"The Comet Ping Pong Gunman Answers Our Reporter’s Questions"

"Mr. Welch was soft-spoken and polite, and said he liked the outdoors. He was cautious when speaking about what happened, sometimes citing advice he had received from his lawyer. He said he did not believe in conspiracy theories, but then added that the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks needed to be re-examined. He has listened to Alex Jones, whose radio show traffics in conspiracy theories and who once said that Mrs. Clinton “has personally murdered and chopped up” children. “He’s a bit eccentric,” Mr. Welch said. “He touches on some issues that are viable but goes off the deep end on some things.” Mr. Welch likes to read. A favorite is “Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secret of a Man’s Soul,” by John Eldredge, about masculinity in evangelical Christianity. He said he did not do drugs but drank the occasional beer. He misses his children: “They are in my thoughts every second of the day.” He said he had grown religious in the last few years. Tattooed on his back are Bible verses: “Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall; but those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.”"

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/12/07/us/edgar-welch-comet-pizza-fake-news.html?_r=0&referer=

If you don't know the #PizzaGate story, I strongly suggest you learn about it. One of my favorite podcasts did an excellent episode on it, and it night be a good way to hear this story because you get to hear it with people and it isn't despairing and it isn't told to get you angry and encourage you to click more. 

This interview made me feel a lot for this man,  who honestly seems kind and who I would believe would be generally a positive figure in this world. A part of me sees parallels between his actions and horribly misguided service trips where wealthy Americans sort of crash into areas with poverty, using a combination of strong positive intentions and naive assumptions and insufficient local knowledge to "try to help". It's sort of an American ethic, that if you have the ability to do something as an individual to help people in need,  then you should - but we don't have the other side of the coin,  asking if we know enough or if individual action is the way to fix the problem. 

"What's a Species, Anyways?"

"To environmentalists, the idea of letting the red wolf go extinct is simply unthinkable. But scientific research has complicated their standoff with local hunters and property owners. Since the red wolf was originally classified as an endangered species, biologists have studied it intensely—sequencing its DNA, scrutinizing its morphology, and piecing together its evolutionary history. And they’ve put forward a compelling new theory: The red wolf, an animal the U.S. government has spent decades and millions of dollars attempting to save from extinction, may not actually be a distinct species at all.

The implications of this idea extend far beyond the swamps and farms of North Carolina, threatening the very foundations of biology itself. “Not to have a natural unit such as the species would be to abandon a large part of biology into free fall, all the way from the ecosystem down to the organism,” the noted biologist and theorist E.O. Wilson wrote in his 1992 book The Diversity of Life . And yet, the research into the red wolf challenges our accepted notions about how species are defined—and about how evolution actually works...

Wayne and Jenks started with blood samples from red wolves living in captivity in American zoos, focusing on 4 percent of the genome. When they sequenced the DNA, however, they were mystified. Every section of red wolf DNA matched almost exactly with the equivalent section of DNA from two other animals: the gray wolf and the coyote. They found no part of the red wolf’s genome that was unique. “I kept running the analyses and checking and double-checking for contamination,” Jenks said. The conclusion, however, was inescapable. “Finally it occurred to me it would make sense that they’re hybrids,” Jenks said...

The Interior Department, charged with enforcing the Endangered Species Act, has reversed the government’s position several times over the years as to whether the law protects hybrids. Initially, the government adopted a general policy to “discourage conservation efforts for hybrids,” under the common notion that hybridization destroys species instead of creating them. Then, in 1990 Interior determined that “rigid standards should be revisited, because the issue of hybrids is more properly a biological issue than a legal one.”...

The idea of a species may be fundamental to biology; but science offers no precise definition of what a species actually is. Anyone can recognize a black bear and a cardinal as distinct animals, but what about two minnows scooped from separate ponds? For centuries, taxonomists delineated species based on morphology, ecology, and behavior, but there was never any standard method to their classifications... evolution helped biologists in the twentieth century land on what seemed like a firmer definition: A species was not simply a group of animals that looked alike, but rather a population whose members could reproduce only with each other... It was not until biologists gained the ability to examine animals’ DNA in the 1980s, though, that they began to discover that species do not always fit the categories that men have drawn around them...

Even human beings aren’t quite as distinct as we once thought. The genomes of European and East Asian peoples contain genetic material from long-extinct Neanderthals, indicating that hybridization has played a role in our own development as Homo sapiens."

https://newrepublic.com/article/124453/whats-species-anyways?mod=e2this

This really raises the question about what the value of a species classification IS, what it can tell us about (in this case) this wolf vs. that wolf. In biology, I might care about different species of lab animals if one has different properties from another that are relevant to my research (say, different versions of a gene, or only one has the behavior/disease I care about) but even within a given species, there is variation between lab strains. There has been a ton of interesting/troubling research about how even genetically identical lab mice, raised for a few generations in different labs, might have different biological characteristics. For example, mice that have been bred for generations in environments without exposure to seasons might have lost some of their circadian rhythm, so they can't be used for experiments about seasonality.

Anyway, we need a more rational and replicable system.

Related: nautilus one on evolution and chaos; another on commonly assumed thing finally being tested? If there is one besides Native Americans not having a gene for alcoholism; I feel like there was another one about how there is no such thing as a species

FB: "few would suggest jettisoning the concept of a species altogether: It is, as E.O. Wilson wrote, too fundamental to human ideas of nature. The difference would be recognizing that a species is a human construction rather than a biological reality—a shift in perspective that would, if anything, give conservationists more flexibility to pursue their goals."

"Why ‘Taking the High Road’ Won’t Save Us and Maybe a Little Shade Will"

"In fact, the ‘high road’ is covertly coded language that leads Black folks to believe that if they act in a way that others deem respectable, that we can elevate ourselves above our own oppression. Taking the high road applies pressure on the victims of oppression to modify their anger and rage in order to package their experiences and reactions for consumption and judgment. The fact is: how Black folks choose to express themselves should never be a measurement of their worthiness to live lives free of harm and domination.

Who gets to judge what the high road is or isn’t? The same folks who protect domination and systems of oppression...

White Supremacy teaches that Black folks are animalistic. It forces Black folks have into dehumanized and oversimplified stereotypes and tropes. A myth within White Supremacy is that Black folks are sub-human and so “take the high road” often becomes a way of telling Black folks to “act civilized.” Of course White Supremacy also asks us to be hyper-sexual, fertile, and aggressive when the white gaze requires it and so how we show up in the world is always impacted by white comfort and white needs.

Tamping down our emotional experiences and the “less acceptable” parts of emotional expression is an act of limiting the fullness of our humanity. Therefore, creating space for the expression of our petty feelings is empowering in the face of dehumanizing respectability politics.

http://blackyouthproject.com/why-taking-the-high-road-wont-save-us-and-maybe-a-little-shade-will/

Related: unhealthy to numb negative emotions; we don't need lincoln-inspired racial unity

FB: "In the fight to thrive, there are no wrong tools. We are resilient, vibrant, and powerful. And, the uses of humor, sarcasm, and “shade” are within the boundaries of struggling against oppression."

"Mice can be male without Y chromosome"

"Reproductive biologist Monika Ward of the University of Hawaii in Honolulu and colleagues started with mice that have only one X chromosome (and no second sex chromosome). Normally those animals would develop as females. But when the researchers manipulated genes found on the X and another chromosome, the mice became males that could produce immature sperm. Those engineered males fathered offspring with reproductive assistance from the researchers, who injected the immature sperm into eggs, Ward and colleagues report in the Jan. 29 Science...

ActivatingSox9 in a genetically female embryo will cause it to develop as a male, Ward and colleagues found. But those males didn’t make sperm. “The testes were empty,” says Ward.

In order to produce sperm, mice need the Eif2s3y gene, the researchers had previously discovered. In the new experiment, the mice were missing the gene because they didn’t have Y chromosomes. So researchers substituted a similar gene from the X chromosome calledEif2s3x. Only one copy of the Y version is needed to make immature, tailless sperm, but it takes at least five copies of the X version to do the same thing. “This indicates that the Y chromosome gene is the strong one,” says Ward.

Her research suggests that the Y chromosome has optimized production from genes that are necessary for making males...

Primates, including humans, don’t have Eif2s3y genes on their Y chromosomes. No one yet knows whetherEif2s3y’s function in primates was taken over by other genes on the Y, its X counterpart or genes elsewhere in the genome."

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/mice-can-be-male-without-y-chromosome

"Tightened rules for antibiotics for food livestock go into effect"

"Putting these particular antibiotics under the control of veterinarians will make it harder for farmers to use them. And it will increase the cost of doing so, something Laxminarayan predicted will discourage nonessential use.

“Anything that increases the cost of using antibiotics essentially will push manufacturers away from using antibiotics,’’ he said.

Scientists and public health professionals have long warned that the increasing use of antibiotics in the rearing of food animals such as chickens, pigs and cattle, and farmed fish and seafood is fueling a rise in so-called superbugs — bacteria capable of evading the drugs.

That puts at risk procedures that have revolutionized modern medicine. Organ transplants, cardiac bypass surgeries, even safe caesarean section births are an accepted part of medical practice but could become much more dangerous to perform if superbugs continue to proliferate... 

it is estimated that about 70 percent of antibiotics are used in agriculture, often not to treat illnesses but to fend off diseases linked to the crowded, high-stress conditions of factory farming or to promote growth."

https://www.statnews.com/2017/01/03/fda-livestock-antibiotics/

I recently developed a skin infection that probably came from a cut so small that it healed before I could notice it, but I had to take some serious antibiotics and I had this weird realization that a century ago I probably would have had to cut the finger off. 

I mentioned this to my mom and she gave me a look and said that they probably would have cut off the hand to be safe. 

So, I'm seriously appreciating antibiotics right now.

"Against “Don’t Read the Comments”"

"What’s astonishing is that design choices that were out of date when built into commenting tools and blogging software 15 years ago are still repeated as mistakes today on many large, mainstream sites.

The result of continuing to repeat the mistakes we made when building commenting systems a dozen years ago is that nearly every popular large-scale app or social network or news site has some significant issues with widespread abuse of users, particularly marginalized users...

I think our reflexive use of these grim jokes have gotten accepted into the culture of people who build, manage, and publish on large social apps and media sites. The fact that we joke about it documents an acceptance of a culture of abuse online. It helps normalize online harassment campaigns and treat the empowerment of abusers as inevitable, rather than solvable."
https://medium.com/@anildash/against-don-t-read-the-comments-aee43ce515b9#.o10jhcabo

Yes. I'm thinking now - who told me that this wasn't solvable? I never read comments, I've really accepted that they are just a lost space where the kids of people whose voices I want to avoid get to talk to one another, where no one will stop them.

And honestly, the most radical thing about being a leader and a change-maker is to recognize that it is totally possible for shitty things to be good things.

Related: Why women don't read the comments or write them either

FB: "There’s a grave cost to assuming online interactivity is always awful. The burden is felt most acutely in denying opportunity to those for whom connecting to a community online may be the only way to get a foot in the door. Those underrepresented, unheard voices are the most valuable ones we lose when we throw the baby out with the bathwater and assume online comments are necessarily bad."

"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."