"Trump and Ethnicity in Comparative Perspective"

"When I think about politics, ethnicity and ethnic identity are never far from my mind. This is especially true in those contexts where ethnicity is a red line for economic, political, and social marginalization: where one’s ethnic identity either qualifies or disqualifies you for a job, housing, membership in a club, or – at least historically – from holding high elected office. That is, ethnic identity is not just about culture, language and/or religion, but it also becomes a vehicle for obtaining and maintaining power.

Social scientists take as given that these conditions obtain in the vast majority of developing countries, which for complex reasons tend to be more ethnically diverse and more prone to intrastate conflict than wealthier, more industrialized or post-industrial societies. Moreover, it is uncontroversial to argue in these circumstances that political competition revolves around ethnicity. But ethnic politics are highly relevant (and climbing with a bullet) in the United States – which is unique among developed, capitalist countries for its long history of domestic slavery and Jim Crow – and increasingly so in Europe, as the countries of the European Union grapple with a mass influx of refugees from the Middle East and North Africa and lingering resentment over the costs of addressing the fallout of the Great Recession...

According to the Ethnic Power Relations data, a cross-national dataset compiled by researchers at ETH Zurich and UCLA, the United States’ political system had been characterized by white ethnic dominance, a situation in which “members of the group hold dominant power in the executive but there is some limited inclusion of ‘token’ members of other groups who however do not have real influence on decision making”, from passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 until 2008, when the first non-white US president was elected.[2] With Obama’s election, whites were re-categorized as a “senior partner” in the government...

White national identity has been activated, but it can be rendered dormant or at least subservient to other sources of identity and self-identification. The election was certainly ethnically divisive and likely increased the temporary salience of ethnic identity (as elections do in other places). The question is whether President Trump will move away from the divisive, ethnically-charged rhetoric Candidate Trump used to win office...

the solution is for leaders within ethnic communities to police the behavior of the agitators among them. That means, my white friends who do not want to see white nationalism take hold in the United States: It is on us. We have to call it out. We have to marginalize these voices and push white nationalism back to the fringe. We cannot and should not expect others to do it for us."

http://politicalviolenceataglance.org/2016/11/29/trump-and-ethnicity-in-comparative-perspective/

This is the kind of scholarship we need

Related: Hope in a Loveless Place

FB: "Here, I outline six “truths” – some inconvenient, some helpful – regarding the comparative literature on ethnic politics and conflict and what it might suggest for both prospects for violence and for addressing the rising tide of white nationalist sentiment in the United States. Rather than focusing on why white nationalism and white resentment are on the rise, I take it as given and focus on what the ethnic politics literature has to say about its likely effects for US politics and ways in which its pernicious message might be marginalized."

"Consciousness may be the product of carefully balanced chaos"

"The results, published online today in theJournal of the Royal Society Interface, show that brain activity varies widely between conscious and unconscious states. The difference may come down to how the brain “explores the space of its own possible configurations,” Tagliazucchi says.

During wakeful consciousness, participants’ brains generated “a flurry of ever-changing activity,” and the fMRI showed a multitude of overlapping networks activating as the brain integrated its surroundings and generated a moment to moment “flow of consciousness.” After the propofol kicked in, brain networks had reduced connectivity and much less variability over time. The brain seemed to be stuck in a rut—using the same pathways over and over again.

The results suggest that, in the brain, there is an optimal level of connectivity between neurons that creates the maximum number of possible pathways. If each neuron can be thought of as a node in the network, consciousness might result from exploring the network as thoroughly as possible. But the most diverse networks—the ones with the largest possible number of arrangements—don’t necessarily have the maximum amount of neuronal connectivity.

If every neuron in the brain were directly connected to every other neuron, however, the brain would become too homogenous, and one signal would become indistinguishable from the next"
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/01/consciousness-may-be-product-carefully-balanced-chaos?utm_source=newsfromscience&utm_medium=facebook-text&utm_campaign=consciouschaos-2100

I love thinking about the functioning of the brain on all. These different levels.

FB: "consciousness might emerge from a careful balancing that causes the brain to “explore” the maximum number of unique pathways to generate meaning, he says. The researchers call this balance point “a critical point.”"

"The black person’s burden of managing white emotions in the age of Trump"

"Demby: I think one of the things that both Jamelle and Tressie are pointing to is the starting premise of the ask, right? I want to have a conversation with you, but I need to first be assured that the conclusion of that conversation is broadly, unrealistically optimistic.

Bouie: Exactly. Which means it isn’t a conversation as much as it is a request for emotional validation.

McMillan Cottom: Absolution. White readers want absolution. They also want to manage all the risk of interracial contact in a way that minority groups can never do. It is a really privileged ask."

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/12/the_black_person_s_burden_of_managing_white_emotions_in_the_age_of_trump.html

FB: An excellent conversation between three black people about the experiences they've had with white strangers trying to lean on them for "answers" about race "My momma always said that until people asked the right question, they weren’t ready for the right answer. If you ask me a broad, unspecific, basic-ass question, then you aren’t ready for a serious answer from a serious person." 

"Shrimp Boy’s Day in Court"

"there Shrimp Boy was, a middle-aged former Chinese-mafia don, now a free man, living at his girlfriend’s condo in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill neighborhood, trying to become what he called ‘‘normal’’ — a state he found exotic and thrilling. Normal, to Shrimp Boy, included mild environmentalism, like conserving gas (‘‘Nobody in prison thinks about the next generation!’’); scooping up after his girlfriend’s dogs, a terrier named Happy and a mastiff named Valentine; and hosting dinner parties...

Lo calls him Raymond, the name a teacher gave him during the one month he attended high school. Shrimp Boy calls himself Shrimp Boy...

He counseled at-risk high-school students about addiction to crime. Shrimp Boy worked with a ghostwriter on a memoir he titled ‘‘Son of the Underworld.’’ He gave advice to young men who sought him out — what to do if, say, you fall in love with a prostitute and want to take her home to your Chinese parents. He told fellow ex-cons about the solace he found in Lo’s dogs. He cooked oxtail soup, enjoyed Marvel comics and learned to paint faces to entertain Lo’s daughter after school...

Shrimp Boy and his lead lawyer, J. Tony Serra, are both characters from a bygone San Francisco. Shrimp Boy describes Serra, who is 80, as ‘‘an old, very old wizard.’’ Earlier in his career, in 1979, Serra successfully defended the Black Panther Party co-founder Huey Newton against the charge of murdering a prostitute. He has also represented members of the Hells Angels, Earth First! and the Symbionese Liberation Army, the revolutionary group that kidnapped Patty Hearst... Serra himself has served two prison terms, as a tax resister — four months in 1974 and 10 months in 2005. He would be happy to serve a third, should anyone care to arrest him. He loves life on the inside — ‘‘It’s like locking a doctor who likes to practice medicine in a hospital,’’ he once said...

The tongs were started by Chinese immigrants who came to California in the mid-1800s, for the Gold Rush and to work on the railroad. The immigrants experienced terrible discrimination. In 1856, the Californian Committee on Mines and Mining Interests declared the Chinese ‘‘a disgusting scab upon the fair face of society — a putrefying sore upon the body politic.’’ The Chinese looked to their own community for help. ‘‘No matter what you need, you go to the tong,” says Ko-lin Chin, a professor at the Rutgers School of Criminal Justice, describing 1800s San Francisco. ‘‘If a Chinese man dies and he doesn’t want to be buried in the United States, the tongs help ship the body back to China. If you need a notice read in English. If you need a loan.’’ The tongs also provided extralegal amenities, like prostitution, opium and gambling dens. To this day, tongs serve a range of roles, and they have spread to Chinatowns nationwide. Some tongs focus on extortion, others on scholarship funds. ‘‘It depends on the leadership,’’ says Chin, who notes that many tongs have a street gang, if not a connection to organized crime...

Upon his release, in 1985, Shrimp Boy took a bus to San Francisco. At a Vietnamese noodle shop, he tried to motivate himself to buy the Chinese newspaper and look for a real job. But then he noticed some girls outside. Pretty classy for hookers, Shrimp Boy thought. Within an hour, he was talking with them about how much money they made through their pimps and whether they would rather work for him. He rented a big Victorian house, and within a matter of months, Shrimp Boy says, his escort business was producing more cash than he could handle. He started rolling profits into a variety of enterprises: cocaine distribution, fencing stolen weapons, Rolexes, jewelry and pills. Shrimp Boy talks about that stage of his life as normal people often talk about college: Crazy time! Learned a lot! Needed to grow up and move on.

The first time Shrimp Boy tried to go straight, he says, was in 1989. He wanted to make his mother proud. She gave him a ritual bath with grapefruit leaves, to cleanse his spirit. Shrimp Boy found work at the Lucky market in Daly City, bagging groceries for $4.50 an hour. He worked hard and was promoted to janitorial staff at $7.25 — but then, he says, a member of the San Francisco Police Department’s gang task force called his boss, who became suspicious, and Shrimp Boy left his job."
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/magazine/shrimp-boys-day-in-court.html?_r=5?login=email

This was such a great article to fall into, to encounter people and history.

"LEIA ORGANA: A CRITICAL OBITUARY"

"By her early teens, Leia Organa demonstrated talents ranging from logistics to sapient asset intelligence analysis. Even as she helped him build the nascent Alliance to Restore the Republic, she found herself drawn to a different aspect of the broad front’s efforts. Her critical materialist analysis of the Rebellion drew from Gererrist radical pragmatism and (not knowing the author was her biological mother) Amidala’s Interspecies Discourse on Naboo, a text banned throughout the Empire due to COMPNOR’s human supremacist policies... 

Most historians now see the Stardust/DS-class superweapons as relatively minor parts of the Empire’s war machine (The Imperial-class Star Destroyer remained the primary engine of its force-projection capabilities), but Organa demonstrated the importance of stymieing these and similar efforts through her landmark analysis of the Empire’s ideology and political economy. Later published as The Head of Clay: Elitism, Warlordism and Weakness in the Galactic Empire, her papers proved that as competition for political prestige motivated the Empire’s factions, they would necessarily centralize power, organizing capital in progressively less efficient “superprojects:” initiatives a clique could explain to the Emperor and his inner circle in simple, direct terms, and control through a centralized command structure...

The Galactic Concordance denied Leia Organa the opportunity to finish off the Empire, but it furnished her with the New Republic’s militarized deep state. Alliance factions maintained independent militias and arms they weren’t willing to contribute to the New Republic, but could be found through the intelligence channels she’d developed over decades. These were primarily Gererrist columns situated in the Outer Rim, who had never been well served by the Old Republic, and whose worlds the Empire exploited for labor and natural resources. Organa was popular among them not for political theories, but as the hardened guerrilla who’d broken the Hutt slave labor cartel, and as a quasi-religious figure attuned to the Force. She took overall command of this combined irregular force: The Resistance."

https://mobunited.wordpress.com/2016/12/28/leia-organa-a-critical-obituary/

Star Wars makes so much more sense now. 

FB: This was totally brilliant. It creates this structure for Star Wars using political and economic theory and I don't know any theory but all of Star Wars seems to make much more sense and be much more interesting now

"OxyContin goes global — “We’re only just getting started”"

"In this global drive, the companies, known as Mundipharma, are using some of the same controversial marketing practices that made OxyContin a pharmaceutical blockbuster in the U.S.

In Brazil, China and elsewhere, the companies are running training seminars where doctors are urged to overcome “opiophobia” and prescribe painkillers. They are sponsoring public awareness campaigns that encourage people to seek medical treatment for chronic pain. They are even offering patient discounts to make prescription opioids more affordable...

Former U.S. Food and Drug Administration commissioner David A. Kessler has called the failure to recognize the dangers of painkillers one of the biggest mistakes in modern medicine. Speaking of Mundipharma’s push into foreign markets, he said, “It’s right out of the playbook of Big Tobacco. As the United States takes steps to limit sales here, the company goes abroad...

Untreated pain is a global scourge. Each year millions with terminal cancer and end-stage AIDS die in needless agony, according to the United Nations. The problem is most acute in the poorest countries.

Stefano Berterame, an officer of the U.N.-affiliated International Narcotics Control Board in Vienna, works to increase access to opioids in countries with shortages. He said most of the global problem could be solved with “very cheap morphine” but that selling it held little allure for multinational drug companies

“It’s not very profitable,” he said. “Companies prefer to market expensive preparations.”"

http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-oxycontin-part3/

This is why people hate pharmaceutical companies. I've been thinking about this a bunch over the past few years,  how we actually really need companies to commit resources if we want drugs available in large quantities, and before that we need them to commit a LOT of resources and trust to the long and uncertain development pathway, so there needs to be a clear financial incentive that makes the whole endeavor feasible. 

But some companies abuse the system - or, rather,  capitalism ruins everything. And then the whole class of companies is demonized. 

But here is some hope: there are a lot of neuroscience researchers trying to use our basic biology and biochemistry knowledge to design non-addictive pain medication (if you want to know more, google "mu opioid receptors")  

"Melania Trump Doesn't Deserve Your Sympathy"

"Here, Melania is a victim of her husband’s brutishness; she is passive and silent, has no political opinions but instead is a sort of tabula rasa for America’s women, on which her treatment is proof of President Trump’s innate misogyny. President Trump’s casual misuse of his wife is a domestic tragedy with national implications. But that narrative only works if, in fact, you believe that Melania is a blank slate or, at least, a woman simply acted on rather than a woman actively collaborating with her husband’s ideologies."

http://theslot.jezebel.com/melania-trump-doesnt-deserve-your-sympathy-1791525306?rev=1485270233114&utm_campaign=socialflow_jezebel_facebook&utm_source=jezebel_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

Realizing that it's probably not a good idea to be lulled into sympathy around Melania, I can so easily imagine her turning around and revealing herself to truly be Trump's partner in his delusions and gaslighting. 

FB: a good reminder -  it's seductive to imagine her as a victim/captive who secretly disagrees with her husband as much as we do, but the evidence swings the other way "Melania Trump is hardly a stand-in for American women, she is neither a victim nor she is lacking agency. Rather she’s an active participant working to construct Donald Trump’s narrative readily available to put a gauzy domestic veil on his racism and misogyny."

"For Every ‘Yes’ Man at Work, There’s a ‘No’ Woman"

"Even when our job description doesn’t specify that it’s our responsibility to rein in our colleagues, it just tends to happen. A friend who works as a consultant has observed that men “are never the one taking notes! They are never the ones writing out the after-meeting ‘action items’ list.” (Raise your hand if you’ve ever found yourself acting as de facto secretary for male colleagues who are no higher on the org chart than you are.) “Whoever is actually doing the documenting ends up needing to own the fact that no one agreed on a motherfucking thing. If you think your role in a meeting is just to drop your glorious magic genius and then peace out, it’s easy to never have to say no.”

Often, women get a shot at leadership precisely because the company has been ruined by self-styled geniuses and is now in desperate need of a few incidents of no. Paula Schneider assumed the CEO role at American Apparel a year ago, and she’s still cleaning up Dov Charney’s messes. “We didn't want a giant charismatic figure CEO — we had one of those already,” the board chair told Elle last year. “We needed a practical, no-nonsense person. The fact that she was a woman was just the icing on the cake." Or, some of us would argue, it was baked in."

http://nymag.com/thecut/2016/02/every-yes-man-at-work-a-no-woman.html

Some people get to play, some people have to do the work.

"Congresswoman Maxine Waters Will Read You Now"

"Reporter: Can you tell us anything about the discussion in the—

Rep. Waters: No, it's classified and we can't tell you anything. All I can tell you is the FBI director has no credibility.

AND THEN SHE THROWS THE WHOLE PRESS CONFERENCE IN THE GARBAGE AND WALKS AWAY.

She didn't even need to drop the mic. She dropped the whole room. She shows up to a press conference, acts like it's the biggest inconvenience she's ever had to endure, and then says that she can't say anything...except that the director of the FBI has no credibility. Honey, as far as reads go this is Infinite Jest. I would leave the room, too. It's no wonder the video cut off abruptly; everybody probably just ran screaming into the streets, scalded by the severity of that burn."

http://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/news/a42222/rep-maxine-waters-will-read-you-now/

"Senators on key panel reject Donald Trump’s skepticism about vaccines"

"In his response, the Republican chairman of the committee, Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, put it plainly: “Sound science is this: Vaccines save lives.”

“They save the lives of the people who are vaccinated,” Alexander said in a statement. “They protect the lives of the vulnerable around them—such as infants and those who are ill.”

No senator who responded indicated any level of concern regarding US vaccine safety. Allegations about the dangers of vaccines have been thoroughly discredited by the current science...

Contrary to Trump, the Senate health committee’s leaders have, if anything, lamented over the last few years that fewer children are being vaccinated."

https://www.statnews.com/2017/01/18/donald-trump-vaccines-senators/

Feeling better - these are the people whose opinions we should know and care about.

"What Would Cool Jesus Do?"

"The book on Hillsong, however—the other book, lowercase b—is that they’re the real article: the world’s first genuinely cool church. “The music! The lights! The crowds!” begins an incredulous woman narrating a CNN segment on Hillsong NYC in smarmy CNNese. “It looks like a rock concert. And the lines around the block are enough to make any nightclub envious.” The chyron reads “Hipster preacher smashes stereotypes.” They call Pastor Carl a hipster—ABC actually said “hipster heartthrob”—and Carl says he doesn’t know what that means, and he wears a motorcycle jacket when he says this.

Like everyone else at Hillsong, Pastor Joel is unwilling to acknowledge that there’s something going on here, vis-à-vis the hat, vis-à-vis the entire fashion-forward, Disney Channel teen, aggressively accessorized aesthetic of the place. It is a non-issue to him. Yes, he tells me, sure, he likes clothes. But that’s the end of it. What he means to say is that lots of people like clothes…and anyway, why am I asking him? I should ask Pastor Carl about the clothes, he tells me. What Pastor Carl does, he says—that’s intentional, and then he laughs. So I did, I asked Pastor Carl, and he said he really doesn’t think about it, okay maybe he does sometimes, but hey, he asked, turning it around, what about me? Aren’t I thinking about it when I show up to an interview in my whole head-to-toe Gap thing? My whole neutrally attired thing? That was a decision, too, Carl pointed out, wasn’t it?...

all around the church, that is the story the congregation tells from beneath their hats: that finally there are clergymen who look familiar, who offer messages that relate to their actual lives, who accept that they’ve lived in New York long enough to know it won’t fly to smear gay people, or tell women to go home and have kids, or expect young, bright, beautiful, maybe-cool people to dress humbly and plainly and ignore the thrills of modern life in a mega-city. This church is the one, finally, that really is different. All are welcome here in their rubber pants...

I came back the next week and the week after, and one Sunday morning after what I had thought would be my last time in church, I woke up and felt a strange and unexpected bodily need to put my hands in the air, this need to be in a room where people frantically worried about the soul, to hear from Carl that he most definitely had answers to all the questions... Over the course of my time with Carl, what was most striking to witness was how grateful people were simply to be asked how a struggle is going, how good it feels to have someone to share in the pain of the answer."
http://www.gq.com/story/inside-hillsong-church-of-justin-bieber-kevin-durant?mod=e2this

I haven't believed in God since I was 8 (the Christian God, particularly the genderless loving figure of my mother's alternative-y Presbyterian church) but I have been thinking a lot about the value and benefits of spiritual communities and the special kind of nurturing that happens in those spaces. And I've been thinking about human needs, and how our society is structured to meet those needs. There is something important about spaces for emotions and philosophies and identity and reflection.

"Becoming Ugly"

"For the first time, I don’t know how to move past my boiling anger or laugh it away. Also for the first time, I have no desire to. Preferable, I now think, is to stop laughing, to become as repulsive as I can in an insult to these men—so many men—who hate women and the women who adulate them. Vanity keeps me from throwing away my makeup and sanity keeps me from, as I often feel the repugnant urge, breaking the mirror with the surface of my own face and leaving us both cracked open. But I also can’t deny my current impulse to become as ugly and unlikeable as I can, merely to serve as constant reminder of the ugliness inflicted upon us. We’ve been told time and time again that prettiness and likability will protect us from harm, that to be good women, we must play by these rules, but this is a lie. Nothing will protect us except for ourselves—and what’s more fortifying than a defensive exterior? There are days when all I want is to become a human road sign, a blinking hazard to any man misfortunate enough to cross my path: “I WANT TO OFFEND YOUR SIGHT. I WANT TO OFFEND YOUR EVERYTHING.”...

Women, though not always “good,” have always been nice. And look where it’s gotten us. Stripped of our rights, degraded, and still under the thumb of men. At no point in history has humanity as a whole been nice, so why should I? There’s no longer a place for pleasantness, not publicly anyway. Now is a time for fury and force—a time for guarding the few things we do have (our perseverance, our bodies, each other) because they’re so at risk and so, so precious."

http://jezebel.com/becoming-ugly-1789622154

A woman processing the trauma of being female in America right now.

"Yes, You’re Irrational, and Yes, That’s OK"

"The decoy effect is just one example of people being swayed by what mainstream economists have traditionally considered irrelevant noise. After all, their community has, for a century or so, taught that the value you place on a thing arises from its intrinsic properties combined with your needs and desires. It is only recently that economics has reconciled with human psychology. The result is the booming field of behavioral economics...

Yet for all their revolutionary impact, even as the behaviorists have overturned the notion that our information processing is economically rational, they still suggest that it should be economically rational. When they describe human decision-making processes that don’t conform to economic theory, they speak of “mistakes”—what Kahneman often calls “systematic errors.” Only by accepting that economic models of rationality lead to “correct” decisions, can you say that human thought-processes lead to “wrong” ones.

But what if the economists—both old-school and behavioral—are wrong? What if our illogical and economically erroneous thinking processes often lead to the best possible outcome? Perhaps our departures from economic orthodoxy are a feature, not a bug. If so, we’d need to throw out the assumption that our thinking is riddled with mistakes. The practice of sly manipulation, based on the idea that the affected party doesn’t or can’t know what’s going on, would need to be replaced with a rather different, and better, goal: self knowledge."
http://m.nautil.us/issue/21/information/yes-youre-irrational-and-yes-thats-ok

FB: "If you read research that emphasizes “mistakes,” he says, “one of the conclusions you would come to is that human beings are just stupid. As a lifelong member of the species, I have a little bit of a problem with that.”

Susceptibility to the “decoy effect” is just one of a number of “irrational” decision strategies that have stood the test of evolutionary time, which suggests these strategies have advantages."

"The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics"

"The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics says that when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. At the very least, you are to blame for not doing more. Even if you don’t make the problem worse, even if you make it slightly better, the ethical burden of the problem falls on you as soon as you observe it. In particular, if you interact with a problem and benefit from it, you are a complete monster. I don’t subscribe to this school of thought, but it seems pretty popular...

what if noticing a problem didn’t make it any worse? What if we could act on a problem and not feel horrible for making it just a little better, even if it was an action that benefited ourselves as well? What if we said that in these instances, these groups weren’t evil – it’s okay to notice a problem and only make it a little bit better."
http://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/

Hmm - definitely interesting to think about the whole "save the world" thing and what that means and why it's save-or-bust.

Also, I love the title of this blog! 

"Photoperiod and Brain Blood Flow: Changing Day Length to Alter Cerebral Perfusion"

"Two bits of information, the absolute day length, and whether day lengths are increasing or decreasing, signal time of year and whether winter is approaching or receding. This information is coded in the body by the hormonal melatonin signal, which is suppressed by light and secreted exclusively at night. Using the information from duration of melatonin secretion animals can measure day length (an ability called photoperiodism) and respond to the shortening days of fall by reorganizing their physiology and behavior...

short days are associated with reduced learning and memory, hippocampal neurogenesis, and impaired long-term potentiation (LTP) along the Shaffer-collateral-CA1 pathway. What could be causing these deficits in cognitive capacity in response to short days? We hypothesized that changes in learning and memory would be preceded by a reduction in blood flow to the hippocampus, a primary brain structure that controls spatial memory formation...

Our study demonstrated that in addition to these factors, day length can contribute to seasonal plasticity in blood flow. These findings may have implications for seasonal changes in cognitive functions in humans, as recent studies report that short photoperiods are associated with reduced hippocampal volumes in a large community sample. Short-day reductions in blood flow may have additional implications for seasonal changes in cardiovascular disease, as the incidence of stroke is increased during the short days of winter."

http://neuronline.sfn.org/Articles/Scientific-Research/2017/Photoperiod-and-Brain-Blood-Flow--Changing-Day-Length-to-Alter-Cerebral-Perfusion

Very cool study, exciting future directions. It makes me want to add photoperiod adjustments to my future work.

I have so many questions about how this is regulated... it also seems like it would be easy to mine existing human fMRI data to confirm that this is true for us.

FB: We have less blood flow to our memory-formation circuits right now.

"What we did in Iowa to chase away the Klan"

"The movement to make racism "respectable" again in the era after the civil rights movement's victories began much earlier than people generally think.

During the late 1970s, Democratic President Jimmy Carter spoke against school busing programs designed to give African American children access to better schools, saying that they undermined the "ethnic purity" of neighborhoods.

Such attitudes among liberals like Carter contributed to the nasty battles over desegregation in Boston and other cities...

The Midwest Network was organized around the idea that the Klan and similar groups had to be confronted publicly, whenever and wherever they tried to organize open events.

The goal was always to turn out the greatest number of anti-racists possible, outnumber the racists, shout them down and show that anti-racist ideas were far more popular than racist ideas...

 the organizing work of the past months had mobilized a unified group of nearly 600 people--from Dubuque, across Iowa and around the Midwest--who were ready to shout down the racists. "A few minutes before 6 p.m.," Socialist Worker reported in its June 1992 edition, "the counterdemonstrators marched to Washington Park chanting 'Kan the Klan,' 'Black and white, unite and fight' and 'You can't hide behind free speech when it's genocide you preach.'"

Fifteen Klan members, dressed in robes and hoods, showed up late to their own event. They ended their rally close to an hour earlier than planned since they couldn't hear themselves spew their hate.

Demoralized, the Klan left Dubuque and even announced that they wouldn't be attempting to recruit in Dubuque in the near future...

While not all the counterprotests were as successful as Dubuque, the Midwest Network's principle of confronting hate with the largest numbers possible did almost always turn out the large numbers and demoralize the right. In fact, Klan marches planned for Cicero and Skokie, Illinois, later in the decade would be canceled shortly after the Midwest Network announced it was organizing a counterdemonstration."

https://socialistworker.org/2016/12/07/what-we-did-in-iowa-to-chase-away-the-klan

"Powerful Women Buried at Stonehenge"

"During the recent excavation, more women than men were found buried at Stonehenge, a fact that could change its present image.

"In almost every depiction of Stonehenge by artists and TV re-enactors we see lots of men, a man in charge, and few or no women," archaeologist Mike Pitts, who is the editor of British Archaeology and the author of the book "Hengeworld," told Discovery News...

Willis said that the role of women in society "probably declined again towards the 3rd millennium B.C…both archaeological and historical evidence has shown that women’s status has gone up and down quite noticeably at different times in the past.""
http://news.discovery.com/history/archaeology/powerful-women-buried-at-stonehenge-160203.htm

Related (kinda): Discovery Channel real science now

"Study finds female faculty are underrepresented in genomics"

"a Northwestern University study of the collaboration patterns of STEM faculty has found that the playing fields in some disciplines are not as level as they first appear.

“Our findings in molecular biology, particularly genomics, are what surprised us the most,” said Luís Amaral, a professor of chemical and biological engineering in the McCormick School of Engineering. “There is a lot of research money in this high-profile area, and women are not represented proportionally. This raises all sorts of questions as to what kind of cultural environment has been created in the field.”... 

By digging deeper, the researchers found that females are underrepresented in large teams in genomics (a subdiscipline of molecular biology). This could be an indication of a negative cultural milieu in this particular subfield, the researchers said."

https://stemdiversity.wisc.edu/stem/study-finds-female-faculty-are-underrepresented-in-genomics/

Fb: "The PLOS Biology study builds on earlier research by Amaral and Woodruff. Previously, they looked at the publication rates and impact of publications for the same faculty cohort. That study showed that bias against women is ingrained in the workforce, despite a societal desire to believe workplace equality exists."

"Can Racism Cause PTSD? Implications for DSM-5"

"One major factor in understanding PTSD in ethnoracial minorities is the impact of racism on emotional and psychological well-being. Racism continues to be a daily part of American culture, and racial barriers have an overwhelming impact on the oppressed. Much research has been conducted on the social, economic, and political effects of racism, but little research recognizes the psychological effects of racism on people of color (Carter, 2007).Chou, Asnaani, and Hofmann (2012) found that perceived racial discrimination was associated with increased mental disorders in African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Asian Americans, suggesting that racism may in itself be a traumatic experience...

Currently, the DSM recognizes racism as trauma only when an individual meets DSM criteria for PTSD in relation to a discrete racist event, such as an assault. This is problematic given that many minorities experience cumulative experiences of racism as traumatic, with perhaps a minor event acting as “the last straw” in triggering trauma reactions (Carter, 2007). Thus, current conceptualizations of trauma as a discrete event may be limiting for diverse populations...

minorities may be reluctant to volunteer experiences of racism to White therapists, who comprise the majority of mental health clinicians. Clients may worry that the therapist will not understand, feel attacked, or express disbelief. Additionally, minority clients also may not link current PTSD symptoms to cumulative experiences of discrimination if queried about a single event...

The more subtle forms of racism mentioned may be commonplace, leading to constant vigilance, or “cultural paranoia,” which may be a protective mechanism against racist incidents. However subtle, the culmination of different forms of racism may result in victimization of an individual parallel to that induced by physical or life-threatening trauma."
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/culturally-speaking/201305/can-racism-cause-ptsd-implications-dsm-5

! The point here about how little research is done! Like, experiencing prejudice is obviously a trauma but we don't want to admit that it still happens and we want to make people feel like it's their responsibility to overcome everything society does to them, so there are definitely disincentives to studying the trauma of prejudice. I mean, I can only imagine how uncomfortable that is to present at conferences, the kinds of questions and looks you would have to deal with.

Also, this is why it's important to me that any therapist I have be a woman of color, ideally black, so that I don't have to worry about educating about/"proving" some of these impactful life experiences.

Related: psych studies on racism

FB: "Currently, the DSM recognizes racism as trauma only when an individual meets DSM criteria for PTSD in relation to a discrete racist event, such as an assault. This is problematic given that many minorities experience cumulative experiences of racism as traumatic, with perhaps a minor event acting as “the last straw” in triggering trauma reactions (Carter, 2007). Thus, current conceptualizations of trauma as a discrete event may be limiting for diverse populations"

"The Incredible Thing We Do During Conversations"

"The brevity of these silences is doubly astonishing when you consider that it takes at least 600 milliseconds for us to retrieve a single word from memory and get ready to actually say it. For a short clause, that processing time rises to 1500 milliseconds. This means that we have to start planning our responses in the middle of a partner’s turn, using everything from grammatical cues to changes in pitch. We continuously predict what the rest of a sentence will contain, while similarly building our hypothetical rejoinder, all using largely overlapping neural circuits.

“It’s amazing, like juggling with one hand,” says Levinson. “It’s been completely ignored by the cognitive sciences because traditionally, people who studied language comprehension were different to the ones who studied language production. They never stopped to think that, in conversations, these things are happening at the same time.”

Pessimists among us might view this as the ultimate indictment of conversation, a sign that we’re spending most of our “listening” time actually prepping what we are going to say. (As Chuck Pahlaniuk once wrote, “The only reason why we ask other people how their weekend was is so we can tell them about our own weekend.”) But really, this work shows that even the most chronic interruptor is really listening. “Everything points to what astute observers we are of every word choice, every phonetic change,” says Stivers."
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/01/the-incredible-thing-we-do-during-conversations/422439/

"DR. UMAR JOHNSON AND THE HOTEP CIVIL WAR, EXPLAINED"

"In this context, Hotep refers to Pan-African extremists who often infuse their Pan-Africanism with misogyny, a Trumpian relationship with facts and understanding of context, and a steadfast belief in bizarre and ridiculous conspiracy theories.

For instance?

The belief that menstruation is unnatural and only happens to Black women because of a European virus."

http://verysmartbrothas.com/the-hotep-civil-war-explained/

I was encountering this term a bunch and thought I knew what it meant and I was wronggg. 

"What Dating Abroad Taught Me About Stateside Racism"

"What took me longer was to understand how often the answer to that question includes racial preferences and biases.

I was reluctant to fully accept what I subconsciously knew was a huge problem, but this willful ignorance couldn’t stand for long. I read the OKCupidstudy How Your Race Affects The Messages You Get, which plainly stated that “men don’t write black women back” regardless of much they responded to others. One of my best friends, who is also black, called me when she read the study, nearly giddy. “Finally! This is what I’ve been saying, but nobody believes me,” she said. “Now there’s proof! If anyone asks me why I haven’t met anybody yet, I’m sending them this study.” She closed her OKCupid account. Her glee at finding evidence was understandable; it’s incredible, though, what counts as good news when you’re dealing with something painful. Soon, I closed my account, too."
http://jezebel.com/what-dating-abroad-taught-me-about-stateside-racism-1745559824

Sometimes it kind of feels like there is this game going on and everyone was handed jerseys so that they could be identified as players, and some of us just never got one.

The really interesting thing about being a brown person in America (and by interesting I mean confounding and exhausting) is how I can switch from being keenly observed to being close to invisible, according to rules that I have to spend a lot of energy parsing.

"Background to “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections”: The Analytic Process and Cyber Incident Attribution"

"We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. We have high confidence in these judgments...

We assess Moscow will apply lessons learned from its Putin-ordered campaign aimed at the US presidential election to future influence efforts worldwide, including against US allies and their election processes...

Before the election, Russian diplomats had publicly denounced the US electoral process and were prepared to publicly call into question the validity of the results. ProKremlin bloggers had prepared a Twitter campaign, #DemocracyRIP, on election night in anticipation of Secretary Clinton’s victory, judging from their social media activity...

We assess with high confidence that the GRU relayed material it acquired from the DNC and senior Democratic officials to WikiLeaks. Moscow most likely chose WikiLeaks because of its selfproclaimed reputation for authenticity. Disclosures through WikiLeaks did not contain any evident forgeries...

Russia used trolls as well as RT as part of its influence efforts to denigrate Secretary Clinton. This effort amplified stories on scandals about Secretary Clinton and the role of WikiLeaks in the election campaign."

https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf

I need a hug after reading through this, but do it - the report was publicly released for a reason. And like any government document, it is highy scannable (25 pages is not really 25 pages...)

"North Carolina is no longer classified as a democracy"

"That North Carolina can no longer call its elections democratic is shocking enough, but our democratic decline goes beyond what happens at election time. The most respected measures of democracy — Freedom House, POLITY and the Varieties of Democracy project — all assess the degree to which the exercise of power depends on the will of the people: That is, governance is not arbitrary, it follows established rules and is based on popular legitimacy.

The extent to which North Carolina now breaches these principles means our state government can no longer be classified as a full democracy.

First, legislative power does not depend on the votes of the people... Second, democracies do not limit their citizens’ rights on the basis of their born identities... Third, government in North Carolina has become arbitrary and detached from popular will."

http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article122593759.html

FB: "When, in response to losing the governorship, one party uses its legislative dominance to take away significant executive power, it is a direct attack upon the separation of powers that defines American democracy." 

"Entitled Millennial Workers of the World, Unite!"

"for the moment, let's stipulate that the fundamental facts about my generation, as established through countless media accounts, are true — that everyone born between 1980 and 1995 was raised in an upper-middle-class home, where the combination of “participation trophies” and helicopter parenting fostered an unprecedented sense of entitlement, leading us all to major in trigger-warning studies instead of innovative engineering, then move to either New York City, Washington, D.C., or San Francisco, where we’ve driven middle managers mad with our audacious demands.

We take these truths to be self-evident, all millennials are created entitled. But one can concede those premises without lamenting them. In fact, I contend that they’re actually worth celebrating...

From the standpoint of a manager tasked with enforcing the prevailing norms of the American workplace, entitled millennials are indeed a scourge. But from the perspective of society as a whole, Generation Y’s unparalleled entitlement may actually be desirable. Few would deny that the entitlement felt by the Freedom Riders or suffragettes ultimately redounded to their nation’s benefit. The question, then, is whether the realization of millennials’ workplace demands — via organized political struggle — would improve or degrade American life. An examination of those demands — as articulated by the generation’s detractors — reveals the virtues of coddling the young."

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/01/entitled-millennial-workers-of-the-world-unite.html

So. Here. For. This.

I think our entitlement is so exciting and is a demand that our world live up to its potential. There is so much energy there and a willingness to point out the inconsistencies.

"Is Children of Men 2016’s Most Relevant Film?"

"Only after speaking with Cuarón did I realize why I wept: not with sorrow, but with hope for my own future. Children of Men imagines a fallen world, yes, but it also imagines a once-cynical person being reborn with purpose and clarity. It’s a story about how people like me, those who have the luxury of tuning out, need to awaken. This has been a brutal year, but we were already suffering from a kind of spiritual infertility: The old ideologies long ago stopped working. In a period where the philosophical pillars supporting the global left, right, and center are crumbling, the film’s desperate plea for the creation and protection of new ideas feels bracingly relevant.

Even though that lesson eluded me for a decade, I retained a passionate affection for Children of Men, long ago losing count of the number of times I’ve watched it. So it’s been deeply satisfying to see its robust second life among critics: It was particularly gratifying to see that, when the BBC polled 177 critics for a master list of the greatest films of the 21st century, Children of Men clocked in at number 13, beating out canonical flicks like 12 Years a Slave, Brokeback Mountain, Lost in Translation, and The Master...

Humans will continue to exist — and we have a responsibility to build a culture of respect and mutual assistance. It seems so dreadfully unlikely, but we are obligated to hope.

Cuarón is very specific about what he means by that word. For him, it is not a passive thing. It is not a messianic thing, either — he speaks derisively of the idea that you could vote for Barack Obama, then sit back passively and feel disappointed. “The hope is something that you create,” he says. “You live by hoping and then you create that change. Hope is trying to change your present for a better world. It’s pretty much up to you.”"

http://www.vulture.com/2016/12/children-of-men-alfonso-cuaron-c-v-r.html?mid=fb-share-vulture

Posting mostly because I endorse watching the movie, it is very good - and the book is even better. I read t a few years ago and then immediately watched the movie, it was just one of those plots that so stuck with you and echoed. I don't like most apocalyptic fiction because it's so often about the apocalypse and the action instead of the experience of that survival and that experience seems like the most rich place for exploration. 

Human societies have experienced so many apocalypses over the millennia and somehow we keep on regrouping, and we get the stories of victories but we don't learn how people function through the gray time in between. How they learn to rebuild even if every touchstone is gone.

This film doesn't get there, but it gets at the desire to rebuild, this industrious spark of humanity. I don't know, it just manages to capture something that feels very real and important.

"An Obamacare success: financial penalties reduce hospital readmission rates"

"After a hospital stay, many patients are still recovering and often facing new illnesses. As they heal, they must struggle to cope with and understand new symptoms and new medications, and often face an array of doctor office visits. Some doctors call this the post-hospital syndrome. Before the ACA, nearly a fifth of all Medicare patients were readmitted to the hospital within 30 days of leaving it, at a cost of $15 billion per year. Some — perhaps many — of these readmissions are preventable.

Helping patients avoid problems that send them back to the hospital can improve their quality of life while also reducing costs. Before the ACA, though, there were no real incentives to help patients avoid a return to the hospital... 

We often don’t have rigorous evidence to support what policies work best to improve quality of life, quality of care, and value for patients covered by Medicare. Based on research we and other colleagues published in today’s Annals of Internal Medicine, we believe that penalties for high readmission rates are working."

https://www.statnews.com/2016/12/27/obamacare-success-penalties-readmissions/

"NOW IS THE TIME TO TALK ABOUT WHAT WE ARE ACTUALLY TALKING ABOUT"

"The election of Donald Trump has flattened the poetry in America’s founding philosophy: the country born from an idea of freedom is to be governed by an unstable, stubbornly uninformed, authoritarian demagogue...

America loves winners, but victory does not absolve. Victory, especially a slender one decided by a few thousand votes in a handful of states, does not guarantee respect. Nobody automatically deserves deference on ascending to the leadership of any country. American journalists know this only too well when reporting on foreign leaders—their default mode with Africans, for instance, is nearly always barely concealed disdain. President Obama endured disrespect from all quarters. By far the most egregious insult directed toward him, the racist movement tamely termed “birtherism,” was championed by Trump.

Yet, a day after the election, I heard a journalist on the radio speak of the vitriol between Obama and Trump. No, the vitriol was Trump’s. Now is the time to burn false equivalencies forever. Pretending that both sides of an issue are equal when they are not is not “balanced” journalism; it is a fairy tale—and, unlike most fairy tales, a disingenuous one...

Now is the time to elevate the art of questioning. Is the only valid resentment in America that of white males? If we are to be sympathetic to the idea that economic anxieties lead to questionable decisions, does this apply to all groups? Who exactly are the élite?...

Now is the time to counter lies with facts, repeatedly and unflaggingly, while also proclaiming the greater truths: of our equal humanity, of decency, of compassion. Every precious ideal must be reiterated, every obvious argument made, because an ugly idea left unchallenged begins to turn the color of normal."

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/now-is-the-time-to-talk-about-what-we-are-actually-talking-about

I love Chimimande.

I'll admit that this essay isn't her at her best, it doesn't flow well, but it is a series of important thoughts and guidances.

FB: Chimimande Ngozi Adiche on the election - "Now is the time for the media, on the left and right, to educate and inform. To be nimble and alert, clear-eyed and skeptical, active rather than reactive. To make clear choices about what truly matters... Now is the time to counter lies with facts, repeatedly and unflaggingly, while also proclaiming the greater truths: of our equal humanity, of decency, of compassion. Every precious ideal must be reiterated, every obvious argument made, because an ugly idea left unchallenged begins to turn the color of normal."