’Nestled amongst hundreds of stunning shots of the aurora borealis taken by Finnish photographer Jani Ylinampa is a series of four photos of Kotisaari, showing the island from a drone’s point of view for each of the four seasons (clockwise from upper left): spring, summer, autumn, and winter.
But seriously, go check out Ylinampa’s Instagram account…it’s packed with aurora borealis photos. What a magical place to live, where the sky lights up like that all the time.…’
Via Kottke
Defendant in largest case of poaching in the state, which killed hundreds of deer.
Via Boston Globe
My guess? The convict will be unmoved.
No sense of humor:
‘While this pales in comparison with his mounting moral, constitutional, and possibly criminal sins, his latest tantrum against “Saturday Night Live” finds him wading deeper into the wannabe dictator muck.…’
Via Boston Globe
What is that they say about political jokes, that the problem with them is that too many of them get elected? Trump would just be funny if he weren’t so pitiful and his impact on human misery so profound.
Via Imgur
’A cosmological model predicts that the expanding Universe could rip itself apart. Too much dark energy could overwhelm the forces holding matter together. The disaster could happen in about 22 billion years.…’
Via Big Think
’Philosophers are supposed to ask Big Questions. The Big Questions is the title of a popular introduction to philosophy and of a long-running BBC programme in which people discuss their ethical and religious perspectives. But since we philosophers, following in the footsteps of Socrates, claim to practice critical thinking, it behooves us to ask whether Big Questions are a good idea.
It’s not easy to say precisely what makes a question big; but we can at least give a few examples form the history of philosophy so that we have some idea what we’re talking about:…’
Via 3 Quarks Daily
’After three weeks of back-to-back-to-back-to-back bombshells by federal prosecutors and special counsel Robert Mueller, it’s increasingly clear that, as 2018 winds down, Donald Trump faces a legal assault unlike anything previously seen by any president—at least 17 distinct court cases stemming from at least seven different sets of prosecutors and investigators. (That total does not count any congressional inquiries, nor does it include any other inquiries into other administration officials unrelated to Russia.)…
Here’s a complete rundown of the various known investigations targeting Trump’s world from local, state, and federal prosecutors:..’
Via WIRED
Disaster-Prepping for the Animals:
’As climate change escalates the intensity and frequency of natural disasters like wildfires and hurricanes, zoos are having to find new ways to keep their animals safe. This means stocking up on emergency provisions for a hundred or more species, each with their own special medical, dietary, and habitat needs. It also means knowing, at a moment’s notice, which species need to move if keeping them outdoors becomes unsafe. Collecting such information requires years of planning. But zoos only began doing the work fairly recently.…’
Via WIRED
’Containing the outbreak in a conflict-heavy region is challenging.…’
Via Ars Technica
A: drug addiction treatment.
’Many drug treatment centers are run as for-profit institutions. Making a buck off of treating people’s addictions often runs counter to actually helping addicts. Some Chinese drug centers are experimenting with removing an addict’s nucleus accumbens, which saps them of their ability to feel pleasure.…’
Via Big Think
’Researchers report human growth hormone, prepared from human tissue prior to 1985, may have been contaminated with seeds of the amyloid beta protein. In a new study, researchers injected mice with the original c-hGH batches containing amyloid beta which seeded amyloid pathology, even decades after storage. Findings support the hypothesis that the Alzheimer’s causing proteins can be transmitted to from contaminated materials.…’
’One of Mick Mulvaney’s first tasks as acting chief of staff to Donald Trump will perhaps be explaining why he previously publicly called his boss “a terrible human being”.
Video has emerged of Mulvaney, previously a Republican congressman, admitting his disdain for Trump shortly before the presidential election in November 2016.
“Yes, I’m supporting Donald Trump; I’m doing so as enthusiastically as I can given the fact I think he’s a terrible human being,” Mulvaney said.…’
Via The Guardian
Via Reddit
This Boston Globe article describes the grief and the search for answers in the aftermath of a suicide cluster (six adolescents and young adults within 20 months) in the communities served by the community hospital where I practice psychiatry. While I thought it was thoughtful and searching, I had several concerns (I wrote essentially a version of this post to the reporter and the editor of The Globe).
The article mentions almost in passing the opinion of one set of parents that antidepressant use may have increased their son’s suicidal thinking and contributed to his death. This comment goes unchallenged and unexplored despite the issue being complex and far from incontrovertible. The question of the possible exacerbation of suicidal thoughts by antidepressants has largely been put to rest, after the concern emerged about a decade ago, by substantial sophisticated research and analysis by psychiatric experts in psychopharmacology and suicidology. In rare isolated cases with particularly vulnerable patients, the agitating side effects of some antidepressants could conceivably worsen their distress to a tipping point. But, in most of the cases where a patient feels that their suicidal thinking escalated after beginning a medication, it is more simply that the medication has not yet kicked in to be the hoped-for ‘fix’ to halt the ongoing progression of their depression.
Furthermore, antidepressant prescribing has increasingly migrated from the psychiatrist’s consulting room to the primary care practice over the past few decades. PCPs, internists, pediatricians and family practitioners have briefer and less frequent visits with their patients (Big Pharma has by and large succeeded in persuading them that antidepressant prescribing is simple, does not require much attention, and will facilitate getting nuisance patients without ‘real’ medical concerns out of their offices more quickly). I have many gifted and empathic primary care colleagues but, by and large, they have less specific training and experience than mental health professionals in creating an alliance with a closed-off patient who may not be communicating suicidal distress with clarity or candor. Medical practice increasingly subscribes to the mistaken notion that simply prescribing the right medicine, outside the context of a therapeutic healing relationship, is sufficient treatment. Nevertheless, prescribing the proper medication is an efficient, some say even essential, component of treating a suicidal depression. Not proposing an antidepressant medication to such a deeply depressed patient has been seen as medical malpractice. The danger of reductively suggesting an irrefutable harmful link between suicide and the antidepressants is that it will have a chilling effect discouraging some from accepting such treatment and depriving sufferers of potentially lifesaving options. We saw this a decade ago.
Parenthetically, of far more concern than antidepressants is that suicidal patients are quite commonly given anti-anxiety medications. These include benzodiazepines such as lorazepam [Ativan], diazepam [Valium], clonazepam [Klonopin], alprazolam [Xanax] and the like. These medications act, exactly like the more familiar effect of alcohol, to lower inhibitions. Shy people socialize more comfortably, with a looser tongue, under the influence of alcohol, and anxiolytics work by the same mechanism at the same brain loci. Unfortunately, among the inhibitions they loosen are our compunctions against acting on any self-destructive impulses we may harbor. Both alcohol and anxiolytics are implicated in a high proportion of suicide attempts and successful suicides and, in my opinion and that of many responsible mental health practitioners, should be avoided when one is struggling with suicidal thoughts or urges.
Particularly in this portrait of a grieving community searching for explanations, one must recognize the impact of the social forces that impede delivery of adequate outpatient care. When we are discharging patients from our acute-stay inpatient unit at my hospital after a suicide crisis, it is outrageous that it typically takes weeks or at times months until they can get an intake with a community mental health provider, especially a psychiatrist. Staffs of inpatient units that stabilize patients in dangerous and acute crises are universally demoralized that patients no matter how motivated will be frustrated in finding adequate support to maintain their gains and their safety in the ensuing months. There are far too few providers, for one thing because insurance company reimbursement for outpatient mental health services does not make it worth many providers’ while. Furthermore, in all too many states providers are not even required to provide coverage for mental health treatment in parity to that for other kinds of medical treatment. (Massachusetts is a parity state, not that it makes that much difference.) The relationship between suicide and inadequacy of community mental health service provision ought to be clear.
I’m not actually sure I would call the six suicides in Acton-Boxborough in the past 20 months a ‘cluster’ and I have seen similar incidences in the other nearby communities involving Lincoln-Sudbury and Concord-Carlisle high schools serviced by my hospital. We have seen a wholesale failure to halt the society-wide increase in suicide, particularly among adolescents and young adults. The article considers the possible contribution of local stresses such as academic pressure to suicide. We have grappled with suicide all too often only on the level of individual emotional factors and circumstantial psychosocial stress. However, we ignore at our peril the fact that large-scale cultural stresses and societal breakdown undoubtedly play an important part in encouraging people to take their lives. Particularly since Trump came to power in 2016, Americans have experienced a drastic acceleration in the postmodern erosion of cohesion of the social fabric, the wholesale betrayal of the expectation of the moral integrity of public figures, and relativity in what is even true on all levels. It is essential not to overlook how social breakdown impacts our young adults at times when they have not yet established a sense of the meaning of their lives, what to believe, or whom to trust. In his seminal 1897 treatise Suicide, the luminary French sociologist Emile Durkheim helped us to understand that suicide correlates not just with individual emotional factors or situational stress but with such society-wide strife and anomie. It is now a given in grappling with suicide, and one cannot ignore this level of analysis.
’The Geminid meteor shower has been raining down on us the past few days, and if you want to see it, tonight is the best night.
Read more Brave the cold for a glimpse at this expansive star show. The Geminids appear to come more of less from the Gemini constellation, but they travel far across the sky. You don’t need a telescope to see them, just endurance: the shower is at its best around 2am, your local time.…’
Via Lifehacker
’Astronomer Carl Wirtanen discovered his namesake comet in 1948. He was a skilled object hunter and used photos of the night sky to spot the quickly moving object, at least astronomically speaking.
Comet 46P/Wirtanen’s orbit keeps it pretty near to the sun. Its aphelion, or farthest point from the sun, is about 5.1 astronomical units (AU), which is just a tad bigger than Jupiter’s orbit. Its perihelion, or closest approach to the sun, is about 1 AU, just about the Earth’s distance from the sun. This path takes about 5.4 years to complete, meaning it comes back into view quite frequently compared to other famous comets.
Right now, it is approaching its perihelion. Its closest point to the sun will fall on Dec. 16 – which is why it will be brightest on this day.
Comet 46P/Wirtanen is a particularly active comet – called a hyperactive comet – and tends to be brighter than other comets of a similar size. This makes it a good candidate for viewing. Predictions suggest it will be as bright as a magnitude 3, which is a little brighter than the dimmest star in the Big Dipper, Megrez. However, there are some predictions that keep it beyond naked eye visibility at a brightest magnitude of only 7.6. The dimmest object visible with the naked human eye is magnitude 6, under perfect observing conditions.…’
Via The Conversation
Adam Davidson writes:
‘The sentencing memos filed by prosecutors on Friday reveal a coördinated conspiracy, conducted by Michael Cohen and a number of others, who are very, very bad at conspiracy. …’
Source: The New Yorker
’Just because you disagree with something doesn’t mean that it isn’t true for someone else.…’
Via Big Think
Michael A. Cohen writes:
‘There were extensive efforts by Russian officials to assist the Trump campaign and that multiple Trump aides were approached;
• These Trump aides have uniformly lied to the FBI and prosecutors about these contacts;
• Collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian officials, in some form, likely took place;
• Efforts to mislead the public and prosecutors, as well as obstruct justice, have continued into Trump’s presidency and will likely implicate White House officials, including the president, in wrong-doing;
• Donald Trump, his son Donald Trump Jr., his son-in-law Jared Kushner, and perhaps other officials are in serious legal peril.
If this is correct then the felony offenses prosecutors say Trump committed are small potatoes compared to what is looming on the horizon. …’
Source: Boston Globe
Critic of Medical Excess Is Dead at 55:
’Dr. Lisa Schwartz, who with her husband devoted her life to warning patients about the dangers of unnecessary medical tests and treatment and excessive diagnoses, died on Nov. 29 in Lebanon, N.H. She was 55.
Her husband, Dr. Steven Woloshin, said the cause was cancer.
Dr. Schwartz and Dr. Woloshin were the directors of the Center for Medicine and Media at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, part of Dartmouth College’s Geisel School of Medicine. There they trained hundreds of journalists to become more skeptical about claimed scientific breakthroughs and miracle cures, and to better communicate the benefits and risks of medical tests and treatments.…’
Via New York Times
’From seizing control of the internet to declaring martial law, President Trump may legally do all kinds of extraordinary things.…’
Via The Atlantic
The cabinet official’s connection to a shady deal for an alleged child molester:
’It is the perverse good fortune of Alexander Acosta, Donald Trump’s secretary of labor, to be part of an administration so spectacularly corrupt that it’s simply impossible to give all its scandals the attention they deserve.
Last Wednesday, The Miami Herald published a blockbuster multipart exposé about how the justice system failed the victims of Jeffrey Epstein, a rich, politically connected financier who appears to have abused underage girls on a near-industrial scale. The investigation, more than a year in the making, described Epstein as running a sort of child molestation pyramid scheme, in which girls — some in middle school — would be recruited to give Epstein “massages” at his Palm Beach mansion, pressured into sex acts, then coerced into bringing him yet more girls. The Herald reported that Epstein was also suspected of trafficking girls from overseas.
What’s shocking is not just the lurid details and human devastation of his alleged crimes, but the way he was able to use his money to escape serious consequences, thanks in part to Acosta, then Miami’s top federal prosecutor. For reasons that are not entirely clear, Acosta took extraordinary measures to let Epstein — and, crucially, other unnamed people — off the hook.
The labor secretary, whose purview includes combating human trafficking, has done nothing so far to rebut The Herald’s reporting. (A spokesman for his department has referred reporters to his previous statements about the case.) It should end his career.…’
’Emile Ratelband, a 69-year-old man who has insisted he should be allowed to legally change his age to make himself 20-years younger, finally had his day in court. As of Monday, December 3, 2018, he is still legally 69 years old, and time will continue to have its way with him, just as it does for all of us.
Last month, Ratelband gained international attention when he told a Dutch court that he doesn’t feel 69-years-old and his age hinders his ability to meet women on the Tinder dating app. He called himself a “young god” and complained that when his actual age is listed on Tinder no one wants to talk to him. He fantasized that were he allowed to be 49, “with the face I have, I will be in a luxurious position.” He also believes that he would have more job opportunities if he were younger. Ratelband is a motivational speaker whose website describes him as “a man who lives a dream and who didn’t even know he had one.”…’
Via Gizmodo
A Supercell Storm Chaser Photographs Thundering Formations:
’FOR THE PAST decade, photographer Mitch Dobrowner has spent a few weeks every summer pursuing extreme weather across the midwestern United States with veteran storm chaser Roger Hill, who, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, has witnessed more tornadoes (more than 650) than anyone in history. During their first outing, in 2009, Dobrowner and Hill spotted a high-precipitation supercell thunderstorm in the Black Hills of South Dakota at noon and followed it all day in Hill’s eight-seater van until giving up the chase at midnight in Valentine, Nebraska.
“It looked like a spaceship,” recalls Hill, who runs Silver Lining Tours, which offers 11 storm-chasing outings each year. “Hail the size of grapefruits, lightning strikes every three or four seconds.”
Dobrowner’s black and white images of that megastorm are some of the most spectacular in his ever-expanding portfolio of extreme weather photography. Although tornadoes get all the attention on TV, Dobrowner is more interested in supercells, massive storm systems that sometimes spawn tornadoes. “I see them as living things,” he says. “Some are gorgeous and beautiful, some are tornadic and violent. And the longer they last the more form they take. Eventually, they mature and die. So I try to take a portrait, almost like with a person.”…’
Via WIRED
’Tibetan monks from all over the world are scheduled to visit India to discuss the issues related to the next reincarnation of the Dalai Lama. Some, including the Dalai Lama himself, have questioned if the institution should be continued. The final decision will have far reaching effects, since China is unlikely to let the monks have the last word on the matter.…’
Via Big Think
Michael Marshall writes:
‘Stone Age Europeans may have deliberately amputated their fingers during religious ceremonies. The controversial idea could explain why so many of the prehistoric images of hands on cave walls are missing fingers. …’
Source: New Scientist
Amanda Marcotte:
’The heat is turning up on Donald Trump this week, as special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation is making news every day, giving a strong impression that justice circles ever closer to Trump himself. … As the walls close in around the president this week, there’s been a detectable shift in the way that Trump and his protectors in both the right-wing media and the Republican Party have defended him. The pretense of innocence is slipping away and in its place is rising a new excuse: Donald Trump and his associates are and should be above the law….
This pretense of respect for rule of law is quickly eroding as it becomes likelier that Trump could be in real trouble. While Trump still occasionally throws the word “innocent” around, he’s been increasingly bold about implying that he and his associates simply cannot be held accountable to the same rules as everyone else.…’
Via Salon.com
Michelle Goldberg, NYT opinion columnist:
’One of the chief questions in the Trump-Russia scandal has been whether Vladimir Putin has leverage over the president of the United States, and, if so, what that leverage looks like. The significance of the fabled “pee tape,” after all, is not that it would reveal Donald Trump to be a pervert bent on defiling the place where Barack Obama slept. Rather, the tape matters because, if real, it would show the president to be vulnerable to Russian blackmail.
That’s also why evidence of Trump’s business involvement with Russia would be significant, as Trump himself acknowledged shortly before his inauguration, when he tweeted, “Russia has never tried to use leverage over me. I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA — NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!”
We still don’t know for certain if Russia has used leverage over Trump. But there should no longer be any doubt that Russia has leverage over him.…’
Via New York Times
Detected as far as 10,000 miles away but, bizarrely, nobody seems to have felt them:
’On the morning of November 11, just before 9:30 UT, a mysterious rumble rolled around the world.
The seismic waves began roughly 15 miles off the shores of Mayotte, a French island sandwiched between Africa and the northern tip of Madagascar. The waves buzzed across Africa, ringing sensors in Zambia, Kenya, and Ethiopia. They traversed vast oceans, humming across Chile, New Zealand, Canada, and even Hawaii nearly 11,000 miles away. These waves didn’t just zip by; they rang for more than 20 minutes. And yet, it seems, no human felt them. Only one person noticed the odd signal on the U.S. Geological Survey’s real-time seismogram displays. An earthquake enthusiast who uses the handle @matarikipax saw the curious zigzags and posted images of them to Twitter. That small action kicked off another ripple of sorts, as researchers around the world attempted to suss out the source of the waves. Was it a meteor strike? A submarine volcano eruption? An ancient sea monster rising from the deep?
“I don’t think I’ve seen anything like it,” says Göran Ekström, a seismologist at Columbia University who specializes in unusual earthquakes. “It doesn’t mean that, in the end, the cause of them is that exotic,” he notes. Yet many features of the waves are remarkably weird—from their surprisingly monotone, low-frequency “ring” to their global spread. And researchers are still chasing down the geologic conundrum. Why are the low-frequency waves so weird? In a normal earthquake, the built-up tensions in Earth’s crust release with a jolt in mere seconds. This sends out a series of waves known as a “wave train” that radiates from the point of the rupture, explains Stephen Hicks, a seismologist at the University of Southampton. The fastest-traveling signals are Primary waves, or P-waves, which are compression waves that move in bunches, like what happens to an extended slinky that gets suddenly pushedat one end. Next come the secondary waves, or S-waves, which have more of a side-to-side motion. Both of these so-called body waves have relatively high frequencies, Hicks says, “a sort of ping rather than a rumbling.”
Earthquakes 101 Finally, chugging along at the end come slow, long-period surface waves, which are similar to the strange signals that rolled out from Mayotte. For intense earthquakes, these surface waves can zip around the planet multiple times, ringing Earth like a bell, Hicks says. However, there was no big earthquake kicking off the recent slow waves. Adding to the weirdness, Mayotte’s mystery waves are what scientists call monochromatic. Most earthquakes send out waves with a slew of different frequencies, but Mayotte’s signal was a clean zigzag dominated by one type of wave that took a steady 17 seconds to repeat. “It’s like you have colored glasses and [are] just seeing red or something,” says Anthony Lomax, an independent seismology consultant.
Mayotte’s volcanic roots Based on the scientific sleuthing done so far, the tremors seem to be related to a seismic swarm that’s gripped Mayotte since last May. Hundreds of quakes have rattled the small nation during that time, most radiating from around 31 miles offshore, just east of the odd ringing. The majority were minor trembles, but the largest clocked in at magnitude 5.8 on May 15, the mightiest in the island’s recorded history. Yet the frequency of these shakes has declined in recent months—and no traditional quakes rumbled there when the mystery waves began on November 11.
The French Geological Survey (BRGM) is closely monitoring the recent shaking, and it suggests that a new center of volcanic activity may be developing off the coast. Mayotte was formed from volcanism, but its geologic beasts haven’t erupted in over 4,000 years. Instead, BRGM’s analysis suggests that this new activity may point to magmatic movement offshore—miles from the coast under thousands of feet of water. Though this is good news for the island inhabitants, it’s irksome for geologists, since it’s an area that hasn’t been studied in detail. “The location of the swarm is on the edge of the [geological] maps we have,” says Nicolas Taillefer, head of the seismic and volcanic risk unit at BRGM. “There are a lot things we don’t know.” And as for the November 11 mystery wave, he says, “it’s something quite new in the signals on our stations.”
Motion in the ocean Though baffled, scientists aren’t without leads. For one, they know that Mayotte is on the move. Since mid-July, GPS stations on the island have tracked it sliding more than 2.4 inches to the east and 1.2 inches to the south, according to a BRGM report from November 12. Using these measurements, Taillefer notes, the agency estimates that a magma body that measures about a third of a cubic mile is squishing its way through the subsurface near Mayotte.…’
’People who speak languages missing from Google Translate, Siri, and Wikipedia will face future crises—leaving aid organizations scrambling.…’
Via WIRED
’We all want to do more to reduce our impact on the environment, but working out what steps to take to actually make a difference is a bit of a minefield…’
Via WIRED UK
One of the most surprising and least noticed aspects of Mueller’s approach all along:
‘…He’s been writing the long-anticipated “Mueller Report” bit by bit, in public, since his very first court filing.
Those waiting for Mueller to issue some massive, 9/11 Commission–style report at the end of the investigation often overlook the sheer volume of detailed information Mueller has pushed into public view already. Nearly every court document he has filed has been what lawyers call a “speaking indictment,” going into deeper detail and at greater length than is strictly needed to make the case for the criminal behavior charged.
Similarly, his “criminal informations,” the indictment-like documents filed as part of guilty pleas, have often included extraneous evidence of additional, formally uncharged criminality.
In former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s plea agreement, Mueller detailed how Flynn served as an unregistered foreign agent for the government of Turkey. Manafort’s criminal information—a document that often is only a few pages, the bare minimum that prosecutors and a defendant will agree upon—this fall stretched to nearly 40 pages, including voluminous details about the so-called Hapsburg group, European politicians enlisted in Manafort’s alleged scheme, information that hadn’t appeared in any of the indictments or charges against Manafort until that point.
With his major court filings, Mueller has already written more than 290 pages of the “Mueller Report.” As Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes has said, if a 9/11 Commission–style body had gathered in the wake of the 2016 election to study Russian interference, its findings would read much like Mueller’s novelistic charges against the Internet Research Agency and the military intelligence agency commonly referred to as the GRU.
Together with the charges against Michael Cohen by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York—which stemmed from findings by the Mueller investigation—the Justice Department has outlined over the course of this year two separate alleged criminal conspiracies that aided the election of Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election.
But even that’s not the full story.
Mueller’s courtroom strategy—guided surely by Michael Dreeben, one of the nation’s top appellate lawyers—has been all but flawless. His prosecutors have batted away numerous challenges, and he has notched a steady stream of guilty pleas. Earlier this fall, when Manafort became the first and only of those cases to go to trial, Mueller’s team convinced a jury of his guilt in each area of crimes they charged and, according to reporting afterward, came within a single vote of conviction on all 18 charges.
And now, Manafort’s apparent dissembling has given Mueller’s team an excuse to publish everything they know about Manafort’s “crimes and lies,” whether they’ve been publicly discussed yet or not. That could potentially include new information about that mysterious 2016 Trump Tower meeting—prompted by a Russian offer to help the campaign—or details about the apparent Assange connection.
A Manafort sentencing submission, meanwhile, would sidestep the current awkward question of delivering a “Mueller Report” to the acting attorney general, Matt Whitaker, that could be suppressed politically or redacted before release.…’
Via WIRED
’Writ presented by Human Rights Watch calls for prosecution over mass civilian casualties in Yemen and murder of Jamal Khashoggi…’
Via The Guardian
’No place is safe from the scourge of superbugs, a new study suggests, not even space. According to the study, samples of bacteria resistant to several antibiotics have been found on the International Space Station (ISS). And while the bacteria may not have made any astronauts sick, the authors say it’s pretty likely that they can…
The new study is actually an update to the researchers’ ongoing work. In January, the same team published research looking into the bacterial genetics of samples swabbed from the surfaces of the ISS in 2015. Within these samples, they found more than 100 bacterial genes known to help make bacteria resistant to antibiotics. And strains belonging to a particular species of bacteria, Enterobacter bugandensis, were resistant to all nine antibiotics tested against them.…’
Via Gizmodo
’Speaking to a parliamentary communications committee, Digital Minister Margot James described the software as “a very cynical, exploitative means… to hoodwink the general public”.
She added: “Some airlines have set an algorithm to identify passengers of the same surname travelling together.
How much money do airlines make from charging for extras? “They’ve had the temerity to split the passengers up, and when the family want to travel together they are charged more.”
It’s an issue that will be looked at by the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation, launched by the government this week to identify and address areas where clearer guidelines and regulation are needed in how data is used.
Passengers first started noticing they were being split up from their party if they didn’t pay more for allocated seating in June 2017, with Ryanair most commonly associated with the practice.
However, Europe’s biggest airline never admitted to changing the way seating was allocated, insisting there was no change and saying that those who don’t pay to choose a seat are “randomly” assigned one.…’
Via The Independent
’A group of psychologists at Emory University have proposed a new three-part model to explain schadenfreude. Their proposal, published in New Ideas in Psychology, suggests that the motivation behind the feeling is important and that an element of viewing others as less than human is often at play.
Drawing upon decades of work, the researchers suggest that three different motivations can drive the feeling of schadenfreude; aggression, rivalry, and justice.
Aggression based schadenfreude involves group identity. Often, improving the group you’re in can require the defeat of other groups. This kind of Schadenfreude is the one you might feel when your favorite team’s rival loses a game to somebody else and can’t make the playoffs, even though your team is already long out of the running.
Rivalry based schadenfreude is similar but distinct. This one is tied to individual achievement and jealousies. It occurs when you go out of your way to do better than another person, such as when you make a move in a game that improves your lead over one player in particular, but that doesn’t help you otherwise. Like when you play The Settlers of Catan with somebody and place a settlement right where they wanted to build one, even though there was a better option for you.
The third kind is justice based and revolves around the joy we feel when somebody who we think deserves some comeuppance, say a successful person who we all know robs, cheats, steals, and overcharges for lifesaving drugs who then goes to prison.…’
Via Big Think
Why ‘Changing-Look Quasars’ Appear to Vanish
’Quasars powered by supermassive black holes have been unexpectedly vanishing. Scientists have started to figure out why.…’
Via Quanta Magazine
Steve Jones writes:
‘Since World War II, and especially since 9/11, American presidents have often dropped in to share holiday meals with U.S. troops deployed in combat zones or potentially dangerous areas.
But don’t expect that from Donald Trump.
The man who couldn’t venture out in the rain to honor fallen Americans in France on the centennial of the World War I armistice has admitted being afraid to visit U.S. troops deployed in hot spots around the world.
According to a Washington Post report, an anonymous White House insider reportedly said, “He’s never been interested in going. He’s afraid of those situations. He’s afraid people want to kill him.” …’
Director of ‘The Man Who Fell to Earth’ Dies at 90:
’Nicolas Roeg, a British director acclaimed for a string of films in the 1970s that included the rite-of-passage tale “Walkabout,” the psychological thriller “Don’t Look Now” and the David Bowie vehicle “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” died on Friday. He was 90.…
Two of his movies made the British Film Institute’s list of the 100 best British movies ever made…’
’Over the past few years, an international team of almost 200 psychologists has been trying to repeat a set of previously published experiments from its field, to see if it can get the same results. Despite its best efforts, the project, called Many Labs 2, has only succeeded in 14 out of 28 cases. Six years ago, that might have been shocking. Now it comes as expected (if still somewhat disturbing) news.
In recent years, it has become painfully clear that psychology is facing a “reproducibility crisis,” in which even famous, long-established phenomena—the stuff of textbooks and ted Talks—might not be real. There’s social priming, where subliminal exposures can influence our behavior. And ego depletion, the idea that we have a limited supply of willpower that can be exhausted. And the facial-feedback hypothesis, which simply says that smiling makes us feel happier.
One by one, researchers have tried to repeat the classic experiments behind these well-known effects—and failed. And whenever psychologists undertake large projects, like Many Labs 2, in which they replicate past experiments en masse, they typically succeed, on average, half of the time.…’
Via The Atlantic
’These oil tanks in Invergordon, Scotland currently hold the world record.…’
Via Independent.UK
’There’s a verbal tic particular to a certain kind of response to a certain kind of story about the thinness and desperation of American society; about the person who died of preventable illness or the Kickstarter campaign to help another who can’t afford cancer treatment even with “good” insurance; about the plight of the homeless or the lack of resources for the rural poor; about underpaid teachers spending thousands of dollars of their own money for the most basic classroom supplies; about train derailments, the ruination of the New York subway system and the decrepit states of our airports and ports of entry.
“I can’t believe in the richest country in the world. …”
This is the expression of incredulity and dismay that precedes some story about the fundamental impoverishment of American life, the fact that the lived, built geography of existence here is so frequently wanting, that the most basic social amenities are at once grossly overpriced and terribly underwhelming, that normal people (most especially the poor and working class) must navigate labyrinths of bureaucracy for the simplest public services, about our extraordinary social and political paralysis in the face of problems whose solutions seem to any reasonable person self-evident and relatively straightforward.…’
Via Truthdig
’A dead sperm whale that washed up in Indonesia on Monday had more than 13 pounds of plastic waste in its stomach, according to local officials. An autopsy of the whale’s stomach turned up 115 plastic cups, 25 plastic bags, four plastic bottles, two flip-flops, some nylon, and more than 1,000 smaller plastic shards.…’
Via Motherboard
Follow Me Here is 19 years old today. Thank you to all my loyal readers, and here’s to many more years of fun curation and occasional sardonic commentary. Keep reading!
’Speaking to Fox News’s Chris Wallace in an interview that aired on Sunday, President Donald Trump explained that he didn’t manage to make it across the river to Arlington National Cemetery for a Veterans Day commemoration because “I was extremely busy on calls for the country, we did a lot of calling as you know.”
Had a Democratic president pulled this remarkable snub/gaffe combination, conservative media and conservative politicians would have pretended to be sincerely outraged and mainstream media would have pretended to believe them. But thanks to the normal operation of the hack gap, Trump’s unwillingness to inconvenience himself in the slightest in order to commemorate Veterans Day simply becomes the subject of arch commentary rather than faux outrage.
Perhaps the strangest thing about it is that Trump pretended to be busy when his public schedule for the day was empty. And thanks to his Twitter feed, we know perfectly well that he spent the day repeating weird misunderstandings of what a trade deficit is, flinging around absurd conspiracy theories about election fraud, feuding with the president of France, etc.
Yet the strangest thing about life in the United States in 2018 is that every time Trump sits down for an interview like this, he gives new evidence that we should almost certainly be glad he’s too lazy to actually bother doing his job most of the time. After all, he has no real understanding of any of the relevant issues.…’
Via Vox
Temperatures over 100 million degrees:
’In a breakthrough for nuclear fusion research, scientists at China’s Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) reactor have produced temperatures necessary for nuclear fusion on Earth. STEPHEN JOHNSON 15 November, 2018 The EAST reactor was able to heat hydrogen to temperatures exceeding 100 million degrees Celsius…
At the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) reactor in Hefei, China, researchers managed to heat hydrogen within the ‘artificial sun’ to a temperature of more than 100 million degrees Celsius, or 212 million degrees Fahrenheit, at which point it becomes plasma. The temperatures inside EAST are actually about seven times hotter than the center of the sun, where the added pressure from gravity allows for fusion to occur.…’
Via Big Think
Secret whale jail discovered by Russian reporters:
’Russian news network discovers 101 black-market whales. Orcas and belugas are seen crammed into tiny pens. Marine parks continue to create a high-price demand for illegal captures.…
This giant group of whales — 11 orcas and 90 belugas — are reportedly believed to have been captured by LLC Oceanarium DV, LLC Afalina, LLC Bely Kit and LLC Sochi Dolphinarium. According to VL, these four firms dominate an illegal export market for marine animals. The four companies appear to be largely unregulated.
These whales are believed to be for sale to one of China’s 60 marine parks and aquariums, with a dozen more venues reportedly under construction. With an individual orca said to be going for about $6 million on the black market, there’s money to be made in supplying all of these attractions, in China and elsewhere. There are thought to be at least 71 orcas currently in captivity — 166 orcas have been captured since 1961, and 129 of them have died since. SeaWorld still has 21 orcas; 48 have previously died at their parks…’
Via Big Think
Time to be afraid for the future:
’…[We] are a nation profoundly divided about what it means to be American. The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer suggested, in Anna Holmes’ documentary The Loving Generation, that the US has long been pledging allegiance to two very different visions of what it means to be an American. On one side, being an “American” involves signing up for a civic faith dedicated to the Constitution, to the rule of law, to the privacy of the voting booth and liberty and justice for all. This is the Americanness of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, of the pulsing urban coastal centers, a vision that’s open to your tired, your poor, your refugees from around the world yearning to be free and ready to work hard. On the other hand are those who believe that “American” means people whose parents were born here, who are white and Christian, who want to bar the doors against the swarthy hordes. And yes, at least some of the latter—like this weekend’s gunman—believe in the more sinister slogan that arbeit macht frei.
The US government has been teetering back and forth between these two visions for generations. And no matter which side occupies the White House, the other wants their country back. One side was happy with George W. Bush’s red meat, red state presidency, invading freedom-hating nations, torturing suspected enemies to show strength, and keeping the country secure with a sprawling (and enduring) “security” apparatus. The other side—the globalists, the diversity-lovers, the cosmopolitans, the blue-coastal urbanites—thought that by electing Barack Obama, they had won back their country. Now, if they didn’t before, these people know that boiling underneath Obama’s presidency was a furious resistance: the Tea Party, the racists, the white nationalists who then elected their Birther-in-Chief.…’
Via Vice
It’s going to get weirder from here.
’“No matter what the kind of natural disaster, whether it’s flooding or wind damage or fire, the biggest burden of the longest duration falls on the already-poor,” David Lodge, director of Cornell University’s Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future, told me.
In addition to the immediate threats to life and limb that come with any severe natural disaster, there may be a temporary period of homelessness or unemployment that can send someone on the brink of poverty over the edge. Without adequate insurance, savings to rebuild, or a reliable social safety net in place, what Lodge has called “the human face of policy-induced suffering” is revealed.
And with the current trajectory of increasing weather disasters, that suffering is likely to grow.…’
Via VICE
’The inner life of plants arouses the passions of even the mildest-mannered naturalists. A debate over plant consciousness and intelligence has raged in scientific circles for well over a century—at least since Charles Darwin observed in 1880 that stressed-out flora can’t rest.
There’s no doubt that plants are extremely complex. Biologists believe that plants communicate with one another, fungi, and animals by releasing chemicals via their roots, branches, and leaves. Plants also send seeds that supply information, working as data packets. They even sustain weak members of their own species by providing nutrients to their peers, which indicates a sense of kinship.
Plants have preferences—their roots move toward water, sensing its acoustic vibes—and defense mechanisms. They also have memories, and can learn from experience. One 2014 experiment, for example, involved dropping potted plants called Mimosa pudicas a short distance. At first, when the plants were dropped, they curled up their leaves defensively. But soon the plants learned that no harm would come to them, and they stopped protecting themselves.
But does any of this qualify as consciousness? The answer to that question seems to depend largely on linguistics, rather than science—how humans choose to define our conceptions of the self and intelligence.…’
Via Quartz
I’ve been sending this Mad TV Bob Newhart Skit with Mo Collins around to all my friends in the psychiatric field for years. (If it is not what we actually do in dealing with some patients, perhaps it is what we ought to do??) You might find it amusing. It runs around 6 min. Via YouTube
’A group of House Democrats will introduce a bill on Friday to help protect millions of nurses and other health care workers from the high rates of violence they experience on the job.
The new bill, called the Workplace Violence Prevention for Health Care and Social Service Workers Act, would require hospitals, nursing homes, rehab centers, and jails to develop a workplace safety plan to protect their workers from violence they experience at the hands of patients — a surprisingly common phenomenon. The bill would also require employers to record and investigate all complaints of violence, and prohibits retaliation against employees who call 911. A draft of the bill was shared with Vox.…’
Via Vox
’The FBI released a report earlier this year on “pre-attack behaviors” of mass shooters, Quartz reports. … The FBI writes in the report’s conclusion:
What emerges is a complex and troubling picture of individuals who fail to successfully navigate multiple stressors in their lives while concurrently displaying four to five observable, concerning behaviors, engaging in planning and preparation, and frequently communicating threats or leaking indications of an intent to attack.
It takes a community to spot all the red flags, they say. But they include forms of abuse, harassment, bullying, and violence, to name just a few. Among the red flags:
Via Lifehacker
Obvious caveat: while mass shooters may display this cluster of behaviors, far from everyone displaying this cluster of behaviors becomes a mass shooter.
Why 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’
’Ask medieval historian Michael McCormick what year was the worst to be alive, and he’s got an answer: “536.” Not 1349, when the Black Death wiped out half of Europe. Not 1918, when the flu killed 50 million to 100 million people, mostly young adults. But 536. In Europe, “It was the beginning of one of the worst periods to be alive, if not the worst year,” says McCormick, a historian and archaeologist who chairs the Harvard University Initiative for the Science of the Human Past.
A mysterious fog plunged Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia into darkness, day and night—for 18 months. “For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year,” wrote Byzantine historian Procopius. Temperatures in the summer of 536 fell 1.5°C to 2.5°C, initiating the coldest decade in the past 2300 years. Snow fell that summer in China; crops failed; people starved. The Irish chronicles record “a failure of bread from the years 536–539.” Then, in 541, bubonic plague struck the Roman port of Pelusium, in Egypt. What came to be called the Plague of Justinian spread rapidly, wiping out one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire and hastening its collapse, McCormick says.
Historians have long known that the middle of the sixth century was a dark hour in what used to be called the Dark Ages, but the source of the mysterious clouds has long been a puzzle. Now, an ultraprecise analysis of ice from a Swiss glacier by a team led by McCormick and glaciologist Paul Mayewski at the Climate Change Institute of The University of Maine (UM) in Orono has fingered a culprit. At a workshop at Harvard this week, the team reported that a cataclysmic volcanic eruption in Iceland spewed ash across the Northern Hemisphere early in 536. Two other massive eruptions followed, in 540 and 547. The repeated blows, followed by plague, plunged Europe into economic stagnation that lasted until 640, when another signal in the ice—a spike in airborne lead—marks a resurgence of silver mining, as the team reports in Antiquity this week.…’
Via Science | AAAS
By comparison, read about the cataclysmic effects of the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora, on the island of Sumbawa, in present-day Indonesia.. Everyone knows about Krakatoa in 1883, but this was an order of magnitude greater.
But the worst may be yet to come. Consider Ragnarok:
Described in several Norse sources (primarily Snorri Sturluson’s 13th century Prose Edda), Ragnarök begins with a brutal winter lasting three times longer than usual, driving mankind to lawless desperation. The stars disappear, and the giant wolf, Fenrir, breaks free of his chains and devours everything in his path. A gigantic sea-dwelling serpent named Jormungand rises, and the trickster god Loki leads an army of giants into battle against Odin and the other gods at Asgard. The gods perish, and whatever remains of the world sinks into the sea.
’The claim, being taken up by an increasing number of people in QAnon circles, is that the fires are caused by “directed energy weapons”—that is, government-directed lasers bent on destroying homes, property, and lives. And if recent history is any judge, there’s a chance the country’s biggest conspiracy-peddlers, up to and including the one who lives in the White House, will take up the cause.
Directed energy weapons, or DEWs, have an interesting place in conspiratorial circles. DEWs are, to begin with, a real technology, but one still in its infancy: a report produced for Congress describes that term as an umbrella to refer to technologies “that produce concentrated electromagnetic energy and atomic or subatomic particles.” The consensus is that there are a number of logistical issues to work out before that the U.S. government will be able to build a laser system that would actually be workable on a battlefield, but that the Department of Defense and private contractors are eager to leverage laser power towards killing people and/or destroying enemy missiles, aircrafts, or satellites.
If you ask people in the deep end of the conspiracy theory pool, though, DEWs are here already. There’s a small body of people who believe themselves to be “targeted individuals”—stalked, harassed, and attacked by the government or other shadowy groups—and at least some of them believe those attacks are being carried out by DEWs. Now, through a strange confluence of forces, the paranoia over DEWs is making its way into the discussion about natural disasters. What we’re seeing is a convergence of longstanding American fears about government mind control and manipulation of the weather merging with climate change skepticism, as climate science becomes ever-more-politicized.…’
Via Earther
Did you know:
- The consensus view among scientists is that polygraph testing has no scientific basis?
- The FBI considered the creator of the lie detector test to be a phony and a crackpot?
- The man who started the CIA’s polygraph program thought that plants can read human thoughts?
- The foremost polygraph advocate in academia was discredited by a federal judge?
- A prominent past-president of the American Polygraph Association is a phony Ph.D., and this premier polygraph organization doesn’t consider it an ethics problem?
- The longest polygraph school produces newly minted polygraphers in just 14 weeks — less than half the time it takes to graduate from a typical barber college?
- The National Center for Credibility Assessment (the erstwhile DoD Polygraph Institute) suppressed a study suggesting that innocent blacks are more likely to fail the polygraph than innocent whites?
- The researcher who developed the U.S. Government’s polygraph Test for Espionage and Sabotage “thought the whole security screening program should be shut down?”
- The National Academy of Sciences concluded that “[polygraph testing’s] accuracy in distinguishing actual or potential security violators from innocent test takers is insufficient to justify reliance on its use in employee security screening in federal agencies?”
- Spies Ignatz Theodor Griebl, Karel Frantisek Koecher, Jiri Pasovsky, Larry Wu-tai Chin, Aldrich Hazen Ames, Nicolás Sirgado, Ana Belen Montes, and Leandro Aragoncillo all passed the polygraph?
- One of the most prolific serial killers in U.S. history passed the polygraph and killed again?
- Al-Qaeda and Iraqi insurgents know full well that the lie detector is bogus?
- You don’t have to be a psychopath, go to spy school, or somehow believe your own lies to fool the polygraph? (We’ll reveal how it’s done.)
Educate yourself. Before playing Russian roulette with yourreputation, learn how to protect yourself against this invalid test. Download AntiPolygraph.org’s free book (4 mb PDF):
The Lie Behind the Lie Detector
(Also available in EPUB and MOBI/Kindle formats)…’
Jack Holmes writes:
‘The president just admitted, unprompted, that he fired the head of the Justice Department and installed a loyalist over a Justice Department investigation into him and his associates. This is obstruction. This is corrupt. This is an untenable assault on the rule of law in a democratic republic. And the Republican majorities in Congress—to say nothing of his base—will happily let him get away with it. …’
Source: Esquire
Can AI fix it?:
’Cities are looking to machine learning to streamline their disaster-response efforts. Will it be too little too late?…’
Via Fast Company
’Poorer people living in formerly industrialized cities in the middle latitudes tend to live on the East side. Here’s what’s probably going on.…’
Via Digg
(Hint: prevailing winds.)
Daily Caller interview transcript shows he has no clue
’In some ways, the friendliest Donald Trump interviews are the most revealing. Given the opportunity to ramble and free-associate without any pushback whatsoever, you can see what channels his mind naturally follows.
His latest interview with the Daily Caller shows a president who’s fundamentally out to sea. The sycophantic interviewers can’t get Trump to answer a policy question of any kind, no matter how much of a softball they lob at him. The only subjects he is actually interested in talking about are his deranged belief in his incredible popularity and how that popularity is not reflected in actual vote totals because he’s the victim of a vast voter fraud conspiracy.
It’s the kind of thing that would be a bit sad if it were just your elderly uncle ranting about his past glories, but Trump mixes it in with authoritarian asides and the fundamental reality that whether he cares to do the actual job or not, he is ultimately the president of the United States.…’
Via Vox
Donald Trump: incompetent or authoritarian? Both are scary. Reject journalist David Brooks’s false choice:
’While promoting an excellent article by Weekly Standard editor Jonathan Last about President Donald Trump’s tendency to be the vaporware president, New York Times columnist David Brooks offers an unfortunate false dichotomy, saying that Americans should fear Trump’s incompetence rather than his authoritarianism.
This is a frequent theme among intelligent conservative commentators who find themselves trapped between the bombast of the MAGA-maniacs and the ideological betrayals of the hardcore Never Trumpers. Ross Douthat wrote in January in the New York Times, for example, that “Trump so far is more farce than tragedy.” …
There are undoubtedly real examples of autocratic rulers who are also savvy, highly skilled technocrats who excel at devising and implementing public policy.
Singapore’s former leader Lee Kwan Yoo is the example one hears most commonly, but the likes of Paul Kagame in Rwanda, Deng Xiaoping in China, and Park Chung-hee in South Korea are also often said to fit the bill.
But a much more common situation is for authoritarians to appoint people to positions of authority based on considerations of loyalty and regime stability rather than competence…’
Via Vox
’George Lakoff, a professor of linguistics and cognitive science at UC Berkeley and the author of the 2004 book Don’t Think of an Elephant, recently published an article laying out the media’s dilemma. Trump’s “big lie” strategy, he argues, is to “exploit journalistic convention by providing rapid-fire news events for reporters to chase.”
According to Lakoff, the president uses lies to divert attention from the “big truths,” or the things he doesn’t want the media to cover. This allows Trump to create the controversies he wants and capitalize on the outrage and confusion they generate, while simultaneously stoking his base and forcing the press into the role of “opposition party.”
I reached out to Lakoff to talk about Trump’s media strategy, but also, more importantly, about solutions. If the president has indeed turned journalistic conventions to his advantage, how can we, the media, respond constructively?…’
Via Vox
’Sen. Jeff Flake, the lame-duck Arizona senator who’s long clashed with President Donald Trump, is once again threatening to use his position to express concerns about executive power and the fate of the Russia investigation.
It’s not an empty threat. But it’s not yet clear to what extent he’ll follow through.
Flake said on Wednesday that he would oppose all judicial nominees coming through the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate floor until Majority Leader Mitch McConnell puts a bill protecting special counsel Robert Mueller up for a vote.…’
Via Vox
Trump rages against Robert Mueller:
’In an angry Twitter rant, Trump describes Mueller as “a disgrace to our Nation.”…’
Via Vox
Fox backs CNN in lawsuit against Trump Administration:
’On Tuesday, CNN filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration for allegedly violating the First and Fifth Amendments when it revoked Jim Acosta’s press badge. Opinions on Acosta may vary among media professionals, though the general consensus seems to be that administrations shouldn’t bar journalists from the White House based on the content of their reporting. White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders, who had tweeted a doctored video of the heated exchange between Acosta and President Donald Trump, described CNN’s lawsuit as “more grandstanding.” Fox News voiced support on Wednesday for CNN’s effort to restore the press pass of reporter Jim Acosta after it was revoked by the White House.…’
Via Big Think
’Technically, “S1” is a stream of debris from a dwarf galaxy torn apart by the Milky Way’s gravity, passing through space. What S1 is pulling along with it, though, is being described in a far more dramatic way, as “a dark matter hurricane.” Scientists believe this companion stream of dark matter (DM) is hurtling through us right now at a jaw-dropping speed of 500 kilometers a second. Hence the “hurricane” metaphor. Is it time to head down into our quantum storm cellars? Not quite. This is dark matter, after all, material we can’t directly perceive and with which we can’t interact, so no worries. On the other hand, this blast of DM has the potential to afford us our best glimpse yet of the elusive stuff.…’
Via Big Think
Is the appendix a useless organ, an immune system benefactor, a Parkinson’s disease instigator, or all of the above?
’As far back as Darwin, scientists have thought the appendix was a vestigial organ, but opinions have changed in recent years. A new study found that the appendix houses Lewy bodies, abnormal protein deposits that contribute to Parkinson’s disease. Researchers suggest an appendectomy may lower one’s risk of Parkinson’s, while other research suggests the appendix has important roles to play in our immune system.…’
Via Big Think
’Progressive America would be half as big, but twice as populated as its conservative twin.…’
Via Big Think
An Open Letter to the NRA from American Healthcare Professionals:
’Dear National Rifle Association, On Wednesday night (11/7/2018), in response to a position paper released by the American College of Physicians (ACP) Reducing Firearm Injuries and Death in the United States, your organization published the statement “Someone should tell self-important anti-gun doctors to stay in their lane.”
On that same day, the CDC published new data indicating that the death toll from gun violence in our nation continues to rise. As we read your demand for us doctors to stay in our lane, we awoke to learn of the 307th mass shooting in 2018 with another 12 innocent lives lost to an entirely preventable cause of death–gun violence.
Every medical professional practicing in the United States has seen enough gun violence firsthand to deeply understand the toll that this public health epidemic is taking on our children, families, and entire communities.
It is long past time for us to acknowledge the epidemic is real, devastating, and has root causes that can be addressed to assuage the damage. We must ALL come together to find meaningful solutions to this very American problem.
We, the undersigned – physicians, nurses, therapists, medical professionals, and other concerned community members – want to tell you that we are absolutely “in our lane” when we propose solutions to prevent death and disability from gun violence.
As the professionals who manage this epidemic, we bear witness to every trauma resuscitation, regardless of outcome:…’ (AFFIRM, the American Foundation for Firearm Injury Reduction in Medicine)
If you are a healthcare professional, you can add your signature to this letter, as I did.
Help Stop Trump Demonization of Immigrants:An individual who might become a “public charge”, according to US immigration law, is inadmissible to the US and ineligible to become a permanent resident. However, up to now, receiving public benefits does not automatically qualify an immigrant as a public charge. Thus, non-citizens could apply for public benefits and participate in essential health, nutrition and housing programs without jeopardizing their immigration status. (Via Public Charge Fact Sheet).
However, the Trump administration has proposed changes to the “public charge” regulation to remove those essential protections. This would be Donald Trump’s most far-reaching immigration policy change and one of his most mean-spirited actions.
Under the proposed rule, the list of public benefits that count against an immigrant would greatly expand. The benefits that the administration proposes be added to the public charge list are benefits that support disadvantaged families and protect public health and child welfare. Immigrants currently receiving public services would incur increased risk of deportation and would be excluded from becoming permanent residents of the US. The chilling effect of the regulation would prevent many others from applying for benefits and services in the first place. If enacted, this regulation would dramatically enhance the misery of many immigrants who have already suffering severe misfortune.
You can submit written comments about this proposal by December 10, 2018, which must be taken into account before a final rule is issued.
So, please join me in voicing opposition to this proposed regulation.
You may submit comments on this proposed rule by any one of the following methods:
— Federal eRulemaking Portal (preferred): www.regulations.gov. Follow the website instructions for submitting comments.
— Mail: Samantha Deshommes, Chief, Regulatory Coordination Division, Office of Policy and Strategy, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Department of Homeland Security, 20 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20529-2140.
To ensure proper handling, please reference DHS Docket No. USCIS-2010-0012 in your correspondence. Mail must be postmarked by the comment submission deadline.
One of many humanitarian agencies that offer further education on the proposed rule change and provide templates for drafting comments is CLINIC, the Catholic Legal Immigration Network.
How Will The Public Charge Rule Impact Employers And Immigrants? (Forbes)
Now the Trump administration is trying to punish legal immigrants for … (Washington Post)
Trump’s Public-Charge Rule Is a One-Two Punch Against Immigrants … (New Yorker)
Immigrants, fearing Trump crackdown, drop out of nutrition programs … (Politico)
’The White House is bracing for the probe of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign to fire up again. Trump’s advisers are privately expressing worries that Robert Mueller, who’s been out of the news for the past month, has been stealthily compiling information and could soon issue new indictments or a damning final report. Trump abruptly altered the chain of command above Mueller on Wednesday, putting his work under the supervision of a Republican loyalist who has been openly sceptical of the special counsel’s authority and has mused about ways to curtail his power. But Trump and his aides are concerned about Mueller’s next move with the work that is complete, according to a White House official and a Republican with close ties to the administration.
Via Medium
’Picked up by MacRumors, iOS has started locking owners of iPhones (and to a lesser extent iPads and Apple TVs) out of their devices, disabling their Apple IDs. And Apple has now acknowledged it.
Apple’s new iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max and iPhone XR are among the devices affected by the widespread Apple ID lockoutAPPLE Citing multiple reports across Reddit and Twitter, MacRumors says users are being told they can no longer use their devices “for security reasons”. In response, @AppleSupport is recognising the issue and guiding users to the company’s Support Communities page which tells users how to restore access when Apple IDs are locked and disabled.…’
Via Forbes
’With the certainty that the incoming Democratic House majority will go after his tax returns and investigate his actions, and the likelihood of additional indictments by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, Trump has retreated into a cocoon of bitterness and resentment, according to multiple administration sources. Behind the scenes, they say, the president has lashed out at several aides, from junior press assistants to senior officials. “He’s furious,” said one administration official. “Most staffers are trying to avoid him.” The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, painted a picture of a brooding president “trying to decide who to blame” for Republicans’ election losses, even as he publicly and implausibly continues to claim victory.…’
Five days of fury:
’Trump’s splenetic tweets and [testy tone were] described in interviews with 14 senior administration officials, outside Trump confidants and foreign diplomats, many of whom requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.
“He was frustrated with the trip. And he’s itching to make some changes,” said one senior White House official. “This is a week where things could get really dicey.”
During his 43-hour stay in Paris, Trump brooded over the Florida recounts and sulked over key races being called for Democrats in the midterm elections that he had claimed as a “big victory.” He erupted at his staff over media coverage of his decision to skip a ceremony honoring the military sacrifice of World War I.
The president also was angry and resentful over French President Emmanuel Macron’s public rebuke of rising nationalism, which Trump considered a personal attack. And that was after his difficult meeting with Macron, where officials said little progress was made as Trump again brought up his frustrations over trade and Iran.
“He’s just a bull carrying his own china shop with him when ever he travels the world,” presidential historian Douglas Brinkley said.…’
Via Washington Post
’Claire Lehmann’s online magazine, Quillette, prides itself on publishing ‘dangerous’ ideas other outlets won’t touch. How far is it willing to go?…’
Marissa Harris (UCLA):
’In a time of borderline hysteria over the effects of technology on sleep and brain development, little attention goes to the fundamental elements of good sleep in adolescents. Ensuring they have comfortable bedding may help improve sleep in all adolescents, particularly among poorer families. And it’s a lot easier to convince parents and teens to invest in pillows than to bicker over phone privileges.…’
Via The Conversation
’When Ted Kaptchuk was asked to give the opening keynote address at the conference in Leiden, he contemplated committing the gravest heresy imaginable: kicking off the inaugural gathering of the Society for Interdisciplinary Placebo Studies by declaring that there was no such thing as the placebo effect. When he broached this provocation in conversation with me not long before the conference, it became clear that his point harked directly back to Franklin: that the topic he and his colleagues studied was created by the scientific establishment, and only in order to exclude it — which means that they are always playing on hostile terrain. Science is “designed to get rid of the husks and find the kernels,” he told me. Much can be lost in the threshing — in particular, Kaptchuk sometimes worries, the rituals embedded in the doctor-patient encounter that he thinks are fundamental to the placebo effect, and that he believes embody an aspect of medicine that has disappeared as scientists and doctors pursue the course laid by Franklin’s commission. “Medical care is a moral act,” he says, in which a suffering person puts his or her fate in the hands of a trusted healer.…’
’Could this be the long-awaited solution to economic inequality?…’
Via Big Think
’Political scientist and journalist David Rothkopf says Trump’s days in the White House are numbered. In a blistering Twitter thread, Rothkopf makes the case that any high-quality people Trump had supporting him have either fled or are getting ready to, and now that the House is under control of Democrats, Trump’s inner circle of bottom-of-the-barrel crooks and buffoons won’t be able to protect him from his sordid history of sleazy dealings and self-destructive narcissism.…’
Via Boing Boing
Can it become a sort of bullshitting itself?
’Calling bullshit has a venerable intellectual pedigree. Plato first carved out a space for philosophy by distinguishing the philosopher’s search for knowledge from the persuasive speech of the sophists, the bullshit artists of antiquity. These wandering debate coaches instructed the Greek political class in the art of making the weaker argument the stronger. The rhetoric of the sophists is just fancy talk that creates the impression of wisdom, Plato tells us, but philosophy offers the genuine article.
In recent years, calling bullshit has become its own cottage industry. Debunkers like Michael Shermer and James Randi make a healthy living by exposing pseudoscience, and Harry Frankfurt scored an unlikely best seller when Princeton University Press managed to package his essay “On Bullshit” into a very small book. The mathematician Alan Sokal landed a blow against postmodern pretension by publishing a sham article in the journal Social Text in 1996, and when a more ambitious act of pomo-baiting surfaced about a month ago—a team of three pranksters had successfully submitted seven sham articles to journals peddling in what they derisively called “Grievance Studies”—the hoax came to be known as “Sokal Squared.”
Bullshitting has its obvious incentives and pleasures: you get all the kudos of saying interesting and important things without any of the work of actually thinking interesting and important things. As Frankfurt notes, there’s even an enjoyable play in concocting bullshit. Less obvious are the incentives and pleasures of calling bullshit. And yet they’re pretty much the same: you get all the kudos of asserting your intellectual superiority to the bullshitters, and it brings a certain aesthetic enjoyment with it as well. Just saying “bullshit” is deeply satisfying, its rich soup of consonants opening with an aggressive plosive and then sliding into the disdainful slurred hiss of “shit.” Where the bullshitter gets to bask in the glow of unearned wisdom, the bullshit-caller gets to strike the pose of the undeceived straight-talker bravely swimming against a rising tide of baloney.…’
Akim Reinhardt writing in 3 Quarks Daily:
’Donald Trump is not a fascist. He’s far too stupid to be a fascist, or to coherently advocate for any complex national political doctrine, evil or otherwise. He is, however, a would-be tin pot dictator. And his largely failed but still very dangerous attempts to establish himself as a right wing autocrat need to be countered, not just by opposition politicians and the press, but also by responsible citizens.
It has been the case for a while now that the proper reaction to Trump’s presidency is frequent public protest. As responsible citizens, we need to engage in not just one or two massive protests per year, but rather in a steady diet of public protests that sends a strong, clear message to the body politic: We the people reject Donald Trump’s would be totalitarianism. That while his very limited abilities and profound incompetence may prove to be our saving grace, it is not enough to quietly accept his likely ultimate and embarrassing failure as reasonable consolation. Instead we must make certain that the power elite in government, corporations, and the media understand our collective revulsion at and resistance to Trump’s failing autocracy. Here are the reasons why.…’
Andrew Sullivan writes:
‘Tuesday, if you step back, was an ordinary election in an extraordinary time. The swing against the president’s party in the first midterm election was not far off the historical range. The average loss for the president’s party in the House two years into a first term over the last century is 29. Trump’s GOP, at last estimate, lost 37. For some recent perspective: In 1982, Reagan’s GOP lost 26 seats; in 1990, George H.W. Bush’s GOP lost 8; in 1994, Clinton’s Democrats lost 54; in 2002, W.’s GOP gained 8 (but in the context of 9/11); in 2010, Obama’s Democrats lost a devastating 63 seats. In terms of the popular vote in the House, the Dems’ share — 51.7 percent — is also very close to the norm for the opposition in a first-term midterm.
There was, in other words, no blue wave. It was rather a familiar blue tide (which nonetheless looked more impressive by Thursday night than it did in the wee hours of Wednesday morning). If you just looked at the data, and knew nothing about the last two years, you’d think it was a conventional, even boring, election.
I wrote last week that the midterms would finally tell us what this country now is. And with a remarkable turnout — a 50-year high for a non-presidential election, no less — we did indeed learn something solid and eye-opening. We learned that the American public as a whole has reacted to the first two years of an unfit, delusional, mendacious, malevolent, incompetent authoritarian as president … with relative equanimity. The net backlash is milder than it was against Clinton or Obama (and both of them went on to win reelection). …’
Source: New York Magazine
The public “deserve to know”:
’Long-term studies certainly suggest that a substantial population of people are affected by a burdensome, recurrent form of the disorder. But Rottenberg’s team cite three studies finding that an average of 40 to 50 per cent of people who suffer an episode of depression don’t go on to experience another (for example, this study in Sweden) – but overall these individuals have been little studied. “This omission, and the field’s lack of focus on good outcomes after depression more broadly, virtually guarantees an unduly pessimistic impression of depression’s course”, Rottenberg and co write – and this is an impression they would like to see changed.…’
Via Big Think
’When the world gets its act together, it can actually solve big problems. Case in point: The ozone hole, which if everything goes according to plan could be healed up by the 2060s, according to a new report from the United Nations.…’
Via Gizmodo
’The Mediterranean region, colloquially called the cradle of civilization, may not be able support much of that civilization within the next 50 years. For starters, it’s poised to suffer from the changing climate much worse than many other locales, according to a paper published by an international network of scientists who worked together to synthesize the predictions and risks for the region.
Future warming in the Mediterranean region will likely surpass global rates by 25 percent, with summer temperatures increasing at a pace 40 percent larger than the global mean, the paper notes. Precipitation will decrease but heavy rainfalls will intensify, with possibly destructive outcomes. Heat waves will get more severe. While the 2003 summer European heat wave was deemed as one of the worst on record, responsible for 22,000 to 35,000 human deaths, as well as killing thousands of birds and fish, the future will bring harsher and more frequent spikes. Droughts and heat waves will spark more wildfires. In warmer weather more disease-carrying pests will survive, spreading West Nile virus, Dengue, and chikungunya further north. During the hot summer of 2017, outbreaks of chikungunya happened in France and Italy and recently, dengue fever was reported in Croatia, France, Greece, Italy, Malta, Portugal and Spain.…’
Via JSTOR Daily
Pioneer of American Zen dies at 79
’The Zen master, spaceship engineer, social entrepreneur, interfaith activist, and clown devoted his life to “penetrating mysteries” and immersing himself in the unknown.…’
Via Lion’s Roar
’Climate scientists are still scrapping over the details, but the increased ferocity, unpredictability and spread of tropical storms is in line with predictions…’
Via New Scientist
What’s driving America’s mental health crisis:
’Beyond trigger warnings and safe spaces lies an entire population that espouses victimhood in all walks of life.…’
Via Big Think
Trumpeter Who Gave Jazz a Jolt of Youth Dies at 49
’Roy Hargrove, a virtuoso trumpeter who became a symbol of jazz’s youthful renewal in the early 1990s, and then established himself as one of the most respected musicians of his generation, died on Friday in Manhattan. He was 49.
His death, at Mount Sinai Hospital, was caused by cardiac arrest brought on by kidney disease, according to his manager, Larry Clothier. He said Mr. Hargrove had been on dialysis for 13 years.
Beginning in his high school years Mr. Hargrove expressed a deep affinity for jazz’s classic lexicon and the creative flexibility to place it in a fresh context. He would take the stock phrases of blues and jazz and reinvigorate them while reminding listeners of the long tradition whence he came.
“He rarely sounds as if he stepped out of a time machine,” the critic Nate Chinen wrote in 2008, reviewing Mr. Hargrove’s album “Earfood” for The New York Times. “At brisk tempos he summons a terrific clarity and tension, leaning against the current of his rhythm section. At a slower crawl, playing fluegelhorn, he gives each melody the equivalent of a spa treatment.” In the late 1990s, already established as a jazz star, Mr. Hargrove became affiliated with the Soulquarians, a loose confederation of musicians from the worlds of hip-hop and neo-soul that included Questlove, Erykah Badu, Common and D’Angelo. For several years the collective convened semi-regularly at Electric Lady Studios in Manhattan, recording now-classic albums. Mr. Hargrove’s sly horn overdubs can be heard, guttering like a low flame, on R&B classics like “Voodoo,” by D’Angelo, and “Mama’s Gun,” by Ms. Badu.
“He is literally the one-man horn section I hear in my head when I think about music,” Questlove wrote on Instagram after Mr. Hargrove’s death.…’
W. B. Yeats 1865-1939
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
’
Perhaps because they are running scared, the Trump family—and Republicans in general—are going all-in on a campaign of overt racism and white supremacist dog whistles to rally MAGA voters across the country as Tuesday’s midterm elections approach.
And in a continual effort to please his racist daddy, Donald Trump Jr. is doing his part to spread the hate. On Saturday, Don Jr. tweeted an attack against independent Maine Sen. Angus King that could have come straight from the white supremacist Iowa Republican congressman Steve King. It had the standard fearmongering of the “other,” in this case, Syrian and “Somalian” refugees; it criticized Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer, who is Jewish; and for good measure, it included the dog whistle term “88,” which neo-Nazis use as code for “Heil Hitler.”
And no, it wasn’t a typo.
“Angus King is a Fake Independent who votes with Schumer 88% of the time. Angus wants to repopulate Maine with Syrian and Somalian refugees. Support @SenatorBrakey who fights for secure borders and Better Jobs for Maine. #me #maine,” Don Jr. tweeted.
“Repopulate.” Where have we heard that concept, which is linked to the myth of “white genocide,” before? Oh, that’s right—Steve King.
As BuzzFeed’s Hayes Brown pointed out, that 88% statistic is wrong. King voted in agreement with Schumer 83% of the time in the 115th Congress, according to ProPublica. But Don Jr. knew that.
“Let’s be clear about what happened here — Donald Trump Jr misstated statistics so he could attack Angus King with a neo-Nazi dogwhistle,” ThinkProgress journalist Aaron Rupar tweeted.
Republican Senate candidate Eric Brakey, currently a state senator from Maine, was elated with the message. “Thank you, we support your family!” Brakey tweeted back at Jr.
Less than a week ago, Brakey tweeted out a similar message, claiming the “left” has a “new strategy” of “mass importation of new voters to transform our political culture.”
Tuesday can’t come fast enough.…’
Via Splinter News
’A careful reading of court filings suggests the special counsel hasn’t been quiet. Far from it.…’
A reprise of my traditional Hallowe’en post of past years:
It is that time of year again. What has become a time of disinhibited hijinx and mayhem, and a growing marketing bonanza for the kitsch-manufacturers and -importers, has primeval origins as the Celtic New Year’s Eve, Samhain (pronounced “sow-en”). The harvest is over, summer ends and winter begins, the Old God dies and returns to the Land of the Dead to await his rebirth at Yule, and the land is cast into darkness. The veil separating the worlds of the living and the dead becomes frayed and thin, and dispossessed dead mingle with the living, perhaps seeking a body to possess for the next year as their only chance to remain connected with the living, who hope to scare them away with ghoulish costumes and behavior, escape their menace by masquerading as one of them, or placate them with offerings of food, in hopes that they will go away before the new year comes. For those prepared, a journey to the other side could be made at this time.
With Christianity, perhaps because with calendar reform it was no longer the last day of the year, All Hallows’ Eve became decathected, a day for innocent masquerading and fun, taking its name Hallowe’en as a contraction and corruption of All Hallows’ Eve.
All Saints’ Day may have originated in its modern form with the 8th century Pope Gregory III. Hallowe’en customs reputedly came to the New World with the Irish immigrants of the 1840’s. The prominence of trick-or-treating has a slightly different origin, however.
The custom of trick-or-treating is thought to have originated not with the Irish Celts, but with a ninth-century European custom called souling. On November 2, All Souls Day, early Christians would walk from village to village begging for “soul cakes,” made out of square pieces of bread with currants. The more soul cakes the beggars would receive, the more prayers they would promise to say on behalf of the dead relatives of the donors. At the time, it was believed that the dead remained in limbo for a time after death, and that prayer, even by strangers, could expedite a soul’s passage to heaven.
English: A traditional Irish turnip Jack-o’-lantern from the early 20th century.
Jack-o’-lanterns were reportedly originally turnips; the Irish began using pumpkins after they immigrated to North America, given how plentiful they were here. The Jack-o-lantern custom probably comes from Irish folklore. As the tale is told, a man named Jack, who was notorious as a drunkard and trickster, tricked Satan into climbing a tree. Jack then carved an image of a cross in the tree’s trunk, trapping the devil up the tree. Jack made a deal with the devil that, if he would never tempt him again, he would promise to let him down the tree.
According to the folk tale, after Jack died, he was denied entrance to Heaven because of his evil ways, but he was also denied access to Hell because he had tricked the devil. Instead, the devil gave him a single ember to light his way through the frigid darkness. The ember was placed inside a hollowed-out turnip to keep it glowing longer.
Nowadays, a reported 99% of cultivated pumpkin sales in the US go for jack-o-lanterns.
Folk traditions that were in the past associated with All Hallows’ Eve took much of their power, as with the New Year’s customs about which I write here every Dec. 31st, from the magic of boundary states, transition, and liminality.
The idea behind ducking, dooking or bobbing for apples seems to have been that snatching a bite from the apple enables the person to grasp good fortune. Samhain is a time for getting rid of weakness, as pagans once slaughtered weak animals which were unlikely to survive the winter. A common ritual calls for writing down weaknesses on a piece of paper or parchment, and tossing it into the fire. There used to be a custom of placing a stone in the hot ashes of the bonfire. If in the morning a person found that the stone had been removed or had cracked, it was a sign of bad fortune. Nuts have been used for divination: whether they burned quietly or exploded indicated good or bad luck. Peeling an apple and throwing the peel over one’s shoulder was supposed to reveal the initial of one’s future spouse. One way of looking for omens of death was for peope to visit churchyards
The Witches’ Sabbath aspect of Hallowe’en seems to result from Germanic influence and fusion with the notion of Walpurgisnacht. (You may be familiar with the magnificent musical evocation of this, Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain.)
Although probably not yet in a position to shape mainstream American Hallowe’en traditions, Mexican Dia de los Muertos observances have started to contribute some delightful and whimsical iconography to our encounter with the eerie and unearthly as well. As this article in The Smithsonian reviews, ‘In the United States, Halloween is mostly about candy, but elsewhere in the world celebrations honoring the departed have a spiritual meaning…’
Reportedly, more than 80% of American families decorate their homes, at least minimally, for Hallowe’en. What was the holiday like forty or fifty years ago in the U.S. when, bastardized as it has now become with respect to its pagan origins, it retained a much more traditional flair? Before the era of the pay-per-view ’spooky-world’ type haunted attractions and its Martha Stewart yuppification with, as this irreverent Salon article from several years ago [via walker] put it, monogrammed jack-o’-lanterns and the like? One issue may be that, as NPR observed,
‘“Adults have hijacked Halloween… Two in three adults feel Halloween is a holiday for them and not just kids,” Forbes opined in 2012, citing a public relations survey. True that when the holiday was imported from Celtic nations in the mid-19th century — along with a wave of immigrants fleeing Irelands potato famine — it was essentially a younger persons’ game. But a little research reveals that adults have long enjoyed Halloween — right alongside young spooks and spirits.’
Is that necessarily a bad thing? A 1984 essay by Richard Seltzer, frequently referenced in other sources, entitled “Why Bother to Save Hallowe’en?”, argues as I do that reverence for Hallowe’en is good for the soul, young or old.
“Maybe at one time Hallowe’en helped exorcise fears of death and ghosts and goblins by making fun of them. Maybe, too, in a time of rigidly prescribed social behavior, Hallowe’en was the occasion for socially condoned mischief — a time for misrule and letting loose. Although such elements still remain, the emphasis has shifted and the importance of the day and its rituals has actually grown.…(D)on’t just abandon a tradition that you yourself loved as a child, that your own children look forward to months in advance, and that helps preserve our sense of fellowship and community with our neighbors in the midst of all this madness.”
That would be anathema to certain segments of society, however. Hallowe’en certainly inspires a backlash by fundamentalists who consider it a blasphemous abomination. ‘Amateur scholar’ Isaac Bonewits details academically the Hallowe’en errors and lies he feels contribute to its being reviled. Some of the panic over Hallowe’en is akin to the hysteria, fortunately now debunked, over the supposed epidemic of ‘ritual Satanic abuse’ that swept the Western world in the ’90’s.
The horror film has become inextricably linked to Hallowe’en tradition, although the holiday itself did not figure in the movies until John Carpenter took the slasher genre singlehandedly by storm. Googling “scariest films”, you will, grimly, reap a mother lode of opinions about how to pierce the veil to journey to the netherworld and reconnect with that magical, eerie creepiness in the dark (if not the over-the-top blood and gore that has largely replaced the subtlety of earlier horror films).
The Carfax Abbey Horror Films and Movies Database includes best-ever-horror-films lists from Entertainment Weekly, Mr. Showbiz and Hollywood.com. I’ve seen most of these; some of their choices are not that scary, some are just plain silly, and they give extremely short shrift to my real favorites, the evocative classics of the ’30’s and ’40’s when most eeriness was allusive and not explicit. And here’s what claims to be a compilation of links to the darkest and most gruesome sites on the web. “Hours and hours of fun for morbidity lovers.”
Boing Boing does homage to a morbid masterpiece of wretched existential horror, two of the tensest, scariest hours of my life repeated every time I watch it:
‘…The Thing starts. It had been 9 years since The Exorcist scared the living shit out of audiences in New York and sent people fleeing into the street. Really … up the aisle and out the door at full gallop. You would think that people had calmed down a bit since then. No…’
Meanwhile, what could be creepier in the movies than the phenomenon of evil children? Gawker knows what shadows lurk in the hearts of the cinematic young:
‘In celebration of Halloween, we took a shallow dive into the horror subgenre of evil-child horror movies. Weird-kid cinema stretches back at least to 1956’s The Bad Seed, and has experienced a resurgence recently via movies like The Babadook, Goodnight Mommy, and Cooties. You could look at this trend as a natural extension of the focus on domesticity seen in horror via the wave of haunted-house movies that 2009’s Paranormal Activity helped usher in. Or maybe we’re just wizening up as a culture and realizing that children are evil and that film is a great way to warn people of this truth. Happy Halloween. Hope you don’t get killed by trick-or-treaters.’
In any case: trick or treat! …And may your Hallowe’en soothe your soul.
’It is not hyperbole to wonder if the outcome of Sunday’s presidential election in Brazil is a planetary game over when it comes to climate change.…’
Via Gizmodo
Humans, as a new paper published today in Nature Ecology & Evolution shows, have been consuming chocolate for a very long time.
’New archaeological evidence suggests humans were cultivating and consuming cacao—the crop from which chocolate is produced—as long as 5,300 years ago, which is 1,500 years earlier than previously thought. What’s more, cacao was initially domesticated in the equatorial regions of South America, and not Central America.…’
Via Gizmodo
Jewish leaders to Trump: until you denounce white supremacy, stay out of Pittsburgh / Boing Boing:
’After this weekend’s anti-Semitic mass-shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, President Donald Trump blamed the victims, implying that if they didn’t want to get murdered, they should have paid for armed guards.
What Trump has notably not said is that the white supremacist movement he has legitimized and fueled with his anti-Muslim, anti-Mexican, anti-disabled, anti-LBGT statements, is connected to anti-Semitic violence — from the “good people” who marched in Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us” to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion-style demonization of George Soros.
Trump’s omission is not subtle. People have noticed. Among them is a coalition of Pittsburgh’s Jewish leaders who have published an open letter to the President telling him that he is “not welcome in Pittsburgh until you fully denounce white nationalism,” “not welcome in Pittsburgh until you stop targeting and endangering all minorities,” “not welcome in Pittsburgh until you cease your assault on immigrants and refugees” and “not welcome in Pittsburgh until you commit yourself to compassionate, democratic policies that recognize the dignity of all of us.”…’
Via Boing Boing
Dana Milbank in the Washington Post:
’George Washington, in his 1790 letter to the Touro Synagogue in Newport, R.I., told Jews they would be safe in the new nation.
“The government of the United States . . . gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance,” he wrote. “May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants — while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.”
Though that assurance has been tested, the United States has endured as a safe haven for Jews.
Now President Trump has violated Washington’s compact. He has given sanction to bigotry and assistance to persecution. After the shooting in Pittsburgh, which the Anti-Defamation League believes is the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history, there is no longer safety under the vine and fig tree…
Consider some of the many times Trump gave sanction to bigotry before 11 worshipers were shot dead at the Tree of Life…’
’Physicians are killing themselves at a higher clip than even military veterans, but their careers depend on denying this sad fact…’
Via MEL Magazine
