"Ford Tough Ford Trucks ford tough Ford Tough Truck ford"

"Ford is so dedicated to the phrase "Built Ford Tough" — which it has already plastered onto distressed hats, hunting knives, and dog collars — that it refuses to let petty worries like "reading comprehension" interfere with its placement within a sentence. Ford Tough.

Once we've navigated the opening noun-salvo, we move into a world where trucks and football players are almost interchangeable. Both, says Ford, possess the quality of "toughness" and that's all there is to it. Show a Ford advertising exec a picture of a linebacker and he will say "What sort of towing capacity does that fella have?" Show him a picture of a Ford F-650 Super Duty truck and he'll reply "That guy really looks like he can tackle.""

http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/8/12846440/ford-tough-ford-trucks-ford-tough-ford-tough-truck-ford

"Help"

"the Clonazepam I got in the meantime worked wonders when I felt an impending panic attack. Clonazepam is generic for Klonipin, and I got nervous when I heard this lyric in an OK Go song: Play that song again, another couple Klonopin, a nod, a glance, a half-hearted bow. I didn’t want to take pills that other people sang about. I tried to go off the medication again, thinking that was the only way to be whole or natural or honest.

Whole and natural and honest ended up looking like terror. Long nights with no sleep at all and days where I was kept from functioning as I could when I took the pill. I asked all the questions:

- What was wrong with me?

- Why did I need this pill to function well?

- Am I the only person who feels so anxious all the time, so scared?

I am not, of course. Something like one of ten adults in America are on SSRIs. But the trick of anxiety — and depression — is that they make you feel alone...

if it helps you, don’t go off of it to prove to yourself that you are strong and capable. Strong and capable are not virtues that we need if they mean the absence of kindness, of love, of tenderness with yourself and others."

https://medium.com/@lauraortberg/help-d36725625008#.m9k6lmfbf

"Diversity, funding, and grassroots organizing"

"As I frantically tried to figure out a solution, I began to run into a lack of cultural proficiency about my situation. I had to repeatedly explain to administrators and PIs that I could not just “take a break” from school until funding was restored because my ability to stay in the country was contingent on being a registered student. I also had to explain that returning to India would be problematic because of the discrimination against LGBT people that is common there. I felt crushed. It was incredibly tough to have made it into a competitive graduate program only to be sideswiped by a problem that neither I nor any of my advisers had foreseen. Realizing that the life I had so painstakingly built in my new home could easily be snatched away from me overwhelmed me with anxiety about my future. I felt very isolated, and questioned whether there was room in scientific research for people like me... 

I got involved with Hutch United, a grassroots diversity organization founded by a group of graduate students and postdocs in 2013. Discussions with other students from underrepresented backgrounds at my own institution reinforced at a personal level what I had already found in my reading about the issue: Funding uncertainty had discouraged many of them from pursuing careers in science, too. For some, the personal financial uncertainty that can come with an academic science career was a powerful deterrent because they were responsible for supporting members of their extended families... 

Getting the fellowship started wasn’t easy, but it has been very gratifying to see firsthand how grassroots organizing can prompt institutional change. I also learned a tremendous amount. For others who are interested in taking on similar projects, here are some of the lessons I learned that can help lead to success."

http://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2016/08/diversity-funding-and-grassroots-organizing

"The Land of the Large Adult Son"

"This seems to be roughly when the large-son meme went more or less mainstream. It had been germinating in arcane corners of the Internet for a couple of years by then. In 2012, the Twitter user @MuscularSon, who eventually deleted his account, started tweeting in character as a beleaguered father of several mythically rowdy boys. “i cant control my enormous nerd sons. they force me to cosplay as a police box from Dr Who and take turns paintballing my enormous nude torso,” he wrote. And later, “my two awful big sons got into the 20 quarts of hummus i have and now their heading toward The City.” In November, 2013, @dril, the ur-account for this genre of absurdist online humor, tweeted, “i have trained my two fat identical sons to sit outside of my office and protect my brain from mindfreaks by meditating intensely.”

At thirty-nine, Don, Jr., is old enough to conduct himself with basic integrity—or, barring that, with basic competence in his plans to deceive. Many people have pointed out the painful absurdity of large adult sons in political families (Don, Jr.; Billy Bush; Ted Kennedy) being excused for shocking behavior well into their thirties when twelve-year-old Tamir Rice was deemed enough of a threat by Cleveland policemen to be shot dead on the sight of his toy gun, in 2014. Donald Trump, Jr., is a mere ten days younger than the French President, Emmanuel Macron. And still, President Trump 

dictated Don, Jr.,’s original statement and excused him after the scandal broke, calling Don, Jr., a “good boy.”"

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-land-of-the-large-adult-son?mbid=social_facebook

Useful cultural knowledge 

FB: If you still need a halloween costume....

"The Day Peruvian Women Rebelled"

"A Peruvian girl is a full-time Little Red Riding Hood. Quite early she learns she has to take this, and not that other, road; that she must watch her back, and feign that she did not hear what they shouted about her vagina...

A Peruvian woman seldom has the opportunity to react, because self-defense for a woman means rape and murder. The law treats her as the rapist did: Even her miniskirt may justify the crime in court. It is like being raped twice...

The outrage was channeled through a Facebook group, #NiUnaMenos. Its goal was to facilitate a large mass demonstration in the streets of Lima, and replicate the impact of protests in Buenos Aires and Mexico City. Something astonishing happened: thousands of women shared their testimonies of violence. They uploaded pictures of their bruises, their scars, their bloodshot and teary eyes. They named their victimizers. It is historic, it is painful, but it also fills you with hope to see how thousands of Peruvian women lost their fear and decided to unite.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/24/opinion/the-day-peruvian-women-rebelled.html?smid=tw-nytopinion&smtyp=cur&_r=0

"The Black Panther Party and Black Anti-Fascism in the United States"

"Black history has been marginalized in this burgeoning contemporary discourse about fascism. Analyses of the US as fascist have a long history in the Black intellectual tradition. Black thinkers like Harry Hayward, Claudia Jones, George Jackson and Kuwasi Balagoon used fascism as an analytical framework to understand the rise of segregation in the South after Reconstruction; white populism at the turn of the 19^th century; land and labor struggles in the Black Belt South, and the evolution of capitalism in the 1970s... 

Vigorous debates erupted between conference attendees over Marxist theory; the “male showmanship” of some speakers; the structure of the conference; and the implications of community control of the police. Some of the most provocative discourse at the UFAF came out of the women’s workshop where Panther women discussed male supremacy as a reflection of capitalism and argued that “there cannot be a successful struggle against Fascism unless there is a broad front and women are drawn into it.” The role of state repression in stifling dissent was a central theme and many speakers touched on the issue of political prisoners as evidence of the operation of fascism in the United States.  The Panthers, under heavy infiltration and attack by the FBI’s counterintelligence program by this time, positioned combatting state violence as the core of anti-fascist organizing."

https://dukeupress.wordpress.com/2017/01/26/the-black-panther-party-and-black-anti-fascism-in-the-united-states/

FB: " The role of state repression in stifling dissent was a central theme and many speakers touched on the issue of political prisoners as evidence of the operation of fascism in the United States.  The Panthers, under heavy infiltration and attack by the FBI’s counterintelligence program by this time, positioned combatting state violence as the core of anti-fascist organizing."

"The Gravity Is Strong"

"We've all heard the old saw: It's never the crime, it's the cover-up. This is almost never true. Covering scandals for any length of time is enough to tell you that. People are generally able to make judgments about how much trouble they're in. We think the 'cover up' is worse than the crime because it's actually very seldom that the full scope of the actual crime is ever known. The cover up works better than you think. The other reason the cover up is a logical response is that it usually works. You only find out about it when it doesn't. So it's a good bet."

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-gravity-is-strong

FB: On scandal and cover-up and Jeff Sessions

"You’ve probably been tricked by fake news and don’t know it"

"And if you think only people on the opposite side of the political fence from you will fall for lies, think again. We all do it. Plenty of research shows that people are more likely to believe news if it confirms their preexisting political views, says cognitive scientist David Rapp of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. More surprising, though, are Rapp’s latest studies along with others on learning and memory. They show that when we read inaccurate information, we often remember it later as being true, even if we initially knew it was wrong. That misinformation can then bias us or affect our decisions.

So just reading fake news can taint you with misinformation. In several experiments, Rapp’s team asked people to read short anecdotes or statements that contained either correct information or untruths. One example of untruthiness: The capital of Russia is St. Petersburg. (It’s Moscow.) Then the researchers surprised these people with a trivia quiz, including some questions about the “facts.” It turns out that people who read the untruths consistently gave more incorrect answers than those who read true or unrelated information, even if they had looked up the correct information previously. Troublingly, these people also then tended to believe that they had already known those incorrect facts before the experiment, showing how easy it is to forget where you “learned” something."...

we have to work extra hard while reading to not only remember a fact, but to remember that it’s false. “One idea is that when we encode problematic information as memory, unless we tag it as ‘wrong,’ we might accidentally retrieve that wrong info as real,” Rapp says."

https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/science-public/youve-probably-been-tricked-fake-news-and-dont-know-it

Related: conspiracy theories

"The brain performs feats of math to make sense of the world"

"The researchers found that our brains can accurately track the likelihood of several different explanations for what we see around us. They traced these abilities to a region of the brain located just behind our eyes known as the orbitofrontal cortex. This work was published July 27 in the Journal of Neuroscience.

"When I try to cross the street, I'm not actually analyzing every bit of the scene," said Yael Niv, an associate professor of psychology and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute (PNI) who co-authored the study. "I'm constructing a narrative that I base my decision on, such as, 'That car is slowing down because of the red light.'... 

To find out where and how the brain tracks these probabilities, the team needed to coax their study participants to compare probabilities without thinking about actual numbers. If participants tried explicitly to do the math, they would fail, said co-author Kenneth Norman, professor of psychology and PNI. "Our brains are horrible at arithmetic. Our implicit computations are so much better than our explicit computations," Norman said."

https://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S47/21/58A47/?section=topstories

I think this is one of the things that drew me into neuroscience (though I don't anticipate studying it, I'm a molecular/biomedical scientist, not cognitive/computational). It's remarkable the calculations we make, the way we can see someone biking towards us and know where we will meet and plan for which direction to move in st what speed so that we won't crash into each other, all while maintaining a conversation and doing the same calculations for several other objects. 

We are all constant geniuses.

Also - The author of this paper was my TA one year, for this truly awful course that she definitely caught all the burden of. 

Related: beauty of math in the brain

"Psychology’s Favorite Tool for Measuring Racism Isn’t Up to the Job"

"A pile of scholarly work, some of it published in top psychology journals and most of it ignored by the media, suggests that the IAT falls far short of the quality-control standards normally expected of psychological instruments. The IAT, this research suggests, is a noisy, unreliable measure that correlates far too weakly with any real-world outcomes to be used to predict individuals’ behavior — even the test’s creators have now admitted as such... 

The most important benchmarks pertain to a test’s reliability — that is, the extent to which the test has a reasonably low amount of measurement error (every test has some) — and to its validity, or the extent to which it is measuring what it claims to be measuring... 

The IAT’s architects have reported that overall, when you lump together the IAT’s many different varieties, from race to disability to gender, it has a test-retest reliability of about r = .55... 

Surprisingly, there’s a serious dearth of published information on test-retest reliability of the race IAT specifically...

And when you use meta-analyses to examine the question of whether IAT scores predict discriminatory behavior accurately enough for the test to be useful in real-world settings, the answer is: No. Race IAT scores are weak predictors of discriminatory behavior...

there have always been alternate potential explanations for what the IAT really measures. From early on, skeptics of Greenwald and Banaji’s claims have highlighted the possibility that the test doesn’t really, or doesn’t only, capture implicit bias; in 2004, for example, Hal Arkes and Tetlock published a paper entitled “Would Jesse Jackson ‘Fail’ the Implicit Association Test?” in which they argued that it could be the case that people who are more familiar with certain stereotypes score higher on the IAT, whether or not they unconsciously endorse those stereotypes in any meaningful way. Along those same lines, some researchers have suggested that it could be the case that those who empathize with out-group members, and are therefore well aware of the negative treatment and stereotypes they are victimized by, have an easier time forming the quick negative associations with minority groups that the IAT interprets as implicit bias against those groups."

http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2017/01/psychologys-racism-measuring-tool-isnt-up-to-the-job.html

There is a TON of detail in this very, very thoroughly researched article, I skimmed heavily. (I would actually advise starting at the last section, starting with "It’s hard not to see Blanton’s point", and the reading up for more details as desired) 

And I'm sad, I liked the IAT. 

Although I suppose that this is much more interesting.

FB: :/ "The IAT, it turns out, has serious issues on both the reliability and validity fronts, which is surprising given its popularity and the very exciting claims that have been made about its potential to address racism. That’s what the research says, at least, and it raises serious questions about how the IAT became such a social-science darling in the first place."

"20 Years Since Welfare 'Reform'"

"Why has TANF left so many needy families behind? Its advocates argue that it reduces dependency and promotes work. Its critics contend that the time limits and work requirements it imposes are too punitive. Yet a careful look under the hood reveals that both of these claims fail to grasp the fundamental nature of what TANF has become.

To put it plainly, TANF is not really a welfare program at all. Peter Germanis, a conservative expert on welfare policy and former Reagan White House aide,describes it best, as a “fixed and flexible funding stream”—think slush fund—for states, provided by what are known as “block grants.” Yes, some block-grant dollars are used to provide cash aid to struggling families. But three of every four dollars allocated to TANF is directed toward other purposes... 

Built into the very core of TANF are perverse incentives for states to shed families from the welfare rolls. If they do so, they get to keep the money and use it for other things. And outside of what’s spent on cash aid, there is virtually no meaningful oversight on how the rest of the money is spent... 

What states spend astonishingly little on—besides cash assistance—is helping the poor find employment. In 2014, Ohio—which is about at the national average here—allocated only 8 percent of combined federal and state TANF funding to vital “hand-up” activities linking recipients to jobs."

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/08/20-years-welfare-reform/496730/?utm_source=nextdraft&utm_medium=email

"Neoliberalism has conned us into fighting climate change as individuals"

"While we busy ourselves greening our personal lives, fossil fuel corporations are rendering these efforts irrelevant. The breakdown of carbon emissions since 1988? A hundred companies alone are responsible for an astonishing 71%. You tinker with those pens or that panel; they go on torching the planet.

The freedom of these corporations to pollute – and the fixation on a feeble lifestyle response – is no accident. It is the result of an ideological war, waged over the last 40 years, against the possibility of collective action. Devastatingly successful, it is not too late to reverse it... 

Neoliberalism has not merely ensured this agenda is politically unrealistic: it has also tried to make it culturally unthinkable. Its celebration of competitive self-interest and hyper-individualism, its stigmatization of compassion and solidarity, has frayed our collective bonds. It has spread, like an insidious anti-social toxin, what Margaret Thatcher preached: “there is no such thing as society.”"

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/true-north/2017/jul/17/neoliberalism-has-conned-us-into-fighting-climate-change-as-individuals

I feel like I wrote about this in another context in a different post... Writing this here is a potentially unsuccessful reminder to go find it before I post this... So, if you're reading this I have failed.

FB: "At the very moment when climate change demands an unprecedented collective public response, neoliberal ideology stands in the way. Which is why, if we want to bring down emissions fast, we will need to overcome all of its free-market mantras: take railways and utilities and energy grids back into public control; regulate corporations to phase out fossil fuels; and raise taxes to pay for massive investment in climate-ready infrastructure and renewable energy — so that solar panels can go on everyone’s rooftop, not just on those who can afford it."

"Mental Illness Is Not a Horror Show"

"The Orange County branch of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) sprang into action, and Doris Schwartz, a Westchester, N.Y.-based mental-health professional, immediately emailed a roster of 130 grass-roots activists, including me, many of whom flooded Cedar Fair and Six Flags with phone calls, petitions and emails. After some heated back-and-forth, Fear VR 5150 was shelved, and Six Flags changed the mental patients in its maze into zombies.

As both a psychiatric patient and a professor of clinical psychology, I was saddened to see painful lived experiences transmogrified into spooky entertainment. I was also unnerved to consider that I was someone else’s idea of a ghoul, a figure more or less interchangeable with a zombie...

For those of us with firsthand experience with mental illness — especially those who have experienced trauma in a mental hospital — such entertainment ventures cut much too close to the bone. When my mother was dying of cancer, she was admitted to some miserable wards, but I find it hard to envision a Halloween event at which you would pretend to be getting chemotherapy and vomiting constantly while surrounded by patients driven into the quasi-dementia that comes of unremitting pain...

I recognize the free-speech claim that individuals and entertainment companies have every right to demean people with mental illnesses, but these representations have very real consequences — the stigmatization of the mentally ill, and the prejudice, poor treatment and violations of their rights that naturally follow."

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/26/opinion/mental-illness-is-not-a-horror-show.html?_r=2

--> late october

"Jimmy Kimmel Tears Into Everyone Who Came After Him for Speaking Out About Health Care, and It’s Glorious"

"Just as senators like Cassidy rely on people being unwilling to call them liars for the sake of civility—Lindsey Graham described it as “inappropriate” on Wednesday—other people in the media ecosystem rely on a certain amount of professional courtesy, an understanding that, no matter what position a person might publicly take on an issue, everyone’s in the entertainment business, you can’t knock someone else’s hustle, and at the end of the day we can all relax over cocktails in the Hamptons and pretend we’re Ronald Reagan or Tip O’Neill, depending. None of it is personal, in other words, and why would it be? Everyone’s rich...

We somehow built a world where Senator Cassidy had a reasonable expectation of lying on television without facing any consequences more serious than a “those clowns in congress are at it again” shrug, a world where Brian Kilmeade could reasonably expect to call Kimmel a “Hollywood elite” from one side of his mouth while asking for favors from the other. In other words, at least when it comes to social norms amongst wealthy and powerful people, we built kind of a shitty world. It’s a delight to watch Jimmy Kimmel tear it down."

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2017/09/21/watch_jimmy_kimmel_respond_to_his_critics.html

It feels like a Thing, watching Jimmy Kimmel. He's usually so aggressively neutral, part of the "leave politics outside" theory of privileged entertainment, so he's legitimately breaking rules right now. 

"Mouse microbes may make scientific studies harder to replicate"

"An explosion of recent studies in both animals and people suggests that resident microbes can influence susceptibility to diseases from HIV to asthma, predispose to obesity across generations, and tinker with how the body responds to drugs. Tying such effects to experimental results is challenging, but some hints have cropped up. In one early example, more than a decade ago, a research team at Pfizer detected an odd change in rats’ urine: a sudden shift in the relative concentrations of two compounds produced when the body breaks down food. The change could muddy toxicology studies that rely on urine metabolites to measure how a drug gets broken down in the body...

Franklin and others suspect that in their zeal to clean up, facilities may have wiped out some of the microbial complexity that makes mice useful models for human disease. Variations in the \u2028microbiome may skew results, but a diverse \u2028microbiome and exposure to microbes may be critical for some studies.

Earlier this year, a team led by immuno\u2028logist David Masopust of the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, tried cohousing lab mice with mice purchased from pet stores. The “dirty” visitors harbored diseases long eradicated from most labs, such as hepatitis and pneumonia. The sudden exposure to these disease-ridden cagemates killed nearly a quarter of the colony, but the survivors began producing a subset of the memory T cells key to fighting infection. They became, the authors argued, a more realistic model of the human immune system."

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/08/mouse-microbes-may-make-scientific-studies-harder-replicate?utm_source=newsfromscience&utm_medium=facebook-text&utm_campaign=micecrobes-6587

I'm very here for this, I have a lot of questions about lab mice... They have been kept in these extremely artificial environments for generation upon generation upon generation and there are all these ways in which they are very weird - and also, all these ways in which they vary when they aren't supposed to. 

'Glow' Star Betty Gilpin: What It's Like to Have Pea-Sized Confidence With Watermelon-Sized Boobs"

"So in my 20s, I had to work doubly hard to disappear. The word "sorry" escaped my mouth a hundred times a day. I spent most of my time at parties trying to convince women that I hated myself, then had social hangovers about those conversations.

But then in the weirdest turn, I became an actor who auditioned to play women who say things like, "Does this look like mauve to you?!" Women who look in the mirror and see something beautiful. A nightmare for the terrified tiny person trapped beneath the blonde and boobs... 

Creators Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch commanded our set with a greater authority than any of the bro-gargoyles of yore, but with open arms, back rubs, and eye contact. This created the constant sense of: You are loved and celebrated—and now that you’re comfortable, please give us your goddamn guts and soul so we can make the best thing possible. Also, have this Philly cheesesteak for God's sake. Alison Brie taught me you don’t have to choose between being liked and having a voice. I watched the crew cry-laugh at her genius bit involving a jig, then suddenly snap to attention to answer questions I hadn’t thought we were allowed to ask. I followed Alison’s lead: If I didn’t understand the scene, I’d ask a question. If I didn’t feel comfortable with something, I’d raise my voice. Her bravery was contagious. And in a shocking twist, no one died."

https://www.glamour.com/story/glow-star-betty-gilpin-what-its-like-to-have-pea-sized-confidence-with-watermelon-sized-boobs?mbid=social_facebook_referral

FB: this essay makes me grin "I saw our power in other ways too. I won’t name names, but sometimes a TV set can be a shame-and-fear obstacle course for an actress. Ten points if the sexist-gargoyle producer tries to flirt with you after you’ve gone through hair and makeup, so you don’t disgust him. Don’t make eye contact with the Philly cheesesteaks they bring out for the crew. Laugh hard at the lead male actor’s improv, then be word-perfect for your line, “Oh, you boys!” Glow was the first set I’d been on run by women. It was a magical never-never land run by type-A amazons. I saw power and care together for the first time. Seeing women possess those two things simultaneously was a huge lesson for me."

"Detroit Movie Review & Film Summary (2017) | Roger Ebert"

“Detroit” was directed, written, produced, shot, and edited by white creatives who do not understand the weight of the images they hone in on with an unflinching gaze.

“Detroit” is ultimately a confused film that has an ugliness reflected in its visual craft and narrative. Bigelow is adept at making the sharp crack of an officer’s gun against a black man’s face feel impactful but doesn’t understand the meaning of the emotional scars left behind or how they echo through American history. “Detroit” is a hollow spectacle, displaying rank racism and countless deaths that has nothing to say about race, the justice system, police brutality, or the city that gives it its title...

Bigelow has made a career out of zeroing in on the particular textures of American masculinity. It’s one of the reasons I particularly love her earlier work whether that be the sublime and unapologetically silly “Point Break” or the gloriously intense “Near Dark.” It’s this history that makes the surface level understanding of character so glaring"

http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/detroit-2017

FB: this review is a perfect illustration of my fears for what "Confederate" could be. "

Ultimately, I was left wondering who is this film really for? The filmmakers aren’t skilled enough to understand the particulars of blackness or bring the city of Detroit to life as another character. What is the value of depicting such nauseating violence if you have nothing to say about how that violence comes to pass or what it says about a country that has yet to reckon with the racism that continues to fester within its very soul?"

"How Nextdoor reduced racist posts by 75%"

"In April, Nextdoor started a pilot program to see if it could change its interface to discourage its users from racially profiling people in their posts. A test group of neighborhoods were shown six different variations of the form used to make a “crime and safety” report for their neighborhood.

Some just saw the addition of new language: “Ask yourself: Is what I saw actually suspicious, especially if I take race or ethnicity out of the equation?” Some were asked to say in advance whether they were reporting an actual crime or just “suspicious activity.” Others actually had their posts scanned for mentions of race (based on a list of hundreds of terms Nextdoor came up with) and if a post did mention race, the user got an error message and was asked to submit more information about the person."

http://fusion.net/story/340171/how-nextdoor-reduced-racial-profiling/

"Facebook’s “Pride button” appears to be rolling out in a way that is culturally sensitive to bigots"

"The feature is only available as a default option for users living in “major markets with Pride celebrations.” In other places, users need to “like” the Facebook LBGQT page to gain access to the feature. And in some places, the feature isn’t available at all.

According to a Facebook blog post, the disparity in access is necessary “because this is a new experience we’ve been testing.”

Some users see it instead as a way for the company to avoid offending those who may not be supportive of LBGQT rights. “It kind of feels like facebook higher-ups are afraid of losing whatever percentage of their userbase are hateful bigots so they hide it behind liking this page so that nobody who would get upset will accidentally see it,” writes a user by the name of Wil Donaldson on the LBGQT Facebook page."

https://qz.com/1009591/facebooks-pride-button-appears-to-be-rolling-out-in-a-way-that-is-culturally-sensitive-to-bigots-fb/?utm_source=qzfb

I had wondered about this, I thought it was bold and cool because there would definitely be people who would be super angry about the pride-react. 

FB: This isn't so much "Facebook is evil and fucked up" as "we live in a frustrating social reality and corporations aren't very brave"  

"Putin’s Hackers Now Under Attack—From Microsoft"

"Since August, Microsoft has used the lawsuit to wrest control of 70 different command-and-control points from Fancy Bear. The company’s approach is indirect, but effective. Rather than getting physical custody of the servers, which Fancy Bear rents from data centers around the world, Microsoft has been taking over the Internet domain names that route to them. These are addresses like “livemicrosoft[.]net” or “rsshotmail[.]com” that Fancy Bear registers under aliases for about $10 each.  Once under Microsoft’s control, the domains get redirected from Russia’s servers to the company’s, cutting off the hackers from their victims, and giving Microsoft a omniscient view of that servers’ network of automated spies...

Neither Microsoft nor Fancy Bear responded to inquiries for this story. But Microsoft concludes in court filings that its efforts have had “significant impact” on Fancy Bear’s operations. By analyzing the traffic coming to its sinkhole, the company’s security experts have identified 122 new cyber espionage victims, whom it’s been alerting through Internet service providers. On Friday, the company is set to ask Magistrate Judge Theresa Carroll Buchanan for a final default judgment against Fancy Bear, and for a permanent injunction giving Microsoft ownership of the domains it’s seized. 

The company is hunkering down for a long fight.  “Defendants are persistent in their activities and are likely to attempt to maintain, rebuild, and even grow, their capabilities again and again,” wrote attorney Jenson last month. As part of its motion, Microsoft is asking for the court monitor to stay on indefinitely, with the company paying the bill, and is seeking an order that prospectively seizes from Fancy Bear a number of other Microsoft-themed domains that have never been registered, but which the company’s algorithms suggest the Kremlin’s hackers may use in the future"

http://www.thedailybeast.com/microsoft-pushes-to-take-over-russian-spies-network?source=twitter&via=mobile

FB: "Microsoft’s Fancy Bear crackdown began one week after The New York Times reported the intelligence community’s “high confidence” assessment that the Kremlin had hacked the DNC.  Microsoft filed a sealed motion seeking an emergency restraining order to temporarily seize 22 Fancy Bear domains, including the ActBlues[.]com address used in an attack on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and domains previously used in intrusion attempts on German energy firms."

"A Father Vows To Save His Daughter From A Marriage He Forced Her Into"

"As for Lumbaram [the father], he says he felt bound by duty. His father was a respected elder in the village. But failing to arrange a marriage for one of his sons would surely cause him to lose status. Already, says Lumbaram, "people were starting to talk." And as the eldest of his brothers, Lumbaram had a special responsibility to safeguard the family's reputation.

Durga wasn't the only one to pay a heavy price. Once Lumbaram agreed to the match for Durga, he felt compelled to marry off his two younger daughters the same night: Wedding celebrations are so expensive that in the village when you marry one daughter, you generally marry the rest in the same go.

Lumbaram's middle daughter, Nimmu — whom NPR profiled in a story last fall — was only 10 at the time. His youngest daughter was 6. But Lumbaram consoled himself that he was at least able to match the two of them to husbands close to their own age — boys with educational prospects. In short, boys who were nothing like Durga's husband...

Now that he had pushed Durga into the marriage, the school gave Lumbaram a temporary way to save her from her husband. Lumbaram has told the groom, "As long as she's getting a free education I'm not sending her to live with you yet." And now Durga is enrolled in a college that the charity has also paid for.

Lumbaram is using the same approach to keep his younger daughters from starting married life with their husbands until they're at least 18...

he has already accomplished something remarkable for rural India. The proof is evident in a procession of singing women who are now making their way past the panches. They're headed to a wedding in a house next door. And the bride is not a child. They don't do that in this village anymore. All this time Lumbaram has been holding off his daughter's husband, he has also been making the rounds of other fathers, persuading them to send their girls to the boarding school too — essentially getting them to rethink their attitude about girls."

http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/08/15/489790411/a-father-vows-to-save-his-daughter-from-a-plight-he-got-her-into?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits

Related: My mother was a child bride

FB: "here's Lumbaram's bet: By waiting until Durga could get more schooling than anyone in the village, he is hoping the panches will have to agree it would now be ridiculous to hold her to the marriage.""

"Do Public Protests Matter in a Democracy? The “outside strategy” as a signal of support to judges and bureaucrats"

"marches send a signal not only about public opinion but also capacity to mobilize voters.  “If we can put so many people on the streets,” the organizers of a protest imply, “imagine how many people we can mobilize for mid-term elections!”... 

By throwing millions of demonstrators on the street, organizers of mass protests might be stiffening the spines of those unelected officials who may otherwise fear the pressure and vengeance of elected incumbents.  Of course, civil service laws and Article III tenure help as well, but such parchment barriers can bend in the face of a persistently hostile Congress and President.  Large demonstrations might send a message to judges and bureaucrats that a critical mass of voters have their back, because politicians will not have a strong stomach for a protracted showdown with the third and fourth branches."

https://www.justsecurity.org/36956/public-protests-matter-democracy-outside-strategy-signal-support-judges-bureaucrats/

"The Al Capone theory of sexual harassment"

"The U.S. government recognized a pattern in the Al Capone case: smuggling goods was a crime often paired with failing to pay taxes on the proceeds of the smuggling. We noticed a similar pattern in reports of sexual harassment and assault: often people who engage in sexually predatory behavior also faked expense reports, plagiarized writing, or stole credit for other people’s work...

Then we realized what the connection was: all of these behaviors are the actions of someone who feels entitled to other people’s property – regardless of whether it’s someone else’s ideas, work, money, or body. Another common factor was the desire to dominate and control other people...

Organizations that understand the Al Capone theory of sexual harassment have an advantage: they know that reports or rumors of sexual misconduct are a sign they need to investigate for other incidents of misconduct, sexual or otherwise. Sometimes sexual misconduct is hard to verify because a careful perpetrator will make sure there aren’t any additional witnesses or records beyond the target and the target’s memory (although with the increase in use of text messaging in the United States over the past decade, we are seeing more and more cases where victims have substantial written evidence). But one of the implications of the Al Capone theory is that even if an organization can’t prove allegations of sexual misconduct, the allegations themselves are sign to also urgently investigate a wide range of aspects of an employee’s conduct."

https://blog.valerieaurora.org/2017/07/18/the-al-capone-theory-of-sexual-harassment/

FB: "So what is the Al Capone theory of sexual harassment? It’s simple: people who engage in sexual harassment or assault are also likely to steal, plagiarize, embezzle, engage in overt racism, or otherwise harm their business... tapping into the existing whisper network of targets of sexual harassment is incredibly valuable. The more marginalized a person is, the more likely they are to be the target of this kind of behavior and to be connected with other people who have experienced this behavior."

"Mission Project Protests Help Spur Changes"

"“This is offensive to some people," says Calvin Hedrick, a Sacramento area father of three school-age kids. He comes from the Maidu Mountain Indian tribe. Hedrick also leads The 5th Direction. It’s a group that promotes cultural strength among tribal youth.

Hedrick says the 4th grade mission project gives kids a false impression of what life was like for California’s indigenous people. 

"This is traumatizing to some of our students. What should happen is that a school district should say ‘we will no longer be doing the mission project.’

“It was a very horrific time for native people," says Hedrick. "Everything was taken away from them – physical, sexual, mental, spiritual, emotional abuse happening when people were being taken to these places to be taught how to be civilized. And the whole idea of what civilization was, was very different through the minds of the missionaries coming in."

http://www.capradio.org/articles/2017/05/17/mission-project-protests-help-spur-changes/

Ya, we spent So Much Time on the missions, learning all of them, visiting them... And thst knowledge has never become relevant or useful again. Some of the gold rush stuff and the immigration of labor in the 19th century and things like that - useful. We spent like no time on the actual indigenous groups that were around before the missions, I remember one field trip where we looked at hollows in rocks where people used to grind acorns and then of course my friends and I came home and collected a bunch of acorns to make into acorn flower and then forgot about them. 

But we spent so much time on missions...