SPACE/COSMOS

HEY KIDZ

How does the International Space Station orbit Earth without burning up?

The Conversation
December 17, 2024

International Space Station (Shutterstock)

Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com.

How is the International Space Station able to orbit without burning up? – Mateo, age 8, New York, New York

Flying through Earth’s orbit are thousands of satellites and two operational space stations, including the International Space Station, which weighs as much as 77 elephants. The International Space Station, or ISS, hosts scientists and researchers from around the world as they contribute to discoveries in medicine, microbiology, Earth and space science, and more.

One of my first jobs in aerospace engineering was working on the ISS, and the ISS remains one of my favorite aerospace systems. I now work at Georgia Tech, where I teach aerospace engineering.

The ISS travels very quickly around the Earth at 5 miles per second (8 kilometers per second), which means it could fly from Atlanta to London in 14 minutes. But at the same time, small chunks of rock called meteoroids shoot through space and burn up when they hit Earth’s atmosphere. How is it that some objects – such as the International Space Station – orbit the Earth unscathed, while others, such as asteroids, burn up?

The ISS moves quickly while it orbits the Earth.

To answer why the ISS can stay in orbit for decades unscathed, you first need to understand why some things, such as meteoroids, do burn up when they enter our planet’s atmosphere.

Why do meteoroids burn up in the atmosphere?

Meteoroids are small chunks of rock and metal that orbit the Sun. These space rocks can travel between 7 and 25 miles per second (12 to 40 km per second). That’s fast enough to cross the entire United States in about 5 minutes.


Sometimes, the orbit of a meteoroid overlaps with Earth, and the meteoroid enters Earth’s atmosphere – where it burns up and disintegrates.

Even though you can’t see them, the atmosphere is full of a combination of particles, primarily nitrogen and oxygen, which make up the air you breathe. The farther you are from the surface of the Earth, the lower the density of particles in the atmosphere.

The atmosphere has several layers. When something from space enters the Earth’s atmosphere, it must pass through each of these layers before it reaches the ground.


Meteoroids burn up in a part of Earth’s atmosphere called the mesosphere, which is 30 to 50 miles (48 to 80 kilometers) above the ground. Even though the air is thin up there, meteoroids still bump into air particles as they fly through.

When meteoroids zoom through the atmosphere at these very high speeds, they are destroyed by a process that causes them to heat up and break apart. The meteoroid pushes the air particles together, kind of like how a bulldozer pushes dirt. This process creates a lot of pressure and heat. The air particles hit the meteoroid at hypersonic speeds – much faster than the speed of sound – causing atoms to break away and form cracks in the meteroid.

The high pressure and hot air get into the cracks, making the meteoroid break apart and burn up as it falls through the sky. This process is called meteoroid ablation and is what you are actually seeing when you witness a “shooting star.”




The ISS orbits in the thermosphere, about 200 miles (322 km) from Earth. NOAA, CC BY-ND

Why doesn’t the ISS burn up?


So why doesn’t this happen to the International Space Station?

The ISS does not fly in the mesosphere. Instead, the ISS flies in a higher and much less dense layer of the atmosphere called the thermosphere, which extends from 50 miles (80 km) to 440 miles (708 km) above Earth.

The Kármán line, which is considered the boundary of space, is in the thermosphere, 62 miles (100 kilometers) above the surface of the Earth. The space station flies even higher, at about 250 miles (402 km) above the surface.


The thermosphere has too few particles to transmit heat. At the height of the space station, the atmosphere is so thin that to collect enough particles to equal the mass of just one apple, you would need a box the size of Lake Superior!

As a result, the ISS doesn’t experience the same kind of interactions with atmospheric particles, nor the high pressure and heat that meteoroids traveling closer to Earth do, so it doesn’t burn up.

A high-flying research hub

Although the ISS doesn’t burn up, it does experience large temperature swings. As it orbits Earth, it is alternately exposed to direct sunlight and darkness. Temperatures can reach 250 degrees Fahrenheit (121 degrees Celsius) when it’s exposed to the Sun, and then they can drop to as low as -250 degrees F (-156 degrees Celsius) when it’s in the dark – a swing of 500 degrees F (277 degrees C) as it moves through orbit.

The engineers who designed the station carefully selected materials that can handle these temperature swings. The inside of the space station is kept at comfortable temperatures for the astronauts, the same way people on Earth heat and cool our homes to stay comfortable indoors.

Research on the ISS has led to advancements such as improved water filtration technologies, a better understanding of Earth’s water and energy cycles, techniques to grow food in space, insights into black holes, a better understanding of how the human body changes during long-duration space travel, and new studies on a variety of diseases and treatments.

NASA plans to keep the ISS active until 2030, when all of the astronauts will return to Earth and the ISS will be deorbited, or brought down from orbit by a specially designed spacecraft.


As it comes down through Earth’s atmosphere in the deorbiting process, it will enter the mesosphere, where many parts of it will heat up and disintegrate.

Some spacecraft, such as the crew capsules that bring astronauts to and from the ISS, can survive reentry into the atmosphere using their heat shield. That’s a special layer made up of materials that are able to withstand very high temperatures. The ISS wasn’t designed for that, so it doesn’t have a heat shield.

If you’d like to see the space station as it passes over your area, you can check out NASA’s website to find out when it might be visible near you.


Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.

And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.

Kelly Griendling, Lecturer of Aerospace Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Boldly brewing where noone has brewed before: Japanese sake to be made in space 

/ Unsplash - Erik Eastman

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By bno - Taipei Office December 17, 2024

Asahi Shuzo Co., renowned for its premium Dassai sake, has unveiled a pioneering plan to brew rice wine on the International Space Station (ISS) in 2025, marking the first step in its audacious vision of brewing on the moon. The Iwakuni-based sake producer, in collaboration with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. and the Aichi Center for Industry and Science Technology, will launch rice, koji mold, and yeast to the ISS next year. This marks a groundbreaking experiment in both the world of brewing and space exploration, as reported by The Asahi Shimbun.

The company’s ambition doesn’t stop at the ISS. Asahi Shuzo's ultimate goal is to establish a sake brewery on the moon, using lunar water to create its signature Dassai sake. "Our ultimate goal is to brew Dassai on the moon using water found there," a spokesperson for the company said, underlining the long-term vision of lunar colonisation.

The project will use Japan's Kibo module on the ISS to initiate the fermentation process. Astronauts will mix the ingredients with water, setting the stage for a unique brewing experience in microgravity. The mixture will then undergo automated stirring and alcohol-level monitoring, before being frozen and returned to Earth. This moromi, or unrefined sake, will be used to create a single 100-millilitre bottle of "Dassai MOON–Space Brew."

This limited-edition bottle, which will carry a price tag of JPY100mn (about $653,000), is expected to capture the public’s imagination. All proceeds will go towards supporting domestic space development projects, reinforcing Japan’s commitment to advancing space technology. Asahi Shuzo believes that sake, due to the lighter weight and lower water content of rice compared to grapes, makes a more viable experiment than winemaking in space.

By venturing beyond Earth's atmosphere, Asahi Shuzo aims to explore new frontiers for brewing while also contributing to the development of space-related technologies. The ambitious project signals a bold future where space exploration and traditional craftsmanship converge, bringing sake brewing to the stars and potentially beyond.

 The Scottish spaceport stuck in limbo

Steven McKenzie
BBC Scotland Highlands and Islands reporter

A site on A'Mhoine Peninsula was selected for a spaceport

A Highland peatbog was to be home to the UK's first spaceport.

But more than six years after a UK government announcement confirming the plan, rockets launching from Sutherland Spaceport seems unlikely any time soon.

Where is the spaceport site?

It is on A'Mhoine Peninsula, a landscape of moorland, peatbogs, grazing pastures, lochs and hills in north west Sutherland.

The 86-acre (35ha) site is owned by Melness Crofters' Estate.

The estate, which covers a total area of 10,000 acres (4,074 ha), is run by crofters.

Crofting is a system of land tenure and farming unique to Scotland.

The nearest homes from the spaceport's boundary are just over two miles (3km) away.

Tongue, a community of about 500 people, is about four miles (6km) away.

Why Sutherland?


The area has been billed as one of the few places in Europe that is sparsely populated and in the right place for launching small rockets vertically into space.

A north facing coast means rockets avoid flying over populated areas - and ideally placed for launching small satellites into commercially-desirable orbits.

The plan for Sutherland was for 12 launches a year and satellites designed for monitoring climate change.

Public agency Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE) has been leading the project.

It previously said the spaceport would bring much-needed highly skilled jobs and investment to the Highlands.

The facility was to be developed as part of a wider network of spaceports.

The billionaire opponents

The Holch Povlsens own land in Sutherland and had concerns about the spaceport's environmental impacts

After Conservative business secretary Greg Clark announced a package of support back in July 2018 at Farnborough International Air Show the project hit a number of milestones in the planning process:Scottish Land Court, which hears disputes in crofting and farming, approved a change use of the land in September 2021
Highland Council granted full planning permission in August 2020
Amended plans were given the go-ahead in October this year

But this journey has been far from smooth.

Some crofters objected because of concerns about the spaceport's impact on the environment, local roads and crofting rights.

Billionaire couple Anders and Anne Holch Povlsen, who own land near the site, also objected because of concerns about its impact on the Caithness and Sutherland Peatlands Special Protection Area.

Their opposition even saw them invest almost £1.5m in a rival project - Shetland's SaxaVord Spaceport.

A project in limbo


The news broke at the start of December.

Orbex, one of the major backers of Sutherland Spaceport, announced construction was paused and it was instead focused on launching its first rockets from SaxaVord.

The rocket manufacturer, which employs 150 people at a factory in Forres in Moray, did not rule out completing the Highland site in the future.

But chief executive Phil Chambers said: "Our primary goal is to support the European space industry by achieving a sustainable series of satellite launches into low Earth orbit.

"This is best achieved by focusing our resources and talents on developing launch vehicles and associated launch services.

"This decision will help us to reach first launch in 2025 and provides SaxaVord with another customer to further strengthen its commercial proposition. It's a win-win for UK and Scottish space."

HIE said the decision was an "unexpected change in direction", but added it was important to stress Orbex was a very significant player and employer in the UK space industry.

Orbex

In numbers:

Sutherland Spaceport costs and investment

£17mExpected cost of the facility


£1.9mHIE grants up to November 2024 given to Orbex for costs associated with developing the site


£2mHIE previously invested. UK Space Agency also gave £2.5m and Nuclear Decommissioning Authority £2.6mSource: HIE

What next?


Melness Crofters' Estate (MCE) wants to work with HIE and Orbex to get the spaceport operational.

A spokesperson told BBC Scotland News: "We were never just doing this for Melness.

"We saw this as planting a seed of something from which other opportunities could grow for the wider community in the north.

"There are very few job opportunities for young people in our area."

They added: "Our payments from the rental of our land have already resulted in MCE investing in several other local projects.

"There are plans for 12 affordable houses in planning at the moment."

HIE said the impact of Orbex decision was unclear.

It added: "We want to send a clear message to local people in north Sutherland that we are deeply disappointed at this turn of events and remain committed to working with them to develop a positive future for Melness and the surrounding area."

Shares in Hungary’s 4iG skyrocket amid speculation over SpaceX collaboration

Elon Musk (left), Viktor Orban (centre), and Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto (to Orban's left) at Mar-a-Lago.

By Tamas Csonka in Budapest December 11, 2024

Shares of 4iG, a leading Hungarian ICT, rallied 9% on December 10 on speculation that the company could work together with Elon Musk's SpaceX. 

President-elect Donald Trump hosted Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto at his Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, on December 9. It marked the first meeting between the two leaders since the November elections. The talks were attended by Gellert Jaszai, head of Budapest-listed 4iG and incoming National Security Advisor Mike Waltz and and tycoon Elon Musk.

One of the topics discussed was the launch of 4iG’s HUSAT satellite programme, the first of its kind in the CEE region to develop satellite-based telecommunications and Earth observation capabilities, the Hungarian IT group 4iG said in a statement. This could open a whole new chapter in the field of innovation and cooperation between the US and Hungary, it added.

Under the HUSAT initiative, the 4iG Group plans to deploy and operate one geostationary satellite (HUGEO) and an additional eight (6+2) low-Earth orbit satellites (HULEO) by 2032.

The company will manufacture the low Earth orbit satellites in a 4,000 sqm space technology centre, near Budapest, slated to start operating by 2026. 4iG’s space and defence arm, grouping a dozen companies, focuses on space and satellite development, the manufacturing of drones and anti-drone systems, and defence sector digitalisation.  

"The friendly discussions marked the beginning of efforts to foster the adoption of advanced technologies and bolster transatlantic economic ties,"  Jaszai was quoted as saying in the statement.

The meeting signals Hungary's ambition to position itself as a credible player in the global space industry. This move represents a notable shift from initial scepticism toward Hungary’s space ambitions, which even drew criticism from within Orban’s own political circles. Over time, however, increased investment and strategic focus from both the Hungarian government and 4iG have turned these efforts into a serious undertaking, Telex.hu writes.

At a joint press conference with his Georgian counterpart, Szijjarto said Hungarian-American political relations are set to enter a "golden age" with the election of Donald Trump.

 

University of Texas at San Antonio launches new center to propel space technology

The Center for Space Technology and Operations Research (CSTOR) is poised to leverage UTSA expertise to strengthen national security and Texas leadership in the emerging trillion-dollar cislunar economy. 

University of Texas at San Antonio

 

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The Center for Space Technology and Operations Research (CSTOR) is poised to leverage UTSA expertise to strengthen national security and Texas leadership in the emerging trillion-dollar cislunar economy. 

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Credit: The University of Texas at San Antonio

UTSA’s Office of Research today announced the launch of the Center for Space Technology and Operations Research (CSTOR), a new research center dedicated to advancing engineering, technology and operations that will support space missions between the Earth and the Moon, an area referred to as cislunar space, as well as the lunar surface. The center will address the growing demand for research and workforce development by civil, commercial and national security space agencies and companies. David Silva, UTSA distinguished professor of physics and astronomy, will serve as the center’s inaugural director.

CSTOR will provide enhanced support to the more than 35 UTSA researchers and over 200 students working on space technology related research and career development in areas such as uncrewed spacecraft, lunar habitation, hypersonics and propulsion. It will further augment the university’s effort to attract even more of the nation’s brightest minds in space technology through UTSA's clustered and connected faculty hiring plan, supported by the UT System Board of Regents’ Research Excellence Program.

“UTSA has intentionally expanded its capacity, facilities and expertise in space technology to meet the rapidly growing demand for innovation and enable stronger comprehensive partnerships with key organizations like Southwest Research Institute and Department of Energy National Labs,” said UTSA President Taylor Eighmy. “The launch of this new center positions UTSA as a destination for innovation, knowledge creation and talent development for the space economy.”

Technology and workforce development for the space economy is a growing priority in federal and state policy. In 2022, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy released a strategy outlining its approach to cislunar space, titled the National Cislunar Science and Technology (S&T) Strategy. The plan affirms the growing role of cislunar space in diplomacy and national security and aims to bolster support for research and development in the field. At the state level, the Texas Space Commission was established in 2024 to sustain and grow Texas’ leadership in space exploration.

“We may not always think about space technology as being integral to national security,” Silva said, “but when you consider the fact that our daily lives rely on satellites for GPS services, telecommunications and weather forecasting, it's clear that cislunar space is a linchpin in our national defense. Our new center is poised to leverage UTSA expertise to strengthen national security and Texas leadership in the emerging trillion-dollar cislunar economy.”

Satellites can also be used in agriculture, logistics and energy to monitor crops, traffic patterns and energy grids. They can optimize supply chains and strengthen maritime security by monitoring ports. They also provide key insight into the environment, for instance by monitoring freshwater availability providing early warnings of natural disasters such as floods and wildfires.

Space infrastructure represents a rapidly growing market in the global economy. A 2022 McKinsey & Company report projects that the industry will grow from $630 billion in 2023 to $1.8 trillion by 2035. This growth will be catalyzed by the rapidly increasing cost-effectiveness of launch, which has been enabled by companies based or operating in Texas such as Blue Origins, Firefly and SpaceX. This expansion will likely spur corresponding growth in the job market, with U.S. aerospace engineering jobs expected to increase by 6% between 2023 and 2033.

CSTOR will support a range of technological space research focus areas in which UTSA excels, including advanced chemical propulsion, fuel for nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP), lunar habitation and surface operations, secure satellite communications and vehicle atmospheric reentry. UTSA is also home to space-related expertise in advanced manufacturing, cybersecurity, energy storage in extreme environments, neuromorphic AI, power systems, robotics, and semiconductor devices for high-power, extreme environment applications.

UTSA’s space technology capabilities are further supported by several research centers and facilities. These include the Hypersonics Lab, the Center for Advanced Measurements in Extreme Environments, the Kleberg Advanced Microscopy Center, the Planetary Material CHaractErization Facility (PMCHEF), the Laser Spectroscopy and Chemical Propulsion Lab, the Wireless Next Generation Systems Laboratory, the Heat and Mass Transfer Experimental Rheology Lab, the Extreme Environments Materials Laboratory, the Laboratory of Turbulence, Sensing, & Intelligence Systems, the Next Generation Networks Laboratory (NGNL) and the Unmanned Systems Lab.

CSTOR will collaborate closely with the National Security Collaboration Center to promote research aimed at advancing and securing these and other critical systems, as well as UTSA’s other existing centers, including the Cybersecurity Manufacturing Innovation Institute, the Center for Infrastructure Assurance and Security, the Institute for Cyber Security, the Cyber Center for Security and Analytics, as well as the NSF CREST Center for Security and Privacy Enhanced Cloud Computing.

Abortion suit against doc came from boyfriend with 'your body, my choice' vendetta: expert

Sarah K. Burris
December 16, 2024

RAW STORY

A legal expert gave an eyebrow-raising opinion on a controversial effort in Texas, where the state's far-right attorney general last week sued a New York doctor for prescribing abortion pills to a woman in suburban Dallas.

MSNBC legal correspondent Lisa Rubin shared a startling update to the lawsuit from Ken Paxton against an abortion provider after a woman lost her pregnancy.

Rubin wrote on X that the suit came from the boyfriend, who was assumed to be the father of the "unborn," and said he believed the woman did something that led to the loss of the pregnancy.

"As we discussed on @Morning_Joe today, part of what's so chilling about Ken Paxton's lawsuit against a New York OB/GYN is how it likely came to be: through a patient's boyfriend with an apparent 'your body, my choice' vendetta," wrote Rubin.

ALSO READ: How Republicans paved the road to Texas with misogyny

Jessica Valenti, who follows laws around reproductive freedom, posted a screen capture of the lawsuit from Paxton, which explains that the angry boyfriend found medications from a New York doctor.


"If you read Paxton's brief, it's clear that the patient's boyfriend is the protagonist - it's all about him," Valenti wrote on X. "This is what happened when a doc mentioned that the patient had lost a pregnancy (she hadn't told her boyfriend)."

The suit reads: "The biological father of the unborn, upon learning this information, concluded that the biological mother of the unborn child had intentionally withheld information from him regarding her pregnancy, and he further suspected that the biological mother had, in fact, done something to contribute to the miscarriage or abortion of the unborn child. The biological father, upon returning to the residence in Collin County, discovered the two above-referenced medications from Carpenter."

Valenti wrote that the man's immediate reaction to the news was to be "angry and suspicious - and head to her place to look for evidence of an abortion."

She referred to him as an example of "aggrieved men."

"All of which is to say: Texas Republicans want this to look like a case where they're protecting women from dangerous abortion pills and irresponsible doctors. But scratch at the surface even a little, and you can see that it's plain old controlling misogyny," said Valenti.

She predicted similar lawsuits would likely surface over the next few years. It's critical, she argued, to ensure careful investigation before reporting something like a woman having "abortion complications" when the reality is something entirely different.


Valenti wrote a report on the way Texas concealed abortion data last year. In the Texas abortion ban, there are 28 medical issues the state considers to be "abortion complications." However, medically, they have nothing to do with abortions. Regardless, Texas requires doctors to input false information so the state can inaccurately claim "any woman who develops one of these issues" is because she had an abortion earlier in life.

For example, if a woman died as a result of ectopic pregnancy and she had an abortion 10 years before that, Texas would deem that "abortion complications."

"Some, like 'adverse reactions to anesthesia,' are risks associated with having any medical procedure," wrote Valeti.

In Texas, this would be categorized as "abortion complications." Another is a "hemolytic reaction resulting from the administration of ABO-incompatible blood or blood products." If a woman dies as a result of being given the wrong blood type, it would also be deemed "abortion complications."

Why does red wine cause headaches? Our research points to a compound found in the grapes’

WORD OF THE DAY; ENOLOGY

The Conversation
December 17, 2024 


Pouring glass of red wine (Shutterstock)


Medical accounts of red wine headaches go back to Roman times, but the experience is likely as old as winemaking – something like 10,000 years. As chemists specializing in winemaking, we wanted to try to figure out the source of these headaches.

Many components of red wine have been accused of causing this misery – sulfites, biogenic amines and tannin are the most popular. Our research suggests the most likely culprit is one you may not have considered.

The common suspects

Sulfites have been a popular scapegoat for all sorts of ailments since it became mandatory in the 1990s to label them on wines in the U.S. However, not much evidence links sulfites directly to headaches, and other foods contain comparable levels to wine without the same effects. White wines also contain the same amount of sulfites as red wines.

Your body also produces about 700 milligrams of sulfites daily as you metabolize the protein in your food and excrete it as sulfate. To do so, it has compounds called sulfite oxidases that create sulfate from sulfite – the 20 milligrams in a glass of wine are unlikely to overwhelm your sulfite oxidases.

Some people point the finger for red wine headaches at biogenic amines. These are nitrogenous substances found in many fermented or spoiled foods, and can cause headaches, but the amount in wine is far too low to be a problem.

Tannin is a good guess, since white wines contain only tiny amounts, while red wines contain substantial amounts. Tannin is a type of phenolic compound – it’s found in all plants and usually plays a role in preventing disease, resisting predation or encouraging seed dispersal by animals.

But there are many other phenolic compounds in grapes’ skin and seeds besides tannin that make it into red wines from the winemaking process, and are not present in white, so any of them could be a candidate culprit.

Tannin is also found in many other common products, such as tea and chocolate, which generally don’t cause headaches. And phenolics are good antioxidants – they’re unlikely to trigger the inflammation that would cause a headache.

A red wine flush

Some people get red, flushed skin when drinking alcohol, and the flushing is accompanied by a headache. This headache is caused by a lagging metabolic step as the body breaks down the booze.

The metabolism of alcohol happens in two steps. First, ethanol is converted to acetaldehyde. Then, the enzyme ALDH converts the acetaldehyde to acetate, a common and innocuous substance. This second step is slower for people who get flushed skin, since their ALDH is not very efficient. They accumulate acetaldehyde, which is a somewhat toxic compound also linked to hangovers.




Leftover acetaldehyde not converted into acetate can cause hangover symptoms. Compound Chemistry, CC BY-NC-ND

So, if something unique in red wine could inhibit ALDH, slowing down that second metabolic step, would that lead to higher levels of acetaldehyde and a headache? To try to answer this question, we scanned the list of phenolics abundant in red wine.


We spied a paper showing that quercetin is a good inhibitor of ALDH. Quercetin is a phenolic compound found in the skins of grapes, so it’s much more abundant in red than white wines because red grape skins are left in longer during the fermentation process than white grape skins.
Putting enzymes to the test

Testing ALDH was the next step. We set up an inhibition assay in test tubes. In the assay, we measured how fast the enzyme ALDH breaks down acetaldehyde. Then, we added the suspected inhibitors – quercetin, as well as some other phenolics we wanted to test – to see whether they slowed the process.




The chemical structure of quercetin, which may cause red wine headaches. Johannes Botne, CC BY-SA

These tests confirmed that quercetin was a good inhibitor. Some other phenolics had varying effects, but quercetin glucuronide was the winner. When your body absorbs quercetin from food or wine, most is converted to glucuronide by the liver in order to quickly eliminate it from the body.

Our enzyme tests suggest that quercetin glucuronide disrupts your body’s metabolism of alcohol. This disruption means extra acetaldehyde circulates, causing inflammation and headaches. This discovery points to what’s known as a secondary, or synergistic, effect.

These secondary effects are much harder to identify because two factors must both be in play for the outcome to arise. In this case, other foods that contain quercetin are not associated with headaches, so you might not initially consider quercetin as the cause of the red wine problem.

The next step could be to give human subjects two red wines that are low and high in quercetin and ask whether either wine causes a headache. If the high-quercetin wine induces more headaches, we’d know we’re on the right track.

So, if quercetin causes headaches, are there red wines without it? Unfortunately, the data available on specific wines is far too limited to provide any helpful advice. However, grapes exposed to the Sun do produce more quercetin, and many inexpensive red wines are made from grapes that see less sunlight.

If you’re willing to take a chance, look for an inexpensive, lighter red wine.

Andrew Waterhouse, Professor of Enology, University of California, Davis and Apramita Devi, Postdoctoral researcher in food science and technology, University of California, Davis

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

AOC handed bruising defeat in fight to become top Dem on House committee

Sarah K. Burris
December 17, 2024 
RAW STORY

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). (Shutterstock)

Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-MD) will become the top Democrat on the House Committee on Oversight and Reform after beating a challenge from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).

The vote, according to Punch Bowl News, was 131-84.

Reporter and Punch Bowl co-founder John Bresnahan noted that Ocasio-Cortez was "gracious" in her defeat, hugging Connolly after the loss.

If Democrats take power back at the 2026 midterm elections, the oversight committee could be critical in investigating Donald Trump's administration.

'Backroom sabotage': Nancy Pelosi accused of hijacking AOC over festering feud

Matthew Chapman
December 17, 2024 8:49AM ET
RAW STORY

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) is facing likely defeat in her candidacy to lead the Democratic minority on the House Oversight Committee, after previously building momentum for the role — because Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has been working behind the scenes to thwart it.

This "backroom sabotage" is not a healthy development for Democrats, wrote Alexander Sammon for Slate — and it's a reflection not of legitimate debate over who is best to lead the committee, but a yearslong vendetta Pelosi is unable to let go of, and a reluctance to truly pass the torch to a new generation of leaders.

Pelosi "now appears to be score-settling over a feud with Ocasio-Cortez that is six years old," she wrote.

"After November’s drubbing, House Democrats signaled that they were prepared to accept a changing of the guard atop some of the important House committees," wrote Sammon, including Reps. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) and Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) stepping aside for relatively younger leaders.

But when Ocasio-Cortez stepped up for Oversight, and began to attract support, things changed.

"Not one to let a young person ascend quietly, Nancy Pelosi entered the fray," wrote Sammon. "The patron saint of Democratic gerontocracy, 84-year-old Nancy Pelosi is supposedly retired from leadership, but this month, she actively threw her weight behind 74-year-old Virginia Rep. Gerry Connolly, who was just diagnosed with throat cancer. Now, Pelosi is whipping votes for Connolly, whose potential promotion would cap off this 'changing of the guard' by replacing a 61-year-old with a guy in his mid-70s. And because Pelosi suffered a fall in Germany and had to have her hip replaced, she’s essentially whipping votes from a hospital bed."

Ocasio-Cortez's outspoken progressive record has made some more centrist lawmakers uneasy, Sammon noted, but she is arguably perfect for this role: "During a second Trump presidency, Oversight will be one of the most important bully pulpits to expose and interrogate the incoming administration’s flagrant corruption," and AOC, who already serves on Oversight, has repeatedly gone viral demolishing Trump allies in that committee. "Her ability as an explainer is top-notch, and her penchant for conveying outrage and injustice is sorely lacking in the party’s upper echelons."

Connolly has extensive experience on the committee, said Sammon, with "a positive reputation for his work beating back Republican witch hunts during the Barack Obama years" — but "it’s pretty obvious which one of these representatives has a bigger megaphone to explain what’s going on. Ocasio-Cortez has 8.1 million followers. Connolly has 4,600."

Pelosi, Sammon noted, was instrumental in building the consensus to force President Joe Biden out of running for a second term — but those same tactics are "harder to justify when an eminently qualified rising star — who, whether Pelosi likes it personally or not, is widely known to be a cornerstone of the party’s future — pushes for a simple promotion."

Newsmax guest rips Trump for 'seeking attention' with 'frivolous' lawsuit against pollster

David Edwards
December 17, 2024 
RAW STORY

Newsmax/screen grab

President-elect Donald Trump was desperately "seeking attention" when he filed a "frivolous" lawsuit against a pollster who showed him losing Iowa this year, an attorney told a conservative news network Tuesday.

In an interview on Newsmax, host Katrina Szish asked lawyer Chandelle Summer to comment after Trump sued pollster Ann Selzer and The Des Moines Register.

"I don't believe there is a case there, Katrina," Summer argued. "I think this is, quite frankly, a frivolous lawsuit filed by Trump seeking attention."

"I think this particular poll hurt him badly at the time, because it was so widely published," she continued. "And there are no damages, because he won the state. He exceeded the poll numbers."

"And I just don't think you can sue for false advertising, which is what this case is."

While announcing the lawsuit on Monday, Trump accused the newspaper of "election interference."

"I'm doing this because I feel I have an obligation to. I'm going to be bringing one against the people in Iowa, their newspaper, which had a very, very good pollster who got me right all the time, and then just before the election, she said I was going to lose by 3 or 4 points," the president-elect complained.

Watch the video below from Newsmax or at this link.

We're watching the largest and most dangerous 'cult' in American history

Dr. Seth D. Norrholm
December 16, 2024

RAW STORY

I was dying…It was just a matter of time. Lying behind the wheel of the airplane, bleeding out of the right side of my devastated body, I waited for the rapid shooting to stop.

—Former Representative Jackie Speier in her memoir Undaunted: Surviving Jonestown, Summoning Courage, and Fighting Back recounting her experience after being shot five times during an ambush during her fact-finding visit to Jonestown, Guyana where Jim Jones and his cult, Peoples Temple, had built a compound.

It, combined with everything else that was going on, made it difficult to breathe…Being crushed by the shield and the people behind it … leaving me defenseless, injured.

—Metropolitan police officer, Daniel Hodges, describing being crushed in a doorway during the January 6, 2021, attack by Trump supporters on the U.S. Capitol

In both of the examples above, the individual speaking was the victim of extreme violence perpetrated by followers of a single person whose influence had spread to hundreds of people (in the January 6th case, thousands of people). In fact, Speier’s experience with the Jim Jones followers was part of the single greatest loss of American life (918 people) prior to 9/11/2001. These followings have been given an umbrella name, cult, and have involved what has been traditionally called “brainwashing.” The cult leader receives seemingly undying support as the Dear Leader or Savior. However, the term brainwashing suggests that indoctrinated members are robots without free will – behavioral scientists argue that this is not the case. It’s an oversimplification.

Rather than being seen as passive victims to an irresistible force, psychiatrist Robert Lifton argues that there is “voluntary self-surrender” in one’s entrance into a cult. Further, the decision to give up control as part of the cult process may actually be part of the reason why people join. Research and experience tell us that those who are “cult vulnerable” may have a sense of confusion or separation from society or seek the same sort of highly controlled environment that was part of their childhood. It has also been suggested that those who are at risk for cult membership feel an enormous lack of control in the face of uncertainty (i.e., economic, occupational, academic, social, familial) and will gravitate more towards a cult as their distress increases. I would argue that many of these factors are at play when we see the ongoing support of Trumpism and MAGA “theology.”


Psychologist Leon Festinger described the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance in which there is a disconnect between one’s feelings, beliefs, and convictions and their observable actions. This dissonance is distressing and, in order to relieve the anxiety, people may become more invested in the cult or belief system that goes against who they are individually. As such, cult members become more “dug-in” and will cling to thoughts and beliefs that contradict available evidence. In other words, they are no longer able to find a middle ground or compromise.

How does this apply to today’s politics?

There was a time when the two major political parties in America could exhibit bipartisanship by moving across the aisle to compromise on the issues on which they were legislating. Tried and true Republicans who favored small government, lower taxes, and national security could find a middle ground with Democrats who pushed for things like universal healthcare, higher minimum wages, and progressive tax reform. The abortion issue in America has been an area of debate between the parties as they debated elements like when life begins, is a heartbeat a heartbeat, and what to do about post-birth abortions (which is murder and not actually a thing). There were largely two sides of the issue and some areas for compromise.


This is no longer possible in today’s sociopolitical climate. Although members of the GOP still refer to themselves as a political party with principled stances, the reality is they have now morphed into a domestic terror organization and to use the umbrella term, a cult – the largest and most dangerous cult in American history.

RELATED: Neuroscientist sounds the alarm on the GOP’s 'contagious sociopaths' who live among us

Cult thinking includes ardent adherence to group thinking such as – clinically speaking, in the face of distorted thinking we ask about one’s strength of conviction by querying, ”Can you think of other ways of seeing this?” Sadly, what we are seeing publicly is ‘No’ from those who still subscribe to Trumpism/MAGA.



Here are a few examples in today’s sociopolitical environment in which cultism has contributed to a lack of middle ground.

There is no middle ground on treasonous, conspiratorial, fraudulent behavior – these are crimes and, arguably, the worst crimes one could commit against their own country.

There is no middle ground on slavery.


There is no middle ground on allowing Americans to die through inaction in response to natural disasters and global health crises.

There is no middle ground on gunning down school children or wearing an AR-15 rifle pin and throwing away a pin to remember a Uvalde victim.

There is no middle ground on jeopardizing national security and retaining and sharing classified documents.


There is no middle ground on breaking campaign finance (i.e., hush money schemes) laws.

There should be no middle ground on tolerance of crime, period.

And so many know this. Tim Scott, Jim Jordan, and Marco Rubio (the last two having gone to law school), all know this and are smarter than they are acting – which takes us back to cult dynamics – if you are a dyed-in-the-wool cultist or pretending to be a cultist – but the outcome is the same – harm to the Country and its people – there is no difference. Whether you actually have a personality disorder or are pretending to be a sociopathically or psychopathically disordered person – if the result is the same – harm to your constituents and your country – what’s the difference? As noted in the opening paragraphs, there is a voluntary submission to cultism – Rubio, for example, identified all of the reasons why the 45th President was not qualified when he himself was running for President in 2016. However, perhaps due to his own intolerance of uncertainties in his life, volunteered for Trumpism.

What can be done?

There are exit strategies for people ensnared in a cult. One factor is accountability or repeatedly seeing the adverse consequences of the group’s behavior (e.g., indictment, incarceration, job loss) which we started to see even more of this week.

But until one party and its ardent followers can admit they are in a domestic terrorist cult and as Rep. Eric Swalwell said are “unserious” people, there is no hope of unification on the horizon. The first step is getting through to people who can’t or won’t see the truth.

ALSO IN THE NEWS: Cognitive neuroscientist explains why stupidity is an existential threat to America

About the Author:

Seth D. Norrholm, PhD (Threads: neuropsychophd; X, artist formerly known as Twitter: @SethN12) is a neuropsychologist and independent socio political columnist. Dr. Norrholm has spent 20 years studying trauma-, stressor-, anxiety-, depressive-, and substance use-related disorders and has published over 135 peer-reviewed research articles and book chapters. The primary objective of his work is to develop “bench-to-bedside” clinical research methods to inform therapeutic interventions for fear and anxiety-related disorders and how they relate to human factors such as personality, genetics, and environmental influences. Dr. Norrholm has been featured on NBC, ABC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC’s Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, Politico.com, The New York Times, The New York Daily News, USA Today, WebMD, The Atlantic, The History Channel, Scientific American, Salon.com, The Huffington Post, and Yahoo.com.

Inside the DOGE billionaires' plan to kill Medicare

Robert Reich

December 16, 2024
ALTERNET

I’ve shared with you the plans of Trump’s unelected multi-billionaires, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, to undermine Social Security — the most popular and successful program in the federal government, into which you’ve paid your entire working life.

Today I want to share their plan to gut Medicaid.

Medicaid is less politically popular than Social Security or Medicare, because it mainly supports poor children and families who have little or no political voice.

But Medicaid covers far more Americans.

Medicaid insures nearly half of all children in the United States. It covers 1 in 5 women of childbearing age. It also pays for a large portion of the nation’s nursing home care and mental health treatment. States and the federal government share its costs, which totaled $880 billion last year.

How are the DOGE billionaires planning to gut it?

First, by turning Medicaid into “block grants,” in which states get lump sums regardless of how many people sign up for the program. Republican senator and founding DOGE caucus member John Cornyn has already publicly stated that he favors this approach.

As more poor children and needy families sign up, block grants will force states to increase their own spending on Medicaid or restrict who gets it. Given the strain on state budgets and the negligible political voice of Medicaid recipients, it will almost surely be the latter.

A second method for gutting Medicaid favored by Musk, Ramaswamy, Cornyn, and other DOGE caucus members is to impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients. They claim this would save the federal government at least $100 billion over the next decade.

But the reason for the saving is that work requirements would cause an estimated 600,000 people — most of them unable to work — to lose coverage (according to estimates from the Congressional Budget Office).

The third idea DOGE is considering is to cut back on the expansion of Medicaid that came with the Affordable Care Act. That expansion enabled adults in families earning up to $43,000 a year to get health care coverage. (Under it, the federal government pays 90 percent of the costs.)

Step back for a moment and consider what’s being proposed.

If the Affordable Care Act’s expanded Medicaid is cut back, hundreds of thousands of Americans in families earning up to $43,000 a year will lose their health care.

If Medicaid is turned into block grants or if work is required of people unable to work, many hundreds of thousands more will lose their only access to health care, including large numbers of children.

The presumed goal of the DOGE exercise is to reduce the federal budget deficit.


Yet Trump and his billionaires are planning to extend the 2017 Trump tax cuts, which disproportionately have benefited large corporations and wealthy people like themselves, along with additional tax cuts and loopholes for the wealthy.

The estimated cost of extending the Trump tax cuts is at least $5 trillion — more than twice the amount Musk has stated DOGE will cut in “wasteful” government spending.

The richest man in the world and his billionaire colleagues are seeking to reduce money spent for the health care of the poorest and most vulnerable Americans, at the same time they’re seeking to reduce taxes on themselves and others who are the richest and most privileged.

Anything wrong with this picture?

Many of the Americans who will be shafted by all this voted for Trump in 2024.

They may never discover that Trump is behind this because Trump won’t have his fingerprints on the Medicaid cuts. He’ll hide behind Musk and Ramaswamy’s DOGE and the newly formed DOGE caucus in Congress.

Not even their fingerprints will be obvious because block grants to the states, work requirements, and elimination of the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion will all do the dirty deed quietly.

Nor will working Americans discover that big corporations and the wealthy are reaping most of the savings from the gutting of Medicaid in the form of lower taxes. Most working Americans haven’t yet discovered how skewed the 2017 Trump tax cut has been to the wealthy and big corporations, so why should they discover it in future years?

One more thing.

Employer-sponsored health insurance — available to most salaried workers in large corporations but rarely to hourly workers or contract workers — remains untaxed.

This is one of the largest tax expenditures in the federal government.

As I said, Medicaid costs about $880 billion a year. The exclusion from taxes of employer-provided health insurance costs the federal government a very large fraction of that — the Joint Committee on Taxation estimated $299 billion in 2022; the Congressional Budget Office projects $641 billion by 2032.

It’s another well-disguised benefit for the privileged that’s underwritten by the non-privileged. Yet I’d be astonished if DOGE touched it.

Why go after the costs of Medicaid and not the costs of employer-provided health insurance? For the same reason Trump’s billionaires will happily cut taxes on themselves even as they gut health care for millions of poor kids and working-class families.

What’s considered “waste and fraud” often depends on whether one is looking downward or upward, and the billionaire DOGEs look only downward. But the biggest waste and fraud is found at the high rungs — in tax loopholes and tax expenditures used by wealthy individuals and big corporations. (Did I hear anyone say “carried interest?”)

When Trump chose Dr. Mehmet Oz, the multimillion-dollar celebrity doctor (who infamously promoted hydroxychloroquine while holding over $615,000 in shares of the drug’s distributor) to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Trump said Oz will “cut waste and fraud within our country’s most expensive government agency.”

Believe that, and you should believe in hydroxychloroquine.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

How white supremacy prevented America from having single-payer healthcare

Thom Hartmann
December 17, 2024 
ALTERNET

Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

In the wake of the assassination of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson, Americans are wondering out loud why we’re getting ripped off by giant insurance companies when every other developed country in the world has healthcare as a right and pays an average of about half of what we do — and gets better outcomes.

As I point out in The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich, and brought up with Joy Reid on her program last week, America is:

— The only developed country in the world that doesn’t recognize healthcare as a human right,

— The only country with more than two-thirds of its population lacking access to affordable healthcare and a half-million families facing bankruptcy every year because somebody got sick,
— The only country in the developed world where over 40% of the population carries $220 billion in medical debt,
— And the only country in the developed world that has, since its founding, enslaved and then legally oppressed and disenfranchised a large minority of its population because of their race.

These things, along with UnitedHealth’s $370 billion in revenue and $32 billion in profit, are connected.

Roughly 60 percent of Americans would have had to take out a loan or otherwise borrow or beg for money to deal with a single, unexpected $1,000 expense.

Yet annual family medical copays and out -of-pocket deductibles averaged $6,575 in 2023, when the Kaiser Family Foundation did a comprehensive survey of Americans. This strikes minorities particularly hard, which, it turns out, is not an accident.

The simple fact is that, were it not for slavery, white supremacy, and the legacy of “scientific racism,” America would have had a national, single-payer healthcare system in 1915, just 31 years after Germany put into place the modern world’s first such program.


At the center of the effort to prevent a national healthcare system — or any form of government assistance that may even incidentally offer benefit to African Americans — were Frederick Ludwig Hoffman and the Prudential Life Insurance Company, which promoted his “science based” racial theories to successfully fight single-payer health insurance.

Racism is the main reason that America doesn’t consider healthcare a human right and provide it to all citizens, in contrast to every other developed country in the world. Racist whites, particularly in the South, have worked for over a century to make sure that healthcare is hard for Black people and other minorities to get.

And their biggest ally, their founding spokesperson in the post–Civil War era, their biggest champion right up to the 1940s, was a man that most Americans have never heard of.


In 1884, 19-year-old Frederick Ludwig Hoffmann left Germany for America after failing at a number of job attempts and being rejected for the German Army because he was “physically deficient” and frail, standing five-foot-seven and weighing a mere 110 pounds. He arrived in New York with $4.76 in his pocket, speaking “not a word of English” but determined to prove wrong his mother’s assessment that he was a “good-for-nothing.”

From this humble beginning, Hoffmann went on to become one of America’s most influential statisticians and analysts of public health, making numerous consequential discoveries about how industrialization was killing American workers.

He dropped the last n in his last name, became so fluent in English that his accent was nearly indistinguishable, and married into an upscale Georgia family. By 1920 he was an American citizen, vice president of America’s largest insurance company, and a national authority on the now-discredited pseudoscience called scientific racism.


In 1908, his article “The Mortality from Consumption [tuberculosis] in the Dusty Trades,” published by the US Department of Labor, produced the first national efforts to reduce lung damage in the workplace. He also published the first work (1915) linking tobacco to lung cancer.

From this, he became vice president of the National Tuberculosis Association (today known as the American Lung Association) and later demonstrated the connection between exposure to asbestos and the disease that killed my father, mesothelioma (a bit of data that asbestos companies worked to keep hidden for the next 80 years).

But Hoffman’s most controversial lifelong obsession was with the relationship between disease, race, and society.


On one of his first trips to Georgia, he wrote, he came across a book by Dr. Eugene R. Corson, a Georgia obstetrician, titled The Vital Equation of the Colored Race and Its Future in the United States. It was apparently an updated or shortened version of Corson’s widely read “The Future of the Colored Race in the United States From an Ethnic and Medical Standpoint,” published in 1887 in the New York Medical Times.

This was just after the failure of Reconstruction, and a widespread topic of speculation, particularly in the South, was whether Black people would soon outnumber white people in that part of the country.

The Ku Klux Klan and others calling for wholesale slaughter and suppression of Black people claimed that they were more likely to have larger families because they were “more prolific,” code for “excessively sexual,” a charge that had persisted from the earliest days of slavery and led to the murder of Emmett Till (among others).


However, the “scientific” racists of the day, like Corson, thought differently. Corson led a movement suggesting that people of African ancestry, now lacking “the protective womb of slavery,” would die out for the simple reason that the Black race was “inferior to whites.”

Corson promoted the Klan’s argument that “the simpler the organism, the simpler the genesis and the greater the prolificness.” But, he said, white people would prevail because they were less likely to die of disease, citing Herbert Spencer’s Theory of Population Deduced from the General Law of Animal Fertility.

While Black people might have more children, Corson wrote, white people would still outnumber them because Black fecundity “is more than compensated for by the ability [of white people] to maintain individual life.”

Enslaved people from Africa had found themselves in a civilization “of which [they are] not a product” and thus were less likely to be successful in “the struggle for existence.” Therefore, Corson wrote, Black people “must suffer physically, a result which forbids any undue increase in the race.”


The discovery of this theory, called the racial extinction thesis, electrified Hoffman, and he spent the rest of his life promoting it, while campaigning to stop any sort of movement toward a national health insurance program that might prevent or slow down the extinction of Black people in America.

In August 1896, the American Economic Association published a book that represented a turning point in Frederick Hoffman’s life and sealed the fate of single-payer health insurance in America. It was Hoffman’s magnum opus, summarizing decades of compiled statistics on Black versus white mortality, proving, according to Hoffman, once and for all, that for Black people, “gradual extinction is only a question of time.”

In Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, Hoffman set out not only to repeatedly make and statistically prove the above claim, but also to prove that anytime white people tried to help Black people, particularly by offering them healthcare services, the result was disaster for both.

Noting that “the Negro has failed to gain a foothold in any of the northern states,” Hoffman wrote, “he is in the South as a permanent factor . . . with a tendency to drift into the cities, there to concentrate in the most undesirable and unsanitary sections . . . and the evil effect will be more felt by the cities which are thus augmented in population of an undesirable character.”

In great detail, Hoffman spent about 300 pages documenting, with exhaustive tables and statistics, the fact that Black people were more likely to die as a result of everything from malaria to tuberculosis to childbirth.

And it was all because of their race, Hoffman argued:
“The decrease in the rate of increase of the colored population has been traced first to the excessive mortality, which in turn has been traced to an inferior vital capacity. . . . This racial inferiority has, in turn, brought about a moral deterioration . . . sexual immorality . . . diminished social and economic efficiency . . .”

And that represented a danger to white people, Hoffman wrote.

The participation of freed Black people in the contemporary labor pool and in society overall, he wrote, “in the course of years must prove not only a most destructive factor in the progress of the colored race, but also in the progress, social as well as economic, of the white race brought under its influence.”

Slavery had actually been good for Black people, Hoffman believed, and the abolition of slavery at the end of the Civil War was only going to speed up the demise of that race.
“Nothing is more clearly shown from this investigation,” he wrote, “than that the southern black man at the time of emancipation was healthy in body and cheerful in mind. He neither suffered inordinately from disease nor from impaired bodily vigor.”
But with abolition, formerly enslaved people were “tending toward a condition in which matters will be worse than they are now, when diseases will be more destructive, vital resistance still lower, when the number of births will fall below the deaths, and gradual extinction of the race will take place.”

While Hoffman pioneered linking causal conditions such as asbestos and carcinogen exposure to sickness, he was so blinded by racism that a modern reader of his book constantly finds himself shouting, “But these things are also true of poor whites! These are caused by discrimination and poverty!!”

At the time, though, the vast majority of white Americans agreed with him. He was echoing the white cultural and scientific consensus of the late 19th and early 20th centuries when he wrote:
“Given the same conditions of life for two races, the one of Aryan descent will prove the superior, solely on account of its ancient inheritance of virtue and transmitted qualities which are determining factors in the struggle for race supremacy. The lower races, even under the same conditions of life, must necessarily fail because the vast number of incapables, which a hard struggle for life has eliminated from the ranks of the white races, are still forming the large body of the lower races.”

And, according to Hoffman and the other white “scientific racists,” the problem wasn’t just physical inferiority. The deepest “problem of the Negro,” Hoffman wrote, was moral:
“All the facts prove that a low standard of sexual morality is the main and underlying cause of the low and anti-social condition of the race at the present time. . . . The conclusion is warranted that it is merely a question of time when the actual downward course, that is, a decrease in the population will take place. In the meantime, however, the presence of the colored population is a serious hindrance to the economic progress of the white race.”

For those well-intentioned white people who wanted to help out the people who were a mere generation or two away from slavery, Hoffman and his colleagues had one simple bit of advice: Don’t even try.

In 1980, David Koch famously ran for vice president of the United States under the banner of the Libertarian Party, an organization founded a few decades earlier by big business to give an economic rationale and political patina to their simple theory that economics were more important than democracy, and the quality of life of working people should be decided in the “free marketplace” instead of by unions or through democratic processes via government regulation.

In this, Koch and his Libertarian friends were echoing Frederick Hoffman.

In his 1896 book Race Traits, Hoffman laid out his “scientific” assertion that when government steps in to help people, it invariably ends up hurting them instead. Not only should there be no government assistance given to help African Americans recover from three centuries of property theft, forced labor, and legal violence, but it is scientifically wrong to even consider the idea.

White people and government programs to better the lives of Black people, Hoffman wrote, deserve “the most severe condemnation of modern attempts of superior races to lift inferior races to their own elevated position.”

The damage done to Black people by offering them any sort of help, government assistance, or even a minimum wage, he wrote, is “criminal” behavior for a “civilized people.”

Hoffman pointed to Native Americans to prove his point:
“Few races have made such a brave struggle for their own preservation; few races can boast of so high a degree of aboriginal civilization. . . . An iron will can be traced upon the countenance of nearly every Indian of note.”

But it was government help, Hoffman wrote, that destroyed the American Indian.

It wasn’t “adulterated whiskey nor the frightful consequences of sexual immorality, spread around the forts and settlements of the whites,” that was “sufficient” to destroy Native Americans. It was charity.
“The most subtle agency of all,” he wrote, sounding like Ronald Reagan or David Koch, “governmental pauperism, the highest development of the theory of easy conditions of life, did what neither drink nor the poisons of venereal disease could do, and today the large majority of the tribes are following the Maories and Hawaiians towards the goal of final extinction.”

White Americans rationalized their brutality toward Native Americans and African Americans by saying that it was simple evolutionary biology: only the strong survive, and when the weak are allowed to propagate, it weakens the overall human race.
“Easy conditions of life and a liberal charity are among the most destructive influences affecting the lower races,” Hoffman concluded, “since by such methods the weak and incapable are permitted to increase and multiply, while the struggle of the more able is increased in severity [by the increase in taxes and regulation].”

And it’s not just charity.
“All the facts prove,” Hoffman wrote, “that education, philanthropy, and religion have failed to develop [among Black people] a higher appreciation of the stern and uncompromising virtues of the Aryan race.
“Instead of making the race more independent, modern educational and philanthropic efforts have succeeded in making it even more dependent on the white race at the present time than it was previous to emancipation.”

Free education — as any Libertarian can tell you — is more dangerous to the souls of people than slavery. And free healthcare is even worse.

Sounding like a modern-day acolyte of Ayn Rand, Hoffman wrote:
“Instead of clamoring for aid and assistance from the white race, the negro himself should sternly refuse every offer of direct interference in his own evolution. The more difficult his upward struggle, the more enduring will be the qualities developed.”

And, like Ayn Rand, David Koch, and Ronald Reagan, Hoffman believed that these were eternal truths independent of race:
“No missionary or educator or philanthropist extended aid or comfort to the English peasant class during its darkest days, to the earliest settlers on the coast of New England, or the pioneer in the forests of the far West. . . . [I]t is extremely rare to find a case where easy conditions of life or liberal charity have assisted man in his upward struggle. Self reliance . . . must be developed, and thus far have not been developed by the aid of charity or liberal philanthropy.”

This libertarian ideal is still pervasive in our modern fragmented healthcare system, and in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis in 2020 it resulted in thousands of daily American deaths, disproportionately hitting racial minorities.

The “compulsory health insurance” (what today we’d call Medicare for All) movement of the early 20th century was as much (and possibly more) about getting paid sick leave as it was about covering doctor visits and hospitalization, because healthcare was so cheap that an unpaid week at work was a bigger hit to the wallet.

But workers wanted both.

The most successful effort of the era came out of an organization that a small group of progressive economists put together in 1905 and 1906, known as the American Association for Labor Legislation (AALL).

Their initial efforts were directed at paid sick leave, workers’ compensation insurance, child labor laws, and workplace safety standards. To that last end, they were actively using the kinds of statistical analysis that Frederick Hoffman had both used and popularized to do everything from laying out his theories on race to showing an association between tobacco use and lung cancer.

Hoffman joined the AALL to promote their efforts…at least that was his claim.

A charitable reading of his motivations was that his statistical research on workplace phosphorus poisoning and lung disease overlapped with their efforts, and they were an organization that, at that time, was held in high regard. He did, after all, consider himself — and was, in a very real way — a major force for reform in public health and workplace safety arenas.

A less charitable motivation is posited in Daniel T. Rodgers’s 1998 book Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age. Rodgers wrote:
“On the AALL social insurance committee, he became the [Prudential] company’s mole. . . . Hoffman took credit for blocking the drafting of any resolutions at the AALL’s social insurance conference in 1913. During the framing of the association’s model health insurance bill, he dragged his feet, obstructed, pressed in vain for company initiatives in the medical insurance field, and informed his employers — more and more certain that public health insurance was ‘distinctly pernicious and a menace to our interests.’”

Despite Prudential and Hoffman’s efforts, government-funded health insurance was gaining popularity in America (and being adopted across Europe).

In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt made a third-party bid for the presidency, forming the Progressive Party (with its Bull Moose logo), and called for “the protection of home life against the hazards of sickness, irregular employment and old age through the adoption of a system of social insurance.”

Jane Addams (Hull House founder), dressed in suffragette white, seconded Roosevelt’s nomination to wild cheers and applause; Roosevelt rallies routinely drew tens of thousands of people, and more than 200,000 people showed up in Los Angeles to support him and the party.

Roosevelt’s endorsement of “social insurance,” including health coverage, both reflected and reinforced a growing national sentiment, and in 1915 the AALL called for every state to support a program of health insurance. Prudential hadn’t yet gotten into the business of insuring health (they would in 1925), but they could see the writing on the wall.

In 1916, the AALL endorsed health insurance provided through a network of local and statewide mutual companies and called for those policies to also provide a small death benefit to cover funeral costs, which would have competed directly with the funeral coverage that was Prudential’s main cash cow.

Hoffman wrote to the company, “We, of course, cannot compete with Compulsory Insurance, including a death benefit of, say $100.” He then resigned “in disgust” from the AALL and begin a campaign, sponsored by Prudential, to stop state-funded health insurance.

Hoffman and Prudential weren’t alone in their concern: the Insurance Federation of New York told their members:
“This is only the entering wedge; if once a foothold is obtained it will mean attempts to have such State Insurance of all kinds...”

The AALL produced model legislation that was taken up in 1916 by eight states, including California and New York, the former via a ballot initiative and the latter in the New York legislature. In addition to calling for policies that would pay all costs of healthcare, the AALL’s legislation called for up to 26 weeks of paid sick leave.

Picking up steam, the American Medical Association endorsed the AALL’s model legislation as well. The battle was joined.

Hoffman’s Prudential-sponsored campaign to prevent any state from adopting a statewide nonprofit health (and death benefit) insurance program went into overdrive through 1916–1920. He traveled to Germany several times to chronicle, in minute detail, the failings of the kaiser’s system that had been operating since 1885.

Prudential, in 1905, had been swept up in New York’s Armstrong Investigation, and so, as historian Beatrix Hoffman (no relation to Frederick) wrote, “[b]ecause of their industry’s public image problems, insurance executives knew their opposition to compulsory health insurance would be perceived as brazen self-interest.”

They needed a front man, and the guy who was famous for discovering the causes of numerous public health crises was perfect. Thus, Frederick Hoffman became the most well-known face of a massive, multiyear effort to stop the AALL’s campaign. He was remarkably effective.

In the years between 1916, when he resigned from AALL, and 1920, when nonprofit state-funded health insurance finally died, Hoffman wrote numerous pamphlets trashing the German single-payer government health system, “exposing” corruption in the British efforts at a National Health Service, and arguing that America’s healthcare system would be thrown into chaos and crisis if the AALL’s programs were adopted.

His work was widely distributed, as historian Daniel Rodgers noted: “The Prudential saturated the state capitols with his pamphlets.”

His 1917 pamphlet Facts and Fallacies of Compulsory Health Insurance, and the subsequent More Facts and Fallacies of Compulsory Health Insurance, published two years later, were his most widely cited and most consequential writings.

Historian Beatrix Hoffman wrote that the Facts pamphlet “resembled Race Traits and Tendencies in its impressive presentation of statistics and graphs alongside passionate polemics.” Frederick Hoffman refuted every figure the Progressives used in defense of their plan, from “Misleading Data on German Longevity” to “Misleading Estimate of Cost” and “Disregard of Actuarial Methods.”

Appealing to the Daniel Boone mythos of rugged, independent individualism that didn’t require assistance from government, Frederick Hoffman wrote in More Facts and Fallacies of Compulsory Health Insurance:
“The ever-present menace to democracy and liberty is the perversion of the legislative function [toward providing health insurance].”

Hoffman’s writing and speeches shook America’s political systems, particularly as this German-born “man of science” warned of the dire consequences to American liberty and democracy represented by universal health insurance.

In 1918, John R. Commons — one of the AALL’s cofounders — wrote that almost all the nation’s anti–compulsory health insurance propaganda “originates from one source; all of the ammunition, all of the facts and statistics that may come across, no matter who gives them to you, will be found to go back to the Prudential Insurance Co. of America, and to Mr. Frederick L. Hoffman.”

Prudential paid to transport Hoffman all across America, from media events to congressional hearings to a trip to England to document the horrors of their National Health Service system, which had gone into effect in 1911.

He wrote from London, in a widely read paper, that because of the British National Insurance Act, “The fine spirit of the English working classes, at one time the finest people of that type in the world, is gone, entirely gone.”

Historian Beatrix Hoffman wrote:
“His agitation was tireless, his influence widespread. . . . His reputation as an expert allowed Hoffman to participate in the deliberations of the health insurance commissions of Illinois, Wisconsin, and Connecticut, and to successfully persuade commission members to vote against the plan.”

In 1920, in large part because of Prudential’s efforts and Hoffman’s warnings, California’s voters resoundingly turned down a voter initiative in that state to provide health insurance, and, although New York’s Senate passed the bill, it died in committee in the Assembly.

While the AALL continued to campaign for state-funded health insurance until their dissolution in 1946, they never again gained enough traction to get their proposal before any state legislatures or the US Congress.

Having succeeded in killing state-funded health insurance, Hoffman, in the later 1920s, turned his attention back to his theory that Black people would eventually die out, joining the Eugenics Research Association (whose work was later used by Hitler to justify racial separation and his “final solution”).

In 1929, Hoffman asserted, in the African American publication Opportunity, that “the white race is almost solely responsible . . . for the health progress which the South has made during the last generation” and that Black people moving in large numbers into cities would “lead to a thoroughly unwholesome state of affairs which unquestionably will express itself in course of time in a lower birth rate and a higher death rate.”

Hoffman’s influence lasted long past his death in 1946 (which satisfied his stated desire to live long enough to see FDR out of office). As late as 1984, according to reporting in the Wall Street Journal, Prudential was still collecting premiums from African Americans that were “in some instances more than a third higher” than those paid by whites.

We even see an echo of it in the opposition of southern white racist Senators to Medicare in 1965, arguably leading to the 20% hole in that system that requires MediGap policies to fill.

Were it not for “scientific racism,” America would have long ago joined the rest of the developed world with a competent and efficient national healthcare system. Instead, we’re stuck with for-profit health insurance giants sucking our blood like giant leeches attached to our backs.