No, that's not the way it works. If you want to stick with your office metaphor, the genes are the company's standard operating procedures and hormones are one form of communication--perhaps interoffice mail--but the office also has phones, intercom, postal mail, email, and conversation.
Yes, but most of the construction of a person, including their brains, is regulated with hormones, which tells what to happen when.
During normal operation, there are, of course, other communication methods going on.
If there actually is a genetic component to autism, I suspect it's because something somewhere produced too much or too little of a hormone at a specific time which altered brain development in a certain way.
I could probably think of an office analogy, but that's getting a bit silly. And anyway wasn't my point. I was just using hormones as something that can be very affected by outside sources yet are needed to operate our body correctly.
Yes, in theory, we could have some other things misregulating gene expression, but environmental factors couldn't be causing them. It would have to be purely genetic and internal, and if you buy the idea that incidents of autism are rising, that is not likely. (Unless there's some mutagen wandering around that very specific.)
Of course, if you don't buy the idea that incidences of autism have increased, that's not important.
Certainly a possibility. There are obviously thousands of substances in our environment that weren't around years ago. But it is hard to know where to start, particularly when it is questionable whether there actually has been a real increase. Perhaps once the genes are better understood, it will provide a clue as to possible environmental culprits--if there are any.
Hell, we don't even understand what's wrong with people with autism. We can MRI them and see part of their brain isn't working at the correct level, but we not only don't know why, we don't even know how.
First we have to figure out why, exactly, they are the way they are, and only then can we figure out why their brain developed that way. (Or whatever causes it) And then we can work on stopping it from happening.
All we have at the moment is the symptom. Or, more specifically, a bunch of people with a bunch of apparently related symptoms.
Actually, this is another myth. Corn syrup is composed of glucose and fructose, same as table sugar (sucrose). Same molecules, same processing (sucrose has to be split to release glucose and fructose, but this is the first thing that happens; the enzyme is present in saliva).
In fact, quite a lot of foods are acidic enough that sucrose is split in inside them. Like all soft drinks.
There have been some worries raised that fructose may not suppress appetite as well as glucose, but in fact the ratio of fructose to glucose in the most widely used corn syrup is not much different than in sucrose.
A 10% difference is still a difference. 55% fructose and 45% glucose vs. 50% fructose and 50% glucose might not seem like much, but considering we eat a hell of a lot of it, who knows.
But I think the 'appetite suppression' is sorta a dead end, and it's more 'triglyceride' we need to worry about.
It's also about the same as you encounter in fruit.
Yeah, but we don't eat anywhere near that much fruit. A single soft drink has six times as much fructose as an apple.
So it might be that glucose (dextrose) would be better for you, but substitution of corn syrup for table sugar probably makes no difference.
I, OTOH, suspect it makes little difference, but that it is making some.
It's worth pointing out when people say 'genetic', they usually really mean 'hormonal'. Genes are things that do things that make hormones that do other things and trigger other genes and so on. Our genes are our personnel department, and our hormones are the workers it hires. Hiring crazy people who mess up the production is basically the same as having crazy people wander in from outside via milk or whatever and mess up the production.
The point I am trying to try to explain the apparent increase in level of autism. Yes, it's possible that's just better diagnosis, but, honestly, that seems a little weird.
But genetics could render people susceptible to an environmental factor that is, at this point, ever-present in the environment, and wasn't earlier in history.
Something like PCBs or other chemicals. It's almost certainly not mercury, as that's been repeatedly checked. (Plus, we do, indeed, know how both mercury and lead poison people, as we've seen it throughout history. Whereas there are plenty of new chemicals we know are toxic in large amounts but have never seen the end result of moderate poisoning on people.) It has to be something that doesn't build up in the system, but is present at key moments.
Of course, something that is present at all moments is dietary changes, like corn syrup. I wasn't actually kidding with that one...I personally suspect that 'corn syrup' instead of sugar is partially the cause of the obesity epidemic because we process it differently than sugar. (However, it probably has nothing to do with autism.) Some trivial chemical could be interacting with some genetic difference in a small set of people.
And, of course, as the parent post said, it's entirely possible there are, say, five different causes of identical-looking autism. (And the whole thing is a 'spectrum' with ranges of symptoms anyway.)
This is not correct. Doctors are essentially engineers, but, like engineers, do apply the scientific method. They create a hypothesis, propose an experiment, do the experiment, and see if they were correct.
It is just they care more about the actual experiment, aka, treatment, than their hypothesis. Instead of new experiments, they are attempting to replicate experiments that gave certain results. (The result being a healthy patient, or a working bridge for, say, structural engineers.)
Saying they have no 'scientific training' is just wrong. Almost any industry that fixes problems, even ones like auto repair or, yes, plumbing, has a firm grasp of the scientific method. Watch an auto mechanic try to figure out what's wrong with a car. They aren't just moving randomly, they are making a guess, aka, a hypothesis as to what is wrong, and testing that. They may not know the term 'scientific method', but it's no less a science. (Hell, it's probably more a science than sociology.)
Doctors and engineers, because of their education, do know the name of it, and how it works, and how it generalizes to everything.
Unlike 'real' scientists most doctors don't invent new experiments to test new things, but that doesn't mean they don't understand how the whole thing works.
And, perhaps more relevantly, they can understand the actual scientific research coming out of doctors who do invent such experiments much better than people without medical training can.
And, just as important, before it was some magical property of the MMR vaccine, it was thiomersal, a mercury-based preservative used to keep vaccines fresh. The theory was this was causing some sort of mercury poisoning, which at least had the bonus of being slightly plausible. Mercury poisoning can cause brain damage, although, like other heavy metal poisonings, it should require a fairly large buildup.
But, okay, whatever. There were all sorts of people promoting the idea, and 'success stories' where children were 'cured' or at least made better with various heavy-metal poisoning treatments.
They were so good at promoting this theory, in fact, that everyone stopped using thiomersal for vaccines in 1999. Since then, as everyone knows, the rate of autism has plummeted to near zero...oh, wait, no, it hasn't gone down at all.
So MMR is the magical replacement theory for people who, for some inexplicably reason, wish to blame vaccines for autism despite unvaccinated children having exactly the same level of autism. Exactly like they said thiomersal was a decade ago.
Advocating research about a disease isn't any sort of 'medical decision' and it's not pushing stupid non-medical facts. There's nothing wrong with what Michael J. Fox is doing. Parkinson's is a real disease that needs research. (Now if he were running around promoting homeopathic research into it..)
Jenny McCarthy, OTOH, is a Scientologist, and they have a fairly lose grasp of 'medical science' as it is.
I'm convinced that attempting to protect children from allergens and exposure to disease (Note that vaccinating them is exposing them to disease.) is backfiring.
We already know that people can spontaneously 'catch' allergic reactions to thing they've been around forever, and suddenly now can't handle.
I suspect there's much more of that unnoticed happening in the opposite direction...people becoming allergic to things they weren't exposed to for long periods of time. Especially children.
If I ever had kids, I'd be sure to expose them to everything. Cats, peanut butter, shellfish, pollen, dust, whatever. Even poison ivy and bee stings, although obviously I'd just place them in situations where that was likely to happen and not actually harm them myself. Other parents should too.
Please note I'm not saying expose them to things they have a reaction to. You can't build up immunities to things you have allergic reactions to. Once that happens it's too late. I'm saying expose them in advance of that, because I think they get allergies due to lack of exposure. As young as possible. And for God's sake don't keep them indoors breathing filtered air their whole childhood.
And, hey, if you're exposing them consciously, you're more likely to realize they do have a reaction to shellfish, than you going to Captain Ds when they're 13 and they order crab legs for the first time and go into anaphylactic shock.
I also figured that if any of my daughters turned out to be in the one in a million group disabled by the vaccine, they would also have been in the one in a thousand group killed if not vaccinated.
That's a very good point. If someone has a bad reaction to a vaccine, then they're especially susceptible to that disease, and thus it's almost dead certain they'd be one of the people killed by the disease if they happened to get it, and they're probably even slightly more likely to get it at the same level of exposure as other people.
Dude, there are plenty of other culprits that make a hell of a lot more sense than the repeatedly-investigated-and-dismissed vaccines.
Better culprits: PCB. Corn Syrup. Organophosphates. Hormones in milk. Radon. Radio waves.
There's literally dozens of better culprits out there, especially as childhood vaccines haven't used mercury-based thiomersal since 1999, which was supposed to be the original reason vaccines were causing autism, as some sort of weird mercury poisoning.
And yet autism hasn't gone down since then, leading people into the totally insane theory that vaccines themselves are causing it, which doesn't even make any sense.
Here's a hint: If conspiracy theorists have to change how something worked, but it mysteriously has exactly the same effects, that's called 'moving the goalposts'. They argued for a decade that it was mercury poisoning, and that treatments designed to remove mercury from the system helped, and, hey, they've been revealed to be entirely full of crap(1) as people who get non-mercury vaccines get autism at the same rate. (Granted, people who didn't get vaccines at all also got autism, too, so I don't know why I'd expect actual facts to slow them down.)
No, I'm not saying thiomersal was a good idea, or that we shouldn't have gotten rid of it, but we've pretty clearly demonstrated it wasn't causing autism.
1) Incidentally, mercury in the environment, put out by coal plants, could still conceivable be the villain. But that has nothing to do with vaccines, and thanks to the stupid theory of mercury in vaccines causing autism, there have been dozens of studies of mercury levels in autism sufferers and no link has even been found.
Many people seem to be unaware high fever is not a result of sickness. High fever is your immune system fighting off a virus, it is a deliberate response to a virus, it is not caused by a virus.
Your body stops working at about 105 degrees, whereas viruses stop working after the slightest rise in temperature, which is why your body is raising your temp to 102 or so. It would be an extremely poorly designed virus that would raise your temperature on purpose.
How high your temperature is not related to how 'infected' someone is. It's related to how hard your immune system is working, which sometimes is a useful sign of how strong the infection is.
Raises in temperature after getting a vaccine doesn't mean you actually got sick. It means your immune system decided you were sick and fought, i.e, exactly what it was supposed to do.
By the way, it's not the Gulf Stream â" that's the primarily wind-driven component of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation. What you're referring to is the thermohaline component.
Um, what? The thermohaline cycle is when the wind-driven surface currents, like the Gulf Stream, move water from the equator to the poles, during which it cools and sinks and heads back to start the cycle over.
I did neglect to mention that stopping the Gulf Stream would also stop the cool water flowing back in the opposite direction, which could cause various Atlantic islands to get rather more tropical. But, regardless, saying the Gulf Stream would shut down is exactly correct.
Although Europe would cool, it probably won't cool to lower than pre-industrial temperatures, because of the large amount of warming necessary to collapse the current in the first place. See Gregory et al.'s GRL paper from 2005 (section 4).
'Europe', no. Northern Europe, yes. And anyone who says we need a 'large amount' of warming to collapse the current is just, essentially, guessing. We don't know how much it will take, and it's probably very dependent on Greenland glaciers, which are currently melting faster than expected.
If Sweden is inhabitable without the current, so is northern Canada and Siberia. (They are at the same latitude, after all.) And I'm imagining New England with the climate of Spain.
If you want to assert it won't happen until the earth heats up that much, well, that's kinda silly.
I am unaware of any scientific support for the claim that an MOC collapse would turn every hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico into a Cat 5 storm headed for the midwest.
Well, clearly all of them wouldn't be headed for the midwest. Some could hit Mexico, or Florida.
But, yes, without the Gulf Stream clearing out the warm water, it would essentially keep building up in the Gulf of Mexico, and any hurricane that made it past Florida would get a giant energy boost. (In addition, Florida and Cuba would start getting some really horrible weather. Imagine Florida as India.)
Of course, it's entirely possible that we'd end up with new ocean current flow and it would be fine, but I suspect that would take years to establish itself.
You know how scientific theories are supposed to provide testable predictions so that you can determine if the theory is correct? What is this bad stuff that's going to happen thanks to global warming? Can we get a list of it and check and see if it happens?
Prediction #1: Ice sheets in the antarctic and glaciers in Greenland will start melting.
And, look, exactly that happened. Exactly on schedule. (In fact, at the highest end of the predicted rate.)
Prediction #2: Sea level continue to rise (As they have for the past century), and the rate at which they rise will accelerate.
Yup. (It's interesting to note this rise is almost entirely due to expansion of sea water as it got warmer, and the effects of melting glaciers have not shown up yet.)
I haven't been convinced that global warming is a bad thing,
Then you need to learn about what happens when the gulf stream collapses. (As it has done before in times of heating.)
When that happens, Northern Europe freezes to death. We're talking about decreases of ten-fifteen degrees. Iceland turns into, ha, solid ice.
Meanwhile, the melting of glaciers in Greenland, and ice at the north pole, stops, in a rather ironic joke. Of course, the ice at the north pole wasn't the stuff raising the sea level, as that's floating. The Greenland ice is to some extent, but no one's worried about it for exactly this reason...before the melting could cause a rise in the sea level, it will shut down the gulf stream and undo the melting trend. It's a glacier with self-defense! (Antarctica, however, will continue to melt and raise sea levels.)
Meanwhile, all that warm water that should have gone northeast to Europe stays in the Gulf of Mexico. Do you know what the major effect would be? Every single hurricane that makes it to the Gulf of Mexico turns into a Category 5 and rampages across the midwest. (And possibly it'd cause more hurricanes to start in the Atlantic, no one is quite sure about that.)
whereas many of the proposed 'solutions' are quite painful, and many will result in economic collapse and the indirect deaths of many... primarily in poverty-stricken countries.
Is it worth pointing out that the people most unequipped to deal with any climate change are the poorest people? They're the ones living in houses with roofs that won't survive the increased precipitation, or without air conditioners when their climate changes from 70 to 80 degrees, or without heating when it changes from 60 to 50.
Making car analogies on slashdot is like driving a car home from work...you just get so used to it that you hardly notice you're doing it, and you get there and you're thinking 'Hey, I must have driven here, but I don't remember it.'.
First of all, there is a lot of evidence that global warming might actually be a good thing.
Are you insane?
Any benefit to the growing season would be more than canceled out when, for example, England freezes to death when the gulf stream collapses.
Or, thanks to the incredibly hot Gulf of Mexico, we end up with ten devastating hurricanes hitting the gulf coast a year, every year. (Talk about an increase in precipitation.)
And let's not even dwell on what even minor rises in sea levels would mean to a large section of the population who would find their cities underwater. Or, hell, just their ports unusable so they can't ship food in.
'Global warming' doesn't mean 'Everywhere gets slightly warmer'. It means 'All the weather patterns that human civilization has been built around get changed'. If the Sahara desert becomes livable again at the cost of Europe becoming unlivable, millions of people will stave because there are no fucking farms or even people in the Sahara.
That doesn't mean, in the end, we'll be worse off. Maybe the patterns will be even better. But that's not where we have cities and farms. It's not where we have ports and shipping lanes. It's not where we have air conditioning and heating. (And in your 'less heating' dreamworld, you should perhaps notice that various parts of the world where it doesn't get over 75 have, every few decades, a heat wave of maybe 80 or 85, and thousands of people die cause they have no AC. And it's a lot easier to emergency heat a house than to cool it.)
Lastly, although there is evidence that supports the theory that greenhouse gasses are part of the reason for global warming it is far from a foregone conclusion. There is also evidence that solar warming and several other factors might be primary causes. Without a thorough understanding of the mechanisms of global warming it is difficult to come up with methods of reducing the warming trend.
Yeah, you go ahead and keep pretending that. And keep muttering about 'primary causes' like that means something...as I pointed out, we know CO2 in the air causes warming, and thus we know we're contributing to it, no matter what else you want to invent might be doing it. And we know there are tipping points beyond which the world's climate is irrevocably changed, so arguing we're only causing 15% if it's that 15% that will push us over, or push us over ten years earlier, is just a fucking stupid argument against reducing that 15%.
We can call for severely impacting our economy and health by curtailing industry in the hopes that it will reduce global warming or we can make sensible cuts while we learn more about the situation.
Yeah, no one's buying that 'impacting the economy' crap anymore. You asshats have been whining about it decades, and, hey, nice economy we've got thanks to that, isn't it?
Every single ecological restriction has ended up helping the industry it's been placed on, and not a single one has ever harmed an industry to the extent it's been claimed it will in advance. Meanwhile, it's each to point to cases where lack of such a restriction has caused serious economic harm...ask Detroit about that and where they'd be if we'd forced them to actually improve their technology. Or the mountaintop removal of coal mining, which was supposed to create jobs but has ended up making less of them, cause you don't actually need coal miners for it.
Frankly, it reminds me of the people who claim that Saddam did have WMDs and smuggled them out to Syria during the invasion.
So...the net result of the Iraq war would be...give WMDs to Syria, where we couldn't keep track of them and they've probably ended up in some random person's hands, instead of keeping them in Iraq, where we could keep them contained?
Yeah, you sure made us anti-war people look like idiots. Boy howdy were we wrong. Thanks for overriding our concerns and handing WMDs to terrorists, you fucking morons. (Luckily, this did not, in fact happen.)
Some people are so concerned with proving the other side wrong they don't bother to think through the implications of what they are actually saying. Any hypothetical possibility as to what might be going on that isn't exactly what the other side has been saying is seized on.
Even if, as in this case, it a) makes the global warming deniers still have been wrong for decades, now hilariously wrong in fact, and b) would logically result in us needing to everything everyone's been saying, even more than before.
You are incorrect. Her graph is scaled by area, not radius. If anything it understates the problem, as you would have noticed if you'd bothered to play with the chart at the bottom of the article and flipped it to a bar chart. January 1855 had thirty times as many deaths due to disease as battle, and that radius is only about four or five times as much, because it is, as I said, by area.
And the point is to compare each slice to itself. There's not really any logical reason to compare each month to the next, which renders your objection about 'stacking' rather moot...no one is going to be comparing casulaties from March to February. You didn't even bother to learn what the graph was trying to demonstrate.
It's important to note she also did bar graphs. One of her most famous graphs, called 'Lines', is a bar graph showing the rate of deaths from disease from civilians vs. soldiers still stationed in English barracks. (Where, despite not being in war conditions at all, and presumably some of the healthiest and most able members of society, the soldiers still died almost twice as much. Yeah, sanitation was that bad.)
She's just famous for the wrong thing: Being a nurse. Like she was the only military nurse ever for some reason.
When she actually should be famous, as this article points out, for managing to convince the British military (With the rest of the world learning it from them) that disease (was) the largest killer in war.
She not only used statistics and tried to convince the military, she personally published pamphlets for the British people to read and got them to force the military to take action.
The military liked to pretend it couldn't do anything about this, but, in one of her most famous graphs, she demonstrated that a good deal more soldiers in barracks in England were dying of disease than the general population. I.e., it wasn't some unique unsolvable problem of soldiers on the move.
Almost everyone knows that more soldiers used to die of disease than battle, but almost no one knows who first informed us of this.
OTOH, she probably wasn't the first user of graphs to represent 'statistics', whatever that means. She did seize upon that format, not so much to convince the military, who were used to numbers, but to convince the general population, a good deal of whom couldn't read to any extent and were very innumerate.
If the earth's temperature is being increased by the sun, then it's more important we do something about global warming, and quick.
All the bad stuff that's going to happen thanks to global warming doesn't magically vanish because it's being done by the sun.
If it's caused by humans, we just need to back off. As long as we don't hit the point where the ocean currents flip or the antarctic ice melts, we're okay.
If it's caused by the sun, we need to back way the hell off, back to the stone age, and even farther, perhaps with some sort of technology to shade the earth, and attempt to weather it out without hitting the tipping point in several of the systems that would push us past no recovery.
I.e., the car we're in just got a flat tire. Most people are arguing that it's because we're driving over a rocky road with bad tires, whereas you're arguing there's a sniper shooting at us. That doesn't make the situation better and somehow mean we can ignore it, that makes it a good deal worse and means we need to start panicking now.
Um, if we're talking about before the US's entrance into the war, it's perhaps relevant to look at why Mussolini was disliked after he sided with Hitler:
Hitler was a darling of the right at that time.
And Italy while Italy entered WWII on the wrong side and thus ultimately lost, it's perhaps relevant to mention that Italy is basically the only Axis power not to commit genocide or mass slaughter of civilians.
They actually interned Jews at rather nice camps and very few of them died. In one notable instance, they attempted to free their Jewish prisoners before the Germans seized control of one of their camps.
Mussolini seized power by coup, and for that he shouldn't be honored. We can argue about why the left liked him when he almost exclusively ruled from the right. He'd been pro-socialist earlier but had given it up by the time he returned from WWI, but apparently the left didn't get the memo.
But anyway, Italy had to make a choice as to which side it should enter WWII on. Staying out of the war was not an option. It almost entered the war on the side of England.
But it choose poorly, and lost, which nice in that it reinstated democracy in Italy. But don't ascribe to them the villainous motives of Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan, and Mussolini shouldn't be included with Hitler in the list of notable villains in history.
Actually, there's a lot in there liberals would agree with.
Liberals would agree with: 12, 15, 16, 20, some of 21, and possible 22.
Sadly for the point that was attempted to be made, those are almost exactly the ones the entire American population would agree with, too.
Incidentally, I love the fact that 12 is on the list. Apparently, everyone who dislike war profiteering is a liberal and Hitler supporter. Biggest liberal and Hitler supporter in history: Dwight D. Eisenhower
Same with the 'the creation and maintenance of a healthy middle class'. Remember, folks, if you hate the middle class, vote Republican! A vote for the middle class is a vote for Hitler!
That list is unintentionally funny in so many ways. Picking things that the American left and Hitler agree on only makes sense if the American public in general disagrees with those things. Otherwise, all you've demonstrated that all modern nations look the same and provide the same thing to their people.
And, hilarious, yeah, most people wouldn't have had a problem with Hitler if not for the genocide thing. That and the war. Saying 'If Hitler hadn't been a bad person, the left wouldn't think he was a bad person' is fairly stupid. Of course they wouldn't. No one would have cared about a fucking coup in Germany 70 years ago and who had ended up in charge if it hadn't resulted in genocide and a war.
Incidentally, before you start throwing stones, I suggest you look at which side, in the US, actually supported Germany in WWII until right before we entered the war on the other side.
We shouldn't discontinue care for patients at all, in any state. That is, the government shouldn't. It should continue to be a decision of the families and doctors.
And health care is, in my book, care for your health. The things you listed don't really affect your 'health', per se.
However, I'd be fine with a list of procedures that require the approval of a local board of doctors before they get paid for by the government. A lot of people don't realize that many of the 'elective' surgeries actually have medical uses. Plastic surgery for burn victims, breast implants for women who had mastectomies, etc.
There's almost nothing that should never be acceptable, I bet there's an actual medical use for botox. But there should be a few things that a doctor has to show up, in front of some other doctors, and actually state the medical reason you need it if the government is to pay for it. This should be a very small list.
And, incidentally, I wouldn't include lasik on it. I don't understand why we shouldn't cover vision. Bad vision is an actual medical condition. I'd also include eye exams and eyeglasses every few years with cheap frames, or contacts. (If you want better frames or lose your glasses, though, you'd have to pay for more. Obviously the same with colored contacts.)
However, ironically, exactly because eye (and dental) care haven't been covered by insurance to hardly any extent, they are both fairly functioning industries that most people can afford, although many people skip regular checkups that could reduce costs in total. So I'd have no problem if those were not included at first
As for abortion, we should cover that, but I suspect we won't if it's actually going to pass.
Yes, most of the DoD budget can safely be cut. The government maintains hundreds of military bases all around the world which do nothing for our country's defense. A very small fraction is necessary for actual defense purposes. At home, the government hires too many military persons who have nothing to do but sit around on base doing trivial tasks. This too, should be cut.
I'll argue that we shouldn't have much of a standing army to start with, and almost all our defense military should, in fact, be National Guard. Which nicely has the due purpose of helping in natural disasters so we're not just paying people to sit around waiting for an invasion that will never come.
And, yes, we have an absurd amount of military bases and troops randomly scattered around the world.
Some of them arguably should stay, like the deterrent one in South Korea to keep the North Korea loons out. I can understand that one. Keeping pressure there makes sense.
Same with the one in Cuba. What we are doing there should stop, but the base is a very good idea, and would be even if Cuba wasn't hostile to us...Cuba is a very undefended county and would an obvious stepping stone to any invasion of the US.
Same with joint bases we have in Canada and Mexico....we're protecting us by protecting our neighbors. However, 90% of the random bases can go away. We don't need bases in England or Ecuador! Even eastern Europe should go...Russia's influence in former satellites is not really relevant to us. The cold war is over.
About the only thing the US military should be doing is running a defensive navy, which oddly enough the states are prohibited from doing.
A defensive navy would be mainly, I suspect, submarines that lurk hidden in US waters, plus the Coast Guard running patrols. I think we can do without aircraft carriers if we're just defending our land and our waters, as we should be able to launch fighters from bases.
Admittedly I am not an expert at this. But I suspect a military designed to protect this country, and maybe protect our shipping, would look a good deal different than our current one.
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No, that's not the way it works. If you want to stick with your office metaphor, the genes are the company's standard operating procedures and hormones are one form of communication--perhaps interoffice mail--but the office also has phones, intercom, postal mail, email, and conversation.
Yes, but most of the construction of a person, including their brains, is regulated with hormones, which tells what to happen when.
During normal operation, there are, of course, other communication methods going on.
If there actually is a genetic component to autism, I suspect it's because something somewhere produced too much or too little of a hormone at a specific time which altered brain development in a certain way.
I could probably think of an office analogy, but that's getting a bit silly. And anyway wasn't my point. I was just using hormones as something that can be very affected by outside sources yet are needed to operate our body correctly.
Yes, in theory, we could have some other things misregulating gene expression, but environmental factors couldn't be causing them. It would have to be purely genetic and internal, and if you buy the idea that incidents of autism are rising, that is not likely. (Unless there's some mutagen wandering around that very specific.)
Of course, if you don't buy the idea that incidences of autism have increased, that's not important.
Certainly a possibility. There are obviously thousands of substances in our environment that weren't around years ago. But it is hard to know where to start, particularly when it is questionable whether there actually has been a real increase. Perhaps once the genes are better understood, it will provide a clue as to possible environmental culprits--if there are any.
Hell, we don't even understand what's wrong with people with autism. We can MRI them and see part of their brain isn't working at the correct level, but we not only don't know why, we don't even know how.
First we have to figure out why, exactly, they are the way they are, and only then can we figure out why their brain developed that way. (Or whatever causes it) And then we can work on stopping it from happening.
All we have at the moment is the symptom. Or, more specifically, a bunch of people with a bunch of apparently related symptoms.
Actually, this is another myth. Corn syrup is composed of glucose and fructose, same as table sugar (sucrose). Same molecules, same processing (sucrose has to be split to release glucose and fructose, but this is the first thing that happens; the enzyme is present in saliva).
In fact, quite a lot of foods are acidic enough that sucrose is split in inside them. Like all soft drinks.
There have been some worries raised that fructose may not suppress appetite as well as glucose, but in fact the ratio of fructose to glucose in the most widely used corn syrup is not much different than in sucrose.
A 10% difference is still a difference. 55% fructose and 45% glucose vs. 50% fructose and 50% glucose might not seem like much, but considering we eat a hell of a lot of it, who knows.
But I think the 'appetite suppression' is sorta a dead end, and it's more 'triglyceride' we need to worry about.
It's also about the same as you encounter in fruit.
Yeah, but we don't eat anywhere near that much fruit. A single soft drink has six times as much fructose as an apple.
So it might be that glucose (dextrose) would be better for you, but substitution of corn syrup for table sugar probably makes no difference.
I, OTOH, suspect it makes little difference, but that it is making some.
It's worth pointing out when people say 'genetic', they usually really mean 'hormonal'. Genes are things that do things that make hormones that do other things and trigger other genes and so on. Our genes are our personnel department, and our hormones are the workers it hires. Hiring crazy people who mess up the production is basically the same as having crazy people wander in from outside via milk or whatever and mess up the production.
The point I am trying to try to explain the apparent increase in level of autism. Yes, it's possible that's just better diagnosis, but, honestly, that seems a little weird.
But genetics could render people susceptible to an environmental factor that is, at this point, ever-present in the environment, and wasn't earlier in history.
Something like PCBs or other chemicals. It's almost certainly not mercury, as that's been repeatedly checked. (Plus, we do, indeed, know how both mercury and lead poison people, as we've seen it throughout history. Whereas there are plenty of new chemicals we know are toxic in large amounts but have never seen the end result of moderate poisoning on people.) It has to be something that doesn't build up in the system, but is present at key moments.
Of course, something that is present at all moments is dietary changes, like corn syrup. I wasn't actually kidding with that one...I personally suspect that 'corn syrup' instead of sugar is partially the cause of the obesity epidemic because we process it differently than sugar. (However, it probably has nothing to do with autism.) Some trivial chemical could be interacting with some genetic difference in a small set of people.
And, of course, as the parent post said, it's entirely possible there are, say, five different causes of identical-looking autism. (And the whole thing is a 'spectrum' with ranges of symptoms anyway.)
This is not correct. Doctors are essentially engineers, but, like engineers, do apply the scientific method. They create a hypothesis, propose an experiment, do the experiment, and see if they were correct.
It is just they care more about the actual experiment, aka, treatment, than their hypothesis. Instead of new experiments, they are attempting to replicate experiments that gave certain results. (The result being a healthy patient, or a working bridge for, say, structural engineers.)
Saying they have no 'scientific training' is just wrong. Almost any industry that fixes problems, even ones like auto repair or, yes, plumbing, has a firm grasp of the scientific method. Watch an auto mechanic try to figure out what's wrong with a car. They aren't just moving randomly, they are making a guess, aka, a hypothesis as to what is wrong, and testing that. They may not know the term 'scientific method', but it's no less a science. (Hell, it's probably more a science than sociology.)
Doctors and engineers, because of their education, do know the name of it, and how it works, and how it generalizes to everything.
Unlike 'real' scientists most doctors don't invent new experiments to test new things, but that doesn't mean they don't understand how the whole thing works.
And, perhaps more relevantly, they can understand the actual scientific research coming out of doctors who do invent such experiments much better than people without medical training can.
And, just as important, before it was some magical property of the MMR vaccine, it was thiomersal, a mercury-based preservative used to keep vaccines fresh. The theory was this was causing some sort of mercury poisoning, which at least had the bonus of being slightly plausible. Mercury poisoning can cause brain damage, although, like other heavy metal poisonings, it should require a fairly large buildup.
But, okay, whatever. There were all sorts of people promoting the idea, and 'success stories' where children were 'cured' or at least made better with various heavy-metal poisoning treatments.
They were so good at promoting this theory, in fact, that everyone stopped using thiomersal for vaccines in 1999. Since then, as everyone knows, the rate of autism has plummeted to near zero...oh, wait, no, it hasn't gone down at all.
So MMR is the magical replacement theory for people who, for some inexplicably reason, wish to blame vaccines for autism despite unvaccinated children having exactly the same level of autism. Exactly like they said thiomersal was a decade ago.
Advocating research about a disease isn't any sort of 'medical decision' and it's not pushing stupid non-medical facts. There's nothing wrong with what Michael J. Fox is doing. Parkinson's is a real disease that needs research. (Now if he were running around promoting homeopathic research into it..)
Jenny McCarthy, OTOH, is a Scientologist, and they have a fairly lose grasp of 'medical science' as it is.
I'm convinced that attempting to protect children from allergens and exposure to disease (Note that vaccinating them is exposing them to disease.) is backfiring.
We already know that people can spontaneously 'catch' allergic reactions to thing they've been around forever, and suddenly now can't handle.
I suspect there's much more of that unnoticed happening in the opposite direction...people becoming allergic to things they weren't exposed to for long periods of time. Especially children.
If I ever had kids, I'd be sure to expose them to everything. Cats, peanut butter, shellfish, pollen, dust, whatever. Even poison ivy and bee stings, although obviously I'd just place them in situations where that was likely to happen and not actually harm them myself. Other parents should too.
Please note I'm not saying expose them to things they have a reaction to. You can't build up immunities to things you have allergic reactions to. Once that happens it's too late. I'm saying expose them in advance of that, because I think they get allergies due to lack of exposure. As young as possible. And for God's sake don't keep them indoors breathing filtered air their whole childhood.
And, hey, if you're exposing them consciously, you're more likely to realize they do have a reaction to shellfish, than you going to Captain Ds when they're 13 and they order crab legs for the first time and go into anaphylactic shock.
I also figured that if any of my daughters turned out to be in the one in a million group disabled by the vaccine, they would also have been in the one in a thousand group killed if not vaccinated.
That's a very good point. If someone has a bad reaction to a vaccine, then they're especially susceptible to that disease, and thus it's almost dead certain they'd be one of the people killed by the disease if they happened to get it, and they're probably even slightly more likely to get it at the same level of exposure as other people.
People should have the right not to vaccinate their children.
And as that is rightly child endangerment, we should take their children away and give them to someone who will vaccinate them.
It's very simple.
Dude, there are plenty of other culprits that make a hell of a lot more sense than the repeatedly-investigated-and-dismissed vaccines.
Better culprits: PCB. Corn Syrup. Organophosphates. Hormones in milk. Radon. Radio waves.
There's literally dozens of better culprits out there, especially as childhood vaccines haven't used mercury-based thiomersal since 1999, which was supposed to be the original reason vaccines were causing autism, as some sort of weird mercury poisoning.
And yet autism hasn't gone down since then, leading people into the totally insane theory that vaccines themselves are causing it, which doesn't even make any sense.
Here's a hint: If conspiracy theorists have to change how something worked, but it mysteriously has exactly the same effects, that's called 'moving the goalposts'. They argued for a decade that it was mercury poisoning, and that treatments designed to remove mercury from the system helped, and, hey, they've been revealed to be entirely full of crap(1) as people who get non-mercury vaccines get autism at the same rate. (Granted, people who didn't get vaccines at all also got autism, too, so I don't know why I'd expect actual facts to slow them down.)
No, I'm not saying thiomersal was a good idea, or that we shouldn't have gotten rid of it, but we've pretty clearly demonstrated it wasn't causing autism.
1) Incidentally, mercury in the environment, put out by coal plants, could still conceivable be the villain. But that has nothing to do with vaccines, and thanks to the stupid theory of mercury in vaccines causing autism, there have been dozens of studies of mercury levels in autism sufferers and no link has even been found.
Many people seem to be unaware high fever is not a result of sickness. High fever is your immune system fighting off a virus, it is a deliberate response to a virus, it is not caused by a virus.
Your body stops working at about 105 degrees, whereas viruses stop working after the slightest rise in temperature, which is why your body is raising your temp to 102 or so. It would be an extremely poorly designed virus that would raise your temperature on purpose.
How high your temperature is not related to how 'infected' someone is. It's related to how hard your immune system is working, which sometimes is a useful sign of how strong the infection is.
Raises in temperature after getting a vaccine doesn't mean you actually got sick. It means your immune system decided you were sick and fought, i.e, exactly what it was supposed to do.
I don't think this is normally installed in that manner. I'm suspecting this is installed via some Windows vulnerability.
By the way, it's not the Gulf Stream â" that's the primarily wind-driven component of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation. What you're referring to is the thermohaline component.
Um, what? The thermohaline cycle is when the wind-driven surface currents, like the Gulf Stream, move water from the equator to the poles, during which it cools and sinks and heads back to start the cycle over.
I did neglect to mention that stopping the Gulf Stream would also stop the cool water flowing back in the opposite direction, which could cause various Atlantic islands to get rather more tropical. But, regardless, saying the Gulf Stream would shut down is exactly correct.
Although Europe would cool, it probably won't cool to lower than pre-industrial temperatures, because of the large amount of warming necessary to collapse the current in the first place. See Gregory et al.'s GRL paper from 2005 (section 4).
'Europe', no. Northern Europe, yes. And anyone who says we need a 'large amount' of warming to collapse the current is just, essentially, guessing. We don't know how much it will take, and it's probably very dependent on Greenland glaciers, which are currently melting faster than expected.
If Sweden is inhabitable without the current, so is northern Canada and Siberia. (They are at the same latitude, after all.) And I'm imagining New England with the climate of Spain. If you want to assert it won't happen until the earth heats up that much, well, that's kinda silly.
I am unaware of any scientific support for the claim that an MOC collapse would turn every hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico into a Cat 5 storm headed for the midwest.
Well, clearly all of them wouldn't be headed for the midwest. Some could hit Mexico, or Florida.
But, yes, without the Gulf Stream clearing out the warm water, it would essentially keep building up in the Gulf of Mexico, and any hurricane that made it past Florida would get a giant energy boost. (In addition, Florida and Cuba would start getting some really horrible weather. Imagine Florida as India.)
Of course, it's entirely possible that we'd end up with new ocean current flow and it would be fine, but I suspect that would take years to establish itself.
You know how scientific theories are supposed to provide testable predictions so that you can determine if the theory is correct? What is this bad stuff that's going to happen thanks to global warming? Can we get a list of it and check and see if it happens?
Prediction #1: Ice sheets in the antarctic and glaciers in Greenland will start melting.
And, look, exactly that happened. Exactly on schedule. (In fact, at the highest end of the predicted rate.)
Prediction #2: Sea level continue to rise (As they have for the past century), and the rate at which they rise will accelerate.
Yup. (It's interesting to note this rise is almost entirely due to expansion of sea water as it got warmer, and the effects of melting glaciers have not shown up yet.)
I haven't been convinced that global warming is a bad thing,
Then you need to learn about what happens when the gulf stream collapses. (As it has done before in times of heating.)
When that happens, Northern Europe freezes to death. We're talking about decreases of ten-fifteen degrees. Iceland turns into, ha, solid ice.
Meanwhile, the melting of glaciers in Greenland, and ice at the north pole, stops, in a rather ironic joke. Of course, the ice at the north pole wasn't the stuff raising the sea level, as that's floating. The Greenland ice is to some extent, but no one's worried about it for exactly this reason...before the melting could cause a rise in the sea level, it will shut down the gulf stream and undo the melting trend. It's a glacier with self-defense! (Antarctica, however, will continue to melt and raise sea levels.)
Meanwhile, all that warm water that should have gone northeast to Europe stays in the Gulf of Mexico. Do you know what the major effect would be? Every single hurricane that makes it to the Gulf of Mexico turns into a Category 5 and rampages across the midwest. (And possibly it'd cause more hurricanes to start in the Atlantic, no one is quite sure about that.)
whereas many of the proposed 'solutions' are quite painful, and many will result in economic collapse and the indirect deaths of many... primarily in poverty-stricken countries.
Is it worth pointing out that the people most unequipped to deal with any climate change are the poorest people? They're the ones living in houses with roofs that won't survive the increased precipitation, or without air conditioners when their climate changes from 70 to 80 degrees, or without heating when it changes from 60 to 50.
Making car analogies on slashdot is like driving a car home from work...you just get so used to it that you hardly notice you're doing it, and you get there and you're thinking 'Hey, I must have driven here, but I don't remember it.'.
First of all, there is a lot of evidence that global warming might actually be a good thing.
Are you insane?
Any benefit to the growing season would be more than canceled out when, for example, England freezes to death when the gulf stream collapses.
Or, thanks to the incredibly hot Gulf of Mexico, we end up with ten devastating hurricanes hitting the gulf coast a year, every year. (Talk about an increase in precipitation.)
And let's not even dwell on what even minor rises in sea levels would mean to a large section of the population who would find their cities underwater. Or, hell, just their ports unusable so they can't ship food in.
'Global warming' doesn't mean 'Everywhere gets slightly warmer'. It means 'All the weather patterns that human civilization has been built around get changed'. If the Sahara desert becomes livable again at the cost of Europe becoming unlivable, millions of people will stave because there are no fucking farms or even people in the Sahara.
That doesn't mean, in the end, we'll be worse off. Maybe the patterns will be even better. But that's not where we have cities and farms. It's not where we have ports and shipping lanes. It's not where we have air conditioning and heating. (And in your 'less heating' dreamworld, you should perhaps notice that various parts of the world where it doesn't get over 75 have, every few decades, a heat wave of maybe 80 or 85, and thousands of people die cause they have no AC. And it's a lot easier to emergency heat a house than to cool it.)
Lastly, although there is evidence that supports the theory that greenhouse gasses are part of the reason for global warming it is far from a foregone conclusion. There is also evidence that solar warming and several other factors might be primary causes. Without a thorough understanding of the mechanisms of global warming it is difficult to come up with methods of reducing the warming trend.
Yeah, you go ahead and keep pretending that. And keep muttering about 'primary causes' like that means something...as I pointed out, we know CO2 in the air causes warming, and thus we know we're contributing to it, no matter what else you want to invent might be doing it. And we know there are tipping points beyond which the world's climate is irrevocably changed, so arguing we're only causing 15% if it's that 15% that will push us over, or push us over ten years earlier, is just a fucking stupid argument against reducing that 15%.
We can call for severely impacting our economy and health by curtailing industry in the hopes that it will reduce global warming or we can make sensible cuts while we learn more about the situation.
Yeah, no one's buying that 'impacting the economy' crap anymore. You asshats have been whining about it decades, and, hey, nice economy we've got thanks to that, isn't it?
Every single ecological restriction has ended up helping the industry it's been placed on, and not a single one has ever harmed an industry to the extent it's been claimed it will in advance. Meanwhile, it's each to point to cases where lack of such a restriction has caused serious economic harm...ask Detroit about that and where they'd be if we'd forced them to actually improve their technology. Or the mountaintop removal of coal mining, which was supposed to create jobs but has ended up making less of them, cause you don't actually need coal miners for it.
Frankly, it reminds me of the people who claim that Saddam did have WMDs and smuggled them out to Syria during the invasion.
So...the net result of the Iraq war would be...give WMDs to Syria, where we couldn't keep track of them and they've probably ended up in some random person's hands, instead of keeping them in Iraq, where we could keep them contained?
Yeah, you sure made us anti-war people look like idiots. Boy howdy were we wrong. Thanks for overriding our concerns and handing WMDs to terrorists, you fucking morons. (Luckily, this did not, in fact happen.)
Some people are so concerned with proving the other side wrong they don't bother to think through the implications of what they are actually saying. Any hypothetical possibility as to what might be going on that isn't exactly what the other side has been saying is seized on.
Even if, as in this case, it a) makes the global warming deniers still have been wrong for decades, now hilariously wrong in fact, and b) would logically result in us needing to everything everyone's been saying, even more than before.
You are incorrect. Her graph is scaled by area, not radius. If anything it understates the problem, as you would have noticed if you'd bothered to play with the chart at the bottom of the article and flipped it to a bar chart. January 1855 had thirty times as many deaths due to disease as battle, and that radius is only about four or five times as much, because it is, as I said, by area.
And the point is to compare each slice to itself. There's not really any logical reason to compare each month to the next, which renders your objection about 'stacking' rather moot...no one is going to be comparing casulaties from March to February. You didn't even bother to learn what the graph was trying to demonstrate.
It's important to note she also did bar graphs. One of her most famous graphs, called 'Lines', is a bar graph showing the rate of deaths from disease from civilians vs. soldiers still stationed in English barracks. (Where, despite not being in war conditions at all, and presumably some of the healthiest and most able members of society, the soldiers still died almost twice as much. Yeah, sanitation was that bad.)
Dude, people do know her name.
She's just famous for the wrong thing: Being a nurse. Like she was the only military nurse ever for some reason.
When she actually should be famous, as this article points out, for managing to convince the British military (With the rest of the world learning it from them) that disease (was) the largest killer in war.
She not only used statistics and tried to convince the military, she personally published pamphlets for the British people to read and got them to force the military to take action.
The military liked to pretend it couldn't do anything about this, but, in one of her most famous graphs, she demonstrated that a good deal more soldiers in barracks in England were dying of disease than the general population. I.e., it wasn't some unique unsolvable problem of soldiers on the move.
Almost everyone knows that more soldiers used to die of disease than battle, but almost no one knows who first informed us of this.
OTOH, she probably wasn't the first user of graphs to represent 'statistics', whatever that means. She did seize upon that format, not so much to convince the military, who were used to numbers, but to convince the general population, a good deal of whom couldn't read to any extent and were very innumerate.
If the earth's temperature is being increased by the sun, then it's more important we do something about global warming, and quick.
All the bad stuff that's going to happen thanks to global warming doesn't magically vanish because it's being done by the sun.
If it's caused by humans, we just need to back off. As long as we don't hit the point where the ocean currents flip or the antarctic ice melts, we're okay.
If it's caused by the sun, we need to back way the hell off, back to the stone age, and even farther, perhaps with some sort of technology to shade the earth, and attempt to weather it out without hitting the tipping point in several of the systems that would push us past no recovery.
I.e., the car we're in just got a flat tire. Most people are arguing that it's because we're driving over a rocky road with bad tires, whereas you're arguing there's a sniper shooting at us. That doesn't make the situation better and somehow mean we can ignore it, that makes it a good deal worse and means we need to start panicking now.
Um, if we're talking about before the US's entrance into the war, it's perhaps relevant to look at why Mussolini was disliked after he sided with Hitler:
Hitler was a darling of the right at that time.
And Italy while Italy entered WWII on the wrong side and thus ultimately lost, it's perhaps relevant to mention that Italy is basically the only Axis power not to commit genocide or mass slaughter of civilians.
They actually interned Jews at rather nice camps and very few of them died. In one notable instance, they attempted to free their Jewish prisoners before the Germans seized control of one of their camps.
Mussolini seized power by coup, and for that he shouldn't be honored. We can argue about why the left liked him when he almost exclusively ruled from the right. He'd been pro-socialist earlier but had given it up by the time he returned from WWI, but apparently the left didn't get the memo.
But anyway, Italy had to make a choice as to which side it should enter WWII on. Staying out of the war was not an option. It almost entered the war on the side of England.
But it choose poorly, and lost, which nice in that it reinstated democracy in Italy. But don't ascribe to them the villainous motives of Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan, and Mussolini shouldn't be included with Hitler in the list of notable villains in history.
Actually, there's a lot in there liberals would agree with.
Liberals would agree with: 12, 15, 16, 20, some of 21, and possible 22.
Sadly for the point that was attempted to be made, those are almost exactly the ones the entire American population would agree with, too.
Incidentally, I love the fact that 12 is on the list. Apparently, everyone who dislike war profiteering is a liberal and Hitler supporter. Biggest liberal and Hitler supporter in history: Dwight D. Eisenhower
Same with the 'the creation and maintenance of a healthy middle class'. Remember, folks, if you hate the middle class, vote Republican! A vote for the middle class is a vote for Hitler!
That list is unintentionally funny in so many ways. Picking things that the American left and Hitler agree on only makes sense if the American public in general disagrees with those things. Otherwise, all you've demonstrated that all modern nations look the same and provide the same thing to their people.
And, hilarious, yeah, most people wouldn't have had a problem with Hitler if not for the genocide thing. That and the war. Saying 'If Hitler hadn't been a bad person, the left wouldn't think he was a bad person' is fairly stupid. Of course they wouldn't. No one would have cared about a fucking coup in Germany 70 years ago and who had ended up in charge if it hadn't resulted in genocide and a war.
Incidentally, before you start throwing stones, I suggest you look at which side, in the US, actually supported Germany in WWII until right before we entered the war on the other side.
We shouldn't discontinue care for patients at all, in any state. That is, the government shouldn't. It should continue to be a decision of the families and doctors.
And health care is, in my book, care for your health. The things you listed don't really affect your 'health', per se.
However, I'd be fine with a list of procedures that require the approval of a local board of doctors before they get paid for by the government. A lot of people don't realize that many of the 'elective' surgeries actually have medical uses. Plastic surgery for burn victims, breast implants for women who had mastectomies, etc.
There's almost nothing that should never be acceptable, I bet there's an actual medical use for botox. But there should be a few things that a doctor has to show up, in front of some other doctors, and actually state the medical reason you need it if the government is to pay for it. This should be a very small list.
And, incidentally, I wouldn't include lasik on it. I don't understand why we shouldn't cover vision. Bad vision is an actual medical condition. I'd also include eye exams and eyeglasses every few years with cheap frames, or contacts. (If you want better frames or lose your glasses, though, you'd have to pay for more. Obviously the same with colored contacts.)
However, ironically, exactly because eye (and dental) care haven't been covered by insurance to hardly any extent, they are both fairly functioning industries that most people can afford, although many people skip regular checkups that could reduce costs in total. So I'd have no problem if those were not included at first
As for abortion, we should cover that, but I suspect we won't if it's actually going to pass.
Yes, most of the DoD budget can safely be cut. The government maintains hundreds of military bases all around the world which do nothing for our country's defense. A very small fraction is necessary for actual defense purposes. At home, the government hires too many military persons who have nothing to do but sit around on base doing trivial tasks. This too, should be cut.
I'll argue that we shouldn't have much of a standing army to start with, and almost all our defense military should, in fact, be National Guard. Which nicely has the due purpose of helping in natural disasters so we're not just paying people to sit around waiting for an invasion that will never come.
And, yes, we have an absurd amount of military bases and troops randomly scattered around the world.
Some of them arguably should stay, like the deterrent one in South Korea to keep the North Korea loons out. I can understand that one. Keeping pressure there makes sense.
Same with the one in Cuba. What we are doing there should stop, but the base is a very good idea, and would be even if Cuba wasn't hostile to us...Cuba is a very undefended county and would an obvious stepping stone to any invasion of the US.
Same with joint bases we have in Canada and Mexico....we're protecting us by protecting our neighbors. However, 90% of the random bases can go away. We don't need bases in England or Ecuador! Even eastern Europe should go...Russia's influence in former satellites is not really relevant to us. The cold war is over.
About the only thing the US military should be doing is running a defensive navy, which oddly enough the states are prohibited from doing.
A defensive navy would be mainly, I suspect, submarines that lurk hidden in US waters, plus the Coast Guard running patrols. I think we can do without aircraft carriers if we're just defending our land and our waters, as we should be able to launch fighters from bases.
Admittedly I am not an expert at this. But I suspect a military designed to protect this country, and maybe protect our shipping, would look a good deal different than our current one.