Griffin kept a journal of his experiences; the 188-page diary was the genesis of the book.
At the time of the book's writing in 1959, race relations in America
were particularly strained and Griffin aimed to explain the difficulties
that black people faced in certain areas. Under the care of a doctor, Griffin artificially darkened his skin to pass as a black man.
facebook | Dear Executive Committee and NAACP Members,
It is a true honor to serve in the racial and social justice movement
here in Spokane and across the nation. Many issues face us now that
drive at the theme of urgency. Police brutality, biased curriculum in
schools, economic disenfranchisement, health inequities, and a lack of
pro-justice political representation are among the concerns at the
forefront of the current administration of the Spokane NAACP. And yet,
the dialogue has unexpectedly shifted internationally to my personal
identity in the context of defining race and ethnicity.
I have
waited in deference while others expressed their feelings, beliefs,
confusions and even conclusions - absent the full story. I am
consistently committed to empowering marginalized voices and believe
that many individuals have been heard in the last hours and days that
would not otherwise have had a platform to weigh in on this important
discussion. Additionally, I have always deferred to the state and
national NAACP leadership and offer my sincere gratitude for their
unwavering support of my leadership through this unexpected firestorm.
While challenging the construct of race is at the core of evolving
human consciousness, we can NOT afford to lose sight of the five Game
Changers (Criminal Justice & Public Safety, Health & Healthcare,
Education, Economic Sustainability, and Voting Rights & Political
Representation) that affect millions, often with a life or death
outcome. The movement is larger than a moment in time or a single
person's story, and I hope that everyone offers their robust support of
the Journey for Justice campaign that the NAACP launches today!
I
am delighted that so many organizations and individuals have supported
and collaborated with the Spokane NAACP under my leadership to grow this
branch into one of the healthiest in the nation in 5 short months. In
the eye of this current storm, I can see that a separation of family and
organizational outcomes is in the best interest of the NAACP.
It is with complete allegiance to the cause of racial and social justice
and the NAACP that I step aside from the Presidency and pass the baton
to my Vice President, Naima Quarles-Burnley. It is my hope that by
securing a beautiful office for the organization in the heart of
downtown, bringing the local branch into financial compliance,
catalyzing committees to do strategic work in the five Game Changer
issues, launching community forums, putting the membership on a fast
climb, and helping many individuals find the legal, financial and
practical support needed to fight race-based discrimination, I have
positioned the Spokane NAACP to buttress this transition.
Please
know I will never stop fighting for human rights and will do everything
in my power to help and assist, whether it means stepping up or
stepping down, because this is not about me. It's about justice. This is
not me quitting; this is a continuum. It's about moving the cause of
human rights and the Black Liberation Movement along the continuum from
Resistance to Chattel Slavery to Abolition to Defiance of Jim Crow to
the building of Black Wall Street to the Civil Rights and Black Power
Movement to the #BlackLivesMatter movement and into a future of self-determination and empowerment.
With much love and a commitment to always fight for what is right and good in this world,
Rachel Dolezal
Cobb | The new hashtag #PassingForBlack is thus ironically manifest by those calling foul. An honest Black man, and let us use the James Baldwin standard, would be not only accepting but embracing of Rachel Dolezal. For in 1963 he said of white people:
The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them.
And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them
with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in
effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and
until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had
to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men
are inferior to white men. Many of them, indeed, know better, but, as
you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they
know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.
In this case, the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the
loss of their identity. Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up
one morning to find the sun shining and all the stars aflame. You would
be frightened because it is out of the order of nature. Any upheaval in
the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one's sense
of one's own reality.
It is hard for me to imagine that Rachel Dolezal is the sort of
person who fears the loss of her white identity or labors under an
understanding of history that gives her innumerable reasons to believe
that black men are inferior to white men. She doesn't impress me as one
with any fear of acting upon what she knows, and she certainly
understands that she is in danger.
Nevertheless some media Negroes and their accomplices and masters
have decided that a few genes must inevitably seal one's fate, and they
call this the attitude of a proper Black man. What kind of man assigns
his fate to his genes in a nation dedicated to Liberty?
In
these exclusive photos, Jenner is seen braving the rain with a big
umbrella, while rocking a pair of figure-hugging skinny jeans, a fitted
black blouse, knee-high boots and an Elisabeth Weinstock Tokyo
cross-body bag.
Looking
very jovial and relaxed, Jenner stayed at the LGBT Center for about two
hours and arrived with her camera crew and bodyguards in tow.
The LGBT Center's mission is to build
"a world where LGBT people thrive as healthy, equal and complete
members of society," and their message seems to fit right in with Caitlyn's views.
"So many people go through life and they never deal with their own issues," the 65-year-old reality star said in a promo for her upcoming eight-part docu-series, I Am Cait.
"No matter what those issues are -- ours happen to be gender identity
-- but how many people go through life and just waste an entire life
because they never deal with themselves? To be who they are."
niot | It is said that there is power in numbers, but when an increasing number
of injustices were committed in Hayden Lake, Idaho, it was a small
group of concerned citizens that stunted the growth of an American Nazi
movement.
Three decades later, the story of the campaign for human rights that
brought down the Aryan Nations--a once powerful organizing force that
incorporated a white supremacist ideology with a frightening mix of
anti-Semitism, racism, and Christianity--is now told in a one-hour
documentary, The Color of Conscience. (To watch the full-length
documentary, click here.)
Director Jay Krajic (left) and producer Marcia Franklin pose with two of
the
founding members of the Kootenai County Task Force on Human relations,
physorg | But people feel
uncomfortable with an incomplete model. They want to feel as if they
know what's going on. So if you create a gap, you need to fill the gap
with an alternative fact.
For example, it's not enough to just provide evidence that a suspect
in a murder trial is innocent. To prove them innocent – at least in
people's minds – you need to provide an alternative suspect.
However, it's not enough to simply explain the facts. The golden rule of debunking, from the book Made To Stick, by Chip and Dan Heath, is to fight sticky myths with even stickier facts. So you need to make your science sticky, meaning simple, concrete messages that grab attention and stick in the memory.
How do you make science sticky? Chip and Dan Heath suggest the
acronym SUCCES to summarise the characteristics of sticky science:
Simple: To paraphrase a quote from Nobel prize winner Ernest
Rutherford: if you can't explain your physics simply, it's probably not
very good physics.
Unexpected: If your science is counter-intuitive, embrace it! Use the unexpectedness to take people by surprise.
Credible: Ideally, source your information from the most credible source of information available: peer-reviewed scientific research.
Concrete: One of the most powerful tools to make abstract science concrete is analogies or metaphors.
Emotional: Scientists are trained to remove emotion from their
science. However, even scientists are human and it can be quite powerful
when we express our passion for science or communicate how our results
affect us personally.
Stories: Shape your science into a compelling narrative.
libraryofsocialscience | In his diary from the years 1947-51, Glossarium, Schmitt
explains the difference between conventional and absolute enmity by the
different behaviour of the German army on the Western and Eastern front
during WW2. Against the West-European (state) enemies, Nazi-Germany
fought a basically non-discriminatory war, where the rules of combat
were by and large upheld and the enemy was considered an equal; and then
a discriminatory against the East-European and Russian absolute
enemies, where all rules of combat and morality were systematically
violated and the enemy was considered inhuman (Schmitt 1991: 117). As
always, Schmitt neglects to deal with the plight of the European Jewry,
where Nazi-Germany fought an all-out discriminatory war.
Schmitt failed to ever really engage with the concept of the ‘total
enemy’, though the ideological radicalization in the absolute enemy
directs our attention to the limitlessness of such an enmity. But in the
post-war years Schmitt devoted his attention on enmities to the
partisan or political struggle enmity forms while failing to really
explore what it means when ideological radicalization merges with a
state machinery. In his Clausewitz – Philosopher of War, Raymond Aron has a chapter on the partisan inspired by Schmitt.
But he criticizes him, not least for the concept of the absolute enemy, which Aron wants to differentiate further between a biologically absolute enmity:
‘Ludendorff-Hitler’, that is, an enmity based on a biological or racist
philosophy: “I would call this ‘absolute hostility’ as it alone
deserves the term ‘absolute’, since it ends logically in massacre and
genocide” (Aron 1983: 368); and ideologically absolute enmity:
‘Mao-Lenin-Stalin’ and In a letter to Schmitt on October 1, 1963 he also
mentioned ‘politically absolute enmity (Carthago for Cato)’ (Müller
2003: 100). Aron is, of course, aware that Mao and Stalin murdered more
people than Hitler, but that was no logical or necessary consequence of
the ideological enmity:
Hostility based on the class struggle has taken on no less extreme
or monstrous forms than that based on the incompatibility of races. But
if we wish to ‘save the concepts’ there is a difference between a
philosophy whose logic is monstrous and one which can be given a
monstrous interpretation. (Aron 1983: 369)
In his book Democracy and Totalitarianism, Aron
differentiates the “aim of the Nazi Party” which was “to remake the
racial map if Europe and to eliminate certain peoples”, whereas the “aim
of Soviet terror is to create a society which conforms completely to an
ideal, while in the Nazi case, the aim was pure and simple
extermination.” (Aron 1968: 203). With Aron we get not only a
differentiation of the totalitarian state enemy but also – like Schmitt
but applied to the totalitarian state – a differentiation in stages of
enmification or as he calls it “three kinds of terror” (Aron 1968: 187).
They seem to follow Hannah Arendt’s differentiation elaborated below
and we can conclude this section by noting that Aron, while inspired by
Schmitt, saw a clear and evident failure on Schmitt’s part to apply his
enemy theory on the totalitarian state. Once a real totalitarian state
came into being in Germany – a qualitatively total state as Schmitt
would call it – he suspended his reflections on the enemy, only to
return to it in the partisan setting.
In order to understand the peculiarities of the total enemy we have
therefore to depart from the premier theorist of the enemy and to take
from him only the reflection on the decisive difference between an
interstate, codified and hedged ‘conventional enmity’ and then various
forms of unhinged, uncontained enmities, of which Schmitt failed to
grasp the most important one. What he basically didn’t understand was
that the state too could be carrier of a completely limitless enmity. To
him it was always state-subversive forces, of which the British Empire
was one, that carried such a universalist enmity, never the territorial
state. Unlike Schmitt – but with decisive common points of departure
(Sluga 2008; Bates 2010) – Hannah Arendt made the total enemy a key
concept in her explorations of both war and post-war ideological and
geopolitical constellations.
thehutchinsonreport |In
February, 2015, the Spokane, Washington NAACP chapter sought action on
job discrimination and civil rights violations complaints, took on
Comcast, secured legal support for a transgender sexual assault victim,
filed police racial profiling complaints, demanded an investigation of
KKK literature in the area, and an FBI investigation of other hate
crimes, and backed several job discrimination lawsuits. In addition, the
Spokane NAACP branch has aggressive, activist committees on education,
health care, and criminal justice reforms. That month was typical of the
strong work it has done on civil rights.
These
actions plopped Spokane NAACP President Rachel Dolezal squarely in the
hate monger’s bulls-eye. She received threats and hate mail, and there
was a reported break-in at her home. Dolezal was undaunted, "I stand by the work that I do for civil rights, and I should be able to do that work that needs to be done here in Spokane."Dozens agreed with her. They expressed their support at a Spokane City Hall rally in March.
Dolezal
is back on the hot seat again. This time the heat is on not from
unreconstructed bigots but many African-Americans who rail at her for
allegedly being a white woman who claims to be African-American. The
issue ostensibly is that she lied and misrepresented herself as black as
the NAACP leader. But the real issue is whether a non-black is fit to
lead a branch of the nation’s oldest civil rights organization. This is a
spurious, silly, and nonsensical concern especially since many of the
NAACP’s original founders were white and Jewish. In its more than a
century of existence, the organization has fought for civil and equal
rights—barring color.
In
that light, Dolezal has done a phenomenal job. She’s taken a small
chapter in a neck of the woods that in times past has been near an area
well-known as a hotbed of white supremacist and armed militia
organizing, and made it a true fighting organization. Dolezal should
ignore the criticism and keep doing the great job she’s done.
She has proven again that actions, not race, are what counts in the civil rights battle.
In 1918 he joined the small national staff of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in New York at the invitation of James Weldon Johnson.
He acted as Johnson's assistant national secretary and traveled to the
South to investigate. White later succeeded Johnson as the head of the
NAACP, leading the organization from 1931 to 1955.
White oversaw the plans and organizational structure of the fight against public segregation. He worked with President Truman on desegregating the armed forces after the Second World War and gave him a draft for the Executive Order to implement this. Under White's leadership, the NAACP set up the Legal Defense Fund, which raised numerous legal challenges to segregation and disfranchisement, and achieved many successes. Among these was the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education
(1954), which determined that segregated education was inherently
unequal. White also quintupled NAACP membership to nearly 500,000.
White used his appearance to increase his effectiveness in conducting investigations of lynchings and race riots in the American South.
He could "pass" and talk to whites, but also identified as black and
could talk to members of the African-American community. Such work was
dangerous. “Through 1927 White would investigate 41 lynchings, 8 race
riots, and two cases of widespread peonage, risking his life repeatedly in the backwaters of Florida, the piney woods of Georgia, and in the cotton fields of Arkansas.”[14]
In his autobiography, A Man Called White, he dedicates an entire chapter to a time when he almost joined the Ku Klux Klan
undercover. White became a master of incognito investigating. He
started with a letter from a friend that recruited new members of the
KKK.[15] After correspondence between him and Edward Young Clark, leader of the KKK, Clark clearly tried to interest White joining.[15]
Invited to Atlanta, to meet with other Klan leaders, White declined,
fearing that he would be at risk of his life if his true identity were
discovered.[15]
White used this access to Klan leaders to further his investigation
into the "sinister and illegal conspiracy against human and civil rights
which the Klan was concocting."[15]
After deeper inquiries into White's life, Clark stopped sending signed
letters; White was threatened by anonymous letters stating his life
would be in danger if he ever divulged any of the confidential
information he had received.[16] By this time, White had already turned the information over to the US Department of Justice and New York Police Department.[16] He believed that undermining the hold of mob violence would be crucial to his cause.
agingrebel | What happened in Waco was much more sordid and cynical than the
American public has yet been allowed to know and it represents a
terrible, possibly fatal, cancer in the body of the American Republic.
What happened in Waco will likely seem incredible to the mainstream
public. It will seem at least plausible to anyone with knowledge of the
motorcycle club world.
What happened in Waco was the tragic culmination of an ongoing,
international war against motorcycle clubs that is a logical outgrowth
of the Global War on Terror. This secret war is aimed at a fringe
counterculture that easily fulfills the role of what totalitarian
regimes call an “objective enemy:” which is to say an enemy that is
prosecuted mostly for its potential criminality rather than its actual
criminality. The war is a manifestation of a sadistic state – a state
that can no longer accomplish the basic tasks of government but that
projects its power mostly by its unique entitlement to punish its
objective enemies and other citizens.
One facet of the war on motorcycle clubs is the exploitation by
government officials of what might be called alternative motorcycle
clubs. Throughout their area of operation, the Bandidos Motorcycle Club
has had repeated conflicts over the last three years with two
alternative motorcycle clubs.
Washington Post | Fifty hospitals in the United States are charging uninsured consumers more than 10 times the actual cost of patient care, according to research published Monday.
All but one of the facilities are owned by for-profit entities and the largest number of hospitals — 20 — are in Florida. For the most part, researchers said, the hospitals with the highest markups are not in pricey neighborhoods or big cities, where the market might explain the higher prices.
Topping the list is North Okaloosa Medical Center, a 110-bed facility in the Florida Panhandle about an hour outside of Pensacola. Uninsured patients are charged 12.6 times the actual cost of patient care.
Community Health Systems operates 25 of the hospitals on the list. Hospital Corporation of America operates 14 others.
“They are price-gouging because they can,” said Gerard Anderson, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, co-author of the study in Health Affairs. “They are marking up the prices because no one is telling them they can’t.” He added: “These are the hospitals that have the highest markup of all 5,000 hospitals in the United States. This means when it costs the hospital $100, they are going to charge you, on average, $1,000.”
The researchers said other consumers who could face those high charges are patients whose hospitals are not in their insurance company’s preferred network of providers, patients using workers’ compensation and those covered by automobile insurance policies.
Carepoint Health-Bayonne Medical Center in Bayonne, N.J., for example, also charges rates 12.6 times the actual cost of patient care. State law limits the maximum that hospitals can charge uninsured patients to 115 percent, a spokesman said.
By comparison, the researchers said, a typical U.S. hospital charges 3.4 times the cost of patient care.
Officials representing the 50 hospitals disputed the findings, saying that they provide significant discounts to uninsured and underinsured patients.
Understanding hospital pricing and charges is one of the most frustrating experiences for consumers and health-care professionals. It is virtually impossible to find out ahead of time from the hospital how much a procedure or stay is going to cost. Once the bill arrives, many consumers have difficulty deciphering it.
Most hospital patients covered by private or government insurance don’t pay full price because insurers and programs such as Medicare negotiate lower rates for their patients. But millions of Americans who don’t have insurance don’t have anyone to negotiate for them. They are most likely to be charged full price. As a result, uninsured patients, who are often the most vulnerable, face skyrocketing medical bills that can lead to personal bankruptcy, damaged credit scores or avoidance of needed medical care.
Researchers said the main factors leading to overcharging are the lack of market competition and the fact that the federal government does not regulate prices that health-care providers can charge. Only two states, Maryland and West Virginia, set hospital rates.
theroot |As of this
writing, almost 500 people—138 of them African American—have been shot
and killed by police in the United States this year. These numbers come
from The Guardian’s investigation that is literally counting the dead.
Outrage against the epidemic of police killings of unarmed black men helped spark a national #BlackLivesMatter protest movement that called for comprehensive reform of the criminal-justice system. The Obama administration’s Task Force on Policing in the 21st Century is, so far, the major policy response to these shootings.
But as many have pointed out, police violence against black women, girls and transgender people of color is often missing from national discussions. In response, thousands of people
have taken to the streets, social media and elsewhere to affirm that
the lives of black girls and women matter as much as those of black men.
The latest case of police brutality against unarmed black people took
place in McKinney, Texas, on Friday, when a police officer brutalized a
group of black teens attending a pool party. A camera phone caught
McKinney Police Cpl. Eric Casebolt pummeling a 15-year-old black girl on
the lawn of a suburban neighborhood and pulling out his gun and
pointing it toward unarmed teenagers.
Systematic police violence against black and Latino communities, in
the form of killings, overt brutality and general harassment, requires a
national database. Anecdotal evidence from social media, personal
stories and public documents suggests that we have only scratched the
surface of widespread illegal use of force by law enforcement that is
directed against the African-American community.
A federal
database—one that could be publicly accessed by law enforcement,
community activists and citizens—is vital to comprehending the depth of
police misconduct and fashioning a cure to a national crisis that new
technology has made visible to the world.
Our heightened national sensitivity to anti-black violence is a
direct result of information sharing, or crowdsourcing, on social media
that has turned small cities such as Ferguson, Mo., into a metaphor for
racial injustice in the 21st century.
Information, during the civil rights era and now, is power.
salon | people continue to deploy the “one bad apple spoils a bunch” analogy
as though the predicate of the sentence is of no consequence. Spoils. The
analogy is less about the singular bad apple and more about its
multiplicative bad effects on those it keeps company with. I agree that
David Casebolt was particularly out of control. I agree that the other
officers saw that and got him to stop waving his gun. They did not keep
him from kneeling on top of the girl or berating and intimidating the
other youth. This means that in a scenario where multiple children were
being unfairly treated, the presence of multiple officers did not offer
them substantial protection in the face one officer becoming entirely
rogue.
Those officers did not demand that their colleague take a
breather while they got the situation under control. They let him go on
and on, half-cocked and ridiculous. The material impact of that was a
bunch of children feeling unsafe and traumatized by those sworn to
protect them.
The 15-year-old white kid who recorded this incident on his smartphone
made it clear that what he saw was a bunch of police mistreating his
Black friends, while leaving him alone entirely. For the white people
who need to hear it, yes, his presence indicates that “not all white
people” are racist. Clearly his parents are doing a good job raising an
anti-racist teen. But if the white people who need to hear such things
hope to float their consciences to safety on the back of this one kid,
the ride might be bumpy. Again we don’t combat racism just by raising
our children to have anti-racist attitudes. We also have to confront the
systematic residential segregation and privatization that makes pools
inaccessible to children who don’t have the privilege of living in
suburbs.
Few white people have stood up and called out the white
adult women who harassed a fellow neighbor having a pool party with her
friends, and with her mother’s permission. But many white people have
watched the video and concluded that the officer’s treatment of the
14-year-old girl was justified. The gender dynamics in this moment are
interesting. There is no universe in which a police officer would drag a
young white girl in a two-piece bathing suit by her hair, demand she
put her face on the ground, and then kneel for several minutes on top of
her adolescent body. If such a thing occurred, it would elicit massive
moral outrage on the part of white people (and Black people, too).
But
Black girls are never deemed feminine enough for their sexual and
adolescent vulnerability to register for white people. They are
frequently viewed as aggressors by both police and regular citizens
alike, even for doing very adolescent things like mouthing off to those
in authority. This is the reason why education scholars suggest that Black girls are suspended from school six times as often as white girls, because even simple adolescent forms of testing boundaries are perceived as far more aggressive based on race.
And
let me be clear: Citizens have the right to “mouth off” to police. We
have the right to question how we are being treated, why we are being
arrested, why we are even being approached. Far too many police deploy
accusations of disturbing the peace or obstructing justice to quiet
citizens who question them within legal bounds. As long as we don’t
threaten or enact physical harm on police officers, we can “mouth off”
all we want. We don’t have to be polite to police officers, and they
clearly have very little interest in being polite to us. And for those
who keep demanding that we act civilly, the point is, “incivility” is
not a crime.
.........
To continue to tell Black people — as many white folks and
respectable black folk on the social media threads I participated in
have said — that if these children “would have just done what the
officers said, none of this would have happened,” is to be deeply
invested in exercises of racial ignorance. Proper behavior has never,
ever protected Black people from police.
Most of these children
came to a pool party with an invite, got harassed and physically
assaulted by white residents who didn’t want them to be there, and then
mistreated by the police. The ones who didn’t have an invite came
because perhaps it was a rare opportunity to get in a clean, safe
swimming pool in the heat of a Texas summer. Good policing could have
dealt with this matter sans violence and without incident.
But that didn’t happen here.
Instead,
the police mistreated these teens (including those who had been
invited) because they started by giving the white residents the benefit
of the doubt, even though good credible evidence suggests that white
racial aggression spurred this incident in the first place. But Black
children and Black people are never given the benefit of the doubt. We
are policed first, and only ever apologized to later, if at all.
White
people in the aggregate value the “safety” of their private,
segregated, residential spaces far more than they value a system of
policing that protects and values all lives equally.
guardian | Black male recruits make up only 6.86% of the 2015 police academy class. At the end of civil rights movement in 1970 it was 7.3%. When
Eric Adams was a lieutenant with the New York police department, he
took a white rookie into public housing in their precinct. When they got
on the elevator, they saw a puddle of urine in the corner.
“You see, lieutenant,” the officer said to him, “these people are all animals; they don’t deserve anything.”
“Only one person pissed in the elevator,” Adams responded. “The
people in this building are just as upset over that piss as you are.”
Adams, who is black, was an officer for 22 years. On the force, he
spoke out against police brutality and served as president of the black
fraternal NYPD Guardians Association; he was a captain when he left in
2006 to enter politics.
Now the Brooklyn borough president, Adams says officers and
management must stop making assumptions about poor communities based on
the “numerical minority” that commits most of the offences.
The majority of residents in every community, Adams says, want the
“same thing as a millionaire”, that is, “an environment where they can
raise a healthy child”. And most work hard. “They may not go to a
high-paying job on Wall Street, but they go and clean the streets. But
if the police don’t have interaction with the healthy people in that
community, then they’ll never know how to properly police it.”
Ray Benitez, who retired in 2004 after 20 years, mostly in
Bedford-Stuyvesant, agrees. He watched officers stereotype entire
neighborhoods. “You’ve got to know that 95% of the people in the
community have no dealing with the police at all. None.” That includes
positive interactions, adds the Flatbush native who identifies as black
Hispanic.
Benitez is blunt about how some officers view majority-black and
Hispanic neighborhoods: “I’m talking about a thinly veiled disgust …
simply because they appear to be in distress, with a different station
in life. Maybe the sociological condition is that somehow those cops
feel they’re more entitled, that they’re better.”
Both men say this often unconscious bias makes policing harder: those
cops are not building relationships that, in turn, can yield the
intelligence they need. When a cop tells a mother about a program for
kids, or even says “good morning, ma’am”, she may reciprocate. “She’ll
tell you, ‘You know, I saw somebody carrying a gun.’”
wired |Cuba has for several years
had a promising therapeutic vaccine against lung cancer. The 55-year
trade embargo led by the US made sure that Cuba was mostly where it
stayed. Until—maybe—now.
The Obama administration has, of course, been trying to normalize
relations with the island nation. And last month, during New York Gov.
Andrew Cuomo’s visit to Havana, Roswell Park Cancer Institute finalized
an agreement with Cuba’s Center for Molecular Immunology to develop a
lung cancer vaccine and begin clinical trials in the US. Essentially, US
researchers will bring the Cimavax vaccine stateside and get on track
for approval by the Food and Drug Administration.
“The chance to evaluate a vaccine like this is a very exciting
prospect,” says Candace Johnson, CEO of Roswell Park. She’s excited,
most likely, because research on the vaccine so far shows that it has
low toxicity, and it’s relatively cheap to produce and store. The Center
for Molecular Immunology will give Roswell Park all of the
documentation (how it’s produced, toxicity data, results from past
trials) for an FDA drug application; Johnson says she hopes to get
approval for testing Cimavax within six to eight months, and to start
clinical trials in a year.
How did Cuba end up with a cutting edge immuno-oncology drug? Though
the country is justly famous for cigars, rum, and baseball, it also has
some of the best and most inventive biotech and medical research in the
world. That’s especially notable for a country where the average worker
earns $20 a month. Cuba spends a fraction of the money the US does on
healthcare per individual; yet the average Cuban has a life expectancy
on par with the average American. “They’ve had to do more with less,”
says Johnson, “so they’ve had to be even more innovative with how they
approach things. For over 40 years, they have had a preeminent
immunology community.”
Despite decades of economic sanctions, Fidel and Raul Castro made
biotechnology and medical research, particularly preventative medicine, a
priority. After the 1981 dengue fever outbreak struck nearly 350,000
Cubans, the government established the Biological Front, an effort to
focus research efforts by various agencies toward specific goals. Its
first major accomplishment was the successful (and unexpected)
production of interferon, a protein that plays a role in human immune
response. Since then, Cuban immunologists made several other vaccination
breakthroughs, including their own vaccines for meningitis B and
hepatitis B, and monoclonal antibodies for kidney transplants.
CimaVax is an active vaccine in which patients are immunized with epidermal growth factor (EGF), thus raising antibodies targeting EGF itself. The product is also formulated with the Neisseria meningitidis outer protein P64k and Montanide ISA 51 as an adjuvant to potentiate the immune response.[4] The epidermal growth factor receptor
(EGFR) is hijacked by many types of cancer, including cancers of the
lung, colon, kidney, and head and neck. By raising antibodies against
EGF, which is EGFR's major ligand,
the concentrations of EGF in the blood are reduced. Thus CimaVax does
not target the cancer cells directly, but is expected to work against
these cancers by denying the cancers the growth stimulus they require.[4][5] For this reason, the Roswell Park group thinks that it may prove most useful as a preventive vaccine rather than as a cancer therapy per se.[3]
Early trials showed a statistical trend towards an improved survival rate amongst vaccinated test subjects.[4][6]
A direct correlation between the level of antibodies that a vaccinated
patient raises against EGF and survival has been observed in several
trials,[4] and in one of the largest trials[5] there was also an age-dependence, with only subjects under the age of 60 benefiting in terms of survival.[4] More antibodies are raised when the vaccine is formulated with Montanide ISA 51 rather than aluminum hydroxide as an adjuvant, and when patients receive a low dose of cyclophosphamide three days before vaccine administration.[4] Cyclophosphamide is thought to temporarily block the body's natural immune tolerance to EGF, thereby increasing antibody titers.[4]
CimaVax is relatively cheap to produce and store, and has low toxicity.[3] Side effects of the vaccine appear to be mild, and include chills, fever, headache, nausea.[7][4]
Researchers caution that the early results to date have been in
relatively small, early-stage trials with patients that were carefully
selected based on predefined inclusion and exclusion criteria, and given
specialized oncology care; they may therefore not be representative of
most patients who might benefit from the vaccine.[4]
It has been urged that CimaVax be tested in patients with earlier-stage
NSCLC cancer and in patients who are not candidates for chemotherapy, and that research be conducted to determine which subgroups of NSCLC patients do and don't respond the vaccine.[4]
It has also been suggested that CimaVax may also be effective in other
types of cancer that are dependent on EGF/EGFR, including many cases of prostate cancer.[4]
npr | Laboratory research seeking new medical treatments and cures is
fraught with pitfalls: Researchers can inadvertently use bad
ingredients, design the experiment poorly, or conduct inadequate data
analysis. Scientists working on ways to reduce these sorts of problems
have put a staggering price tag on research that isn't easy to
reproduce: $28 billion a year.
That figure, published Tuesday in the journal PLOS Biology,
represents about half of all the preclinical medical research that's
conducted in labs (in contrast to research on human volunteers). And the
finding comes with some important caveats.
The $28 billion
doesn't just represent out-and-out waste, the team that did the research
cautions. It also includes some studies that produced valid results —
but that couldn't be repeated by others because of the confusing way the
methods were described, or because of other shortcomings.
Leonard Freedman,
who heads a nonprofit called the Global Biological Standards Institute,
decided to undertake the study with two Boston University economists, Iain Cockburn and Timothy Simcoe. Their goal was to identify ways to make research more efficient.
"We initially were asking a very simple question," Freeman says.
"We simply wanted to know how much money is being spent each year on
basic preclinical research that is not reproducible."
That
turned out to be a very difficult question; only a few studies have
addressed the issue head-on, and they aren't directly comparable. The
economists eventually homed in on a best estimate: $28 billion per year.
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Comet 3I/Atlas is on its way out on a hyberbolic course to, I don't know
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
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SeeNew
Can't get on your site because you've gone 'invite only'?
Man, ...
First Member of Chumph Cartel Goes to Jail
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With the profligate racism of the Chumph Cartel, I don’t imagine any of
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