In Thomas Geoghegan’s 11 January 2010 op-ed in the NY Times (Mr. Smith Rewrites the Constitution) argues that the Senate’s use of the filibuster subverts the U.S. Constitution and the intent of our Founding Fathers.

[T]he Senate, as it now operates, really has become unconstitutional: as we saw during the recent health care debacle, a 60-vote majority is required to overcome a filibuster and pass any contested bill. The founders, though, were dead set against supermajorities as a general rule, and the ever-present filibuster threat has made the Senate a more extreme check on the popular will than they ever intended.  (…)

[The filibuster is] a revision of Article I itself: not used to cut off debate, but to decide in effect whether to enact a law. The filibuster votes, which once occurred perhaps seven or eight times a whole Congressional session, now happen more than 100 times a term. But this routine use of supermajority voting is, at worst, unconstitutional and, at best, at odds with the founders’ intent.

Read Geoghegan’s analysis of Article I and the Federalist Papers. He then continues,

So on the health care bill, as on so many other things, we now have to take what a minority of an inherently unrepresentative body will give us. Forty-one senators from our 21 smallest states — just over 10 percent of our population — can block bills dealing not just with health care but with global warming and hazards that threaten the whole planet. Individual senators now use the filibuster, or the threat of it, as a kind of personal veto, and that power seems to have warped their behavior, encouraging grandstanding and worse.

He suggests several approaches to dispensing with the procedural filibuster.

If the House passed a resolution condemning the use of the procedural filibuster, it might begin to strip the supermajority of its spurious legitimacy. It’s the House that has been the great victim of the filibuster, and at least with such a resolution that chamber could express the grievance of the people as a whole against this usurpation by a minority in the Senate.

The president of the Senate, the vice president himself, could issue an opinion from the chair that the filibuster is unconstitutional. Our first vice presidents, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, felt a serious obligation to resolve the ties and tangles of an evenly divided Senate, and they would not have shrunk from such a challenge.

We citizens could also demand that our parties stop financially supporting senators who are committed to the filibuster, and we ourselves could deprive them of fund-raising dollars.

And we needn’t rule out the possibility of a Supreme Court case. Surely, the court would not allow the Senate to ignore either the obvious intent of the Constitution.

Whether any such approach works, the founders would have expected us to do something about this unconstitutional filibuster. In Federalist No. 75, Hamilton denounced the use of supermajority rule in these prophetic words: “The history of every political establishment in which this principle has prevailed is a history of impotence, perplexity and disorder.” That is a suitable epitaph for what has happened to the Senate.

-RichardH

In his blog on 6 January 2010, film critic and cancer-sufferer Roger Ebert wrote, Nil by mouth, about what he has lost (and gained) through his inability to eat or drink. Poignant.

-RichardH

From WebMD on 6 January 2010, Can Cell Phones Help Fight Alzheimer’s?

Cell phone exposure may be helpful in the fight against Alzheimer’s disease, a new study shows. The study, involving mice, provides evidence that long-term exposure to electromagnetic waves associated with cell phone use may protect against, and even reverse, Alzheimer’s disease. The study is published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease.

From the BBC on 3 June 2009, “Weekly curry ‘may fight dementia’, and earlier on 21 November 2001, Curry ‘may slow Alzheimer’s.’

Eating a curry once or twice a week could help prevent the onset of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, a US researcher suggests. The key ingredient is curcumin, a component of the spice turmeric. Curcumin appears to prevent the spread of amyloid protein plaques – thought to cause dementia – in the brain.

From Associated Content on 13 November 2007, Tips and Recipes for Cooking with Turmeric. Three recipes. Turmeric Lime Shrimp looks like the best one.

For about five years, I have liberally laced my homemade curry dishes and homemade soups with turmeric. When I asked my physician if he had heard about the purported beneficial aspects of turmeric on Alzheimer’s Disease, he smiled and said, “That’s why I go out for curry at least once a week.” One of my friends even takes curcumin tablets.

-RichardH

Brian Krebs, on 31 December 2009, wrote in Wired Underground Services Let Virus Writers Check Their Work.

-RichardH

In the 3 January 2010 issue of the New York Times, Barbara Strauch gives hope to us dottering oldsters in How To Train The Aging Brain.

Indeed, aging brains, even in the middle years, fall into what’s called the default mode, during which the mind wanders off and begin daydreaming. Given all this, the question arises, can an old brain learn, and then remember what it learns? Put another way, is this a brain that should be in school?

As it happens, yes. While it’s tempting to focus on the flaws in older brains, that inducement overlooks how capable they’ve become. Over the past several years, scientists have looked deeper into how brains age and confirmed that they continue to develop through and beyond middle age. (…) What is stuffed into your head may not have vanished but has simply been squirreled away in the folds of your neurons.

[Pomona College psychology professor Deborah M.] Burke has done research on “tots,” those tip-of-the-tongue times when you know something but can’t quite call it to mind. Dr. Burke’s research shows that such incidents increase in part because neural connections, which receive, process and transmit information, can weaken with disuse or age. But she also finds that if you are primed with sounds that are close to those you’re trying to remember, (…) suddenly the lost name will pop into mind. The similarity in sounds can jump-start a limp brain connection.

Recently, researchers have found even more positive news. The brain, as it traverses middle age, gets better at recognizing the central idea, the big picture. If kept in good shape, the brain can continue to build pathways that help its owner recognize patterns and, as a consequence, see significance and even solutions much faster than a young person can. The trick is finding ways to keep brain connections in good condition and to grow more of them.

“The brain is plastic and continues to change, not in getting bigger but allowing for greater complexity and deeper understanding,” says Kathleen Taylor, a professor at St. Mary’s College of California. (…) Educators say that, for adults, one way to nudge neurons in the right direction is to challenge the very assumptions they have worked so hard to accumulate while young. With a brain already full of well-connected pathways, adult learners should “jiggle their synapses a bit” by confronting thoughts that are contrary to their own, says Dr. Taylor.

Teaching new facts should not be the focus of adult education, she says. Instead, continued brain development and a richer form of learning may require that you “bump up against people and ideas” that are different. In a history class, that might mean reading multiple viewpoints, and then prying open brain networks by reflecting on how what was learned has changed your view of the world. “There’s a place for information,” Dr. Taylor says. “We need to know stuff. But we need to move beyond that and challenge our perception of the world. If you always hang around with those you agree with and read things that agree with what you already know, you’re not going to wrestle with your established brain connections.” Such stretching is exactly what scientists say best keeps a brain in tune: get out of the comfort zone to push and nourish your brain.

Jack Mezirow, a professor emeritus at Columbia Teachers College, has proposed that adults learn best if presented with what he calls a “disorienting dilemma,” or something that “helps you critically reflect on the assumptions you’ve acquired.”

-RichardH

To celebrate the New Year, a friend sent this 6 October 2004  Molly Ivins video for all of us to keep in mind.

-RichardH

The reclusive Providence, RI writer of horror and fantasy, H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), created, “The Cthulhu Mythos.”

What? You haven’t read his works? You know, you really should.

The Tabernacle Choir performs a “delightful” Carol of the Old Ones, celebrating Cthulhu and the lesser gods.

I hope you enjoy this song as much as I do.  My wife and I sing bits of it to each other as we stroll the streets of Cambridge.

-RichardH

In the 21 December 2009 issue of the New Yorker Magazine, Paul Rudnick’s article, Holly or Challah? gives “some tips to help the sensitive Christian make everyone, no matter what they’re wearing on their head, feel at ease and have a Happy Interfaith Holiday Season!”

Amusing.

-RichardH

An excellent obituary of Paul Samuelson in the New York Times (14 December 2009).

The 1970 Economic Sciences Nobel webpage with links to Samuelson’s Nobel addresses and selected other articles.

David Runciman, in the 17 December 2009 issue of the London Review of Books, reviews Taylor Branch’s book, The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History in the White House. Branch, a long-time friend of Bill Clinton, recounts his conversations with Clinton over the course of his presidency.