Autonomous Autistic Incels Not So Keen On Being Gamed For Fun And Political Profit?

RightWingWatch |  As Jared reported earlier today, Jerome Corsi, the Washington bureau chief for Alex Jones’ Infowars, who has spent hours online every day for the last several months “decoding” the cryptic message-board posts made by an anonymous figure known as “QAnon,” has declared that “Q” has been “compromised” and that his postings can no longer be trusted.

Many fringe right-wing activists believe that QAnon was a high-level Trump administration official who has been leaking secret intelligence information to them via the anonymous message boards 4chan and 8chan and Corsi was among the most vocal proponents of the theory, having once even claimed that President Trump himself had directly ordered QAnon to release information.

Recently, Corsi began to sour on QAnon and today he joined Jones on his radio program where Jones claimed that he had personally spoken with QAnon and had been told that the account had been compromised and should no longer be trusted.

“I was on the phone this morning talking to some folks who were out playing golf with people that have been involved in QAnon, they say, ‘Hey, that’s been taken over, we’re unable to even post anymore, that’s not us anymore,'” Jones said. “I’ve talked to QAnon. There is only about five or six that have actually be posting. I’ve talked to QAnon and they are saying QAnon is no longer QAnon.”

“Stick a fork in the avatar of QAnon,” Jones declared. “It is now an overrun disinformation fount.”

exopolitics | According to veteran investigative reporter and best selling author, Dr. Jerome Corsi, he was approached three years ago by a group of generals and told that Donald Trump had been recruited by U.S. military intelligence to run in the 2016 Presidential elections, and subsequently help remove corrupt Deep State officials from positions of power. Corsi claims that QAnon represents the same group of senior military intelligence officials who are exposing the Deep State corruption and officials involved in a history of treasonous actions against the U.S. Republic.

This is what Corsi said at a meeting on April 11, which also featured the founder of InfoWars.com, Alex Jones:

About three years ago a group of Generals came to me, and it was explained to me that they were ready to conduct a coup d’etat. They were ready to move Barack Obama from office with military force. And then a few weeks later I got another call and said they were reconsidering.

You know why they were reconsidering? [audience calls out answers] Because they talked to Donald Trump, and Trump had agreed he would run, and they agreed that if he would run, they would conduct their coup d’etat as a legitimate process, rooting out the traitors within government.  And that pact between the military and Donald Trump has held, as we have been interpreting and watching, and Alex has been following QAnon.

QAnon is military intelligence and close to Trump, and the intelligence we’ve getting, that we’ve explained on Infowars, really is a lot of the inside script. 

While Corsi didn’t name the generals or provide hard evidence for his startling claim, an examination of public comments by President Trump, QAnon and related political events do make Corsi’s extraordinary claim very plausible.

It’s important to note that Corsi’s speech happened only a day after a tweet by President Trump featuring him with 20 senior U.S. military officials who dined with him the previous night:

Did Autistic Attention To Detail And Collaborative Morality Drive Human Evolution?

tandfonline |  Selection pressures to better understand others’ thoughts and feelings are seen as a primary driving force in human cognitive evolution. Yet might the evolution of social cognition be more complex than we assume, with more than one strategy towards social understanding and developing a positive pro-social reputation? Here we argue that social buffering of vulnerabilities through the emergence of collaborative morality will have opened new niches for adaptive cognitive strategies and widened personality variation. Such strategies include those that that do not depend on astute social perception or abilities to think recursively about others’ thoughts and feelings. We particularly consider how a perceptual style based on logic and detail, bringing certain enhanced technical and social abilities which compensate for deficits in complex social understanding could be advantageous at low levels in certain ecological and cultural contexts. ‘Traits of autism’ may have promoted innovation in archaeological material culture during the late Palaeolithic in the context of the mutual interdependence of different social strategies, which in turn contributed to the rise of innovation and large scale social networks.

physorg | The ability to focus on detail, a common trait among people with autism, allowed realism to flourish in Ice Age art, according to researchers at the University of York. 

Around 30,000 years ago realistic art suddenly flourished in Europe. Extremely accurate depictions of bears, bison, horses and lions decorate the walls of Ice Age archaeological sites such as Chauvet Cave in southern France.

Why our ice age ancestors created exceptionally realistic art rather than the very simple or stylised art of earlier modern humans has long perplexed researchers.

Many have argued that psychotropic drugs were behind the detailed illustrations. The popular idea that drugs might make people better at art led to a number of ethically-dubious studies in the 60s where participants were given art materials and LSD.

The authors of the new study discount that theory, arguing instead that individuals with "detail focus", a trait linked to autism, kicked off an artistic movement that led to the proliferation of realistic cave drawings across Europe.

The ability to focus on detail, a common trait among people with autism, allowed realism to flourish in Ice Age art, according to researchers at the University of York.
Around 30,000 years ago realistic art suddenly flourished in Europe. Extremely accurate depictions of bears, bison, horses and lions decorate the walls of Ice Age archaeological sites such as Chauvet Cave in southern France.
Why our ice age ancestors created exceptionally realistic art rather than the very simple or stylised art of earlier modern humans has long perplexed researchers.
Many have argued that psychotropic drugs were behind the detailed illustrations. The popular idea that drugs might make people better at art led to a number of ethically-dubious studies in the 60s where participants were given art materials and LSD.
The authors of the new study discount that theory, arguing instead that individuals with "detail focus", a trait linked to autism, kicked off an artistic movement that led to the proliferation of realistic cave drawings across Europe.

In Bourne Legacy A 1.5% Gain Of Mitochondrial Function Yielded Super Soldiers

thescientist |  Since the 1970s, when researchers turned up similarities between DNA in eukaryotes’ mitochondria and bacterial genomes, scientists have suspected that the organelles descended from symbionts that took up residence within larger cells. A diverse class of bacteria called Alphaproteobacteria soon emerged as a likely candidate for the evolutionary origins of mitochondria. 

But a new analysis, published today (April 25) in Nature, suggests that mitochondria are at best distant cousins to known alphaproteobacteria lineages, and not descendents as previously thought.

“We are still left hungry for the ancestor of mitochondria,” says Puri Lopez-Garcia, a biologist at the University of Paris-South who was not involved in the study.

While it’s generally agreed that Alphaproteobacteria includes the closest bacterial relatives of mitochondria, that relationship doesn’t reveal much about how mitochondrial ancestors made a living or how they made the jump to acting as organelles. That’s because “Alphaproteobacteria is a particularly diverse group of organisms in terms of kinds of metabolism,” Lopez-Garcia explains. 

“You find more or less everything in there.” Some studies have found genetic similarities between mitochondria and an order of alphaproteobacterial symbionts known as Rickettsiales, but other, free-living candidates have also emerged.

The question of where on the alphaproteobacteria family tree the mitochondrial ancestor fell has pestered study coauthor Thijs Ettema throughout his scientific career. “Now, with all the available data from all these new lineages in all sorts of environments, we thought we should just do one bold approach and see where this ends up,” says Ettema, an evolutionary biologist at Uppsala University in Sweden.

Much of the genomic data he and colleagues used in their analysis came from the Tara Oceans dataset, which includes metagenomic sequences from microbes in ocean waters sampled from various depths. “For reasons that are not extremely clear . . . it seems that oceanic waters are extremely enriched for Alphaproteobacteria, and not just one species—it seems to be a whole array,” Ettema explains. The datasets were “good and deep enough to make an effort to reconstruct near-complete genomes.”

DIY DNA Tinkering...,

NYTimes  |  If nefarious biohackers were to create a biological weapon from scratch — a killer that would bounce from host to host to host, capable of reaching millions of people, unrestrained by time or distance — they would probably begin with some online shopping.

A site called Science Exchange, for example, serves as a Craigslist for DNA, a commercial ecosystem connecting almost anyone with online access and a valid credit card to companies that sell cloned DNA fragments.

Mr. Gandall, the Stanford fellow, often buys such fragments — benign ones. But the workarounds for someone with ill intent, he said, might not be hard to figure out.

Biohackers will soon be able to forgo these companies altogether with an all-in-one desktop genome printer: a device much like an inkjet printer that employs the letters AGTC — genetic base pairs — instead of the color model CMYK.

A similar device already exists for institutional labs, called BioXp 3200, which sells for about $65,000. But at-home biohackers can start with DNA Playground from Amino Labs, an Easy Bake genetic oven that costs less than an iPad, or The Odin’s Crispr gene-editing kit for $159.

Tools like these may be threatening in the wrong hands, but they also helped Mr. Gandall start a promising career.

At age 11, he picked up a virology textbook at a church book fair. Before he was old enough for a driver’s permit, he was urging his mother to shuttle him to a research job at the University of California, Irvine.

He began dressing exclusively in red polo shirts to avoid the distraction of choosing outfits. He doodled through high school — correcting biology teachers — and was kicked out of a local science fair for what was deemed reckless home-brew genetic engineering.

Mr. Gandall barely earned a high-school diploma, he said, and was rebuffed by almost every college he applied to — but later gained a bioengineering position at Stanford University.

“Pretty ironic, after they rejected me as a student,” he said.

He moved to East Palo Alto — with 14 red polo shirts — into a house with three nonbiologists, who don’t much notice that DNA is cloned in the corner of his bedroom.

His mission at Stanford is to build a body of genetic material for public use. To his fellow biohackers, it’s a noble endeavor.

To biosecurity experts, it’s tossing ammunition into trigger-happy hands.

“There are really only two things that could wipe 30 million people off of the planet: a nuclear weapon, or a biological one,” said Lawrence O. Gostin, an adviser on pandemic influenza preparedness to the World Health Organization.

“Somehow, the U.S. government fears and prepares for the former, but not remotely for the latter. It baffles me.”

The Wizard of Q (Gaming Autistic Incels For Fun And Political Profit)

Harpers |  I concluded that the internet and the novel were natural enemies. “Choose your own adventure” stories were not the future of literature. The author should be a dictator, a tyrant who treated the reader as his willing slave, not as a cocreator. And high-tech flourishes should be avoided. Novels weren’t meant to link to Neil Diamond songs or, say, refer to real plane crashes on the day they happen. Novels were closed structures, their boundaries fixed, not data-driven, dynamic feedback loops. Until quite recently, these were my beliefs, and no new works emerged to challenge my thinking.

Then, late last year, while knocking around on the internet one night, I came across a long series of posts originally published on 4chan, an anonymous message board. They described a sinister global power struggle only dimly visible to ordinary citizens. On one side of the fight, the posts explained, was a depraved elite, bound by unholy oaths and rituals, secretly sowing chaos and strife to create a pretext for their rule. On the other side was the public, we the people, brave and decent but easily deceived, not least because the news was largely scripted by the power brokers and their collaborators in the press. And yet there was hope, I read, because the shadow directorate had blundered. Aligned during the election with Hillary Clinton and unable to believe that she could lose, least of all to an outsider, it had underestimated Donald Trump—as well as the patriotism of the US military, which had recruited him for a last-ditch battle against the psychopathic deep-state spooks. The writer of the 4chan posts, who signed these missives “Q,” invited readers to join this battle. He—she? it?—promised to pass on orders from a commander and intelligence gathered by a network of spies.

I was hooked.

Known to its fan base as ­QAnon, the tale first appeared last year, around Halloween. Q’s literary brilliance wasn’t obvious at first. His obsessions were unoriginal, his style conventional, even dull. He suggested that Washington was being purged of globalist evildoers, starting with Clinton, who was awaiting arrest, supposedly, but allowed to roam free for reasons that weren’t clear. Soon a whole roster of villains had emerged, from John ­McCain to John Podesta to former president Obama, all of whom were set to be destroyed by something called the Storm, an allusion to a remark by President Trump last fall about “the calm before the storm.” Clinton’s friend and supporter Lynn Forrester de Roth­schild, a member by marriage of the banking family abhorred by anti-Semites everywhere, came in for special abuse from Q and Co.—which may have contributed to her decision to delete her Twitter app. Along with George Soros, numerous other bigwigs, the FBI, the CIA, and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey (by whom the readers of Q feel persecuted), these figures composed a group called the Cabal. The goal of the Cabal was dominion over all the earth. Its initiates tended to be pedophiles (or pedophilia apologists), the better to keep them blackmailed and in line, and its esoteric symbols were everywhere; the mainstream media served as its propaganda arm. Oh, and don’t forget the pope.

As I read further, the tradition in which Q was working became clearer. Q’s plot of plots is a retread, for the most part, of Cold War–era John Birch Society notions found in books such as None Dare Call It Conspiracy. These Bircher ideas were borrowings, in turn, from the works of a Georgetown University history professor by the name of Carroll Quigley. Said to be an important influence on Bill Clinton, Quigley was a legitimate scholar of twentieth-century Anglo-American politics. His 1966 book Tragedy and Hope, which concerned the power held by certain elites over social and military planning in the West, is not itself a paranoid creation, but parts of it have been twisted and reconfigured to support wild theories of all kinds. Does Q stand for Quigley? It’s possible, though there are other possibilities (such as the Department of Energy’s “Q” security clearance). The literature of right-wing political fear has a canon and a pantheon, and Q, whoever he is, seems deeply versed in it.

While introducing his cast of fiends, Q also assembled a basic story line. Justice was finally coming for the Cabal, whose evil deeds were “mind blowing,” Q wrote, and could never be “fully exposed” lest they touch off riots and revolts. But just in case this promised “Great Awakening” caused panic in the streets, the National Guard and the Marine Corps were ready to step in. So were panels of military judges, in whose courts the treasonous cabalists would be tried and convicted, then sent to Guantánamo. In the manner of doomsayers since time began, Q hinted that Judgment Day was imminent and seemed unabashed when it kept on not arriving. Q knew full well that making one’s followers wait for a definitive, cathartic outcome is a cult leader’s best trick—for the same reason that it’s a novelist’s best trick. Suspense is an irritation that’s also a pleasure, so there’s a sensual payoff from these delays. And the more time a devotee invests in pursuing closure and satisfaction, the deeper her need to trust the person in charge. It’s why Trump may be in no hurry to build his wall, or to finish it if he starts. It’s why he announced a military parade that won’t take place until next fall.

As the posts piled up and Q’s plot thickened, his writing style changed. It went from discursive to interrogative, from concise and direct to gnomic and suggestive. This was the breakthrough, the hook, the innovation, and what convinced me Q was a master, not just a prankster or a kook. He’d discovered a principle of online storytelling that had eluded me all those years ago but now seemed obvious: The audience for internet narratives doesn’t want to read, it wants to write. It doesn’t want answers provided, it wants to search for them. It doesn’t want to sit and be amused, it wants to be sent on a mission. It wants to do.

BeeDeeism Strategically Ineffective For Anything More Complicated Than Stewing Prunes...,

newyorker |  On March 14, 2017, Conservative Review, a Web site that opposed the Iran deal, published an article portraying Nowrouzzadeh as a traitorous stooge. The story, titled “Iran Deal Architect Is Running Tehran Policy at the State Dept.,” derided her as a “trusted Obama aide,” whose work “resulted in an agreement that has done enormous damage to the security interests of the United States.” David Wurmser, who had been an adviser to Vice-President Dick Cheney, e-mailed the article to Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House. “I think a cleaning is in order here,” Wurmser wrote. Gingrich forwarded the message to an aide to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, with the subject line “i thought you should be aware of this.”

As the article circulated inside the Administration, Sean Doocey, a White House aide overseeing personnel, e-mailed colleagues to ask for details of Nowrouzzadeh’s “appointment authority”—the rules by which a federal worker can be hired, moved, or fired. He received a reply from Julia Haller, a former Trump campaign worker, newly appointed to the State Department. Haller wrote that it would be “easy” to remove Nowrouzzadeh from the policy-planning staff. She had “worked on the Iran Deal,” Haller noted, “was born in Iran, and upon my understanding cried when the President won.” Nowrouzzadeh was unaware of these discussions. All she knew was that her experience at work started to change.

Every new President disturbs the disposition of power in Washington. Stars fade. Political appointees arrive, assuming control of a bureaucracy that encompasses 2.8 million civilian employees, across two hundred and fifty agencies—from Forest Service smoke jumpers in Alaska to C.I.A. code-breakers in Virginia. “It’s like taking over two hundred and fifty private corporations at one time,” David Lewis, the chair of the political-science department at Vanderbilt University, told me.

Typically, an incoming President seeks to charm, co-opt, and, when necessary, coerce the federal workforce into executing his vision. But Trump got to Washington by promising to unmake the political ecosystem, eradicating the existing species and populating it anew. This project has gone by various names: Stephen Bannon, the campaign chief, called it the “deconstruction of the administrative state”—the undoing of regulations, pacts, and taxes that he believed constrain American power. In Presidential tweets and on Fox News, the mission is described as a war on the “deep state,” the permanent power élite. Nancy McEldowney, who retired last July after thirty years in the Foreign Service, told me, “In the anatomy of a hostile takeover and occupation, there are textbook elements—you decapitate the leadership, you compartmentalize the power centers, you engender fear and suspicion. They did all those things.”

This idea, more than any other, has defined the Administration, which has greeted the federal government not as a machine that could implement its vision but as a vanquished foe. To control it, Trump would need the right help. “I’m going to surround myself only with the best and most serious people,” he said, during the campaign. “We want top-of-the-line professionals.”

Every President expects devotion. Lyndon Johnson wished for an aide who would “kiss my ass in Macy’s window at high noon and tell me it smells like roses. I want his pecker in my pocket.” But Trump has elevated loyalty to the primary consideration. Since he has no fixed ideology, the White House cannot screen for ideas, so it seeks a more personal form of devotion. Kellyanne Conway, one of his most dedicated attendants, refers reverently to the “October 8th coalition,” the campaign stalwarts who remained at Trump’s side while the world listened to a recording of him boasting about grabbing women by the genitals.

Jordan Peterson On The Jewish Question

jordanbpeterson |  The players of identity politics on the far right continue ever-so-pathologically to beat the anti-Semitic drum, pointing to the over-representation of Jews in positions of authority, competence and influence (including revolutionary movements). I’m called upon–sometimes publicly, sometimes on social media platforms–to comment on such matters, and criticized when I hesitate to do so (although God only knows why I would hesitate 🙂

So let’s take apart the far-right claims:

First, psychologically speaking: why do the reactionary conspiracy theorists even bother? This is a straightforward matter. If you’re misguided enough to play identity politics, whether on the left or the right, then you require a victim (in the right-wing case, European culture or some variant) and a perpetrator (Jews). Otherwise you can’t play the game (a YouTube video I made explicating the rules can be found here). Once you determine to play, however, you benefit in a number of ways. You can claim responsibility for the accomplishments of your group you feel racially/ethnically akin to without actually having to accomplish anything yourself. That’s convenient. You can identify with the hypothetical victimization of that group and feel sorry for yourself and pleased at your compassion simultaneously. Another unearned victory. You simplify your world radically, as well. All the problems you face now have a cause, and a single one, so you can dispense with the unpleasant difficulty of thinking things through in detail. Bonus. Furthermore, and most reprehensibly: you now have someone to hate (and, what’s worse, with a good conscience) so your unrecognized resentment and cowardly and incompetent failure to deal with the world forthrightly can find a target, and you can feel morally superior in your consequent persecution (see Germany, Nazi for further evidence and information).

Second, in what manner (if any) are such claims true? Well, Jews are genuinely over-represented in positions of authority, competence and influence. New York Jews, in particular, snap up a disproportionate number of Nobel prizes (see this Times of Israel article), and Jews are disproportionately eligible for admission at elite universities, where they, along with Asians, tend to be discriminated against (see this Newsweek article). It’s possible that we should be happy about this, rather than annoyed: is the fact that smart people are working hard for our mutual advancement really something to feel upset? What, exactly, is the preferable alternative? In any case, the radical/identity-politics right wingers regard such accomplishment as evidence of a conspiracy. It hardly needs to be said that although conspiracies do occasionally occur, conspiracy theories are the lowest form of intellectual enterprise.

Three Ring Phukkery On The Alt-White Fringe Of BeeDee's Big Tent...,

theoccidentalobserver |  Celebrity intellectual Jordan Peterson has written a blog post, “’On the So-Called ‘Jewish Question’,” the inner quotes indicating he doesn’t think this is a real issue—something that only “reactionary conspiracy theorists” would propose.  His blog includes a link to Nathan Cofnas’s criticism of The Culture of Critique. No links to my replies—which may provide a clue about his intellectual honesty.

Indeed, one must wonder about the seriousness of someone who thinks he can settle an issue that has gotten the attention of some of the most celebrated thinkers in Western history with an 1100-word blog post.

Peterson has become popular because of his courage and knowledge in opposing political correctness. He stands up for men and for individual responsibility. To his credit he achieved celebrity status via social media, not as a creature of the mainstream media. Much of his stature rests on his use of scientific data in his arguments.  I and many others certainly appreciate this approach; he is particularly cogent in discussing sex differences and gender politics. There is not enough of this in public discourse.

However, my confidence in Peterson’s trustworthiness was shaken by his shoddy treatment of the Jewish Question, including name-calling directed at my own work. This is part of his broader offensive against identitarians, people who defend their group interests. For Peterson there are only individual interests (a bit strange for someone who approves of evolutionary biology, a subdiscipline that encompasses kin selection theory and, for humans, cultural group selection). For Peterson to admit there is a Jewish Question would be to concede the reality of group interests—not only families but religions, ethnic groups, and nations.

Psychosocial Environmental Stress Process Activation

NYTimes |  Black infants in America are now more than twice as likely to die as white infants — 11.3 per 1,000 black babies, compared with 4.9 per 1,000 white babies, according to the most recent government data — a racial disparity that is actually wider than in 1850, 15 years before the end of slavery, when most black women were considered chattel. In one year, that racial gap adds up to more than 4,000 lost black babies. Education and income offer little protection. In fact, a black woman with an advanced degree is more likely to lose her baby than a white woman with less than an eighth-grade education.

This tragedy of black infant mortality is intimately intertwined with another tragedy: a crisis of death and near death in black mothers themselves. The United States is one of only 13 countries in the world where the rate of maternal mortality — the death of a woman related to pregnancy or childbirth up to a year after the end of pregnancy — is now worse than it was 25 years ago. Each year, an estimated 700 to 900 maternal deaths occur in the United States. In addition, the C.D.C. reports more than 50,000 potentially preventable near-deaths, like Landrum’s, per year — a number that rose nearly 200 percent from 1993 to 2014, the last year for which statistics are available. Black women are three to four times as likely to die from pregnancy-related causes as their white counterparts, according to the C.D.C. — a disproportionate rate that is higher than that of Mexico, where nearly half the population lives in poverty — and as with infants, the high numbers for black women drive the national numbers.

Monica Simpson is the executive director of SisterSong, the country’s largest organization dedicated to reproductive justice for women of color, and a member of the Black Mamas Matter Alliance, an advocacy group. In 2014, she testified in Geneva before the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, saying that the United States, by failing to address the crisis in black maternal mortality, was violating an international human rights treaty. After her testimony, the committee called on the United States to “eliminate racial disparities in the field of sexual and reproductive health and standardize the data-collection system on maternal and infant deaths in all states to effectively identify and address the causes of disparities in maternal- and infant-mortality rates.” No such measures have been forthcoming. Only about half the states and a few cities maintain maternal-mortality review boards to analyze individual cases of pregnancy-related deaths. There has not been an official federal count of deaths related to pregnancy in more than 10 years. An effort to standardize the national count has been financed in part by contributions from Merck for Mothers, a program of the pharmaceutical company, to the CDC Foundation.

The crisis of maternal death and near-death also persists for black women across class lines. This year, the tennis star Serena Williams shared in Vogue the story of the birth of her first child and in further detail in a Facebook post. The day after delivering her daughter, Alexis Olympia, via C-section in September, Williams experienced a pulmonary embolism, the sudden blockage of an artery in the lung by a blood clot. Though she had a history of this disorder and was gasping for breath, she says medical personnel initially ignored her concerns. Though Williams should have been able to count on the most attentive health care in the world, her medical team seems to have been unprepared to monitor her for complications after her cesarean, including blood clots, one of the most common side effects of C-sections. Even after she received treatment, her problems continued; coughing, triggered by the embolism, caused her C-section wound to rupture. When she returned to surgery, physicians discovered a large hematoma, or collection of blood, in her abdomen, which required more surgery. Williams, 36, spent the first six weeks of her baby’s life bedridden. The reasons for the black-white divide in both infant and maternal mortality have been debated by researchers and doctors for more than two decades. But recently there has been growing acceptance of what has largely been, for the medical establishment, a shocking idea: For black women in America, an inescapable atmosphere of societal and systemic racism can create a kind of toxic physiological stress, resulting in conditions — including hypertension and pre-eclampsia — that lead directly to higher rates of infant and maternal death. And that societal racism is further expressed in a pervasive, longstanding racial bias in health care — including the dismissal of legitimate concerns and symptoms — that can help explain poor birth outcomes even in the case of black women with the most advantages.

“Actual institutional and structural racism has a big bearing on our patients’ lives, and it’s our responsibility to talk about that more than just saying that it’s a problem,” says Dr. Sanithia L. Williams, an African-American OB-GYN in the Bay Area and a fellow with the nonprofit organization Physicians for Reproductive Health. “That has been the missing piece, I think, for a long time in medicine.”

Why BeeDeeist Racetardism Maintains Its Hold On AltRightwing Imagination

Guardian  |  The recent revival of ideas about race and IQ began with a seemingly benign scientific observation. In 2005, Steven Pinker, one of the world’s most prominent evolutionary psychologists, began promoting the view that Ashkenazi Jews are innately particularly intelligent – first in a lecture to a Jewish studies institute, then in a lengthy article in the liberal American magazine The New Republic the following year. This claim has long been the smiling face of race science; if it is true that Jews are naturally more intelligent, then it’s only logical to say that others are naturally less so.

The background to Pinker’s essay was a 2005 paper entitled “Natural history of Ashkenazi intelligence”, written by a trio of anthropologists at the University of Utah. In their 2005 paper, the anthropologists argued that high IQ scores among Ashkenazi Jews indicated that they evolved to be smarter than anyone else (including other groups of Jews).

This evolutionary development supposedly took root between 800 and 1650 AD, when Ashkenazis, who primarily lived in Europe, were pushed by antisemitism into money-lending, which was stigmatised among Christians. This rapid evolution was possible, the paper argued, in part because the practice of not marrying outside the Jewish community meant a “very low inward gene flow”. This was also a factor behind the disproportionate prevalence in Ashkenazi Jews of genetic diseases such as Tay-Sachs and Gaucher’s, which the researchers claimed were a byproduct of natural selection for higher intelligence; those carrying the gene variants, or alleles, for these diseases were said to be smarter than the rest.

Pinker followed this logic in his New Republic article, and elsewhere described the Ashkenazi paper as “thorough and well-argued”. He went on to castigate those who doubted the scientific value of talking about genetic differences between races, and claimed that “personality traits are measurable, heritable within a group and slightly different, on average, between groups”.

In subsequent years, Nicholas Wade, Charles Murray, Richard Lynn, the increasingly popular Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson and others have all piled in on the Jewish intelligence thesis, using it as ballast for their views that different population groups inherit different mental capacities. Another member of this chorus is the journalist Andrew Sullivan, who was one of the loudest cheerleaders for The Bell Curve in 1994, featuring it prominently in The New Republic, which he edited at the time. He returned to the fray in 2011, using his popular blog, The Dish, to promote the view that population groups had different innate potentials when it came to intelligence.

Sullivan noted that the differences between Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews were “striking in the data”. It was a prime example of the rhetoric of race science, whose proponents love to claim that they are honouring the data, not political commitments. The far right has even rebranded race science with an alternative name that sounds like it was taken straight from the pages of a university course catalogue: “human biodiversity”.

A common theme in the rhetoric of race science is that its opponents are guilty of wishful thinking about the nature of human equality. “The IQ literature reveals that which no one would want to be the case,” Peterson told Molyneux on his YouTube show recently. Even the prominent social scientist Jonathan Haidt has criticised liberals as “IQ deniers”, who reject the truth of inherited IQ difference between groups because of a misguided commitment to the idea that social outcomes depend entirely on nurture, and are therefore mutable.

Defenders of race science claim they are simply describing the facts as they are – and the truth isn’t always comfortable. “We remain the same species, just as a poodle and a beagle are of the same species,” Sullivan wrote in 2013. “But poodles, in general, are smarter than beagles, and beagles have a much better sense of smell.”

---

The race “science” that has re-emerged into public discourse today – whether in the form of outright racism against black people, or supposedly friendlier claims of Ashkenazis’ superior intelligence – usually involves at least one of three claims, each of which has no grounding in scientific fact.

Cultivating The Mystique Of The Forbidden

NYTimes  |  To the alt-right, of course, being red-pilled means abandoning liberalism as a lie. It means treating one’s own prejudices as intuitions rather than distortions to be overcome. The act of doing this — casting off socially acceptable values in favor of those that were once unthinkable — creates the edgy energy that has, of late, attracted Kanye West. (West’s sojourn on the alt-right has been facilitated in part by Candace Owens, a conspiracy-minded African-American conservative who created the website Red Pill Black.)

Because the red pill experience is so intense, progressives should think about how to counter dynamics that can make banal right wing beliefs seem like seductive secret knowledge. Attempts at simply repressing bad ideas don’t seem to be working.

To be clear: I don’t think the members of the alt-right or the Intellectual Dark Web — which overlap in places but are quite different — are repressed. The latter regularly appear on television; write for the op-ed pages of leading newspapers, including this one; publish best-selling books; and give speeches to large crowds. They haven’t been blackballed like Colin Kaepernick, who lost his football career for kneeling during the national anthem in protest of police brutality. No state has passed laws denying government contracts to critics of political correctness; such measures are only for supporters of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel.

But online life creates an illusion of left-wing excess and hegemony that barely exists in the real world, at least outside of a few collegiate enclaves. Consider, for example, how an online mob turned a Utah teenager who wore a Chinese-style dress to her prom into a national news story. The sanctimony and censoriousness of the social justice internet is like a machine for producing red pills. It makes people think it’s daring to, say, acknowledge that men and women are different, or pick on immigrants, or praise the president of the United States.

The leftist writer Angela Nagle captured this phenomenon in her 2017 book about the alt-right, “Kill All Normies.” Long before the alt-right “bubbled up to the surface of college campuses, and even Twitter and YouTube,” she wrote, it developed in opposition “to its enemy online culture of the new identity politics typified by platforms like Tumblr.”

Countering right-wing movements that thrive on transgression is a challenge. One of the terrifying things about Trump’s victory is that it appeared to put the fundamental assumptions underlying pluralistic liberal democracy up for debate, opening an aperture for poisonous bigotry to seep into the mainstream. In California, a man named Patrick Little, who said he was inspired by Trump, is running for U.S. Senate on a platform of removing Jews from power; in one recent state poll 18 percent of respondents supported him. On Thursday, Mediaite reported that Juan Pablo Andrade, an adviser to the pro-Trump nonprofit America First Policies, praised the Nazis at a Turning Point USA conference. (Owens, West’s new friend, is Turning Point’s communications director.)

It’s a natural response — and, in some cases, the right response — to try to hold the line against political reaction, to shame people who espouse shameful ideas. But shame is a politically volatile emotion, and easily turns into toxic resentment. It should not be overused. I don’t know exactly where to draw the line between ideas that deserve a serious response, and those that should be only mocked and scorned. I do know that people on the right benefit immensely when they can cultivate the mystique of the forbidden.

In February, Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist who has garnered a cultlike following, asked, in an interview with Vice, “Can men and women work together in the workplace?” To him, the Me Too movement called into question coed offices, a fundamental fact of modern life, because “things are deteriorating very rapidly at the moment in terms of the relationships between men and women.”

Having to contend with this question fills me with despair. I would like to say: It’s 2018 and women’s place in public life is not up for debate! But to be honest, I think it is. Trump is president. Everywhere you look, the ugliest and most illiberal ideas are gaining purchase. Refusing to take them seriously won’t make them go away. (As it happens, I’m participating in a debate with Peterson next week in Toronto.)

"This is America. Don’t catch me slipping, now."

medium |  Don’t catch me slipping. There’s always a way to make Black people’s suffering seem like our own fault, no matter how targeted or deliberate the attacks against us are. If you get got, it’s because you and your people got caught slipping. There’s a reason headlines make it seem like cops’ bullets fire themselves. Even their guns get the benefit of the doubt; Black people shot full of holes don’t.

The narrative that Black America is solely responsible for all the violence it suffers is centuries-old and extremely resilient. This is where Kanye West’s statements about slavery being a choice find their roots. It’s more palatable to blame the victims than force the perpetrators to take a posture of forgiveness, and this upside-down world is what Black Americans have to negotiate without losing their minds. As he dances through the frame, Glover goes from grimacing to grinning in split seconds, from brutal violence to almost shucking and jiving. He skillfully navigates the madness and chaos unfolding behind him. At the end, he’s sweaty, wide-eyed, and running for his life.

This is America, where Blackness is pathologized and capitalism warps ghastly incentives even further. Black people in America have been selected to be the lowest rung, the exploited class upon which the nation’s wealth is built. It’s no accident that Black entertainment has become one of the primary vehicles for masking this reality. There’s a reason the gaudy exhibitions of “new Black money” are reliably programmed.

When the choir raises their voices to sing, “Grandma told me, ‘Get your money, Black man!’” I can’t tell if it’s a cry for reparations or a call to dive headfirst into the rapacious, winner-take-all capitalism of America’s streets and boardrooms. And while I’m not convinced that this uncertainty isn’t deliberate (a slippery way of not alienating anyone), that tension is at the heart of the truth Glover is telling. Survival demands that Black people participate in an immoral, capitalist system that brutalizes them, and justice demands the wealth built on the backs of our stolen ancestors be returned to us. We try to achieve both and end up accomplishing neither.

As Goes Blackness - The Parable

thisisinsider |  Like much of Glover's work, "This is America" is cryptic and loaded with shocking imagery and metaphor. The track's tone swerves from happy-go-lucky psalmic readings to more alarming verses. In typical Glover fashion, he dismissed close readings of his work in an interview at the Met Gala Monday night. 

"I just wanted to make a good song," Glover told E!. "Like something that people could play on Fourth of Julys." 

Directed by his frequent "Atlanta" collaborator Hiro Murai and choreographed by Sherrie Silver, the music video touches on gun violence, the precarious state of black bodies in the US, and how we've historically used entertainment to distract us from pervasive cultural and political problems. But the music video's iconoclastic images and many layers deserve close examination to fully parse. 

Here are 24 things you may have missed.  Twitter moments.

Brand Consumption Coalitions: As Goes Blackness...,

LATimes |  West, however, has yet to face such industry reprisals. He has even posed with a grinning Universal Music Group head Lucian Grainge and influential hip-hop executive Lyor Cohen while wearing his MAGA hat. As an established artist with a huge multi-platinum back catalog, extensive production credits and his own GOOD Music label, West is perhaps less sensitive to fiscal concerns than other artists.

Adidas, the company that distributes his incredibly popular Yeezy apparel line, is standing behind him but made it clear that there are "some comments [the company] doesn't support."

And when it came time to record her first new music in six years, pop diva Christina Aguilera called West. He produced a handful of records on her upcoming album, including new single "Accelerate," which was released amid the furor.

"I've always been a huge fan of Kanye … Outside of, you know, his controversial aspects," she told Billboard in a recent interview. "I just think he's a great artist and musicmaker and beatmaker. The artists that he chooses to pluck from different walks of life are so interesting."

The recent backlash has been driven by fans who took his statements as a personal affront.

"This is a person who has spoken a lot about race over the years and in some very eloquent ways. The dramatic reversal of it all feels like it's more about power or … something else," said Justin Simien, creator of "Dear White People," a Netflix series adapted from his 2014 film of the same name that explores race and identity among a group of black college students.

At 34, Simien is part of a generation of West's core following — those entering adulthood when the Chicago rapper debuted with 2004's "The College Dropout," a potent offering that veered away from gangster posturing in favor of thoughtful observations on family, sexuality, religion, education, prejudice and wealth.

Disappointed fans have a few ways to voice their opinions. One, of course, is on West's own favored platform. The day he voiced his latest support of Trump, Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, Kendrick Lamar and Drake were among those who hit 'unfollow' on Twitter.

West is one of the most successful touring acts today. More than 97,000 fans attended his sold-out six-night 2016 stint at the Forum for his "Saint Pablo" tour.

That tour, however, was derailed in San Jose after West said: "I didn't vote, but if I did, I would have voted for Trump," prompting fans to boo and hurl expletives at him. He later nixed over 20 dates and was reportedly in treatment for mental health and addiction issues.

Similarly, his Adidas clout is considerable. The company's Adidas Originals division (which releases West's popular Yeezy sneakers) touted revenues up 45% for the period when he released "Life of Pablo" in conjunction with a new season of apparel.

The controversy, at least, has proven beneficial to West's "dragon brother," the president.

Kanye West Wants Freedom...,

theatlantic |  What Kanye West seeks is what Michael Jackson sought—liberation from the dictates of that we. In his visit with West, the rapper T.I. was stunned to find that West, despite his endorsement of Trump, had never heard of the travel ban. “He don’t know the things that we know because he’s removed himself from society to a point where it don’t reach him,” T.I. said. West calls his struggle the right to be a “free thinker,” and he is, indeed, championing a kind of freedom—a white freedom, freedom without consequence, freedom without criticism, freedom to be proud and ignorant; freedom to profit off a people in one moment and abandon them in the next; a Stand Your Ground freedom, freedom without responsibility, without hard memory; a Monticello without slavery, a Confederate freedom, the freedom of John C. Calhoun, not the freedom of Harriet Tubman, which calls you to risk your own; not the freedom of Nat Turner, which calls you to give even more, but a conqueror’s freedom, freedom of the strong built on antipathy or indifference to the weak, the freedom of rape buttons, pussy grabbers, and fuck you anyway, bitch; freedom of oil and invisible wars, the freedom of suburbs drawn with red lines, the white freedom of Calabasas.

It would be nice if those who sought to use their talents as entrée into another realm would do so with the same care which they took in their craft. But the Gods are fickle and the history of this expectation is mixed. Stevie Wonder fought apartheid. James Brown endorsed a racist Nixon. There is a Ray Lewis for every Colin Kaepernick, an O.J. Simpson for every Jim Brown, or, more poignantly, just another Jim Brown. And we suffer for this, because we are connected. Michael Jackson did not just destroy his own face, but endorsed the destruction of all those made in similar fashion.

The consequences of Kanye West’s unlettered view of America and its history are, if anything, more direct. For his fans, it is the quality of his art that ultimately matters, not his pronouncements. If his upcoming album is great, the dalliance with Trump will be prologue. If it’s bad, then it will be foreshadowing. In any case what will remain is this—West lending  his imprimatur, as well as his Twitter platform of some 28 million people, to the racist rhetoric of the conservative movement. West’s thoughts are not original—the apocryphal Harriet Tubman quote and the notion that slavery was a “choice” echoes the ancient trope that slavery wasn’t that bad; the myth that blacks do not protest crime in their community is pure Giulianism; and West’s desire to “go to Charlottesville and talk to people on both sides” is an extension of Trump’s response to the catastrophe. These are not stray thoughts. They are the propaganda that justifies voter suppression, and feeds police brutality, and minimizes the murder of Heather Heyer. And Kanye West is now a mouthpiece for it.

It is the young people among the despised classes of America who will pay a price for this—the children parted from their parents at the border, the women warring to control the reproductive organs of their own bodies, the transgender soldier fighting for his job, the students who dare not return home for fear of a “travel ban,” which West is free to have never heard of. West, in his own way, will likely pay also for his thin definition of freedom, as opposed to one that experiences history, traditions, and struggle not as a burden, but as an anchor in a chaotic world.

It is often easier to choose the path of self-destruction when you don’t consider who you are taking along for the ride, to die drunk in the street if you experience the deprivation as your own, and not the deprivation of family, friends, and community. And maybe this, too, is naive, but I wonder how different his life might have been if Michael Jackson knew how much his truly black face was tied to all of our black faces, if he knew that when he destroyed himself, he was destroying part of us, too. I wonder if his life would have been different, would have been longer. And so for Kanye West, I wonder what he might be, if he could find himself back into connection, back to that place where he sought not a disconnected freedom of “I,” but a black freedom that called him back—back to the bone and drum, back to Chicago, back to Home.

Good, Phukkem, Go Play That Degenerate ___________ Some Place Else

theatlantic |  Last week, Larry Moneta, Duke’s vice president of student affairs, stopped into his regular coffee shop in the student center, Joe Van Gogh, for a hot tea and a vegan muffin. The business was streaming music on Spotify, per usual, and as the university administrator stood waiting in line, “Get Paid” by Young Dolph happened to be playing. Its endlessly repeated refrain is “Get paid, young nigga, get paid.”

Durham’s alt-weekly, Indy Week, recounts what happened next:

Britni Brown, who was manning the register, was in charge of the playlist that day... Moneta, a white man, told Brown, an African-American woman, that the song was inappropriate. “The words, ‘I’ll eff you upside down,’ are inappropriate,” Moneta said, according to Brown. (Those exact lyrics are not in the song, though it has plenty of f-bombs.)

“Yes, of course,” Brown said. She says she shut the song off immediately. She grabbed him a vegan muffin and offered it free of charge. “No,” Brown recalls Moneta saying. “Ring me up for it.” Brown says she offered again, apologizing for the offense the song had caused. “You need me to ring me up for it right now,” Moneta insisted.

...Kevin Simmons, the other barista on duty, was busy making drinks. Simmons had worked there for three months and was up for his ninety-day review the next week. While pulling shots of espresso, he noticed a man who was upset with Brown. “Harassing is definitely the word I would use,” Simmons says. “He was verbally harassing her.” Simmons did not hear what Moneta or Brown said specifically, but he noticed Brown hastily turning off the music and apologizing profusely.

If that’s where the matter ended, this would be the sort of story that happens all the time in the United States but is seldom discussed: a patron feels righteously entitled in interaction with low-wage service worker, lashing out in a manner that is needlessly harsh and glaringly uncharitable, while the low-wage service worker is unfailingly polite and doing her level-best to be accommodating.

But that is not where it ended.

Instead, Moneta, a college administrator playing to type, escalated the matter by needlessly injecting it into his institution’s bureaucracy. If you’ve been wondering what Duke’s burgeoning numbers of administrators do all day, here’s a look at a priority two chose: Moneta called Robert Coffey, Duke’s director of dining services, telling him that while at a coffee shop that contracts with the university, he heard an inappropriate song playing.

So the head of dining services called Robbie Roberts, the owner of Joe Van Gogh, who relies on income from Duke University. Now back to the alt-weekly, which somehow got audio of the meeting between the two baristas who were there during the incident and Joe Van Gogh’s human-resources manager:

Apres Moi Le Deluge - Do The Rich Think They Have An Escape Plan?

therealnews |  And the role of finance in deciding who gets to run as a heck of a lot more powerful than any Russians.

RANA FOROOHAR: Yeah. That’s, that’s absolutely true.

PAUL JAY: So very dangerous times. And now we haven’t even talked about in this whole conversation the issue of climate change. There was a time in ’07-’08 when even finance seemed to get what a danger this was. Then the crash comes. And now it’s, like, it’s not even on the political agenda.

RANA FOROOHAR: Well, you know, the only, I would argue the only reason finance cared about climate change in ’07-’08 is that we were having an oil boom. And whenever oil prices go up, finance gets more interested in green technologies because they suddenly seem to make sense economically. If you think about wind, you know, I don’t know the exact figures, but wind power, say, costing, you know, the equivalent of $40 a barrel of oil, or whatever the equivalent would be. Those technologies become more cost effective as the price of oil soars. And so that’s why you saw a lot of interest. But then when oil, which is very cyclical, right, very volatile, when it tanks you see all the money flow out of the sector, out of the clean energy sector. And I expect that’s how it would be now.

It’s too bad, because, you know, we haven’t really talked about what are the alternatives to this financial, financialized capitalism. One of the kind of amazing, like, duh, low-hanging fruit things that we could do is have a green stimulus program. Joe Stiglitz has talked about this, many others have talked about it. It would be the easiest, quickest, smartest way to actually create some real growth in the economy, transition off of fossil fuels. You know, just, just implementing the best technologies available today in all homes and schools, institutions, would create so many jobs and so much growth that it could really help jumpstart the economy in a true ground-up way.

PAUL JAY: There’s no better example of the complete irrationality of this system that that would even make Wall Street money. I mean, capitalists would make money out of a new green economy. But the politics of it is you’re going to have to take on the Koch brothers. There’s a lot of money being made now in war. I should say getting ready for war, and wars. And as rational as that is, and it wouldn’t even be anti-capitalist. Like, you could have a big green economy. People could make money out of it.

RANA FOROOHAR: And in fact, China—

PAUL JAY: You can, you can, and China’s to some extent doing it.

RANA FOROOHAR: China’s, is starting to try and do this. I mean, I have a lot of, you know, issues with China, policy-wise. But one thing that they’ve been very smart on is making these green technologies, green batteries, solar panels, wind, making these strategic sectors and really connecting the dots between workers, businesses, funders, job creators, et cetera.

PAUL JAY: So get into the heads of these people who are making these decisions.

RANA FOROOHAR: Do I have to?

PAUL JAY: They have kids. They have grandkids. They got to live in this world. I know they’re making an orgy level of money. But they’ve made it. And I know I’m not suggesting that there’s ever an end of wanting to make money. I’ve asked people who have ridiculous amounts of money, why are you still trying to make more money? And it comes down to because that’s who I am, and what else am I going to do. I mean, there’s some that decide to start giving it away and do philanthropy. And, but even then are still very concerned about making more and making more. But more importantly, how do, do you ask, how do these people go home at night and not be concerned about climate crisis, and war, and financial meltdown? How do we not worry about that?

RANA FOROOHAR: You know, I think it’s, it’s a worry that if it exists, it gets kind of tucked in the back pocket some, somewhere. One thing I’ve been hearing from a lot of very wealthy people these days, since the election, actually, is that they all have escape plans. You know, I mean, there was a very interesting story, actually, in the New Yorker by Evan Osnos who I knew, actually, when he was a reporter in China. And he covered the ways in which rich people are buying up ranches in New Zealand and creating bunkers in the Bahamas, or wherever they’re going, thinking that they’re somehow going to be able to avoid the apocalypse when it comes. There’s actually a business that operates in New York. It’s a boat that will come, you can apparently pre-buy, this sounds like the biggest scam in history to me, but you can pre-buy tickets if there’s some political crisis or some danger moment, and they’ll come and pick you up and whisk you up the Hudson.

Now, you know, which rich people think there’s going to be their seat waiting when there’s a real problem, I don’t know. But I think that that that goes to this idea that the wealthy have come to believe, frankly like, you know, the French, perhaps, in the 18th century that—

What Is The Purpose Of Food-Powered Make-Work?

evonomics |  There’s a lot of questions one could ask here, starting with, what does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law? (Answer: if 1% of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call “the market” reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else.) But even more, it shows that most people in these jobs are ultimately aware of it. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever met a corporate lawyer who didn’t think their job was bullshit. The same goes for almost all the new industries outlined above. There is a whole class of salaried professionals that, should you meet them at parties and admit that you do something that might be considered interesting (an anthropologist, for example), will want to avoid even discussing their line of work entirely. Give them a few drinks, and they will launch into tirades about how pointless and stupid their job really is.

This is a profound psychological violence here. How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labour when one secretly feels one’s job should not exist? How can it not create a sense of deep rage and resentment. Yet it is the peculiar genius of our society that its rulers have figured out a way, as in the case of the fish-fryers, to ensure that rage is directed precisely against those who actually do get to do meaningful work. For instance: in our society, there seems a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it.  Again, an objective measure is hard to find, but one easy way to get a sense is to ask: what would happen were this entire class of people to simply disappear? Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it’s obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic. A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place. It’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish. (Many suspect it might markedly improve.) Yet apart from a handful of well-touted exceptions (doctors), the rule holds surprisingly well.

Even more perverse, there seems to be a broad sense that this is the way things should be. This is one of the secret strengths of right-wing populism. You can see it when tabloids whip up resentment against tube workers for paralysing London during contract disputes: the very fact that tube workers can paralyse London shows that their work is actually necessary, but this seems to be precisely what annoys people. It’s even clearer in the US, where Republicans have had remarkable success mobilizing resentment against school teachers, or auto workers (and not, significantly, against the school administrators or auto industry managers who actually cause the problems) for their supposedly bloated wages and benefits. It’s as if they are being told “but you get to teach children! Or make cars! You get to have real jobs! And on top of that you have the nerve to also expect middle-class pensions and health care?”

If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it’s hard to see how they could have done a better job. Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorised stratum of the – universally reviled – unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc) – and particularly its financial avatars – but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value. Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. It emerged from almost a century of trial and error. But it is the only explanation for why, despite our technological capacities, we are not all working 3-4 hour days.

Donald Glover's Succinct Annihilation Of Rhyming, Posing, America....,

NewYorker |  The video, which was released online as Glover performed the track on live television, turned the single into a pessimistic statement on American entertainment—both the making and consumption of it. As such, the artist inculpates himself. In the video, Glover is shirtless and his teeth gleam. He plays a kind of deleterious tramp, all instinct, skitting around an airy parking hangar. Dance is its own language; the choreographer for the video, Sherrie Silver, has taught Glover to contort his body in a manner that induces memories of the grotesque theatre of jigging and cake-walking. Sometimes the movements and how they activate his muscles make him look sexy, at other times crazed. His manic elation erupts into violence at a speed that matches something of the media consumer’s daily experience. Glover strikes a pose, and then, in time for the rhythm drop, shoots a black man in the head from behind.

A moment ago, the victim had been strumming a guitar. Glover carefully places the gun on a lush pillow held out for him by an eager school-aged black child. The awful syncopation of murder and music recalls Arthur Jafa’s seven-minute video “Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death,” from 2016, in which footage of a police officer shooting Walter Scott in the back corresponds to a climax in Kanye West’s “Ultra Light Beam.” This is what it’s like, Glover’s video seems to say, to be black in America—at any given time, vulnerable to joy or to destruction. When his character is not dancing, he is killing. The camera amiably follows Glover and a new set of companions, a troupe of uniformed schoolchildren doing the gwara gwara, and then a slew of viral dances. The reprieve ends abruptly when, in another room, Glover is passed another gun, a rifle this time, and murders the members of a black choir. The ten actors fall down in a gruesome heap, reminding us of the night we got word that a young white man had killed a gathering of black worshippers at a church in Charleston. And then Glover is dancing again—this time, with cars burning and police chaos beyond him. The song ends with an eerie melody from Young Thug, who is almost-singing, “You just a big dawg, yeah / I kennelled him in the back yard, yeah.” At the video’s end, Glover is running for his life, the police gaining on him. I’ve been watching it on a loop.

BostonGlobe |  Diving down into the pop-culture id, Glover plays games with the politics of racial personae, the ways they can be appropriated and reappropriated by a racist culture, and the traps into which a trapped people can fall. He casts himself as the swaggering bad boy here, conjuring a centuries-long history of black male image, self-image, used image. 

The body movements and facial contortions reach back to the mother country, through Jim Crow and Juba and America’s sorry legacy of minstrelsy, through Alvin Ailey and “Thriller” and modern street dance — the dance is many-sided, many-streamed, lethal; it’s beautiful and grotesque. The machine-gunning of a gospel choir and Gambino’s crotch-grabbing, his lyrics sardonically boasting “Grandma told me, Get your money, black man” all taunt rap culture’s obsession with machismo, material success, and the glorification of gun violence — memes that are then taken up, reified, and reiterated both by black audiences and by a panicked, powerful white mainstream anxious to define and diminish.

Taken as a whole, “This Is America” functions as a double-edged machete, slicing into a divided culture’s twinned illusions and acknowledging the cartoon as a further form of bondage. Jim Crow mutates into Bad Mutha, burns the culture down, dances across its ashes, and still he ends up running for his life down a dark alley, pursued by an out-of-focus white mob. For a black audience (I’m assuming) it’s a familiar story, and Glover only connects the dots in fresh, unholy ways. For white viewers, those who have the comfort of rarely, if ever, being uncomfortable in their skins in public, this is history written with a different kind of lightning.

The response to this dead-serious work of satire has been exactly what it should be, confused and conversational, struggling toward clarity. In the words of one Twitter onlooker, “Donald Glover is doing what Kanye [West] thinks he’s doing.” (Arguments ensued.) Justin Simien, the writer-director whose wonderful Netflix show “Dear White People” parses the conundrums of black college life with wry empathy, weighed in with an epic interpretive “love letter” to “This Is America.” A white reader would learn a great deal by simply going online and reading the multiplicity of black responses to this video.

When BeeDeeism Hoists Itself By Its Own Little Petard...,

theburningplatform |  A famous line from the movie The Usual Suspects is “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” Even after all these years, it turns up in comment sections and social media. It is a good line to have in mind when thinking about who is actually ruling over us. In America, our elites have spent a very long time convincing us that there are no elites. The fact is though, every society has an elite and it is usually a stable, semi-permanent one. The people in charge tend to stay in charge.

Here’s an interesting bit of data that underscores the stability of a nation’s elites. In the 16th century, the Spanish conquered the area that is now Guatemala. The Spanish were not settlers like the English, so a local Spanish elite came into rule over the conquered people, who were often used as slaves in mining and agriculture. Since 1531, 22 families have controlled Guatemala’s economy, politics and culture. Another 26 families have served as a secondary elite, often marrying into the core elite.

The result is one percent of the population, descendants of the Conquistadors, has controlled the country for over 400 years. This dominance has been locked in by a set of marriage rules, that created a self-perpetuating marriage strategy. For example, both the bride and groom had to bring a certain amount of wealth into the marriage. The result was both families would negotiate marriages much in the same way it was done in medieval Europe. These rules have their roots in the Siete Partidas, that dates to the 13th century.

Of course, elite families marrying one another is not a new idea, but it is more than just wealthy families using marriage to solidify alliances. There is a biological factor to it. The people in the elite got there originally by having elite cognitive skills. Modern elites like to throw around the term meritocracy, but they know biology counts for a lot. It’s why you don’t often see a member of the elite marrying one of the servants. Arnold learned that lesson. The one on the left is from the maid, while those on the right are with a Kennedy.