{"id":3322,"date":"2026-08-28T22:49:48","date_gmt":"2026-08-28T22:49:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/?p=3322"},"modified":"2026-08-28T22:49:48","modified_gmt":"2026-08-28T22:49:48","slug":"coffee-break-working-class-life-climate-change-politics-and-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/?p=3322","title":{"rendered":"Coffee Break: Working Class Life, Climate Change, Politics and Science"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Part the First: A Day in the Life of the Working Class<\/strong>.\u00a0 When members of the Professional Managerial Class speak of the working class, seldom do they know what they are talking about.\u00a0 This is news only to said denizens of the PMC.\u00a0 While I am a paid-up member of the PMC now, I worked for an extended period after high school in a heavy chemical plant (where the highest paying union wage was about $180,000 per year adjusted for inflation) that is now long gone to parts unknown, leaving behind a large Superfund site.\u00a0 I learned a lot from those men, and they were all men in those days.\u00a0 Joseph Palange, a firefighter and concrete worker illustrates one lesson, that of the birddog<\/strong><\/a>, whom members of the PMC seem to think is the typical worker on a construction site or in a manufacturing plant.\u00a0 I learned quickly how to spot my \u201ccoworker\u201d who spent more time and energy avoiding a job instead of just doing it.\u00a0 For example, I worked with this guy, while at the age of 17 and 18 learning to ignore him until the work really had to get done, which is the only time he moved:<\/p>\n

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He was famous for contorting the half hour we had for lunch\u2014innovatively finding ways to double it. He would make an important personal call at 12:30, suggest he make a run to the supply shop at 11:30, head to the tool trailer at 11:40 only to never return, or sometimes simply feign negligence as if he had lost track of time. That ostensible negligence with which he watched the clock as it approached 12:30 was a tricky game though. He\u2019d lose the excuse if the boss caught him and, like any other spent munition, would have to wait until a new one was manufactured. It can\u2019t be the case that you\u2019re accidentally late returning from lunch every time the superintendent shows up. He had to be seen working at 12:31 a few times first.<\/p>\n

Worst of all was that working with him necessitated constantly babysitting his expectations because he seldom wanted to do what the work required. Thus, he fought me incessantly on every detail\u2014all of which were essentially non-negotiable. Had I given in on any of them I would have gotten it worse from those in charge of us. \u201cYou don\u2019t let a man like Tommy Keough direct the work,\u201d I had been told once when he wore me down. It was as if every detail of the work was putting the man out. It was like asking someone to pick you up from the airport ten times a day. He huffed and berated my decision making and claimed I had no idea what I was doing. Even so it was mostly bluster, and he talked and worked with a smile on his face. The man loved me, and for all his faults I loved him too. When we were up against it and you could genuinely feel the weight of how important the work was and how tight time was, Tommy always came through for me. And over the years\u2014and over 2x4s and whaler loops, and turnbuckles, and the magical substance that is hydraulic cement\u2014I learned about the man.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The only difference between Tommy Keough and his biosimilars among the people I have worked with since I was in my early twenties is that Tommy always could be counted on in a pinch.\u00a0 Which leads to Mr. Palange\u2019s conclusion:<\/p>\n

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I do not blame the populists from either party who romanticize the working class. Steve Bannon has likely never got stuck digging a ditch alone because the guys who are supposed to help him are smoking crystal meth in a porta-john. I doubt that Bernie Sanders has ever waited half an hour only to realize that the new guy isn\u2019t showing up for day two. I don\u2019t expect elite ideologues to get it, I just wish they\u2019d stop flattening the problems of the working class into neat and tidy stories that serve their political projects. Because none of it is simple, and the fixes are not obvious. You cannot open enough mills and mines to solve the fallen nature of man, and sometimes it is those fallen men who step up when you need it most.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And it could be that as the AI revolution destroys PMC jobs up and down the scale (it might just happen), those who know what it is like to pour concrete or clean out an oil storage tank or tote two flasks of mercury at a time, 92 pounds each for proper balance, will find themselves once again in demand.\u00a0 Worse things could happen.<\/p>\n

Part the Second: Is There Any Hope Humans Will Grasp Climate Change?<\/strong>\u00a0 A very good friend of mine has told me that he does not \u201cbelieve in\u201d anthropogenic global warming (AGW) because he doesn\u2019t see how humans can affect something as big as the climate.\u00a0 I have asked him about the Montreal Protocol<\/a> and the ozone hole but he is resistant.\u00a0 It is hard for people to think of something as big as the climate.\u00a0 The philosopher Timothy Morton<\/a> of Rice University, who is inscrutable to me most of the time, has used \u201chyperobject<\/a>\u201d as the term for those things we can\u2019t grasp because they are so large in space and time.\u00a0 This I can understand, for the most part.<\/p>\n

A recent article from the McGill Office for Science and Society asks, How to You Squeeze Climate Change Inside the Human Brain?<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0 Good question:<\/p>\n

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The loudest alarm blaring all over the world right now is that of climate change\u2014but the brains of many seem to have habituated to it.<\/p>\n

Climate experts find themselves trapped in irony: they can predict disastrous consequences for the planet we live on, yet most people\u2019s eyes glaze over when reading the resulting headlines. We keep scrolling and living our lives. Forests get broiled by apocalyptic infernos<\/a>, turning our skies red and ravaging entire towns, and we keep scrolling. Summers become human barbecues, with more and more of us dying of heat<\/a>, and we keep scrolling. Our world has become less hospitable and we seem apathetic to it.<\/p>\n

Where does climate apathy come from? Researchers have attempted to answer this question using highly artificial experiments. The most promising of these studies shows us that\u00a0how<\/em>\u00a0we present the alarming data we have can make a difference.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The human mind focuses on \u201cthe urgency of now,\u201d as in food, shelter, and perhaps reproduction.\u00a0 But climate change is a \u201ctomorrow problem.\u201d\u00a0 True until it isn\u2019t.\u00a0 And it is difficult to look at the news on any given day \u2013 raging forest fires and floods that happen \u201conce a century\u201d ever few years \u2013 and not see that something is happening.\u00a0 On a more mundane level, where I live now is no longer \u201cabove the gnat line\u201d and the plant regions specified by the USDA are moving north in at a perceptible pace.\u00a0 But still, \u201cit\u2019s just the weather.\u201d<\/p>\n

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There\u2019s also the fact that climate change is an amorphous problem. A predator is flesh and blood: it can be avoided or, if necessary, fought off. But climate change can\u2019t be physically tackled; it can\u2019t be seen with the naked eye; and its isolated manifestations\u2014a blaze here, a tsunami there\u2014are not easily blamed on it. There have always been forest fires and destructive waves. What changes is the intensity, the frequency, the range, but these changes over time may not register inside the brain.<\/p>\n

There is a distressing essay<\/a> (pdf) from 1995 that illustrates this using fish. The number and diversity of fish in a body of water can collapse over a long enough period of time without fishers noticing. It\u2019s not that they don\u2019t have eyes; it\u2019s that when they retire, the number of fish is down from when they started, but the next generation of fishers doesn\u2019t know. To them,\u00a0this\u00a0<\/em>lower number is normal. They have never experienced what the lake looked like fifty years earlier.<\/p>\n

The essay\u2019s writer, Daniel Pauly, called it \u201cshifting baselines syndrome.\u201d The first time you enter an ecosystem sets the baseline for you as to what is normal; if change is slow enough, it won\u2019t seem drastic. For Vox<\/em><\/a>, David Roberts summarized it this way: \u201cNo generation experiences the totality of the loss.\u201d The kind of major air pollution we are experiencing in summer due to forests burning is new to us; to babies born now, it will be expected. Little by little, our species gets accustomed to a worsening situation without ever fully perceiving the change. We are, in effect, boiling frogs.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Is this a matter of human perception?\u00a0 Of course, it is.\u00a0 And there are ways to improve our perception.\u00a0 In my work, when I see someone present data in a table, alarms go off: What are they trying to hide?\u00a0 Unless there is a dose-response curve or array of some kind, the human mind will not perceive the change, such as this illustration:<\/p>\n

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That the lake stopped freezing just about every year between 1990 and 2000 is obvious to all but the most obtuse.\u00a0 It\u2019s not just the weather, after the year 2000.\u00a0 And only the most obtuse will deny the cause of this phenomenon.\u00a0 The tobacco industry fought against the obvious truth that smoking causes lung cancer for more than twenty years after the first demonstration of this fact using statistics during the British Doctor\u2019s Study<\/a>.\u00a0 In that large cohort of British physicians not everyone who got lung cancer was a smoker.\u00a0 But of those who were so stricken, 90% of them had been or were smokers.\u00a0 No, correlation does not prove causation. But in this case, doctors who smoked more were more likely to get lung cancer, so the dose-response curve was present.\u00a0 We now know the mechanism.\u00a0 We also know the mechanism of AGW: Releasing into the atmosphere in a few hundred years that was sequestered over several hundred million years.\u00a0 This is not difficult.\u00a0 And the scientists and engineers in Big Oil knew this more than fifty years ago<\/a> (if you go there, please ignore the repeated typo caused by my malpractice in the use of Microsoft Word).<\/p>\n

Part the Third: Amyloid Hypothesis of Alzheimer\u2019s Disease in the News.<\/strong>\u00a0 Fair is fair.\u00a0 The former president of Stanford is entitled to make his case<\/strong>.<\/a>\u00a0 We have discussed the amyloid hypothesis and problems with some of this research on AD several times here.\u00a0 One of the latest stories is that of Marc Tessier-Lavigne, who has been an AD researcher who more recently served as president of Stanford.\u00a0 He resigned that position three years ago due to uncertainty about research for which he was responsible more going back to 2009.\u00a0 STAT News has an article up in which Dr. Tessier Lavigne disputes the findings, originally published by Stanford student Theo Baker in the Stanford Daily and later in his book How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University.\u00a0 This is likely to drag out, but this may be yet another massive ding in the amyloid hypothesis of AD.\u00a0 In my view, the key to the story lies here:<\/p>\n

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Baker, who was a Stanford freshman in the fall of 2022, wrote a series<\/a> of<\/a> stories<\/a> for the Daily detailing concerns related to around a dozen studies co-authored by Tessier-Lavigne. Some of these papers contained images manipulated in ways scientific sleuths<\/a> said were unlikely to be honest errors. Baker\u2019s coverage spurred Stanford\u2019s board to investigate the matter with the help of a law firm and a panel of outside scientists. His reporting also prompted an internal review<\/a> (pdf) by Genentech.<\/p>\n

While neither investigation uncovered evidence Tessier-Lavigne had committed research misconduct or covered up fraud, the report commissioned by Stanford confirmed that at least four studies in which he\u2019d played a leading role contained doctored results and found that he failed to \u201cdecisively and forthrightly\u201d correct errors.<\/strong> Tessier-Lavigne announced his resignation<\/a> the same day the report<\/a> came out, stating that discussions about the findings might affect his ability to lead.<\/p>\n

The investigation and its aftermath have fueled lasting<\/a> conversations<\/a> about the conduct of elite science<\/a> (Running a lab is a full-time job!). Just last year, President Trump\u2019s science adviser referenced<\/a> Tessier-Lavigne\u2019s story and the 2009 study as a \u201cpainful episode\u201d that illustrates how academics have strayed from producing \u201cgold-standard\u201d science.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Did the \u201cinvisible college\u201d of AD researchers have their suspicions about the work?\u00a0 Having been a scientific worker or scientist since the mid-1970s, my spidey sense says, \u201cYes.\u201d\u00a0 And Dr. Tessier-Lavigne confirms this:<\/p>\n

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While the Stanford investigation determined that the fraud allegations appeared to be mistaken, it found that the Nature paper had some image duplications and biostatistical errors, and that the quality of the work \u201cfell below accepted scientific practices, let alone Dr. Tessier-Lavigne\u2019s self-described standard of scientific excellence.\u201d The panel also said his choice to publish additional studies rather than correct or retract the original paper fell within standard practice but was \u201csuboptimal<\/strong>,\u201d a finding he told STAT he agrees with.<\/p>\n

\u201cI believe the Alzheimer\u2019s community and the developmental neurobiology communities, which follow these things, most certainly knew about the corrections I provided in the follow-on papers,\u201d<\/strong> he said. \u201cIt would have been beneficial to less specialized audiences to append a correction to the original paper, too. So I think with hindsight I would have done that.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

How and why did this happen?\u00a0 I know I sound like a broken record, but American biomedical science went off the rails with passage of the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, after which the goals of academic science became to make bank and cash out quickly with a unicorn<\/a> instead of make discoveries and see where they led.\u00a0 And this irresistible imperative has given the Current Administration one more excuse to prattle on about \u201cgold-standard science.\u201d\u00a0 American science is unlikely to recover.\u00a0 Sometimes it seems good to be old.\u00a0 But only sometimes.\u00a0 There is still too much to get done!<\/p>\n

Parting shot:<\/strong> Apologies for this somewhat truncated Coffee Break, but life intervenes.\u00a0 Here is another story from STAT that sums up our current predicament very well<\/strong><\/a>.\u00a0 The mother of a daughter with cystic fibrosis commented on new policies that are likely to have the shade of Trofim Lysenko cast a shadow over American science and this might affect advances that all of us will depend on, eventually.\u00a0 Her comment was stricken from the record because she noted that the daughter of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget has benefitted from the same drug cocktail:<\/p>\n

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Federal agencies have discretion in what comments they post to regulations.gov<\/a>, the public-facing website that hosts the dockets for proposals. Generally, comments won\u2019t be posted if they are wholly irrelevant to the proposed rule, if they contain obscenities or threats, or if they include information that should not be released publicly (like individuals disclosing their Social Security numbers or companies disclosing proprietary information). But that process typically occurs before comments are posted.<\/p>\n

That Vought\u2019s child has cystic fibrosis, and has benefited from Trikafta, has long been public knowledge<\/a>. In 2014, Vought and his wife, Mary, themselves wrote on a conservative news site that their second child, Porter Louise, had been diagnosed with the disease<\/a>. \u201cBecause of Porter, our hearts break for sick children and their families in a new way,\u201d they wrote. In 2022, Mary Vought went on a podcast<\/a> saying that her daughter had been on the \u201cbreakthrough medication\u201d\u00a0for several months. \u201cIt is very, very, very hopeful,\u201d she said of her daughter\u2019s health.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s very weird because there\u2019s no legal implication to those 8 being on or off of regulations.gov<\/a>,\u201d said Stuart Shapiro, dean of the Rutgers School of Planning and Public Policy and a former OMB official who has written about the role public comments play in shaping regulation<\/a>. \u201cThere\u2019s no reason to do it, unless it was offensive to the head of OMB there, which I suspect it might have [been].\u201d Adding more confusion to the matter, there are still some comments<\/a> on the docket that mention Vought and Trikafta.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And so it goes.\u00a0 Thank you for reading!\u00a0 See you next week as we head into September and the end of a long hot summer in the Northern Hemisphere.\u00a0 Remember, no white shoes after Labor Day, or so said my grandmother who was born in 1910 and had an excellent sense of style.<\/p>\n

Part the Fourth added in proof: Something that came in over the transom this morning<\/strong>.\u00a0 A British cardiologist and his wife took \u00a350 million from a pharmaceutical company whose drug they endorsed<\/a><\/strong>.\u00a0 And Big Medicine and Big Science still wonder why people tend to not trust them:<\/p>\n

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A British cardiologist and former president of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) has been judged by the ESC to have committed severe misconduct after a Danish TV documentary reported that he had been involved in drawing up guidelines for the use of the heart drug ivabradine (Corlanor, Procoralan) while profiting from lucrative contracts with the drug\u2019s maker.<\/p>\n

Between 2006 and 2015, Kim Fox, emeritus professor of clinical cardiology at the National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College London, and his wife Karen Summers, a former drug industry executive, received more than \u00a350m as co-directors of the UK based contract research organisation Heart Research. This company was involved in running at least three clinical trials of ivabradine, made by French drug company Servier, that were published in the same period.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This reminds me of the case of the late conservative darling Sir Roger Scruton<\/a> (some of whose books are challenging in the good way) who was on the take for Big Tobacco<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The stupid, it burns.<\/p>\n

\"Print<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Part the First: A Day in the Life of the Working Class.\u00a0 When members of the Professional Managerial Class speak of the working class, seldom do they know what they are talking about.\u00a0 This is news only to said denizens of the PMC.\u00a0 While I am a paid-up member of the PMC now, I worked…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3323,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":0,"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[470,796,4197,5404,469,4578,3085,584,466],"class_list":["post-3322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economy","tag-break","tag-change","tag-class","tag-climate","tag-coffee","tag-life","tag-politics","tag-science","tag-working"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3322","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3322"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3322\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3323"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}