The SeedSing (half) year in Politics and Society

What is the opposite of progress?

SeedSing was launched on May 1st (National Workers Day) so we could look at politics and pop culture from the common person. We are not interested in influence or telling stories that will protect the egos of the well connected. What started out as one man's personal political philosophy has grown into a discussion covering a variety of topics. Join us for a look back at the year in politics and society.

The first article posted on our Politics/Society section was about The Ohio Problem. Every presidential election states like Ohio become very important to the national Democratic Party. Out of state consultants are brought in to fund raise and create a massive voter outreach program for the presidential nominee. In their effort to secure the state, the Democratic Party forgets about the local candidates. The lack of voter turnout during non-presidential elections is a direct consequence of the Ohio problem. There was another election in November of 2015, and the Commonwealth of Kentucky saw the election of a Tea Party zealot for Governor, large in part because voter turnout was so low. This is directly related to the Republican Party taking over the majority of local offices in many blue states. We identified the The Ohio Problem, and then tried to find out how to solve this issue. Technology and an emphasis on local messaging are two solutions we put forward. In 2016 SeedSing is looking forward to many other solution oriented ideas on how to fix a problem like Ohio.

The how and why of the modern Republican Party was featured many times on SeedSing. The hypocrisy, lack of global leadership, the need to be hateful, the absence of vision, and the celebration of failure, were all on display for the Republican Party this year. The only glimmer of hope in their dreary future seems to be Senator Rand Paul, but the Republican Party does not seem to care about a candidate who can grow the parties voter base. The parties faithful base would rather rally behind a loudmouthed bigot idiot that has never heard of Muhammad Ali or Kareem Abdul Jabbar.

The traditional press and the original internet taste makers were beginning to show their incompetence in 2015. The rise of Donald Trump is upon us because the news people on television love to have a good story. It is time to ignore the press before they really bring disaster to our society. The old icons of the internet were not behaving any better than their television counterparts. Reddit and Gawker may be letting out their final breaths. At SeedSing we believe it is time for the old walled ways of the internet to die, and it is time to make way for a new open discussion.

How we live and the way we define people became a topic of discussion all over the internet. Tina S shared her views on what #ILookLikeAnEngineer really means. The saga of Rachel Dolezal briefly made us talk about how we identify race. Kirk Aug recommended books on  the failure that is the war on drugs, and the policy side of death. We took a look at the legalization of marijuana, and it's eventual failure at the Ohio ballot box.  Who we are and how we live will determine the type of society we will die in.

Gun violence became a larger problem with a solution falling farther away. Guns were used as tools of destruction for a racist. Guns were used to kill two people trying to do their jobs. Guns were used to cause terror at rural community college. Guns were used by crazy people to insight terror in Paris. Predictable we decided to fight this terror with more destruction. Each event was covered by the news, and as a society we tried to find meaning. The public was never able to discuss the gun as being part of the problem, and the violence continues. 

We had many challenging discussions at SeedSing about the state of our politics and our society. 2016 looks to be an even more exciting year. We have a Presidential election to look forward to. Will Hillary win it all (probably)? Have something to say about the state of politics and society? Come join our conversation.

Thank you for 2015. On to 2016

RD Kulik (and all the SeedSing contributors)

RD is the Head Editor for SeedSing. Do you love SeedSing, but do not want to write? Money is always welcome around here.

Kirk reads "Being Mortal" by Atul Gawande. He thinks you should pick it up.

Time to read a bit more.

I am not sure what lead me to reading this book. It was certainly a recommendation that resulted from the use of some algorithm, probably Amazon or Overdrive, based on books I have read in the past. But I have no idea which book or books that I have read provoked this recommendation. Many times throughout I found myself wondering how this was related to other books I have enjoyed. Nonetheless, it was an excellent recommendation and I could not put it down.

Being Mortal by Atul Gawande is a book about how our culture handles aging and dying. Gawande is a surgeon who has seen far too much end of life suffering in the well intentioned attempt to fix or give hope in the face of a hard fact of life: that it must eventually come to an end.

Gawande investigates how the elderly have been treated traditionally in a time before our world of fast paced and over committed lives when instead of having strangers care for people at their final days, it was more commonly the role of their descendants. It was a time when multiple generations often shared a dwelling and folks were free to continue writing the story of their lives with a lot more autonomy and meaning than they are afforded by many of today's arrangements.

The focus today, Gawande points out, is instead on safety and health restoration. Safety is often a concern that counters the autonomy that gives life meaning. It is also most often a priority of the family, friends, and doctors rather than the ill-fallen person themselves. The traditional setup of nursing homes is for the peace of mind of the brood of the elderly who are often making the decisions as well as the efficiency of the institution rather than focusing on what the needs of the residents are.

Often times when patients find themselves in a condition that is unlikely to be repaired they hold out hope that they can go back to the way things were prior to the ailment. It is not just the patient and their family that hold on to these hopes, but the doctor as well. Gawande points out that, statistically, doctors predictions for how long someone with a life threatening disease will live are on average longer than what really ends up being the case.

Doctors also often see their role as one to fix the problem and are dumbfounded as to how help them realize which choice is best for the patient on an individual level, especially when that best choice is less aggressive. Gawande describes two typical types of doctors. Those who are authoritarian, or as he puts it, paternal. These are the doctor knows best types. Then there are doctors who simply lay out all the options in a very informative manner. A sort of, “here are your options, pick one” scenario.

A third option proposed by Gawande is a what he calls shared decision making. There are a few questions, albeit difficult ones, that can help get down to what the ill really wants to do. What are your biggest fears and concerns? What goals are most important to you? What sacrifices are you willing to make and unwilling to make? Having these hard discussions can tremendously help everyone involved help find the decision that is best for the individual.

Unfortunately, this kind of care is not common. It is just not how a lot of doctors see their role. There is hope though. Gawande writes of assisted living centers that have started to focus more around the needs of the residents. The advanced directive is a step in the right direction and palliative care is becoming a wider spread specialty. However simply being a specialty is not enough. Doctors in general as well as families and loved ones need to start addressing these questions before we can be truly sensitive to providing the absolute best quality of life possible in the end. 

I highly recommend giving this book a read.

Kirk Aug

Kirk is SeedSing's writer on society, science, and whatever else his brain may fancy. He received the good reading certificate in elementary school 5 out of six years. Follow him on twitter @kirkaug.

Kirk comes to terms with a dwarf planet thanks to Neil deGrasse Tyson's The Pluto Files

On this eve of the Pluto flyby of the New Horizons spacecraft I could not help but think of how much has changed for the planet since the probe’s launch over nine years ago in January of 2006. Indeed nothing actually changed for Pluto itself, but for the way we define and classify him (her?) and the presumed hundreds of other celestial bodies like it. See, when New Horizons launched, Pluto was still classified as a planet. In August of that same year the International Astronomical Union (IAU) declared Pluto to be a dwarf planet. This was a big letdown to the ninth planet  lovers everywhere.

As the only planet discovered by an American astronomer, Pluto had become an American icon. Even Mickey Mouse’s dog bears the name. And many Americans, as well as some other folks around our planet, were not comfortable with the designation change. One man stood to receive much of the heat for re characterization of the icy Pluto. That man was Neil deGrasse Tyson, and in 2009 he described from his own point of view the path out of planet-hood that Pluto took in his book, The Pluto Files.

Earlier this year Dr. Tyson was going to be doing a lecture here in St. Louis. In anticipation of my attendance, I decided to to pick the book up.

Long before we knew of nine planets in our solar system, we had already settled on eight. In fact, Tyson starts out by pointing to the Adler Planetarium in Chicago was out-of-date the day it opened its doors. Opening only two months after the discovery of Pluto by Clyde W. Tombaugh in February of 1930, Adler had already been designed to showcase eight planets. One can still go there today and see the plaques depicting the eight planets which after 76 years of being out-of-date are finally right with the times.

I think that Tyson was pointing this out to exemplify the cost of changing our view of the universe and our solar system in particular. In reclassifying Pluto, textbooks need to be revised, museums need to be reorganized, and entire generations of people will go on without accepting it because either they do not care enough, they are unwilling to see the nuance as to why, or perhaps because of the culture surrounding our old understanding.

Mickey’s dog was far from the only part of this culture. Upon the discovery of Pluto, this new planet was an budding rock star. In 1932 a laxative known as Pluto Water hit the market. In 1941 a new element who needed a name became known as Plutonium. And of course how can anyone raised in the 80s and 90s forget that My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas? If Pluto is no longer a planet, many Plutophiles have pointed out, we have to come up with a new mnemonic. Indeed the culture of Pluto was strong and so demotion was destined to bring about controversy.

Throughout describing the history and science surrounding Pluto, Tyson helps to distinguish it from what we now define as a planet. For example, Pluto is mostly made of ice. Pluto’s moon, Charon, is so large that center of motion is between Pluto and Charon. Every other planet in the solar system has moons whose center of motion lies within the boundaries of the planet. Pluto is so small that it is less than five percent the size of mercury. Pluto also exists in the Kuiper belt along with many smaller ice balls as well as some similarly sized icy objects. Should we start calling the larger of those planets as well? For a little while some people did.

Of course Tyson was not personally or otherwise responsible for Pluto’s fall from grace. The planet had long been on the radar in a large part due to the discovery of Kuiper belt objects that were increasingly closer to Pluto’s size. What put Tyson in the crosshairs of the Plutophiles was mostly exposure due to his involvement of the design of the New York Hayden Planetarium’s Rose Center for Earth and Space. Given the climate of disagreement of how to classify Pluto among relevant scientists at the time and the permanence of the Rose Center which was to be built and opened in 2000, some presentational creativity was going to be required. Instead of an “enumeration of orbs to be memorized” (Tyson, 2009), they presented the solar system as families of objects with similar characteristics. You have the Sun, the rocky terrestrial planets, the asteroid belt, the gas giants, and the Kuiper belt. Pluto lives in the Kuiper belt.

No one really noticed that Pluto was missing from the presentations of the Rose Center until a New York Times article came out almost a year after its opening. The article was titled, “Pluto’s Not A Planet? Only In New York”. This is when the firestorm started for Tyson. In the book several humorous letters are shared from various elementary classrooms begging Dr. Tyson to make Pluto a planet again. This was probably my favorite part of the book. I never cease to be amused by the visceral reaction to those who resist a change that is so obviously needed.

Part of the problem for the IAU was that there hadn’t really been a formal definition of the term planet. Therefore, the task ahead was to formulate that definition which then included them deciding what to do if or when certain celestial bodies did not make the cut. In any event there were no longer going to be nine planets in our solar system. If Pluto made the cut, Pluto’s moon, another Kuiper belt object named Eris, and an asteroid belt object named Ceres would also have become planets. As it turned out. All four of those objects became part of a new class called dwarf planets.

For Tyson, the emails came at a rate of hundreds per day. Articles were written blasting the decision. Even many astronomers were burned by the development. But no amount of passion from the Plutophiles could reverse it. Pluto was now a dwarf planet. When I saw Dr. Tyson’s lecture a couple of months ago, he could not have put his attitude toward it better. In three words he said, “Get over it.”

The Pluto Files is a fascinating read. I hope this week as you are enjoying the new data coming from our favorite little dwarf planet, you might give this book a look.

Kirk Aug

Kirk has conflicting feelings about losing the planet Pluto. He is excited to see whatever thing New Horizons takes pictures of. Follow him on twitter @kirkaug

Cloves and Fedoras: The War on Drugs is examined in the book "Chasing the Scream"

The Seed Sing team would like to welcome Kirk Aug to our little part of the internet world. Kirk will be looking at expanding your knowledge of books, science, technology, and anything else he sees fit to have in electronic print.

Cloves and Fedoras is Seed Sings reviews for little known pieces of pop culture (or older pieces).  Feel free to contact us with your own submissions of undiscovered gems that must be known. 

Chasing the Scream by Johann Hari is the story of the War on Drugs driven by America and spread to the rest of the world under the fear of retaliation from America. The wage of war began in the 1930s and is alive and well today. Hari begins his book by painting a picture of what it was like before the engagement of this long since failed crusade. You could go to any American pharmacy and buy products made from the same ingredients as heroin and cocaine. The most popular cough mixtures in the United States contained opiates, a new soft drink called Coca­Cola was made from the same plant as snortable cocaine, and over in Britain, the classiest department stores sold heroin tins for society women. In the book we follow the story of so many who were caught up in the drug war starting with the man behind it, Harry Anslinger. He was appointed head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics which was a new role for the people who ran the Department of Prohibition which had recently been abolished. It was apparent to many that this bureau was due to be a part of history at any time. We also learn about Billie Holiday and how the drug war killed her. Anslinger personally saw to it as he made sure she was forbade adequate care to survive her addiction. There was also Arnold Rothstein, the top gangster who immediately saw the benefit of the drug war. Just as prohibition opened up a black market for alcohol, the drug war would do the same for narcotics. Rothstein was all too ready to benefit. And although he was eventually anonymously murdered for his stranglehold on the market, many more rapidly emerged to take his place. Hari then turns to the climate of the drug war today by following a retired police officer who is now fighting to legalize drugs after what she had seen for many years on the force. A New York City street dealer who embodies the modern day Rothstein selling crack on the corner and leading a gang to keep his turf his not because he wants to, but out of necessity. A woman who lost her daughter to a man mixed up in the war in Juarez, Mexico, who marched to her state capitol only to be murdered by the drug cartels who have bought the state right on the front steps for anyone and everyone to see. And so many other victims of the this failed policy intended to remove drugs from society. It quickly becomes more than clear that our prescribed solution to the drug problem is monumentally more of a problem that drug addiction is alone. The author also goes to a few places where things are turning around thanks to a change in policy. Leaving drug prohibition and criminalization behind and focusing on compassion and education seems to be working for places like Vancouver, Switzerland, and Portugal. These places are trying new approaches which seem to be reducing most of the negative side effects that been left in the stain of the drug war leaving us with hope for ways to spread this change of tide.

Kirk Aug

Kirk is the new guy around here at Seed Sing.  We are still evaluating his personality and will let you know some interesting facts soon. In the meantime give Kirk a follow on twitter @kirkaug