![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brdgt
Illnesses Afflict Homes With a Criminal Past
By SHAILA DEWAN and ROBBIE BROWN, The New York Times, July 14, 2009
WINCHESTER, Tenn. — The spacious home where the newly wed Rhonda and Jason Holt began their family in 2005 was plagued by mysterious illnesses. The Holts’ three babies were ghostlike and listless, with breathing problems that called for respirators, repeated trips to the emergency room and, for the middle child, Anna, the heaviest dose of steroids a toddler can take.
Ms. Holt, a nurse, developed migraines. She and her husband, a factory worker, had kidney ailments.
It was not until February, more than five years after they moved in, that the couple discovered the root of their troubles: their house, across the road from a cornfield in this town some 70 miles south of Nashville, was contaminated with high levels of methamphetamine left by the previous occupant, who had been dragged from the attic by the police.
The Holts’ next realization was almost as devastating: it was up to them to spend the $30,000 or more that cleanup would require.
With meth lab seizures on the rise nationally for the first time since 2003, similar cases are playing out in several states, drawing attention to the problem of meth contamination, which can permeate drywall, carpets, insulation and air ducts, causing respiratory ailments and other health problems.
Federal data on meth lab seizures suggest that there are tens of thousands of contaminated residences in the United States. The victims include low-income elderly people whose homes are surreptitiously used by relatives or in-laws to make meth, and landlords whose tenants leave them with a toxic mess.
Some states have tried to fix the problem by requiring cleanup and, at the time of sale, disclosure of the house’s history. But the high cost of cleaning — $5,000 to $100,000, depending on the size of the home, the stringency of the requirements and the degree of contamination — has left hundreds of properties vacant and quarantined, particularly in Western and Southern states afflicted with meth use.
“The meth lab home problem is only going to grow,” said Dawn Turner, who started a Web site, www.methlabhomes.com, after her son lost thousands of dollars when he bought a foreclosed home in Sweetwater, Tenn., that turned out to be contaminated. Because less is known about the history of foreclosed houses, Ms. Turner said, “as foreclosures rise, so will the number of new meth lab home owners.”
Meth contamination can bring financial ruin to families like that of Francisca Rodriguez. The family dog began having seizures nine days after the Rodriguezes moved into their home in Grapevine, Tex., near Dallas, and their 6-year-old son developed a breathing problem similar to asthma, said Ms. Rodriguez, 35, a stay-at-home mother of three.
After learning from neighbors that the three-bedroom ranch-style home had been a known “drug house,” the family had it tested. The air ducts had meth levels more than 100 times higher than the most commonly cited limit beyond which cleanup is typically required.
The former owner had marked “no” on a disclosure form asking whether the house had ever been a meth lab, Ms. Rodriguez said. But because he is now in prison for meth possession, among other things, the Rodriguezes decided there was nothing to gain by suing him. They moved out, throwing away most of their possessions because they could not be cleaned, and are letting the house go into foreclosure.
“It makes you crazy,” Ms. Rodriguez said. “Our credit is ruined, we won’t be able to buy another house, somebody exposed my kids to meth, and my dog died.”
Federal statistics show that the number of clandestine meth labs discovered in the United States rose by 14 percent last year, to 6,783, and has continued to increase, in part because of a crackdown on meth manufacturers in Mexico and in part because of the spread of a new, easier meth-making method known as “shake and bake.”
There are no national standards governing meth contamination. Congress ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to publish cleanup guidelines by the end of 2008, but the agency is still reviewing a draft version. Without standards, professional cleaners say, it is easy to bungle a job that often requires gutting and repeated washing.
About 20 states have passed laws requiring meth contamination cleanup, and they use widely varied standards. Virtually all the laws hold the property owner financially responsible; Colorado appears to be the only state that allots federal grant money to help innocent property owners faced with unexpected cleanup jobs.
In other states, like Georgia, landlords and other real estate owners have fought a proposed cleanup law.
After the Holts bought their house here, Tennessee passed such a law. But since 2005, only 81 of 303 homes placed under a resulting quarantine have been cleaned, according to the state, which has one of the few registries tracking meth lab addresses. The law applies only if the police find a working meth lab at the house, and Jerry Hood, a lawyer and cleanup contractor hired by the Holts for the decontamination work, said many houses in the county had escaped the legislation.
The health effects of meth contamination are frequently difficult to prove, and research is scant. But John W. Martyny, a meth expert at the National Jewish Medical and Research Center in Denver, said living in a former meth lab made children more likely to develop learning disabilities and caused long-term respiratory and skin problems.
Even brief exposure can have severe effects, Dr. Martyny said. A 2007 study by the Denver center found that more than 70 percent of law enforcement officials who had inspected meth labs subsequently reported health problems.
To Ms. Holt’s horror, inspectors found high concentrations of meth on her kitchen countertops, where she sterilized bottles, prepared baby food and doled out snacks.
“We had no idea that we were starting a family in a meth house,” she said. “We bought a house that eventually was going to sentence our family to death.”
When the family left the house, moving in with Mr. Holt’s parents, their health problems largely subsided. The children no longer needed medication to breathe. The migraines and the kidney ailments vanished.
But the heartaches continued. Ms. Holt has been working two jobs to earn money to pay for her house’s remediation, which has proceeded in fits and starts with donations from church fund-raisers and local businesses. And Anna, 2, had a relapse and had to return briefly to the hospital.
“We don’t know what it’s going to be in the future,” Ms. Holt said, standing in the barren, unfinished structure that was once her dream home and reflecting on her children. “This meth contamination is all their immune systems have ever known.”
Vocal Minority Insists It Was All Smoke and Mirrors
By JOHN SCHWARTZ, The New York Times, July 14, 2009
They walk among us, seemingly little different from you or me. Most of the time, you would never know of their true nature — except that occasionally, they feel compelled to speak up.
Take an example from Lens, this newspaper’s photography blog. A recent feature,“ Dateline: Space,” displayed stunning NASA photographs, including the iconic photo of Buzz Aldrin standing on the lunar surface.
The second comment on the feature stated flatly, “Man never got to the moon.”
The author of the post, Nicolas Marino, went on to say, “I think media should stop publicizing something that was a complete sham once and for all and start documenting how they lied blatantly to the whole world.”
Forty years after men first touched the lifeless dirt of the Moon — and they did. Really. Honest. — polling consistently suggests that some 6 percent of Americans believe the landings were faked and could not have happened. The series of landings, one of the greatest gambles of the human race, was an elaborate hoax developed to raise national pride, many among them insist.
They examine photos from the missions for signs of studio fakery, and claim to be able to tell that the American flag was waving in what was supposed to be the vacuum of space. They overstate the health risks of traveling through the radiation belts that girdle our planet; they understate the technological prowess of the American space program; and they cry murder behind every death in the program, linking them to an overall conspiracy.
And while there is no credible evidence to support such views, and the sheer unlikelihood of being able to pull off such an immense plot and keep it secret for four decades staggers the imagination, the deniers continue to amass accusations to this day. They are bolstered by films like a documentary shown on Fox television in 2001 and “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon” by Bart Sibrel, a filmmaker in Nashville.
“There are smart, normal people who buy into these conspiracy theories,” said Philip Plait, an astronomer and author who counters the conspiracy theorists point by point and at excruciating length at his “Bad Astronomy” Web site. He is one of many people who have joined the fight to affirm that It Happened. A group effort, at www.clavius.org, debunks with gusto; its main author, Jay Windley, named the site for the Moon base in Arthur C. Clarke’s classic science fiction novel, “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
Even though the so-called evidence from the conspiracists can clearly be proved wrong, Mr. Plait said, understanding the proof can require a working knowledge of history and photography and of science and its methodology. “You’ve got to do the work; you’ve got to put the elbow grease to it,” he said, “and most people don’t do the work. So these things get traction.”
Mr. Marino, the author of the post on the Lens blog, is a 31-year-old architect born in Argentina. In an e-mail interview, he said that the political corruption during the years of dictatorship in his country shaped his thinking: “I started to realize how political corruption operates and how it is the interests of a few in power that really governs our world.”
As he traveled the world — he now lives and works in China — he picked up books contending that the landings were faked and saw documentaries including Mr. Sibrel’s, he said, which paints a dark portrait of political manipulation during the Nixon administration and somehow ties in the Vietnam War, the Titanic and the Tower of Babel before even getting to the supposed photographic evidence of lunar deception.
Mr. Sibrel, who sells his films online, has hounded Apollo astronauts with a Bible, insisting that they swear on camera they had walked on the Moon. He so annoyed Buzz Aldrin in 2002 — ambushing him with his Bible and calling him “a coward, and a liar, and a thief” — that Mr. Aldrin punched Mr. Sibrel in the face. Law enforcement officials refused to file charges against Mr. Aldrin, the second man on the Moon.
In an interview, Mr. Sibrel said that his efforts to prove that men never walked on the Moon has cost him dearly. “I have suffered only persecution and financial loss,” he said. “I’ve lost visitation with my son. I’ve been expelled from churches. All because I believe the Moon landings are fraudulent.”
Ted Goertzel, a professor of sociology at Rutgers University who has studied conspiracy theorists, said “there’s a similar kind of logic behind all of these groups, I think.” For the most part, he explained, “They don’t undertake to prove that their view is true” so much as to “find flaws in what the other side is saying.” And so, he said, argument is a matter of accumulation instead of persuasion. “They feel if they’ve got more facts than the other side, that proves they’re right.”
Mark Fenster, a professor at the University of Florida Levin College of Law who has written extensively on conspiracy theories, said he sees similarities between people who argue that the Moon landings never happened and those who insist that the 9/11 attacks were planned by the government and that President Obama’s birth certificate is fake: at the core, he said, is a polarization so profound that people end up with an unshakable belief that those in power “simply can’t be trusted.”
The emergence of the Internet as a communications medium, he noted, makes it possible for once-scattered believers to find one another. “It allows the theory to continue to exist, to continue to be available — it’s not just some old dusty books on the half-price shelf.”
Adam Savage, the co-star of the television show “MythBusters,” spent an episode last year taking apart Moon hoax theories bit by bit, entertainingly and convincingly. The theorists, he noted, never give up. “They’ll say you have to keep an open mind,” he said, “but they reject every single piece of evidence that doesn’t adhere to their thesis.”
For those who actually went — and have I mentioned that we did land astronauts on the Moon? Six times? — the conspiracy theories are simply galling.
Harrison Schmitt, the pilot of the lunar lander during the last Apollo mission and later a United States senator, said in an interview that the poor state of the nation’s schools has had predictable results. “If people decide they’re going to deny the facts of history and the facts of science and technology, there’s not much you can do with them,” he said.
“For most of them, I just feel sorry that we failed in their education.”
An earlier version of this article misstated who was in a Moon photograph on the Lens blog.
Administration Seeks to Restrict Antibiotics in Livestock
By GARDINER HARRIS, The New York Times, July 14, 2009
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration announced Monday that it would seek to ban many routine uses of antibiotics in farm animals in hopes of reducing the spread of dangerous bacteria in humans.
In written testimony to the House Rules Committee, Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, principal deputy commissioner of food and drugs, said feeding antibiotics to healthy chickens, pigs and cattle — done to encourage rapid growth — should cease. And Dr. Sharfstein said farmers should no longer be able to use antibiotics in animals without the supervision of a veterinarian.
Both practices lead to the development of bacteria that are immune to many treatments, he said.
The hearing was held to discuss a measure proposed by Representative Louise M. Slaughter, Democrat of New York and chairwoman of the Rules Committee. It would ban seven classes of antibiotics important to human health from being used in animals, and would restrict other antibiotics to therapeutic and some preventive uses.
The legislation is supported by the American Medical Association, among other groups, but opposed by farm organizations like the National Pork Producers Council. The farm lobby’s opposition makes its passage unlikely, but advocates are hoping to include the measure in the legislation to revamp the health care system.
The Union of Concerned Scientists has estimated that as much as 70 percent of antibiotics used in the United States is given to healthy chickens, pigs and cattle to encourage their growth or to prevent illnesses.
The use of antibiotics for “purposes other than for the advancement of animal or human health should not be considered judicious use,” Dr. Sharfstein said in his written testimony. “Eliminating these uses will not compromise the safety of food.”
Much of Dr. Sharfstein’s testimony summarized information that has been widely accepted for years by medical groups. But many farm organizations dispute such claims.
“There are no good studies that show that some of these antibiotic-resistant diseases — and it seems like we’re seeing more of them — have any link to antibiotic use in food-animal production,” said Dave Warner, a spokesman for the pork producers’ group.
Robert Martin, a senior officer at the Pew Environment Group, which has paid for an advertising campaign to support the measure, said the prospects for the measure’s passage were improving.
“Just the fact that Congresswoman Slaughter is having a hearing today is a huge step forward,” Mr. Martin said.
The New Old Age - Caring and Coping: With Friends Aplenty, Many Widows Choose Singlehood
By Anne C. Roark, The New York Times, July 13, 2009
When Jane Austin, a retired schoolteacher from Rockford, Ill., suddenly became a widow at age 69, her older brother called from Florida to warn her about “all those old guys who are looking for a nurse . . . or an insurance settlement.”
The warning wasn’t necessary. One husband had been enough, thank you very much. After nearly 47 years of marriage, Ms. Austin knew she would miss her husband’s company, but like many widows today, she had plans for the future — travel and a new part-time career as a school curriculum consultant — none of which involved managing another man’s domestic life.
That women like Ms. Austin aren’t interested in remarrying is likely to be unwelcome news for widowers who assume that the storied “casserole brigade” will always line up on their doorsteps. The notion of love-starved widows has become so entrenched in American culture that it has been a sitcom staple and the subject of an endless succession of jokes.
The jokes may continue, but loved-starved widows, if they ever really existed outside men’s imaginations, have gone the way of June Cleaver. Women like Ms. Austin see themselves as part of a new generation of widows who openly, and sometimes gleefully, admit they like being liberated from their roles as wives and homemakers. While they may grieve over the deaths of beloved spouses and while some will never recover from their losses, the vast majority of older widows, studies show, accept and even revel in their roles as single women. They keep in close contact with their children and other family members, but they also go out to dinner, organize poetry soirées and plan travel adventures with other women, often making use of social networks developed during years of childrearing and community volunteering.
The same cannot be said of men who lose their wives. In a strange twist of fortune — some might call it poetic justice — age can bring with it something of a reversal in gender roles. The rise of an old girls’ network, friends and family who see women through a lifetime of transitions, often contrasts sharply with the decline of the old boys’ network, the professional associations that secure young men’s places in the world but offer little support or solace in later life.
“For many white men, old age is the first time that they are minorities,” Henry Alford, author of “How to Live: A Search for Wisdom From Old People,” wrote in an e-mail. “It can be a double whammy for them: not only are they prey to declining physical health, but they now also are experiencing a loss of status, which can beget depression and sometimes suicide.”
Older men may be reluctant to talk about these feelings, but their children often sense what’s happening. Georgia Dunn’s father and father-in-law have both lost their wives. “My dad has rekindled a friendship with his high school sweetheart, and I think he would remarry her in an instant, but she doesn’t seem all that interested,” said Ms. Dunn, 57, a retired school teacher in Mount Lebanon, Ohio. “My husband’s father is trying to establish a good old boys’ network and has some success . . . but he is really lost and lonely.”
Statistics paint a grim picture of the male population over the age of 65. While men seem to start out with all the advantages — greater financial security, fewer chronic health illness and less frequent complaints of depression — elderly men, especially those who are divorced or widowed, end up with fewer friends, reduced involvement in their communities and less contact with their families.
Left to their own devices, older men don’t eat as well as older women, are less likely to seek medical care when they are sick, and more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol. Older women have more chronic diseases, in part because they live longer, but older men are more likely to die suddenly from heart attacks and other catastrophic, stress-related diseases. Men over 65 are five times as likely as women to commit suicide. Divorced and widowed men have suicide rates three times higher than that of older men living with a spouse.
Detecting emotional problems in elderly men before it is too late can be a serious challenge for family caregivers and even physicians. Men of Ward Cleaver’s generation don’t usually think of themselves as having emotional problems and are less likely to seek treatment for them. What makes matters harder for caregivers is that unspoken symptoms of depression are not always the same in men and women. Women who are depressed tend to feel sad, worthless and guilty, whereas men often become irritable and hostile, or complain of fatigue, sleeplessness or physical symptoms often assumed to be ordinary signs of aging.
Men and women also appear to have different mechanisms for coping with bereavement, so that what is normal grief for one may be a sign of emotional instability in the other. In one study, women who said they were comfortable being alone were significantly more likely to be coping with their grief than men who made similar remarks.
Looking back on her 83-year-old brother’s warning about predatory men, Ms. Austin now sees it less a cautionary tale for lonely widows and more an “indictment from an old man regarding other old men.”
“Most of the men I know who are widowed are not comfortable in their own homes alone,” Ms. Austin said. Either they seek replacement wives as housekeepers and social directors, or they end up “in a chair watching CNN and the cooking channels . . . waiting for the end.”
By SHAILA DEWAN and ROBBIE BROWN, The New York Times, July 14, 2009
WINCHESTER, Tenn. — The spacious home where the newly wed Rhonda and Jason Holt began their family in 2005 was plagued by mysterious illnesses. The Holts’ three babies were ghostlike and listless, with breathing problems that called for respirators, repeated trips to the emergency room and, for the middle child, Anna, the heaviest dose of steroids a toddler can take.
Ms. Holt, a nurse, developed migraines. She and her husband, a factory worker, had kidney ailments.
It was not until February, more than five years after they moved in, that the couple discovered the root of their troubles: their house, across the road from a cornfield in this town some 70 miles south of Nashville, was contaminated with high levels of methamphetamine left by the previous occupant, who had been dragged from the attic by the police.
The Holts’ next realization was almost as devastating: it was up to them to spend the $30,000 or more that cleanup would require.
With meth lab seizures on the rise nationally for the first time since 2003, similar cases are playing out in several states, drawing attention to the problem of meth contamination, which can permeate drywall, carpets, insulation and air ducts, causing respiratory ailments and other health problems.
Federal data on meth lab seizures suggest that there are tens of thousands of contaminated residences in the United States. The victims include low-income elderly people whose homes are surreptitiously used by relatives or in-laws to make meth, and landlords whose tenants leave them with a toxic mess.
Some states have tried to fix the problem by requiring cleanup and, at the time of sale, disclosure of the house’s history. But the high cost of cleaning — $5,000 to $100,000, depending on the size of the home, the stringency of the requirements and the degree of contamination — has left hundreds of properties vacant and quarantined, particularly in Western and Southern states afflicted with meth use.
“The meth lab home problem is only going to grow,” said Dawn Turner, who started a Web site, www.methlabhomes.com, after her son lost thousands of dollars when he bought a foreclosed home in Sweetwater, Tenn., that turned out to be contaminated. Because less is known about the history of foreclosed houses, Ms. Turner said, “as foreclosures rise, so will the number of new meth lab home owners.”
Meth contamination can bring financial ruin to families like that of Francisca Rodriguez. The family dog began having seizures nine days after the Rodriguezes moved into their home in Grapevine, Tex., near Dallas, and their 6-year-old son developed a breathing problem similar to asthma, said Ms. Rodriguez, 35, a stay-at-home mother of three.
After learning from neighbors that the three-bedroom ranch-style home had been a known “drug house,” the family had it tested. The air ducts had meth levels more than 100 times higher than the most commonly cited limit beyond which cleanup is typically required.
The former owner had marked “no” on a disclosure form asking whether the house had ever been a meth lab, Ms. Rodriguez said. But because he is now in prison for meth possession, among other things, the Rodriguezes decided there was nothing to gain by suing him. They moved out, throwing away most of their possessions because they could not be cleaned, and are letting the house go into foreclosure.
“It makes you crazy,” Ms. Rodriguez said. “Our credit is ruined, we won’t be able to buy another house, somebody exposed my kids to meth, and my dog died.”
Federal statistics show that the number of clandestine meth labs discovered in the United States rose by 14 percent last year, to 6,783, and has continued to increase, in part because of a crackdown on meth manufacturers in Mexico and in part because of the spread of a new, easier meth-making method known as “shake and bake.”
There are no national standards governing meth contamination. Congress ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to publish cleanup guidelines by the end of 2008, but the agency is still reviewing a draft version. Without standards, professional cleaners say, it is easy to bungle a job that often requires gutting and repeated washing.
About 20 states have passed laws requiring meth contamination cleanup, and they use widely varied standards. Virtually all the laws hold the property owner financially responsible; Colorado appears to be the only state that allots federal grant money to help innocent property owners faced with unexpected cleanup jobs.
In other states, like Georgia, landlords and other real estate owners have fought a proposed cleanup law.
After the Holts bought their house here, Tennessee passed such a law. But since 2005, only 81 of 303 homes placed under a resulting quarantine have been cleaned, according to the state, which has one of the few registries tracking meth lab addresses. The law applies only if the police find a working meth lab at the house, and Jerry Hood, a lawyer and cleanup contractor hired by the Holts for the decontamination work, said many houses in the county had escaped the legislation.
The health effects of meth contamination are frequently difficult to prove, and research is scant. But John W. Martyny, a meth expert at the National Jewish Medical and Research Center in Denver, said living in a former meth lab made children more likely to develop learning disabilities and caused long-term respiratory and skin problems.
Even brief exposure can have severe effects, Dr. Martyny said. A 2007 study by the Denver center found that more than 70 percent of law enforcement officials who had inspected meth labs subsequently reported health problems.
To Ms. Holt’s horror, inspectors found high concentrations of meth on her kitchen countertops, where she sterilized bottles, prepared baby food and doled out snacks.
“We had no idea that we were starting a family in a meth house,” she said. “We bought a house that eventually was going to sentence our family to death.”
When the family left the house, moving in with Mr. Holt’s parents, their health problems largely subsided. The children no longer needed medication to breathe. The migraines and the kidney ailments vanished.
But the heartaches continued. Ms. Holt has been working two jobs to earn money to pay for her house’s remediation, which has proceeded in fits and starts with donations from church fund-raisers and local businesses. And Anna, 2, had a relapse and had to return briefly to the hospital.
“We don’t know what it’s going to be in the future,” Ms. Holt said, standing in the barren, unfinished structure that was once her dream home and reflecting on her children. “This meth contamination is all their immune systems have ever known.”
Vocal Minority Insists It Was All Smoke and Mirrors
By JOHN SCHWARTZ, The New York Times, July 14, 2009
They walk among us, seemingly little different from you or me. Most of the time, you would never know of their true nature — except that occasionally, they feel compelled to speak up.
Take an example from Lens, this newspaper’s photography blog. A recent feature,“ Dateline: Space,” displayed stunning NASA photographs, including the iconic photo of Buzz Aldrin standing on the lunar surface.
The second comment on the feature stated flatly, “Man never got to the moon.”
The author of the post, Nicolas Marino, went on to say, “I think media should stop publicizing something that was a complete sham once and for all and start documenting how they lied blatantly to the whole world.”
Forty years after men first touched the lifeless dirt of the Moon — and they did. Really. Honest. — polling consistently suggests that some 6 percent of Americans believe the landings were faked and could not have happened. The series of landings, one of the greatest gambles of the human race, was an elaborate hoax developed to raise national pride, many among them insist.
They examine photos from the missions for signs of studio fakery, and claim to be able to tell that the American flag was waving in what was supposed to be the vacuum of space. They overstate the health risks of traveling through the radiation belts that girdle our planet; they understate the technological prowess of the American space program; and they cry murder behind every death in the program, linking them to an overall conspiracy.
And while there is no credible evidence to support such views, and the sheer unlikelihood of being able to pull off such an immense plot and keep it secret for four decades staggers the imagination, the deniers continue to amass accusations to this day. They are bolstered by films like a documentary shown on Fox television in 2001 and “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon” by Bart Sibrel, a filmmaker in Nashville.
“There are smart, normal people who buy into these conspiracy theories,” said Philip Plait, an astronomer and author who counters the conspiracy theorists point by point and at excruciating length at his “Bad Astronomy” Web site. He is one of many people who have joined the fight to affirm that It Happened. A group effort, at www.clavius.org, debunks with gusto; its main author, Jay Windley, named the site for the Moon base in Arthur C. Clarke’s classic science fiction novel, “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
Even though the so-called evidence from the conspiracists can clearly be proved wrong, Mr. Plait said, understanding the proof can require a working knowledge of history and photography and of science and its methodology. “You’ve got to do the work; you’ve got to put the elbow grease to it,” he said, “and most people don’t do the work. So these things get traction.”
Mr. Marino, the author of the post on the Lens blog, is a 31-year-old architect born in Argentina. In an e-mail interview, he said that the political corruption during the years of dictatorship in his country shaped his thinking: “I started to realize how political corruption operates and how it is the interests of a few in power that really governs our world.”
As he traveled the world — he now lives and works in China — he picked up books contending that the landings were faked and saw documentaries including Mr. Sibrel’s, he said, which paints a dark portrait of political manipulation during the Nixon administration and somehow ties in the Vietnam War, the Titanic and the Tower of Babel before even getting to the supposed photographic evidence of lunar deception.
Mr. Sibrel, who sells his films online, has hounded Apollo astronauts with a Bible, insisting that they swear on camera they had walked on the Moon. He so annoyed Buzz Aldrin in 2002 — ambushing him with his Bible and calling him “a coward, and a liar, and a thief” — that Mr. Aldrin punched Mr. Sibrel in the face. Law enforcement officials refused to file charges against Mr. Aldrin, the second man on the Moon.
In an interview, Mr. Sibrel said that his efforts to prove that men never walked on the Moon has cost him dearly. “I have suffered only persecution and financial loss,” he said. “I’ve lost visitation with my son. I’ve been expelled from churches. All because I believe the Moon landings are fraudulent.”
Ted Goertzel, a professor of sociology at Rutgers University who has studied conspiracy theorists, said “there’s a similar kind of logic behind all of these groups, I think.” For the most part, he explained, “They don’t undertake to prove that their view is true” so much as to “find flaws in what the other side is saying.” And so, he said, argument is a matter of accumulation instead of persuasion. “They feel if they’ve got more facts than the other side, that proves they’re right.”
Mark Fenster, a professor at the University of Florida Levin College of Law who has written extensively on conspiracy theories, said he sees similarities between people who argue that the Moon landings never happened and those who insist that the 9/11 attacks were planned by the government and that President Obama’s birth certificate is fake: at the core, he said, is a polarization so profound that people end up with an unshakable belief that those in power “simply can’t be trusted.”
The emergence of the Internet as a communications medium, he noted, makes it possible for once-scattered believers to find one another. “It allows the theory to continue to exist, to continue to be available — it’s not just some old dusty books on the half-price shelf.”
Adam Savage, the co-star of the television show “MythBusters,” spent an episode last year taking apart Moon hoax theories bit by bit, entertainingly and convincingly. The theorists, he noted, never give up. “They’ll say you have to keep an open mind,” he said, “but they reject every single piece of evidence that doesn’t adhere to their thesis.”
For those who actually went — and have I mentioned that we did land astronauts on the Moon? Six times? — the conspiracy theories are simply galling.
Harrison Schmitt, the pilot of the lunar lander during the last Apollo mission and later a United States senator, said in an interview that the poor state of the nation’s schools has had predictable results. “If people decide they’re going to deny the facts of history and the facts of science and technology, there’s not much you can do with them,” he said.
“For most of them, I just feel sorry that we failed in their education.”
An earlier version of this article misstated who was in a Moon photograph on the Lens blog.
Administration Seeks to Restrict Antibiotics in Livestock
By GARDINER HARRIS, The New York Times, July 14, 2009
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration announced Monday that it would seek to ban many routine uses of antibiotics in farm animals in hopes of reducing the spread of dangerous bacteria in humans.
In written testimony to the House Rules Committee, Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, principal deputy commissioner of food and drugs, said feeding antibiotics to healthy chickens, pigs and cattle — done to encourage rapid growth — should cease. And Dr. Sharfstein said farmers should no longer be able to use antibiotics in animals without the supervision of a veterinarian.
Both practices lead to the development of bacteria that are immune to many treatments, he said.
The hearing was held to discuss a measure proposed by Representative Louise M. Slaughter, Democrat of New York and chairwoman of the Rules Committee. It would ban seven classes of antibiotics important to human health from being used in animals, and would restrict other antibiotics to therapeutic and some preventive uses.
The legislation is supported by the American Medical Association, among other groups, but opposed by farm organizations like the National Pork Producers Council. The farm lobby’s opposition makes its passage unlikely, but advocates are hoping to include the measure in the legislation to revamp the health care system.
The Union of Concerned Scientists has estimated that as much as 70 percent of antibiotics used in the United States is given to healthy chickens, pigs and cattle to encourage their growth or to prevent illnesses.
The use of antibiotics for “purposes other than for the advancement of animal or human health should not be considered judicious use,” Dr. Sharfstein said in his written testimony. “Eliminating these uses will not compromise the safety of food.”
Much of Dr. Sharfstein’s testimony summarized information that has been widely accepted for years by medical groups. But many farm organizations dispute such claims.
“There are no good studies that show that some of these antibiotic-resistant diseases — and it seems like we’re seeing more of them — have any link to antibiotic use in food-animal production,” said Dave Warner, a spokesman for the pork producers’ group.
Robert Martin, a senior officer at the Pew Environment Group, which has paid for an advertising campaign to support the measure, said the prospects for the measure’s passage were improving.
“Just the fact that Congresswoman Slaughter is having a hearing today is a huge step forward,” Mr. Martin said.
The New Old Age - Caring and Coping: With Friends Aplenty, Many Widows Choose Singlehood
By Anne C. Roark, The New York Times, July 13, 2009
When Jane Austin, a retired schoolteacher from Rockford, Ill., suddenly became a widow at age 69, her older brother called from Florida to warn her about “all those old guys who are looking for a nurse . . . or an insurance settlement.”
The warning wasn’t necessary. One husband had been enough, thank you very much. After nearly 47 years of marriage, Ms. Austin knew she would miss her husband’s company, but like many widows today, she had plans for the future — travel and a new part-time career as a school curriculum consultant — none of which involved managing another man’s domestic life.
That women like Ms. Austin aren’t interested in remarrying is likely to be unwelcome news for widowers who assume that the storied “casserole brigade” will always line up on their doorsteps. The notion of love-starved widows has become so entrenched in American culture that it has been a sitcom staple and the subject of an endless succession of jokes.
Q. Rabbi, when do I take my casserole to the widower — before Shiva [the period of mourning] or after Shiva?
A. Before Shiva is too soon. After Shiva is too late; he’ll already be taken.
The jokes may continue, but loved-starved widows, if they ever really existed outside men’s imaginations, have gone the way of June Cleaver. Women like Ms. Austin see themselves as part of a new generation of widows who openly, and sometimes gleefully, admit they like being liberated from their roles as wives and homemakers. While they may grieve over the deaths of beloved spouses and while some will never recover from their losses, the vast majority of older widows, studies show, accept and even revel in their roles as single women. They keep in close contact with their children and other family members, but they also go out to dinner, organize poetry soirées and plan travel adventures with other women, often making use of social networks developed during years of childrearing and community volunteering.
The same cannot be said of men who lose their wives. In a strange twist of fortune — some might call it poetic justice — age can bring with it something of a reversal in gender roles. The rise of an old girls’ network, friends and family who see women through a lifetime of transitions, often contrasts sharply with the decline of the old boys’ network, the professional associations that secure young men’s places in the world but offer little support or solace in later life.
“For many white men, old age is the first time that they are minorities,” Henry Alford, author of “How to Live: A Search for Wisdom From Old People,” wrote in an e-mail. “It can be a double whammy for them: not only are they prey to declining physical health, but they now also are experiencing a loss of status, which can beget depression and sometimes suicide.”
Older men may be reluctant to talk about these feelings, but their children often sense what’s happening. Georgia Dunn’s father and father-in-law have both lost their wives. “My dad has rekindled a friendship with his high school sweetheart, and I think he would remarry her in an instant, but she doesn’t seem all that interested,” said Ms. Dunn, 57, a retired school teacher in Mount Lebanon, Ohio. “My husband’s father is trying to establish a good old boys’ network and has some success . . . but he is really lost and lonely.”
Statistics paint a grim picture of the male population over the age of 65. While men seem to start out with all the advantages — greater financial security, fewer chronic health illness and less frequent complaints of depression — elderly men, especially those who are divorced or widowed, end up with fewer friends, reduced involvement in their communities and less contact with their families.
Left to their own devices, older men don’t eat as well as older women, are less likely to seek medical care when they are sick, and more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol. Older women have more chronic diseases, in part because they live longer, but older men are more likely to die suddenly from heart attacks and other catastrophic, stress-related diseases. Men over 65 are five times as likely as women to commit suicide. Divorced and widowed men have suicide rates three times higher than that of older men living with a spouse.
Detecting emotional problems in elderly men before it is too late can be a serious challenge for family caregivers and even physicians. Men of Ward Cleaver’s generation don’t usually think of themselves as having emotional problems and are less likely to seek treatment for them. What makes matters harder for caregivers is that unspoken symptoms of depression are not always the same in men and women. Women who are depressed tend to feel sad, worthless and guilty, whereas men often become irritable and hostile, or complain of fatigue, sleeplessness or physical symptoms often assumed to be ordinary signs of aging.
Men and women also appear to have different mechanisms for coping with bereavement, so that what is normal grief for one may be a sign of emotional instability in the other. In one study, women who said they were comfortable being alone were significantly more likely to be coping with their grief than men who made similar remarks.
Looking back on her 83-year-old brother’s warning about predatory men, Ms. Austin now sees it less a cautionary tale for lonely widows and more an “indictment from an old man regarding other old men.”
“Most of the men I know who are widowed are not comfortable in their own homes alone,” Ms. Austin said. Either they seek replacement wives as housekeepers and social directors, or they end up “in a chair watching CNN and the cooking channels . . . waiting for the end.”
