Why I read books

No more science. Instead, we need "conservative-based" research

For a clear and intelligent rebuttal, read Why “Conservative Research” Is Confirmation Bias Disguised as Science

Why your brain keeps making the same decisions – even when better options exist

Have you wondered why some people voted for Trump three times?

Technische Universität Dresden

Why do we keep making the same choices even when better options are available? 

Researchers found that simply repeating a decision can reshape what we prefer, causing familiar choices to feel better than alternatives. 

Instead of weighing every option from scratch, the brain often remembers what it chose before and repeats it. That shortcut may help explain many everyday habits and seemingly irrational decisions.

A recent study from TUD Dresden University of Technology suggests that what people have done before can shape their current decisions more strongly than researchers previously believed. The findings offer new insight into how people make everyday choices and develop habits. The results were published in the journal Communications Psychology.

Brown University research finds additional benefits to getting vaccinated for shingles

Shingles vaccine linked to 24% lower dementia risk

Brown University

Older adults who received the Shingrix shingles vaccine were 24% less likely to be diagnosed with dementia over four years in a study of more than 500,000 people. 

Researchers estimate the difference could amount to roughly one dementia case prevented for every 17 people vaccinated.

The analysis drew on Medicare data and health records from more than 500,000 adults age 66 and older who were admitted to skilled nursing facilities for either short-term or long-term care. Researchers compared patients who received at least one dose of the recombinant shingles vaccine, known as RZV or Shingrix, with patients who remained unvaccinated. Shingrix was introduced in 2017 and is currently the only shingles vaccine available on the market.

Two reflections on September 11

One by a witness, the second on the consequences

These are updated versions of articles that originally ran on the 20th anniversary of 9/11

What I saw

By Will Collette

What Donald Trump has forgotten about 9/11

Twenty-five years ago today, I woke up to a glorious Tuesday morning. As I got into my car to go to work, the sky was a clear deep blue, temperature and humidity were delightful in sharp contrast to Washington’s hot and humid summers. It was a perfect day.

We lived just out the DC Beltway in Kensington, a modest Maryland suburb.

I was alone on my drive to downtown DC. Cathy was in Los Angeles at her union convention, due to fly back later that day.

I headed out, past the Mormon Temple and down Rock Creek Park, our favorite commuting route, a largely unknown way to bypass the bumper-to-bumper traffic on 16^th Street and Connecticut Ave. Emerging in the Adams Morgan neighborhood, I continued on to park in Cathy’s designated space in a garage next to AFSCME's building and walked three blocks to the AFL-CIO building where I worked in the Building Trades Department as a senior strategic researcher.

Just after 9:30 AM, Building Trades Chief of Staff Bob Ozinga ran into my office yelling “get off that fucking phone….we’re under attack!” and told me we all had to evacuate. I asked WTF and he said, “Look out the window.” From the south windows on the upper floors of the AFL building, Lafayette Park, the White House, Washington Monument and the Pentagon line up in a row. I saw a roiling column of smoke and flame rising from the Pentagon.

Like everyone else, I evacuated into the sheer pandemonium on the downtown streets. Rumors were that bombs had gone off in the Metro. People couldn’t figure out how to get home, or at least get out of range of the inbound plane likely headed for the White House (Flight 93, the one taken down by brave passengers over Shanksville, PA). My office was only a block away from the White House across Lafayette Park.

I tried to work out in my head when Cathy was due to board her flight for home from LA. I figured she wouldn’t board until around noon our time, given her nighttime ETA at Dulles.

In all that chaos, I ran into three of Cathy’s colleagues who were distraught about how to get out. I told them to come with me so I could drive them out to suburban Maryland. The radio was not providing much useful (or as we learned later, even factual) information.

I took back routes to reach Rock Creek Park. We made it up to Maryland and I dropped each of Cathy’s staff at home. When I got home, I started calling to find out if Cathy was OK. Phone service was overloaded. Cathy finally got through to me a couple hours later to tell me she was stopped at the check-out desk and told she wouldn’t be flying anywhere since all flights were grounded indefinitely. It took her almost a week to get back.

Like most Americans, I spent the next few days watching endless replays of the plane strikes and the Towers falling. The Bush Administration started giving their version of events and vowed revenge for this vicious and totally unforeseen event.

I remember thinking “vicious, yes” and “revenge, sure.” But “unforeseen? Bullshit.” I like to read for pleasure and often indulge in thrillers. Two best-selling thrillers I had read EXACTLY foretold 9/11.

One was Tom Clancy’s 1994 bestseller “Debt of Honor” that featured a high-jacked 747 hitting the Capitol during the State of the Union speech. Also in 1994, Dale Brown’s best-seller “Storming Heaven” featured high-jacked airliners used as weapons against US infrastructure and political targets.

We later learned that George W. Bush had been explicitly warned on June 29^th and August 6^th about likely attacks on the homeland by Osama Bin Laden and had done nothing. Further, we learned that the FBI was already on to the hijackers while they were still taking lessons at flight schools.

A month after 9/11, the US invaded Afghanistan at first to destroy al-Qaeda and punish the Taliban for allowing al-Qaeda to operate. Our NATO allies joined in, though the “mission” had morphed into changing Afghanistan from top to toe into a client state that served our interests.

I remember thinking that this is what happens when the country is run by people who don’t read books. This problem is far worse today.

Clancy and Brown had predicted the use of airliners as missiles and dozens of histories told of the Afghan people’s refusal to be conquered. Since Alexander the Great through the Soviet Union and now the US occupation, Afghanistan has been the “graveyard of empires.”

While waiting for the announcement that we would be permitted to go back into DC and to our jobs, I stewed in anger at the terrorists who murdered so many people as well as our lapse in intelligence and judgement that allowed us to be taken by surprise.

When we were finally allowed to come back to work later in the week, there were Humvees at every major intersection with nervous looking kids from the DC National Guard manning 50 cal. machine guns. It’s a truly weird commute when you are targeted and tracked by a kid with a 50 cal.

Much of downtown was barricaded to traffic. You could walk to most places under the watchful eyes and tactical machineguns of troops stationed everywhere. 

This was surreal, but it got worse. You needed an ID and a pass to go from building to building and in some instances (at the AFL-CIO for example), floor to floor.

We were told in the harshest terms to stay away from south–facing windows (like the one in my office) and absolutely forbidden to go on any south facing balcony under penalty of being shot without warning by sharpshooters.

A week after 9/11, letters filled with anthrax started arriving across DC. Five people died and 17 more were infected. We all looked at every piece of mail suspiciously.

Cathy and I had left Rhode Island in 1979 for new jobs in DC but always felt like Rhode Islanders and believed in our eventual return. We loved our jobs. We loved the travel that came with those jobs. But after George W. Bush got “elected” by the Supreme Court, we felt the time to go home was getting near. We bought our current home in Charlestown in November 2000 and rented it out.

After 9/11 and the anthrax attacks, life in DC stopped being fun. Travel was a nightmare. Security was so tight as to be unbearable. George Bush was taking us into the “war on terror.”

The last straw was the DC snipers, John Muhammed and Lee Malvo, who terrorized the metro area for three weeks in October 2002. One of their first victims was a woman shot while gassing up at the gas station I regularly used. That was it for us.

Cathy took her retirement. We sold our house in Kensington MD and moved into the house we had already bought here. I was hired by the Laborers Union regional office in Providence. Goodbye DC, Hello Charlestown. And no regrets.

Please read on. My colleague Mitchell Zimmerman, whose work appears nationwide and frequently in Progressive Charlestown, reminds us that we were hardly the only victims of 9/11. I share just about all his thoughts on the subject, but he expresses them much more eloquently than I can.

The victims of our post-9/11 wars deserve remembrance, too

Countless innocents died in the 20 years of war our country launched in the name of our 9/11 dead.

By Mitchell Zimmerman 

Few who offer their prayers this September in the hallowed plaza where the Twin Towers once stood will be aware that the September 11 memorial echoes a 1987 Holocaust “counter-memorial” in Kassel, Germany.

Like our memorial, the German monument consists of a hollow in the shape of what had once been there, into which water flows. But the scope of the remembrances evoked by the two memorials are revealingly different.

We Americans want only to recall our innocent dead and to honor them. Unlike the Germans, we spurn acknowledging the evils done in their name that came to be intertwined with our losses, the catastrophe we inflicted on other innocent nations.

In 1939, the Nazis destroyed a forty-foot pyramidal fountain in Kassel, Germany because it had been built by a Jew, the entrepreneur Sigmund Aschrott. The elimination of “the Jews’ Fountain” was soon followed by the elimination of Kassel’s 3,000 Jews themselves.

Forty-five years later it was proposed to rebuild the fountain. But simply rebuilding the original fountain would have erased the memory of its destruction. So artist Horst Hoheisel designed a new fountain: “a mirror image of the old one, sunk beneath the old place in order to rescue the history of this place as a wound and an open question.”

It’s part of the way Germans have accepted responsibility for the crimes of the Nazi era. The small monument conjures the sadness of loss, and the responsibility of a people for acts that can never be made right.

The mass murder of Americans, the crime of September 11, 2001, spawned a larger tragedy for others. Treating the 9/11 “war on terrorism” as license for war on Afghanistan as well as on Iraq, our government invaded both countries, overthrew their governments, and occupied them.

Far-seeing people like Rep. Barbara Lee warned that war on Afghanistan was the wrong response to the 9/11 attacks, and they were right. But using the attacks as a pretext to attack Iraq was arguably even more absurd and criminal.

“In the weeks immediately after 9/11,” Bush White House anti-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke confirmed, the president told “the Pentagon to prepare for the invasion of Iraq… Even though they knew at the time from me, from the FBI, from the CIA, that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.”

As a delegation from our British allies secretly reported to their government before the invasion, “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” of going to war.

Even by relatively conservative estimates, America’s post-9/11 wars have caused nearly a million deaths. They’ve also made millions of refugees and inflicted malnutrition, birth defects, and other health disasters on generations of children in Iraq and other war zones.

It would represent no insult to the memory of the innocents murdered in America, 20 Septembers ago, were we to acknowledge and memorialize the carnage and catastrophe we unleashed in other countries. To our 9/11 memorial, America should add a wall on which we engrave the names of the million innocent men, women and children slain in those futile wars.

I don’t think that’s likely anytime soon, but the proposal may be useful. As Hoheisel says, “That’s how a counter-monument works. People get angry, they write letters, but you have a discussion. Out of this void, the history begins to come out.”

Mitchell Zimmerman is an attorney, longtime social activist, and author of the anti-racism thriller Mississippi Reckoning. This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org. It was also sent to me by Mitchell along with photos of the Aschrott counter-monument.

How Charlestown voted

One out of four registered Charlestown voters turned out for this Primary

By Will Collette

Tina lands the Big One

Out of a total of 7,207 registered voters, 1,746 cast ballots in either the Democratic or Republican primary. Democratic turnout in Charlestown topped Republicans by roughly four to one to decide some hotly contested races, including House District 36, Governor and US House District 2.

The numbers allow some insights into Charlestown voters’ thinking. In the Democratic primary for Governor, Charlestown didn’t give Helena Foulkes the same margin she won in the rest of the state, picking her over Dan McKee by 57% to McKee’s 43% compared to Foulkes’ 24% statewide landslide.

Charlestown Republicans went for the more radical uber-MAGA nut Elaine Pellino over LORIB-adjacent Aaron Guckian. Current statewide numbers currently show Guckian up by a razor thin margin.

But more interesting to me is that only 307 Charlestown Republican voters cast ballots in the Primary compared to 1,357 Democrats. There were enough important primary matchups to offer registered voters from both parties' strong incentives to vote.

The almost 5 to 1 turnout edge for Democrats could mean good things for the Democratic slate for Charlestown Town Council, with three votes constituting a controlling majority.

Endorsed Democrats running for Charlestown Town Council: Council President Deb Carney, Cynthia Drummond and Cynthia Fonnemann

The most meaningful local race for Charlestown was the Democratic primary for House District 36, the seat held with distinction by Rep. Tina Spears, campaigning for a third term.

She was challenged League of RI Businesses (LORIB)-backed Leah Boisclair who makes her living by defending clients charged with sex crimes. She had lots of campaign signs out but that didn’t translate into votes.

Tina trounced Boisclair in Charlestown by a margin of 82% to 18%, roughly the same margin as the rest of District 36. With no opponent in November, congratulations to Tina for winning a third term.

And Boisclair can now turn her full attention back to representing guys charged with pedophilia, baby rape and domestic violence.

For November, we still have some important races that will be decided by the voters, this time with independents – the majority of the electorate – in the mix.

For the southern half of Charlestown, our great state Senator Victoria Gu is seeking a third-term and will face LORIB-backed challenger Westin Place, a MAGA guy she has beaten twice already.

Neither faced a primary challenger, but it’s worth noting that their party base voters cast ballots for them. Victoria scored 591 Charlestown Democrats’ votes, compared to Place’s meager 137 Republican votes. The vote counts are still lopsided when you look at the totals for all of Senate District 38.

2,884 Democrats voted for incumbent Victoria Gu while only 708 Republicans voted for Westin Place. Ouch.

Looks like Westin Place is heading toward Strike Three.

Samantha "Sam" Wilcox. Go, Sam Go!

The northern half of Charlestown will have to choose between the embarrassing incumbent Sen. Elaine Morgan (R-MAGA) who is facing a strong challenge from Richmond Town Council President Samantha “Sam” Wilcox.

Neither faced a primary challenger but nevertheless, their primary vote counts are worth noting. In Charlestown, Sam won 553 Democratic votes compared to Morgan’s 145 Republicans. Historically, Charlestown has usually backed Morgan’s Democratic opponent since she won the seat in 2016.

However, if you look at the comparison between Wilcox’s and Morgan’s total vote count for the whole district, Morgan might be in trouble. 

Even though she is backed by LORIB, her base of Republican primary voters only totaled 1,114 compared to the 2,732 Senate District 34 Democratic voters who turned out for Sam.

Going into the November 3 General Election with almost a 3 to 1 advantage in base voters is a good sign for Sam in a year that promises to be a big one for Democrats and a bad one for Republican incumbents.

Primary results are in no way foolproof predictors for the General Election where the majority of the electorate are independent voters. However, virtually every national poll shows independents moving sharply away from Republicans and toward Democrats whose base turned out in impressive numbers for this Primary.

Fingers crossed that Trump doesn’t cancel the November elections and that we win.

Works on everything

Trump NEVER pays

 

Smart kitty

When plastic companies write the lesson plans

Keep plastic industry propaganda out of schools

Joseph Winters

"This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist's weekly newsletter here."

This fall, 54 million K-12 students are headed back to the classroom for another year of lessons in all the classic subjects: math, English, history, biology. But there’s another subject that’s been sneaking into school curricula: plastics.

A new report from the nonprofit Plastic Pollution Coalition documents the many ways the plastics industry has been inserting its agenda into classrooms across the U.S. — including through lesson plans and worksheets, hands-on science experiments, and a program called “PlastiVan” that travels from city to city teaching students about “the contribution plastics make to modern life.”

Industry interests offer these resources to teachers for free or for cheap, according to the report. The materials tend to highlight the necessity of plastics while downplaying their significant downsides to human health and the environment. 

“When that information is provided to kids, it obfuscates the true impacts of plastic pollution,” said Madison Dennis, senior policy and advocacy manager for Plastic Pollution Coalition and one of the report’s main authors. Besides harming marine life, plastics can expose people to hazardous chemicals, clog storm drains and contribute to flooding, and release planet-warming greenhouse gases. Dennis’ organization is calling for stricter school policies against the use of industry-sponsored learning materials. 

Can you slow the aging process?

Study reveals which interventions might help

By Karen Guzman, Yale University

Edited by Sadie Harley, reviewed by Robert Egan

When Raghav Sehgal arrived at Yale as a graduate student several years ago, he wanted to explore the use of powerful computer science tools in cancer research. With an engineering background and a computational biology startup already under his belt, he was well prepared.

But as Sehgal began his Ph.D. studies, his thesis adviser at the Yale School of Medicine posed a larger question: If you want to solve cancer or any age-related disease, such as cardiovascular disease, why not solve aging itself?

"That put me on a different path," said Sehgal, an associate research scientist in psychiatry with specialties in computational biology and bioinformatics. "As researchers, we have a long way to go in understanding the aging process and whether the steps we take to manage it really work."

Today, Sehgal's research focuses on the biological systems that drive human aging and how to best measure aging, as well as why aging gives rise to diseases like cancer, diabetes and dementia. And while his research might not necessarily solve aging, he does explore whether the aging process can be reversed through interventions.

Testing which interventions truly register

In a new paper, Sehgal's research team took a significant step toward determining which existing anti-aging measures have quantifiable impacts. Using a new class of DNA-based blood tests, they found that lifestyle interventions and certain drug treatments appear to slow the aging process, while over-the-counter supplements don't have much effect.

The long afterlife of QAnon conspiracy theories haunting American politics

Crazy has a long half-life

Matthew N. Hannah, University of Wisconsin-Madison

On Election Day in 2024, as voters cast their ballots, Elon Musk posted a campaign music video supporting Donald Trump’s bid for president.

Set to Van Halen’s “Jump,” with a montage of 1980s cultural references and images of Trump in various strongman poses, the video includes a line about “PATRIOTS” in which the “O” turns into a “Q,” a reference to the online conspiracy theory QAnon.

Started on the online forum website 4chan in 2017, QAnon spread false, far-right theories on social media about a shadowy cabal of satanic pedophiles among the political elite, which Trump was purportedly fighting alongside a mysterious ally named “Q.”

As a scholar of conspiracy theories and extremism, I’ve watched QAnon seep from the margins into mainstream American politics over the past decade. While Q stopped posting in 2022, the movement did not disappear. As we near the 10-year anniversary of QAnon, these theories continue to haunt America’s politics.

The afterlife of QAnon

Building on the 2016 “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory, which claimed Democrats were trafficking children in the basement of a pizza restaurant based on interpretations of Hillary Clinton’s leaked emails, QAnon appeared on 4chan in October 2017 with claims that Clinton was about to be arrested.

That’s when someone calling himself Q claimed to be an intelligence operator trying to expose the “deep state,” a purported shadow government secretly controlling global events in pursuit of a satanic agenda. QAnon invited users to build the theory by decoding messages on social media. That work, Q claimed, would expose a satanic cabal of pedophiles among the elites.

The theory is an example of what author Naomi Klein has called a “conspiracy smoothie,” mixing existing theories into a vast conspiracy map, which absorbs existing conspiracy theories about events such as 9/11 or the JFK assassination into itself. The result is a sprawling theory combining paranoid interpretations of current events with historical conspiracies.

Polls suggest that 20% of Americans had favorable views of QAnon as late as 2022.

Many of Trump’s nominations for high-ranking posts were figures who had previously been considered on the fringes of national politics. Some of them have brought conspiracy theories into the highest echelons of government.

FBI Director Kash Patel, for example, has been sympathetic to QAnon. He appeared on a show hosted by a QAnon influencer before being selected to run the agency. And Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has advocated anti-vaccination conspiracy theories also shared by QAnon.

Primary results: LORIB loses, real Democrats win

MAGA gun PAC seems to have lost EVERY Democratic primary

By Will Collette

EDITOR'S NOTE: Am having tech problems with graphics. So in the absence of that, check out this one Tina posted on Xitter yesterday: Tina Spears on X: "Are you HOOKED on civic engagement??? 🎣 I know I am! Early voting wraps up today, and tomorrow is your last chance to CAST your ballot. Make your voting plan and REEL in that vote! https://t.co/ep8qJXDxDZ" / X

Well, the top story for Charlestown is our respected state Representative Tina Spears absolutely crushed her opponent, sex crime defense lawyer Leah Boisclair, by a margin of 82% to 18%, despite a ton of money poured into Boisclair by the ultra-rightwing League of Rhode Island Businesses, and the gun lobby. 

Based on the posted results as of 9 PM, Tina’s margin of victory is the highest for a Democrat facing a LORIB-funded challenger.

Since Tina has no Republican challenger in the General Election unless LORIB boss Dave Levesque wants to spend more money running a write-in campaign. Otherwise, Tina wins a third term as Charlestown’s Rep.

State Senator Alana DiMario, representing neighboring South Kingstown and Narragansett, beat her LORIB challenger Mark Mesrobian by 72% to 28%. She also has no opponent in the General Election.

Bob Craven Jr. won his primary to replace his dad as state Representative for North Kingstown by 74 to 26 beating LORIB-backed Kevin Hoyle.

LORIB lost all six of the Democratic primary challengers they paid for upstate: three in the Senate and three in the House. Only two of those races had margins of less than 10 points.

There will be a second chance for LORIB in November when its remaining clients, all running as Republicans, attempt to beat Democratic incumbents. We have many of those in South County where LORIB is going to try knocking out Charlestown’s state Senator Victoria Gu by backing a guy Victoria has already beaten twice.

In South Kingstown, Rep. Carol McEntee also faces a loser, Jessica Drew Roy, who also lost to McEntee twice already. Rep. Kathy Fogarty will face Jennifer Nerbonne whose main political experience was as a Donald Trump delegate at the 2024 GOP Convention.

Rep. Megan Cotter will face climate-change denier and Moms for Liberty maven Jasmine Roy.

The most peculiar LORIB challenge is an effort to unseat Westerly state Rep. Sam Azzinaro, funding his opponent developer Christopher Stanton. Sam, a very conservative Democrat, doesn't fit the LORIB target profile. Indeed, in other districts, LORIB has backed DINO incumbents, such as Coventry-West Greenwich state Senator Leonidas Raptakis and several others.

The November race that may be the most high drama is the effort by Richmond Town Council President Samantha (Sam) Wilcox to finally rid South County of the embarrassing MAGA nut, Sen. Elaine Morgan who represents the top half of Charlestown and is backed by LORIB. Go, Sam, go!

Cold consolation

While Dave Levesque ponders where all his money went while crying into his iced latte, there were some LORIB-adjacent scores that may give him some cold comfort.

Levesque and LORIB did not endorse any candidates for state office or Congress, but there were still such characters as Florida carpetbagger and MAGA nut Vic Mellor who hung around LORIB a lot. He won the GOP primary by 58% to 42% for the green light to challenge Charlestown’s US Representative Seth Magaziner in the November election. I just wonder how serious Mellor would be about representing RI District 2 since he is already a registered representative of government of Cuba. Not joking.

LORIB-adjacent Republican Aaron Guckian appears to have edged his MAGA-nut opponent Elaine Pelino by 298 votes. We’ll see if that result holds up.

In Charlestown, lots of Leah Boisclair signs were paired with LORIB-adjacent Democratic candidate for Attorney General Joe Solomon. He lost, coming in third out of four candidates, losing to winner Kim Ahern by a wide margin. If Rhode Island had run-off elections when no candidate gets 50+% of the vote, Solomon would not have made the run-off.

Bye, bye Dan

The marquee event of the day is of course the battle for Governor between inept incumbent Dan McKee versus Helena Foulkes. As expected, McKee got waxed by a margin of 62 to 38.

I think everyone in the state knew this was coming, given McKee’s unprincipled and incompetent management of the state’s business. Democratic voters chose corporate Democrat Helena Foulkes to move on to the three-way November election. She will definitely face so-called independent Ken Block and most likely Republican challenger Aaron Guckian.

I have no illusions about Foulkes being far more corporate than progressive. Despite that, I kind of like her but expect, as I am with nearly every politician, that I will probably be disappointed. However, she could be great. And I believe she will be a far better Governor than either Guckian or Block.  

I want to know

Stolen valor and Donald Trump. What's MAGA going to do about it? Jim?

Here's what a non-MAGA person did...