News bits: Abnormalizing the politically abnormal; Memory enhancement method; GOP hypocrisy; Misc.

A NYT opinion by Russ Douthat makes an interesting argument about normalizing vs abnormalizing the abnormal in politics. Douthat opines: 

In the quest to escape Donald Trump’s dominance of American politics, there have been two camps: normalizers and abnormalizers.

The first group takes its cues from an argument made in these pages by the Italian-born economist Luigi Zingales just after Trump’s 2016 election. Comparing the new American president-elect to Silvio Berlusconi, the populist who bestrode Italian politics for nearly two decades, Zingales argued that Berlusconi’s successful opponents were the ones who treated him “as an ordinary opponent” and “focused on the issues, not on his character.” Attempts to mobilize against the right-wing populist on purely moral grounds or to rely on establishment solidarity to deem him somehow illegitimate only sustained Berlusconi’s influence and popularity.

The counterargument has been that you can’t just give certain forms of abnormality a pass; otherwise, you end up tolerating not just demagogy but also lawbreaking, corruption and authoritarianism. The more subtle version of the argument insists that normalizing a demagogue is also ultimately a political mistake as well as a moral one and that you can’t make the full case against a figure like Trump if you try to leave his character and corruption out of it.

Trump won in 2016 by exploiting the weak points in this abnormalizing strategy, as both his Republican primary opponents and then Hillary Clinton failed to defeat him with condemnation and quarantines, instead of reckoning with his populism’s substantive appeal.

His presidency was a more complicated business. I argued throughout, and still believe, that the normalizing strategy was the more effective one, driving Democratic victories in the 2018 midterms (when the messaging was heavily about health care and economic policy) and Joe Biden’s “let’s get back to normal” presidential bid. Meanwhile, the various impeachments, Lincoln Project fund-raising efforts, Russia investigations and screaming newspaper coverage seemed to fit Zingales’s model of establishment efforts that actually solidified Trump’s core support.

On reflection, Douthat is probably right. Vilifying and calling out DJT's corruption, lies, moral failings and anti-democracy authoritarianism and ideology (the "rot") do not faze his rank and file supporters. It just doesn't. Maybe it is best to mostly (not completely) ignore the rot and focus much more on issues, especially ones where there is supporting majority public opinion. One aspect of the rot that should not be ignored is the lies, slanders and crackpottery about issues that radical right authoritarians want to impose despite contrary majority public opinion.

That would mean that the Dems should soften their stance about some issues such as aggressive wokeness, transgenderism and some aspects of public education. 

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Researchers At U. California Irvine published a paper in Frontiers in Neuroscience that used seven different odors to significantly boost memory in a word recall test. Brain imaging at the beginning and end of the study showed apparent improvement in a brain pathway that connects two parts of the brain. That pathway normally weakens or deteriorates with age. Science Daily writes: 

Simple fragrance method produces major memory boost

The project was conducted through the UCI Center for the Neurobiology of Learning & Memory. It involved men and women aged 60 to 85 without memory impairment. All were given a diffuser and seven cartridges, each containing a single and different natural oil. People in the enriched group received full-strength cartridges. Control group participants were given the oils in tiny amounts. Participants put a different cartridge into their diffuser each evening prior to going to bed, and it activated for two hours as they slept.

People in the enriched group showed a 226% [2.26-fold] increase in cognitive performance compared to the control group, as measured by a word list test commonly used to evaluate memory. Imaging revealed better integrity in the brain pathway called the left uncinate fasciculus. This pathway, which connects the medial temporal lobe to the decision-making prefrontal cortex, becomes less robust with age. Participants also reported sleeping more soundly.

Scientists have long known that the loss of olfactory capacity, or ability to smell, can predict development of nearly 70 neurological and psychiatric diseases. These include Alzheimer's and other dementias, Parkinson's, schizophrenia and alcoholism. Evidence is emerging about a link between smell loss due to COVID and ensuing cognitive decrease. Researchers have previously found that exposing people with moderate dementia to up to 40 different odors twice a day over a period of time boosted their memories and language skills, eased depression and improved their olfactory capacities. The UCI team decided to try turning this knowledge into an easy and non-invasive dementia-fighting tool.

"The reality is that over the age of 60, the olfactory sense and cognition starts to fall off a cliff," said Michael Leon, professor of neurobiology & behavior and a CNLM fellow. "But it's not realistic to think people with cognitive impairment could open, sniff and close 80 odorant bottles daily. This would be difficult even for those without dementia."

The study's first author, project scientist Cynthia Woo, said: "That's why we reduced the number of scents to just seven, exposing participants to just one each time, rather than the multiple aromas used simultaneously in previous research projects. By making it possible for people to experience the odors while sleeping, we eliminated the need to set aside time for this during waking hours every day."  

"The olfactory sense has the special privilege of being directly connected to the brain's memory circuits," said Michael Yassa, professor and James L. McGaugh Chair in the Neurobiology of Learning & Memory. The director of CNLM, he served as collaborating investigator. "All the other senses are routed first through the thalamus. Everyone has experienced how powerful aromas are in evoking recollections, even from very long ago. However, unlike with vision changes that we treat with glasses and hearing aids for hearing impairment, there has been no intervention for the loss of smell."

The research paper described the treatment protocol:

Individuals assigned to the olfactory enrichment group were provided with an odorant diffuser (Diffuser World) and 7 essential oil odorants (rose, orange, eucalyptus, lemon, peppermint, rosemary, and lavender; from The Essential Oil Company, Portland, OR) in identical glass vials that each fit into the diffuser. They were asked to turn on the diffuser when they went to bed, and the odorant was released into the air during the night for 2 h when they first went to sleep. They rotated through the different odorants each night. Individuals in the control group also were provided with an odorant diffuser, and they followed the same regimen as the olfactory enrichment participants, however they were provided with bottles that contained distilled water with an undetectable, de minimis amount of odorant added. Participants were instructed to change the odorant bottle daily before they went to bed, and they continued this regimen at home for 6 months.

The paper described the research protocol rationale like this:

While sniffing 40 odorants twice a day benefits patients with dementia, it is unlikely that they would be able to load, open, and close 80 sniff bottles each day. This problem would be expected even in older adults without dementia. Since it is important to get high levels of compliance for olfactory enrichment to obtain maximal benefits, we tested the idea that we could get enhanced neural and cognitive outcomes after minimal-effort olfactory enrichment at night.

Although memory enhancement is an elusive beast, this sounds like a plausible way to help maintain or even improve a neural pathway that normally deteriorates with age. This might actually be the real deal if this result is reproducible. Caution, this needs to be repeated at least once with more subjects to begin to confirm this astonishing result. The study had only 20 treated male and female participants, age 60–85, of good general health, with normal cognition. The control group had 23 people in it. That's a small sample size for the treated group.

But dang, I might give this a try. Even if the isn't real, there's no harm I can see in sleeping a couple of hours at night with different scents wafting around the room for a few months.

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Garden variety Republican hypocrisy: 

Barely a day after former President Donald Trump was indicted for the third time, some Senate Republicans are already trying to undermine the credibility of the federal judge who was randomly assigned to preside over his trial.

Here’s a detail they’re hoping you won’t notice: They unanimously voted to confirm her.  

Not a single Republican raised concerns about Chutkan during her nomination hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee in February 2014. In fact, only one GOP member of the committee even showed up to the hearing: Sen. John Cornyn (Texas), who was only there to rave about a separate Texas judicial nominee on the schedule. He left before Chutkan was up.

The named Republican hypocrites are Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham.

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Fun but hopeless ideas

We already name hurricanes, so let's name heat waves after oil companies, their executives, e.g., the Darren Woods (Exxon-Mobil CEO) Heat Wave, etc. 

Congress needs to pass a law requiring that offices of executives or politicians in pro-pollution companies and the pro-pollution Republican Party have air conditioning set to kick in at 85ᵒ, and heat set to kick in at 55ᵒ.

Congress needs to pass a law requiring gun owners to get a license and pay an annual license tax for each gun owned and take a gun safety course every three or four years.

Congress needs to pass a law requiring the government to negotiate drug prices for Medicare, Medicaid and all government employees. It would be nice if it negotiated for the rest of us too, but that asks way too much because we are just us.