Kelly thinks he’s saving U.S. from disaster:

‘White House chief of staff John Kelly has eroded morale in the West Wing in recent months with comments to aides that include insulting the president’s intelligence and casting himself as the savior of the country, according to eight current and former White House officials.

The officials said Kelly portrays himself to Trump administration aides as the lone bulwark against catastrophe, curbing the erratic urges of a president who has a questionable grasp on policy issues and the functions of government. He has referred to Trump as “an idiot” multiple times to underscore his point, according to four officials who say they’ve witnessed the comments….’

Via NBC

He may be grandiose and conceited but his instincts, and his apparent growing abhorrence of the Orange Tyrant, are well-founded.

‘Sarah Huckabee Sanders can dish it, but Republicans can’t take it….’

Via Vox

City Upbringing, Without Pets, Increases Risk of Mental Illness

‘People who were raised in cities and without a family pet show significantly higher levels of an immune system component following a stressful event, researchers report.

Children raised in a rural environment, surrounded by animals and bacteria-laden dust, grow up to have more stress-resilient immune systems and might be at lower risk of mental illness than pet-free city dwellers, according to new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences…’

Via Neuroscience News

‘With meth resurgent and the opioid crisis showing no sign of abating, a growing number of people are getting endocarditis from injecting the drugs — sometimes repeatedly if they continue shooting up. Many are uninsured, and the care they need is expensive, intensive and often lasts months. All of this has doctors grappling with an ethically fraught question: Is a heart ever not worth fixing?…’

Via New York Times

‘The Negro Motorist Green Book was a series of annual guides for African-American drivers and holiday-makers who wanted to know where they could find gas-stations, restaurants and hotels that would serve them and which “sunset towns” they should avoid on pain of violence from corrupt, racist law-enforcement.

The Green Books have taken on a new cultural relevance; they play a central role in Matt Ruff’s outstanding anti-racist Lovecraftian tale Lovecraft Country (which is being adapted by Jordan “Get Out” Peele for the small screen).

In late 2017, Jan Miles released the The Post Racial Negro Green Book, an unexpected bestseller that catalogs police killings, violence and harassment; businesses that racially profile black customers; and places where white people publicly abuse black people with impunity.

Miles created her Green Book as a way of coping with an onslaught of news about racist violence and discrimination; rather than being a passive observer of the news, she did something to process it (this is how I deal with the news, too — Boing Boing is both a public notebook and a personal way of reflecting on the news rather than letting it get on top of me).

She calls it “a snapshot of contemporary racism in America.”

It’s timely: the NAACP just released its first-ever travel advisories, warning black people to avoid both Mississippi and American Airlines….’

Via Boing Boing

London crawling: 

‘if you happen to be in England’s capital, whatever you do, don’t touch the caterpillars.

A particular breed of caterpillar (well, technically the larval stage of the oak processionary moth—or OPM if you’re into the whole brevity thing), has invaded London and has been deemed toxic by authorities at the UK’s Forestry Commision. Since they have started hatching over the last couple of weeks, the caterpillar’s 62,000 ultra-fine hairs appear to trigger severe allergic reactions in humans. The hairs, which the creatures can eject if threatened, contain a protein called thaumetopoein that appears to be the source of the allergy symptoms. The BBC reports that these hairs themselves can last up to 5 years on the ground, while the caterpillar will only last until late May or mid-June before turning into a not-so-deadly moth.

It can cause skin rash, difficulty breathing, and even death by anaphylactic shock. It also tends to kill the oak trees that they thrive on. The nests — which the Forestry Commision has warned Britons to steer clear of — tend to look like overgrown and slightly bulbous cobwebs….’

Via Big Think

Schadenfreude Dept.:

‘President Trump is privately rejecting the growing consensus among Republican leaders that they may lose the House and possibly the Senate in November, leaving party officials and the president’s advisers nervous that he does not grasp the gravity of the threat they face in the midterm elections….’

Via The New York Times

And:

Trump: If Dems win in 2018 midterms, they’ll impeach me

‘A Quinnipiac poll released on Thursday shows that if Democrats win control of the House, more than 70 percent of their supporters want them to begin impeachment proceedings….’

Via The Hill

Join the elite who rule the world covertly:

‘We all know Beyoncé, and Jay Z are most likely in the Illuminati. And George Bush is in Skull and Bones. Does that mean you have to be amazingly successful or come from blue blood to join a secret organization that rules the world through a New World Order?…’

Via Big Think

‘Researchers report we may have evolved to depend on our gut bacteria to aid normal brain function, and changes in our microbiome could have effects on our behavior….’

Via Neuroscience News

A new CDC reports says that 1 in 59 children in 11 studied states are identified as being on the autistic spectrum, up from 1 in 68 just two years previously. But does this mean that the prevalence of autism is increasing? Probably not. Increased screening for and recognition of affected children as well as a broadened definition of the syndrome are probably to blame. Via Neuroscience News

This is emblematic of a larger problem in behavioral science overall, as diagnosis is done by descriptive criteria in the absence of definitive empirical measures. This leads to expansion and contraction of various diagnostic groups (e.g. bipolar disorder or schizophrenia) both over time and from place to place. 

Trump impeachment: 

‘This yearning is for something, anything, to end the death loop that American democracy appears to be trapped in, for a big, dramatic blowup to fix the system’s ills. In the liberal imagination, that blowup typically takes the form of Trump’s removal from office, an event that sets us back to a path of normalcy and sane politics.

This yearning is understandable — but it is both dangerous and misplaced. Ending the Trump presidency will not fix, or even substantially ameliorate, most of the problems plaguing the American political system. They were mounting for years before he took office — indeed, they made him possible — and they will continue to plague us for years after he leaves.

What’s more, the desire for a dramatic explosion of the Trump presidency at times seems to blend into a desire for the dramatic blowup of the American political system altogether, a sense that we need some apocalyptic event that will wipe the slate clean and revitalize our democracy in one big revolutionary motion. It’s no accident that the rise of Trump has coincided with fearful but titillated worries about coups d’état, collapses into tyranny, and even a second American civil war or secession. These concerns are partially specific to Trump. But they reflect worries that transcend him too….’

Via Vox

When humans die out because of climate change, they may be the biggest and most widespread animal left, thereby inheriting the planet. 

‘After humans started migrating out of Africa, the largest land mammals have died out in each territory that humans have spread to. It’s somewhat of a human hallmark, making other species extinct, although we’ve kept cows around for both food and leather. We’ve actually prioritized cows over other species, leading to a 1.5 billion total cow population across the globe. That’s more than cats and dogs combined: there are only 500 to 600 million dogs in the world and about as many cats.

If global warming keeps going at its current pace, Stephen Hawking estimated last year that humanity has about 100 years left to find a new planet to live on and only 1,000 years left on this planet before the heat completely kills all life. Pre human-kind meddling, larger animals simply adapted to climate change. But at this accelerated pace, species go extinct at an astronomical level. Between 24-100 species every day become extinct, and that’s a conservative estimate. Because there are so many cows on the planet, it’s fairly safe to say that even if all humans died out tomorrow all cows would have to do is graze and slowly move north as the planet got hotter. That’s conjecture, sure, but from a strictly numerical standpoint, there’s a good chance that cows will enjoy a very short time at the top of the food chain before the planet becomes completely uninhabitable except for cockroaches….’

Via Big Think

The dark history of ‘America first’:

‘When he promised to put America first in his inaugural speech, Donald Trump drew on a slogan with a long and sinister history – a sign of what was to follow in his presidency…’

Via The Guardian

A look at the available evidence:

‘…[C]ould researchers find clear evidence that an ancient species built a relatively short-lived industrial civilization long before our own? Perhaps, for example, some early mammal rose briefly to civilization building during the Paleocene epoch about 60 million years ago. There are fossils, of course. But the fraction of life that gets fossilized is always minuscule and varies a lot depending on time and habitat. It would be easy, therefore, to miss an industrial civilization that only lasted 100,000 years—which would be 500 times longer than our industrial civilization has made it so far.

Given that all direct evidence would be long gone after many millions of years, what kinds of evidence might then still exist? The best way to answer this question is to figure out what evidence we’d leave behind if human civilization collapsed at its current stage of development….’

Via The Atlantic

‘Despite seeing it millions of times in pretty much every picture book, every novel, every newspaper, and every email message, people are essentially unaware of the more common version of the lowercase print letter “g,” Johns Hopkins researchers have found.

Most people don’t even know that two forms of the letter—one usually handwritten, the other typeset—exist. And if they do, they can’t write the typeset one we typically see. They can’t even pick the correct version of it out of a lineup….’

Via Neuroscience News

‘Except for Sinan Antoon’s richly deserved jeremiad, the 15th anniversary of the worst foreign policy disaster in modern American history went sailing by largely unremarked, at least in this country. After all, over here, everyone was too busy keeping track of the latest news involving the vulgar talking yam the country had installed as president, how he was still truckling to Russian oligarchs, how he was still being run to ground by Bob Mueller, and about how he was being outwitted and out-lawyered by a lady from the adult entertainment industry….’

Via 3Quarks Daily