (e.g., the Roman Saturnalia) to induce warmth, growth, and life to return to a world which had apparently gone dead from cold and darkness, and the Ancient Christian Church decided that since it couldn't suppress this Pagan holiday it was better to co-opt it, so they decided to declare it also somehow turned ouf to be the birthday of Christ by a remarkable coincidence. So a holiday with one purpose morphed into a holiday at the same time with a different purpose. But now there has been yet another transformation in which the religious celebration of the birth of some redeemer who reopens the gates of Heaven to the faithful has become just a new Saturnalia, only this time it is not an orgy of lust but of commercialism. The Christian aspect is increasingly neglected, and now even some Jewish families have adopted parts of the religiously neutralized Christmas festival, such as gift-giving, Santa Claus rituals, and even the traditional tree in the house.

The idea that anyone could expect to get a Master's Degree from a respectable university with a title like 'The Nature of History' seems absurd, unless he's Hegel. Normal academic theses, especially short M.A. theses, have highly specific topics so they can be treated adequately to an academic standard, like 'The Role of Crowds as an Agent of Restraint in the French Revolution,' or 'Mitochondrial Changes in Diabetic Retinal Cells,' but never 'The Nature of History.' If plagiarism is demonstrated, the consequenes can range from failing the M.A. program to having to do another thesis or being expelled with no option to return. It all depends on the university. I had a student last year who copied the text of some of her assignments from internet articles, which was not a smart thing to do, given that a) these acts of plagiarism carry a red flag, since the writing style looks so different from usual student writing; and B) it is so easy today use phrases as a search term to pull up exact correspondences from the internet. Since this was just plagiarism in a single course, the student had to take a failing grade and repeat the course as punishment.

Also, everything has a 'lethal dose 50' number, or LDL 50, which represents the dosage per kilogram of body weight of a test subject at which 50% of those subjects die of the tested substance. Even water has an LDL 50, though since it is fairly non-toxic, the number is high. So in this loose sense everything can be regarded as toxic.

I am looking at the problem from a population-perspective. So if (say) we have already built 70% of our housing stock at a great distance from where activities need to be performed, then when energy costs soar we are either going to have to accept the massive cost of lost infrastructure involved in abandoning housing, shopping centers, and work places which can only be reached by long drives, or we are going to have to continue the massive waste of a now very expensive energy resource in expending huge amounts of fuel just to traverse the dispersions unnecessarily created by an earlier generation of town planners who never dreamt that energy would one day be scarce.

In the history of medicine there have been a huge range of different medical approaches, including allopathic medicine, homeopathic medicine, eclectic, Thomsonian, osteopathic, Ayurvedic, you name it. A normal pancreas releases thousands of microdoses of insulin per day in response to blood sugar increases, and no insulin deliverty device in existence today can do that. No matter how many times a day a patient gives a bolus of insulin, the insulin will only start to act about 20 minutes after it is injected, and there is no known way exactly to tailor a delivered dose to the body's constantly changing requirements. The best diabetic patients can do is adjust their insulin dose to current glucose levels and anticipated carbohydrate consumption, but they can't even know how constantly changing levels of insulin resistance at the cell walls, constantly varying levels of blood sugar elevating hormones such as cortisone and thyroid hormone, variable rates of digestion, subclinical inflammation, and a myriad of other factors will transform even the most accurately calculated insulin dosage into unwanted hypo- or hyperglycemia. Similarly, if you have ever tried to titrate the 'right' dosage of thyroxine for a hypothyroidic patient, you will know how approximate the results of this sort of hormone replacement therapy can be, even though it is infinitely simpler than insulin therapy. I'm not sure why anyone would describe most surgery or chemotherapy as 'curative' or hold that it is without side effects. IQ points are lost with every application of general anesthesia; bones never perfectly mend to be as strong as before they were broken; surgical incisions always result in some loss of nerve tissue, etc. Chemotherapy certainly has some of the worst side-effects of any medical treatment, and many patients find them so bad that they prefer to go without treatment than endure chemotherapy's horrors. But of course it is all a matter of degree. In some areas of medicine, such as orthopedic surgery or some infectious diseases, for example, medicine does come fairly close to correcting the pathology the patient presents with, but in most others, the results are fairly dismal.

But even making batteries for electric cars or generating electricity to store and use in electric cars represents an energy cost, as is also true of maintaining road surfaces, replacing tires, repairing cars, etc. That all amounts to a lot of money to spend just to create a little urban sprawl so it can take me three hours to drive from my home to my work, two hours to drive from my home to where I shop, and force me to tie up resources in buying, maintaining, and replacing a car to access places my great grandfather used to reach easily and cheaply by foot or trolley.

Well, the topic has wandered considerably from the OP. Initially I asked if the U.S. should pay reparations for slavery, and after a short reaction to that question, people got involved in a lengthy discussion of how capitalism works, which is at best tangentally related to the OP. But when someone developed a theory in the course of the capitalist section of the discussion which was so near Karl Marx's discussion of the importance of the freedom of labor (cf. Wikipedia article on 'Division of Labour,' section on Karl Marx), I felt it useful to point out the similarity, as an ancillary point. I'm not really taking a position on either the topic of the OP or the division of labor and capitalism, I'm just proposing and testing arguments or putting them in context -- something like the way a scientist proposes and tests a working hypothesis.

Wilhelm Reich once said that the world naturally contains enough people for all of us to have our wildest sexual fantasies shared by willing partners all the time, but a panoply of artificial rules limiting sexual activity transform sex into a rare and costly commodity, increasing the power of those who can withhold and dispense it, and diminishing the power of those who seek it. Perhaps if this idea that sex should be transformed into a scarce commodity were socialized out of the population from an early age then our 'natural' tendency towards sexual jealousy would also disappear, with the result that a relaxed system of partner sharing and exchanging would arise. Having sex with someone would then function in society like having a conversation with someone does today: It would be so common, readily available, and socially insignificant that only the most insanely jealous partner would object to his or her mate enjoying the experience with someone else. There would be no rape, since no one ever holds someone at gunpoint in a dark alley to force him or her to talk about the day's news events, nor would teenagers giggle about it, people sell it on the streets, or manufacturers use disguised appeals to it to advertise their products. The problem of free love in relation to the children produced would be diminished by the fact that in the modern era of birth control, only a tiny percentage of sexual interactions are designed to produce children. In cultures which practice unrestricted mating, like the Kalahari Bushmen, children are brought up by the entire village, which has the advantage of freeing children from the risk of being trapped with psychotic parents.

The only person's stem cells which are perfectly compatible with your own immune system are yours or those of an identical twin. Everyone else's could at best be 'compatible' in the loose way that transplant physicians use the term, as having the same complement of the six most immunologically significant HLA groups, which would still require toxic immunosuppressive drugs once the cells grew beyond the primordia stage.

But NO production is defective in a lot of disease conditions, such as diabetes, but medicine still doesn't attempt to supplement it, effectively leaving the patients with unresolved vascular problems, so for some patients more NO could be better.

In the spirit of scientific inquiry it seems reasonable to shed light on any question from as many perspectives as possible, so as to locate the issues through a process akin to triangulation. The essence of scientific debate is that we are not ideologues but are open-minded and flexible in our thinking, so I adopt whatever approach seems likely to inspire the most interesting and useful contributions. If we had to adopt a consistent debating persona and stick to it through all posts and at all costs, this would be the opposite of a science forum, since no one would have an open mind.

Obviously reconstructing the social world so that plural sexual partnerships would be possible alongside stable familial partnerships would require changing socialization to make people less sexually jealous. Even Wilhelm Reich, the great sex revolutionary, said that "It is naturally difficult to cope with the idea of one's partner in the arms of another." But there are now some people who seem not to be jealous about their life partners having other sexual partners (many gay men, for example, report such arrangements; Jean-Paul Sartre and Simon de Beauvoir had such an arrangement in the 1950s, 'swingers' seem not to be bothered by this, Kalahari Bushmen have sex so promiscuously that they have never learned the link between sex and pregnancy, etc.), so it must represent a possible form of socialization. It just seems to me that rather than setting up monogamy as the only ethically and institutionally endorsed system of partnership and then having to cope with all the social stresses that arise because this ideal is constantly violated, it would be more rational, less conflictive, and more honest for society to abandon monogamy as a strict ideal and socialize people not to be bothered by an institutional arrangement more consistent with both male and female biological drives toward variety in sexual partners.

Another problem with converting the society to an energy-efficient system is that nearly the entire capital infrastructure of North America is built for 'car culture,' with huge commuting distances from one place to another even within single cities, to say nothing of urban sprawl and suburban expansion. The huge and originally unnecessary energy cost to transport people for shopping, work, and socializing across the huge distances we have foolishly built into our urban and suburban spaces cannot be done away with at this point without tearing down a hundred trillion dollars worth of infrastructure and reconstructing it in more compact form, which would be prohibitively expensive. Perhaps for this reason alone, when fossil fuels become hugely expensive in the future, Europe with its relatively compact urban areas will become much more prosperous than North America, which will be forever tied to a system of massive energy waste to get from one isolated strip mall to the next.

This is of course exactly what Karl Marx said: "In the morning I will fish for my food, in the afternoon farm, in the evening write for a newspaper, and on weekends practice as a surgeon," or something to that effect. His general point was that class inequality is created not just by different financial rewards for each type of work but also by different qualities of work, with those doing dangerous, dirty, intellectually crippling, subordinate, uncreative, and stultifying jobs paying twice over for their low status, getting both less income and less personal reward for their work. This was why the highest paid wage laborers in the Soviet Union were not factory managers but coal miners.

Most medicines used by allopathic medicines are toxins since they are not designed to cure the disease which is causing the unpleasant symptom, but instead just poison the natural response of the body to disease and thus suppress the symptom. Conventional medicine gave up long ago trying to cure anything and instead just focuses on masking symptoms. Thus for example, while benfotiamine is a natural substance which is actually curative for neuropathy because it is a pro-vitamin of B1, allowing high concentrations of B1 to form along the nerves and restore them to health, conventional medicine rejects this, in large part because there is no money in it, since as a natural substance it cannot be patented. In contrast, it prefers to suppress the pain which arises from neuropathy with various drugs which poison the natural ability of the body to sense discomfort from decaying nerves, and it regards this symptom suppression as the only acceptable treatment. While there are a few medicines in allopathic medicine which could be regarded as ameliorating deficiency conditions rather than as suppressing symptoms, such as insulin injections or thyroid supplements, these also produce unwanted side-effects since they are not delivered to the body in tailored doses by the organs naturally charged with regulating their constantly changing levels, and are instead just given to the patient in crude guestimate doses a few times a day rather than continuously and as needed.

I have also heard some good things about glycine propionyl-l-carnitine, but are there any negative side effects?

Because of its important role in maintaining vascular health and promoting vasodilation, some have proposed that nitric oxide be regarded as an essential nutrient. I was wondering if anyone could suggest a good dietary source of nitric oxide donors or a nitric oxide donor supplement other than the well-known one of l-arginine?

I once read an article in an 18th century science journal which raised this topic, but it seems that despite the long history of the problems of monogamy being recognized, society seems quite inert with respect to suggesting any changes. An old adage says that if you put a penny in a jar for every time you have sex during your first year of marriage, and take a penny out of that jar for every time you have sex after the first year, you will never empty the jar no matter how long you are married. Since sex is quite important and is now culturally recognized as something good which should be promoted, why do we have as the central social institution of our culture a form of sexual partnership which has been known for centuries to destroy sexual desire through the tedium of familiarity? While there seem to be many good psychological reasons for forming life partnerships, and perhaps life partnerships with one other person of the opposite sex have certain deep psychological resonances for most of us, why should we connect that psychological, social, financial, and operational partnering with one person with a requirement that there also be an exclusive sexual partnership with that same person? Wouldn't it make more sense to isolate the aspects of human interaction which flourish through partnering with one person throughout life and preserve those, but detach from them the one aspect which withers and dies if it also falls under the rule of lifelong focus on just one partner? The most society seems to be able to do is to accept some tinkering along the edges of this problem, with people who would otherwise go insane with sexual boredom being allowed to have affairs as long as they keep them secret. But this seems an insincere half-measure for a problem which society should have the courage to address and deal with more forthrightly.