Counterpunch | Beals isn’t the only candidate for NY-19’s Democratic nomination with
ties to the Iraq War and the intelligence establishment. Patrick Ryan,
who served two tours in Iraq as an intelligence officer after graduating
from West Point, is also running in the primary against Beals.
“Seven years ago, Ryan, then working at a firm called
Berico Technologies, compiled a plan to create a real-time surveillance
operation of left-wing groups and labor unions… The pitch, a joint
venture with a now-defunct company called HBGary Federal and the Peter
Thiel-backed company Palantir Technologies, however, crumbled in 2011
after it was exposed in a series of news reports.
Years later, Ryan pivoted to a startup called Dataminr, a data
analytics company that provided social media monitoring solutions for
law enforcement clients. Dataminr, which received financial support from
the CIA’s venture capital arm, produced real-time updates about
activists for law enforcement. For example, according to documents
obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union of California and
reported by The Intercept for the first time, Dataminr helped track
social media posts relating to Black Lives Matter.”
Interestingly, Ryan has gone the traditional fundraising route, and
is orders of magnitude more flush with cash than Beals ($900,000 as of
the end of 2017 versus Beals’ $174,000). In a sense, these are two very
similar, odious candidates following two divergent campaign models
utilizing different elements of the Democratic Party machine.
Ryan is backed by right-wing elements of the Democratic Party, as evidenced by his receiving support from the New Democrat Coalition PAC,
a conservative, pro-business element of the party. In contrast, Beals
doesn’t have such overt institutional support, and is instead handled by
a Clinton surrogate who actively discourages large-scale fundraising as
part of his strategy to build up his candidate as the true voice of the
grassroots.
As such, Beals is attempting to craft an image as a progressive who
stands in contrast to the Blue Dog conservatism of Ryan. What can you
call this farce? It is the primary equivalent of professional wrestling.
A rigged game.
Beals and Ryan represent a disturbing trend taking place across the
country: intelligence insiders and military officers running as
Democrats in an election year that expects to see triumphs for Democrats
in reaction to the Trump shit show.
The World Socialist Website’s Patrick Martin has compiled a rather exhaustive list of other candidates who fall into this trend as well, including, but not limited to:
NYTimes | The California police had the Golden State Killer’s DNA and recently found an unusually well-preserved sample from one of the crime scenes. The problem was finding a match.
But these days DNA is stored in many places, and a near-match ultimately was found in a genealogy website beloved by hobbyists called GEDmatch, created by two volunteers in 2011.
Anyone can set up a free profile on GEDmatch. Many customers upload to the site DNA profiles they have already generated on larger commercial sites like 23andMe.
The detectives in the Golden State Killer case uploaded the suspect’s DNA sample. But they would have had to check a box online certifying that the DNA was their own or belonged to someone for whom they were legal guardians, or that they had “obtained authorization” to upload the sample.
“The purpose was to make these connections and to find these relatives,” said Blaine Bettinger, a lawyer affiliated with GEDmatch. “It was not intended to be used by law enforcement to identify suspects of crimes.”
But joining for that purpose does not technically violate site policy, he added.
Erin Murphy, a law professor at New York University and expert on DNA searches, said that using a fake identity might raise questions about the legality of the evidence.
The matches found in GEDmatch were to relatives of the suspect, not the suspect himself.
Since the site provides family trees, detectives also were able to look for relatives who might not have uploaded genetic data to the site themselves.
ROTFLMBAO..., Broke, busted. and cain't be trusted Joy Reed has now been cast as the face of progressive "evolution". Lil'Pookie and the whole and entire MSDNC rainbow coalition was out in force this morning in mock indignation to very mildly toast the ultimate hypocrisy and flagrant lying of Comcast's star #NeverTrump interrogator.
(scared to death of what's past that signpost up ahead under President Mike Pence - so - good, old fashioned Guyanese disgust with degeneracy doesn't hold a candle to the formalized de jure clampdown to come if the Deep State prevails in its attempted coup on Trump)
Mr. Rodger, who killed six people
in Isla Vista, Calif., in 2014, recorded YouTube videos raging against
“spoiled, stuck-up” women he called “sluts” who sexually rejected him.
And before Mr. Rodger, there was George Sodini, who killed three women
in a Pennsylvania gym in 2009. He left behind an online diary complaining that women ignored him and that he hadn’t had sex in years.
Despite
a great deal of evidence that connects the dots between these mass
killers and radical misogynist groups, we still largely refer to the
attackers as “lone wolves” — a mistake that ignores the preventable way
these men’s fear and anger are deliberately cultivated and fed online.
Here’s
the term we should all use instead: misogynist terrorism. Until we
grapple with the disdain for women that drives these mass murderers, and
the way that the killers are increasingly radicalized on the internet,
there will be no stopping future tragedies.
Over
the past decade, anti-women communities on the internet — ranging from
“men’s rights” forums and incels to “pickup artists” — have grown
exponentially. While these movements differ in small ways, what they
have in common is an organized hatred of women; the animus is so
pronounced that the hate-watch group Southern Poverty Law Center tracks their actions.
The
other dangerous idea that connects these men is their shared belief
that women — good-looking women, in particular — owe them sexual
attention. The incel community that Mr. Minassian paid homage to, for
example, was banned from Reddit last year because, among other issues, some adherents advocated rape as a means to end their celibacy.
Elle | Now Reid’s show, AM Joy, regularly pulls in viewers, and 2017
marks the first time in 16 years that MSNBC beat out CNN in the
Saturday-morning time slot. Twitter swells with real-time reactions from
#Reiders, especially when Reid schools a guest in her trademark
patient, no-nonsense fashion. (After Shonda Rhimes retweeted a clip of
Reid calmly demolishing a guest who was spouting Clinton Foundation
conspiracy theories—appending the comment “Just in case you’re wondering
how to dismiss foolishness”—Reid confesses, “I died. Oh, I died!”)
Given the cacophony of cable news, where the loudest panelist often
wins, Reid’s approach has few antecedents on the right or the left, but
perhaps that’s why she has so many newly minted fans: In a
sensationalist climate, she refuses to let facts wriggle out of her
grasp.
“As a woman of color,” Cross notes, “there’s often this unspoken pressure to dot your i’s
with hearts to avert the presumed angry Black woman stereotype. But Joy
skirts past that and gets right to the business of unapologetic truth
telling.”
Reid also looks for what she calls
“ideological diversity,” although that can backfire in cases like the
dustup that earned her Rhimes’s attention. “I’m not trying to do Barnum
& Bailey’s circus. If you’re coming on to do a circus act and say
that Hillary Clinton murdered 40 people, we can’t have a conversation,”
she says. When she appears on Meet the Press, she’s been known
to run upstairs, in heels, to her own studio between breaks to check a
fact. “You have to act fast, because once something’s said on TV, people
think it’s true. So that’s one of the reasons I will interrupt people.”
Notes Hayes, “She has this deep centeredness I have come to really
value and appreciate. She doesn’t really raise her voice. She’s not a
ranter; she’s not a yeller.”
Still, every viral
clip earns cries of approval from the rah-rah arm of the left-wing
media—and ire from the far right. Reid tells me the harassment has
spread beyond Twitter; she recently had to inform NBC of a rape threat.
Her
philosophy, she tells me, is just to keep on keeping on. “We’re trying
to fill the show with as many fact-vitamins as we can, to inoculate our
audience against the fact-free nonsense they’ll deal with the rest of
the week. We’re trying to load you up with nutritious facts, so when you
go into the world and are arguing with your argle-bargle uncle who’s
trying to tell you Seth Rich was murdered [referring to the conspiracy theory that the Clintons were somehow involved],
you’ve got some facts; or they tell you that Uranium One was a scandal,
you’ve got something. We’re delivering people some ammunition to be
able to fight in a fact-free world.”
mediaite | The author also repeatedly advocated against gay marriage on the site by
criticizing liberals deemed too far left on the issue. Cable news host Rachel Maddow, who is openly gay and now works with Reid at MSNBC, was a recurring target in these Reid Report posts.
Other comments include making gay jokes about dozens of figures in
politics, media, and entertainment. The following list includes the
names of people the author either accused of being gay — satirically or
not — or made a gay joke about, aside from the previously mentioned
Aiken and Cooper:
The author even lobbed a gay joke at Reid’s now-MSNBC colleague Chris Matthews, who was accused of “loving” Bush in the same sexual way Saudi Prince Abdullah was accused of loving the former president.
nydailynews | “In December I learned that an unknown, external party accessed and
manipulated material from my now-defunct blog, The Reid Report, to
include offensive and hateful references that are fabricated and run
counter to my personal beliefs and ideology,” she said in a statement to
Mediaite.
“I began working with a cyber-security expert who first identified the
unauthorized activity, and we notified federal law enforcement officials
of the breach. The manipulated material seems to be part of an effort
to taint my character with false information by distorting a blog that
ended a decade ago.
“Now that the site has been compromised I can state unequivocally that
it does not represent the original entries. I hope that whoever
corrupted the site recognizes the pain they have caused, not just to me,
but to my family and communities that I care deeply about: LGBTQ,
immigrants, people of color and other marginalized groups.”
The Internet Archive, which runs the Wayback Machine, denied that the blog had been tampered with in any way.
Late Tuesday, Reid’s cybersecurity expert, Jonathan Nichols, said in a
statement provided to the Daily News that login information to The Reid
Report “was available on the Dark Web” five months ago. He also said
that the screenshots of the blog had been manipulated “with the intent
to tarnish Ms. Reid's character.”
Nichols locked his Twitter profile shortly after the statements went
out, but the Wayback Machine showed tweets in which he bragged about his
relationship with Andrew Auernheimer, the webmaster for Nazi website
The Daily Stormer, who is frequently known as weev online.
Reid’s lawyer, John H. Reichman, said the FBI has been brought into the matter.
“We have received confirmation the FBI has opened an investigation into
potential criminal activities surrounding several online accounts,
including personal email and blog accounts, belonging to Joy-Ann Reid,”
he said in a statement through MSNBC.
“Our own investigation and monitoring of the situation will continue in
parallel, and we are cooperating with law enforcement as their
investigation proceeds.”
Daily Beast exec editor @NoahShachtman sent this note out to staff today regarding the @JoyAnnReid situation. He says reporters @kpoulsen and @maxwelltani are investigating her claims and examining her history: “In the meantime, we’re going to hit pause on Reid’s columns...” pic.twitter.com/eJwwFeHSCn
theatlantic | A strange story about MSNBC host Joy
Reid has been unfolding for a week. It began when a Twitter user with
about 1,000 followers, @Jamie_Maz, dug up what appeared to be homophobic posts on Reid’s defunct blog, the Reid Report. They were similar in nature to posts that Reid apologized for as “insensitive” back in December, after @Jamie_Maz brought those to light.
The
new round of posts contain a lot of cliche gay jokes about Charlie
Crist and others, concerns that “adult gay men tend to be attracted to
very young, post-pubescent types, bringing them ‘into the lifestyle,’”
and commentary like “part of the intrinsic nature of ‘straightness’ is
that the idea of homosexual sex is ... well ... gross ... even if you
think that gay people are perfectly lovely individuals.”
The
triumph of the gay-rights movement has been so complete and fast that
it’s easy to forget that 10 years ago—in the same election that swept
Barack Obama to the White House—California voters passed a state constitutional amendment
banning same-sex marriage. Attitudes changed, the moral arc bent, and
now, a lot fewer people disparage gay people like this than did in 2006.
A liberal talk-show host would and should be embarrassed and ashamed by
these posts popping up, but Reid apologized once, and could have done
so again.
Instead, Reid released a statement to Mediaite
saying that she’d been hacked and was not responsible for the posts.
“In December I learned that an unknown, external party accessed and
manipulated material from my now-defunct blog, The Reid Report, to
include offensive and hateful references that are fabricated and run
counter to my personal beliefs and ideology,” Reid said.
The posts
had been dug up on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which
maintains copies of many pages on the web. When Reid said she’d been
hacked, many jumped to the conclusion that it was the Wayback Machine
that had been hacked. On its blog, the Internet Archive said that Reid’s
lawyers had contacted them about a possible hack, but that they had no
indication that one had occurred.
“This past December, Reid’s
lawyers contacted us, asking to have archives of the blog
(blog.reidreport.com) taken down, stating that ‘fraudulent’ posts were
‘inserted into legitimate content’ in our archives of the blog,” they
wrote. “Her attorneys stated that they didn’t know if the alleged
insertion happened on the original site or with our archives (the point
at which the manipulation is to have occurred, according to Reid, is
still unclear to us).”
On review, the Internet Archive “found nothing to indicate tampering or hacking of the Wayback Machine versions.”
truthdig | Exactly 200 days before the crucial midterm election that will
determine whether Republicans maintain control of Congress, the
Democratic National Committee filed a 66-page lawsuit that surely cost
lots of money and energy to assemble.
Does the lawsuit target
purveyors of racist barriers to voting that block and deflect so many
people of color from casting their ballots?
No.
Well,
perhaps this ballyhooed lawsuit aims to ensure the rights of people who
don’t mainly speak English to get full access to voting information?
Unfortunately, no.
Maybe it’s a legal action to challenge the ridiculously sparse voting booths provided in college precincts?
Not that either.
Announced with a flourish by DNC Chair Tom Perez, the civil lawsuit—which
reads like a partisan polemic wrapped in legalisms—sues the Russian
government, the Trump campaign and operatives, as well as WikiLeaks and
its founding editor, Julian Assange.
It’s hard to imagine that
many voters in swing districts—who’ll determine whether the GOP runs the
House through the end of 2020—will be swayed by the Russia-related
accusations contained in the lawsuit. People are far more concerned
about economic insecurity for themselves and their families, underscored
by such matters as the skyrocketing costs of health care and college
education.
To emphasize that “this is a patriotic—not
partisan—move,” Perez’s announcement of the lawsuit on April 20 quoted
one politician, Republican Sen. John McCain, reaching for the hyperbolic
sky: “When you attack a country, it’s an act of war. And so we have to
make sure that there is a price to pay, so that we can perhaps persuade
the Russians to stop these kind of attacks on our very fundamentals of
democracy.”
Setting aside the dangerous rhetoric about “an act of
war,” it’s an odd quotation to choose. For Russia, there’s no “price to
pay” from a civil lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the
Southern District of New York. As the DNC well knows, any judgment
against such entities as the Russian Federation and the general staff of
its armed forces would be unenforceable.
The DNC’s lawsuit
amounts to doubling down on its fixation of blaming Russia for the
Democratic Party’s monumental 2016 loss, at a time when it’s essential
to remedy the failed approaches that were major causes of Hillary
Clinton’s defeat in the first place. Instead of confronting its fealty
to Wall Street or overall failure to side with working-class voters
against economic elites, the Democratic National Committee is ramping up
the party leadership’s 18-month fixation on Russia Russia Russia.
In truth, the party’s Russia fixation
leaves significantly less messaging space for economic and social issues
that the vast majority of Americans care about far more. Similarly, the
Russia obsession at MSNBC (which routinely seems like “MSDNC”) has left
scant airtime for addressing, or even noting, the economic concerns of
so many Americans. (For instance, see the data in FAIR’s study, “Russia or Corporate Tax Cuts: Which Would Comcast Rather MSNBC Cover?”)
But
even some of the congressional Democrats who’ve been prominent
“Russiagate” enthusiasts have recognized that the lawsuit is off track.
When Wolf Blitzer on CNN
asked a member of the House Intelligence Committee, Jackie Speier,
whether she believes that Perez and his DNC team “are making a big
mistake by filing this lawsuit,” the California congresswoman’s reply
was blunt: “Well, I’m not supportive of it. Whether it’s a mistake or
not we’ll soon find out.” Speier called the lawsuit “ill-conceived.”
The
most unprincipled part of the lawsuit has to do with its targeting of
Assange and WikiLeaks. That aspect of the suit shows that the DNC is
being run by people whose attitude toward a free press—ironically
enough—has marked similarities to Donald Trump’s.
techcrunch | A new — and theoretical — system for blockchain-based data storage
could ensure that hackers will not be able to crack cryptocurrencies
once the quantum era starts. The idea, proposed by researchers at the
Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, would secure
cryptocurrency futures for decades using a blockchain technology that is
like a time machine.
To
understand what’s going on here we have to define some terms. A
blockchain stores every transaction in a system on what amounts to an
immutable record of events. The work necessary for maintaining and
confirming this immutable record is what is commonly known as mining.
But this technology — which the paper’s co-author Del Rajan claims will make up “10 percent of global GDP… by 2027” — will become insecure in an era of quantum computers.
Therefore
the solution to store a blockchain in a quantum era requires a quantum
blockchain using a series of entangled photons. Further, Spectrum
writes: “Essentially, current records in a quantum blockchain are not
merely linked to a record of the past, but rather a record in the past,
one that does not exist anymore.”
Yeah, it’s weird.
From the paper intro:
Our
method involves encoding the blockchain into a temporal GHZ
(Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger) state of photons that do not
simultaneously coexist. It is shown that the entanglement in time, as
opposed to an entanglement in space, provides the crucial quantum
advantage. All the subcomponents of this system have already been shown
to be experimentally realized. Perhaps more shockingly, our encoding
procedure can be interpreted as non-classically influencing the past;
hence this decentralized quantum blockchain can be viewed as a quantum
networked time machine.
In short, the quantum
blockchain is immutable because the photons that it contains do not
exist at the current time but are still extant and readable. This means
the entire blockchain is visible but cannot be “touched” and the only
entry you would be able to try to tamper with is the most recent one. In
fact, the researchers write, “In this spatial entanglement case, if an
attacker tries to tamper with any photon, the full blockchain would be
invalidated immediately.”
Is this possible? The researchers note that the technology already exists.
ieee | Chinese researchers have put forward a new quantum cryptography
standard that could, if confirmed, substantially increase the speed of
encrypted messages. The proposed new standard has been simulated on
computers although not yet tested in the lab.
Quantum cryptography, the next-generation of secret messages whose
secrecy is guaranteed by the laws of quantum mechanics, has been in the
news recently. Last fall a group from the Chinese Academy of Sciences
transmitted quantum cryptographically encoded communications (via
satellite) to a ground station in Vienna, Austria.
The communications included quantum-encoded images and a 75-minute
quantum-cryptographically secured videoconference, consisting of more
than 2 gigabytes of data. IEEE Spectrum reported on the event at the time. And now, as of last month, the entire project has been detailed in the journal Physical Review Letters.
Media coverage of the event stressed its significance in moving
toward a so-called “quantum Internet.” Yet the quantum internet would
still be a distant dream when quantum cryptography can only mediate one
or, at most, a few quantum-secured communications channels. To scale up
to anything worthy of the name quantum Internet, quantum cryptography
would need to generate not only thousands of cryptographic keys per
second. Rather, a scalable quantum crypto system should aspire to
key-generation rates closer to billions per second or greater—in the
gigahertz (GHz) range and up, not kilohertz (kHz).
cosmos |For a few minutes each night in certain parts of China, the
brightest light in the sky is the lurid glow of the Micius satellite,
shooting a green laser down to Earth as it swings through space 500
kilometres above. When conditions are right, you might also see a red
beam lancing back through the darkness from one of the ground stations
that send signals in reply.
Micius is not your average
telecommunications satellite. On 29 September 2017, it made history by
accomplishing an astonishing feat, harnessing the mysterious qualities
of quantum entanglement – what Einstein called ‘spooky action at a
distance’ – to ‘teleport’ information into space and back again. In doing so, it enabled the first intercontinental phone call – a video call, in fact, between Beijing and Vienna – that was completely unhackable.
The weird science of quantum physics that powers Micius is at the heart of a technology arms race. On one side are quantum computers,
still in their infancy but with enormous potential once they grow in
power. Among their most prized, and feared, applications is the capacity
to cut through the complex mathematical locks that now secure computer
encryption systems – the ones that mean you can confidently conduct
financial transactions over the internet. On the other side is the only
sure defence – encryption techniques that also rely on the laws of
quantum physics.
Until recently scientists had managed to make
quantum encryption work only across distances of a hundred kilometres or
so. The Chinese scientists behind Micius have now reached around the
world. It brings the ultimate prize tantalisingly closer. “I envision a
space-ground integrated quantum internet,” says Pan Jianwei, whose team
became frontrunners in the quantum communications race after Micius
switched on.
NewYorker | “History teaches, but
has no pupils,” the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci wrote. That
line comes to mind when I browse in the history section of a bookstore.
An adage in publishing is that you can never go wrong with books about
Lincoln, Hitler, and dogs; an alternative version names golfing, Nazis,
and cats. In Germany, it’s said that the only surefire magazine covers
are ones that feature Hitler or sex. Whatever the formula, Hitler and
Nazism prop up the publishing business: hundreds of titles appear each
year, and the total number runs well into the tens of thousands. On
store shelves, they stare out at you by the dozens, their spines steeped
in the black-white-and-red of the Nazi flag, their titles barking in
Gothic type, their covers studded with swastikas. The back catalogue
includes “I Was Hitler’s Pilot,” “I Was Hitler’s Chauffeur,” “I Was
Hitler’s Doctor,” “Hitler, My Neighbor,” “Hitler Was My Friend,” “He Was
My Chief,” and “Hitler Is No Fool.” Books have been written about
Hitler’s youth, his years in Vienna and Munich, his service in the First
World War, his assumption of power, his library, his taste in art, his
love of film, his relations with women, and his predilections in
interior design (“Hitler at Home”).
Why do these books pile up in
such unreadable numbers? This may seem a perverse question. The
Holocaust is the greatest crime in history, one that people remain
desperate to understand. Germany’s plunge from the heights of
civilization to the depths of barbarism is an everlasting shock. Still,
these swastika covers trade all too frankly on Hitler’s undeniable flair
for graphic design. (The Nazi flag was apparently his
creation—finalized after “innumerable attempts,” according to “Mein Kampf.”) Susan Sontag, in her 1975 essay “Fascinating Fascism,”
declared that the appeal of Nazi iconography had become erotic, not
only in S & M circles but also in the wider culture. It was, Sontag
wrote, a “response to an oppressive freedom of choice in sex (and,
possibly, in other matters), to an unbearable degree of individuality.”
Neo-Nazi movements have almost certainly fed on the perpetuation of
Hitler’s negative mystique.
Americans have an especially
insatiable appetite for Nazi-themed books, films, television shows,
documentaries, video games, and comic books. Stories of the Second World
War console us with memories of the days before Vietnam, Cambodia, and
Iraq, when the United States was the world’s good-hearted superpower,
riding to the rescue of a Europe paralyzed by totalitarianism and
appeasement. Yet an eerie continuity became visible in the postwar
years, as German scientists were imported to America and began working
for their former enemies; the resulting technologies of mass destruction
exceeded Hitler’s darkest imaginings. The Nazis idolized many aspects
of American society: the cult of sport, Hollywood production values, the
mythology of the frontier. From boyhood on, Hitler devoured the
Westerns of the popular German novelist Karl May.
In 1928, Hitler remarked, approvingly, that white settlers in America
had “gunned down the millions of redskins to a few hundred thousand.”
When he spoke of Lebensraum, the German drive for “living space” in Eastern Europe, he often had America in mind.
Among recent books on Nazism, the one that may prove most disquieting for American readers is James Q. Whitman’s “Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law”
(Princeton). On the cover, the inevitable swastika is flanked by two
red stars. Whitman methodically explores how the Nazis took inspiration
from American racism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. He notes that, in “Mein Kampf,” Hitler praises America as the
one state that has made progress toward a primarily racial conception
of citizenship, by “excluding certain races from naturalization.”
Whitman writes that the discussion of such influences is almost taboo,
because the crimes of the Third Reich are commonly defined as “the nefandum,
the unspeakable descent into what we often call ‘radical evil.’ ” But
the kind of genocidal hatred that erupted in Germany had been seen
before and has been seen since. Only by stripping away its national
regalia and comprehending its essential human form do we have any hope
of vanquishing it.
nursingclio | Genetic counseling, as the previous two posts in this series
suggested, has a lot to offer for navigating the tricky decisions things
like prenatal testing and preimplantation genetic diagnosis raise.
Well, in this post I’d like to make things a little more complicated. Enter the sheer messiness of history.
I still believe genetic counseling is the best approach we have right
now for helping prospective parents with hard choices, but it has a
complicated — and not so distant — past that continues to shape
counselors’ ways of interacting with clients and their decisions.
A LITTLE REVIEW
In the first post
I shared a little bit of the history of genetic counseling in the
United States and gave some examples of how, today, it can help
prospective parents understand why they’re being tested and what those
tests might mean. The second post
discussed the history of blame and disability more broadly and
introduced the fact that ideas about what disability means have changed
over time — often significantly.
I’ve argued that genetic counseling has the potential to address
feelings of blame, guilt, and confusion in the face of genetic testing
results. Further, it can help answer questions like: What will life
actually be like for parents and their children? What do genetic tests
say and what don’t they say? What are the options after having a test?
My optimism about genetic counseling, evident in these two posts, is
tempered by the fact that it has a complex and challenging past with
origins in eugenics ideology that have influenced the way counseling is
provided today. In a sense what I’m suggesting is that genetic
counseling still has a lot of issues that need to be talked about and
worked on, but that it’s way better than nothing.
Lets take a look at what I mean about how eugenic ideas shaped genetic counseling.
EUGENIC BEGINNINGS
Most of the first genetic counselors in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s
were human geneticists, but the origins of human genetics lay in
eugenics. Early genetic counselors identified self-proclaimed
eugenicists like Charles Davenport, founder of the Eugenics Record
Office at Cold Spring Harbor — one of the nation’s leading eugenics
institutions between 1910 and the 1930s — as some of the first human
geneticists in the United States. And four of the first five presidents
of the American Society of Human Genetics, founded in 1948, were also
board members of the American Eugenics Society.[1]
Human geneticists tried to distance themselves from aspects of the
traditional eugenics movement, particularly its racial prejudices and
some of its scientific methods, but were still concerned about the
eugenic effects of their work. They worried about what effect their
counseling might have on the population as a whole.
gizmodo | Imagine a scenario, perhaps a few years from now, in which Canada
decides to release thousands of mosquitoes genetically modified to fight
the spread of a devastating mosquito-borne illness. While Canada has
deemed these lab-made mosquitoes ethical, legal and safe for both humans
and the environment, the US has not. Months later, by accident and
circumstance, the engineered skeeters show up across the border. The
laws of one land, suddenly, have become the rule of another.
If
modern science can can defy the boundaries of borders, who exactly
should be charged with deciding what science to unleash upon the world?
A
version of this hypothetical scenario is already unfolding in the UK.
Last year, the British government gave scientists the green light to
genetically engineer human embryos. But in the US and most other
nations, this possibility is still both illegal and morally fraught.
Opponents to the practice argue that it risks opening up a Pandora’s Box
of designer babies and genetically engineered super-humans. Even many more neutral voices argue that the technology demands further scrutiny.
And
yet, the UK, at the vanguard of genetic engineering human beings, has
already opened that box. In 2015, the British government approved the
use of a controversial gene-editing technology to stop devastating
mitochondrial diseases from being passed on from mothers to their future
children. And last February, the UK granted the first license in the
world to edit healthy human embryos for research. Recently, a Newsweek headline asked whether the scientists of this small island nation are in fact deciding the fate of all of humanity. It is a pretty good question.
This alarming ethical conundrum has not escaped the notice of global governments. A National Intelligence Council report
released this month concluded that “genome editing and human
enhancement” are “likely to pose some of the most contentious values
questions in the coming decades.” Advancements in these arenas, the
report said, “will affect relations between states.”
Dr. Calhoun was a researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).
In his most famous experiment, four breeding pairs of mice were moved
into a mouse utopia. There were unlimited supplies of food, water and
bedding. The area was disease free, the temperature perfectly
controlled, and the researchers even cleaned the place monthly. As close
to heaven as a mouse could get. All that they lacked was infinite space. There was, however, room for 3,000 mice.
Mice, for those who are unaware,
are actually quite social creatures in the right conditions. They take
on group roles, mark out territories, and develop hierarchies if their
environment allows. It is this behavior that Calhoun wished to affect,
and study. He described the experiment in terms of four “eras”,
summarized here.
Days 0-100: The era called “Strive”. During which the mice were getting used to the new world, territories were established.
Days 100-315: The “Exploit”
period. The population doubled every 60 or so days. Normal social
behavior was noted here, and the population took full advantage of its
unlimited resources.
Days 315-600: The “Equilibrium”
period. It was here that the social roles of mice began to break down.
Mice born during this period found they lacked space to mark out
territories in, and random acts of violence among the mice began to
occur. Many males simply gave up on trying to find females. These males
retreated into their bedding and rarely ventured out. Simply eating,
sleeping, and grooming. Calhoun dubbed these narcissistic loners “The Beautiful Ones”. They also tended to be rather stupid.
Days 600-800: The “Die”
phase. The population, which maxed-out at 2,200, began to decline. No
surviving births took place after day 600, and the colony ultimately
died out. Individuals removed from the colony and placed in similar
units continued to demonstrate erratic behavior and also failed to
reproduce. The mice were remarkably violent at this time, for little
reason.
A formula was written to explain what happened to the
mice, how the population continued to crash even after conditions began
to improve again. Calhoun felt there were truly two deaths for the
mice: the first death was a spiritual one, leading to the
decline into chaos and madness. After that event, no recovery was
possible for the mice. The second was physical, and inevitable after the
first.
Counterpunch | It feels as if world events are in overdrive, and sometimes it’s hard
to escape the thought that that there is no longer much point in trying
to analyse, or make sense of, a trajectory increasingly out of control.
I see little evidence that those of us in the segment of the world
political spectrum likely to read these words need much persuasion — nor
that those who consider us dupes of the Evil Vladimir, or apologists
for what was once called the “Yellow Peril”, could ever have any
inclination to even glance at the arguments and sentiments of those they
consider so utterly deluded.
In fact, the plethora of information (both truth and lies), and the
amazing communicative possibilities most of us now have at our disposal,
have brought with them a world in which no one is very often persuaded
of anything: for every fact we present, they have access to an official
or cleverly crafted lie with convincing-looking documentation that
demonstrates our ostensible mendacity and subversion.
What pre-internet thinker – is it possible that bygone age ended only
20 years ago for most of us? — would have ever thought that a
technological world in which every voice can be heard worldwide would
solidify, rather than threaten, the role of propaganda in public life?
or that near-universal access to technology enabling impressively
thorough research, at incredible speed, would be one of the major
factors in eliminating political consensus and rendering nearly obsolete
the recognition of facts as such?
Well, perhaps there are brilliant minds out there who foresaw it all.
But consider me dumbfounded. While there is a range of similarities
between our world today and those described by Orwell and Huxley in
their famous novels of future horror, there are other aspects that
render this a different universe altogether, and one that continues to
shock me.
Assuming that it WERE in fact possible to persuade people who accept
their governments’ colossal lies and distortions that those same lies
are in fact exactly that – lies — one would be required to acquaint most
of them with the most basic facts of recent history. For remarkably,
almost unbelievably, in a world where all of us have limitless
information and history at our fingertips, most people know nothing
about recent history – and the vast majority is not even curious about
it.
‘Most White Americans, as a general statement, think they are better
than the rest of the world. And most Americans have scant knowledge
about the rest of the world. So the belief in cultural (and moral)
superiority is based on what? The answer is not simple, but as a general
sort of response, this trust in “our” superiority is built on violence.
On an ability to be effectively violent. Most British, too, think they
are superior to those “wogs” south of their emerald isle. But since the
setting of the sun on Empire, “officially”, the British hold to both a
sense of superiority and a deep panic-inducing sense of inferiority — at
least to their American cousins. They are still better than those
fucking cheese eating frogs or the krauts or whoever, but they accept
that the U.S. is the sort of heavyweight champ of the moment. Meanwhile,
the tragic and criminal fire at Grenfell Towers in London elicited a
public discourse that perfectly reflected the class inequality of the
UK, but also reflected, again, the colonialist mentality of the ruling
party and their constituency … But that is exactly it. The colonial
template is one etched in acid in the collective imagination of the
West. At least the English-speaking West. Expendable natives…which is
what Jim Mattis sees everywhere that he dumps depleted uranium and Willy
Pete. It is what Madeleine Albright saw in Iraq or Hillary Clinton in
Libya or Barack Obama in Sudan, Yemen, and…well… four or five other
countries. It is what most U.S. police departments see in neighborhoods
ravaged by poverty. As in those old Tarzan films, when the sound of
drums is heard, the pith helmeted white man notes…”the natives are
restless tonight”. When one discusses Syria, the most acute topic this
week, remember that for Mad Dog and Boss Trump, or for the loopy John
Bolton, these are just natives in need of pacification. Giving money to
ISIS or Daesh, or whoever, as a cynical expression of colonial
realpolitik, is nothing out of the ordinary. It is what the UK and US
have done for a long while. It’s Ramar of the Jungle handing out beads
to the *natives*.’ (John Steppling, “The Sleep of Civilization”)
medicalnewstoday | The potentially catastrophic consequences of an exponentially growing
global population is a favorite subject for writers of dystopian
fiction.
The most recent example, Utopia - a forthcoming David Fincher-directed series for HBO
- won critical acclaim in its original incarnation on UK television for
its depiction of a conspiracy-laden modern world where the real threat
to public health is not Ebola or other headline-friendly communicable viruses, but overpopulation.
Fears over the ever-expanding number of human bodies on our planet are
not new and have been debated by researchers and policy makers for
decades, if not centuries. However, recent research by University of Washington demographer Prof. Adrian Raftery
- using modern statistical modeling and the latest data on population,
fertility and mortality - has found that previous projections on
population growth may have been conservative.
"Our new projections are probabilistic, and we find that there will
probably be between 9.6 and 12.3 billion people in 2100," Prof. Raftery
told Medical News Today. "This projection is based on a
statistical model that uses all available past data on fertility and
mortality from all countries in a systematic way, unlike previous
projections that were based on expert assumptions."
Prof. Raftery's figure places up to an additional 5 billion people more
on the Earth by 2100 than have been previously calculated.
A key finding of the study is that the fertility rate in Africa is
declining much more slowly than has been previously estimated, which
Prof. Raftery tells us "has major long-term implications for
population."
medium |Earlier this summer, I presented the American Nations:
the eleven regional cultures that comprise the United States and North
America. Their existence explains much about our history, our constitutional arrangements,
and, indeed, our political fissures — past and present. If you have any
ancestors who were living in North America prior to the Civil War, the
existence of these rival nations is likely reflected in parts of your
family tree and, according to a recent study published in Nature Communications, may very well have left a mark on your DNA.
I couldn’t miss this study, because shortly after it came out, readers of my 2011 book, American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America,
were stuffing my inbox and flooding my social media feeds with it. A
glance at the thumbnail illustration that accompanied the study made it
clear why: Unbeknownst to the scientists who’d written the paper, the
map depicting the key results of their research on the patterns of
genetic variation in North America over time and space mirrored the
American Nations map to an uncanny degree.
This
is remarkable because the American Nations paradigm is resolutely not
about genetics or genealogy. Rather, it’s built on the late cultural
geographer Wilbur ZeFrolinsky’s Doctrine of First Effective Settlement,
which argues that when a “new” society is settled, the cultural
characteristics of the initial settlement group will have a lasting and
outsized effect on the future trajectory of that society — even if their
numbers were very small and those of later immigrants of different
origins were very large. These lasting characteristics, which inform the
dominant culture of entire regions of North America, are passed down
culturally, not genetically, which explains why the Dutch-settled area
around New York City still has obvious and distinct characteristics
inherited from Golden Age Amsterdam, even though the portion of people
there reporting Dutch ancestry to census takers is a vanishingly small
0.2 percent. Culture is learned, not inherited.
And yet the Nature
study — powered by the enormous cross-referenced genomics and genealogy
databases of Ancestry.com — reveals that the regional cultures have
left a significant genetic imprint as well. That’s because members of a
regional culture tended to mate with one another, rather than with
people from rival areas, even when those rivals lived nearby, in the
very same colony or state.
“Who
we are today — the genetics of Americans all over the place — is the
result of all kinds of cycles of reproductive isolation and the release
of that isolation,” says Catherine A. Ball, a geneticist and the chief
scientific officer at Ancestry who oversees the company’s DNA work. “Who
your mates would be was linked to geography, politics, religion, war,
and all of that is showing today in people walking on the streets and
who they are related to.”
Ball wasn’t familiar with American Nations
before I spoke with her, but the results show that the boundaries of
the regional cultures were very real when it came to human reproduction,
creating reproductive clusters centuries ago that geneticists have been
able to recreate through the examination of nearly a million living
Americans’ DNA.
ieet | For the sake of the children, let’s control human breeding. No one
should be permitted to reproduce until they pass a battery of tests.
Does that proposal enrage you? Go ahead, hate me. Call me vile names
like “Neo-Nazi-Elitist-Baby-Killing-Totalitarian-Sicko.” Or simply
“Eugenicist.” I don’t care. I know I’m right.
It’s blatantly clear that 15-year-old intoxicated half-wits can
easily spawn, but should they? Hell no. Let’s control human breeding,
please. Let’s keep babies away from buffoons, and let’s test fetuses
meticulously to guarantee healthy infants. No one should be permitted to
reproduce unless and until they pass a battery of tests.
Philosophers, psychologists, and social workers have advanced this
idea for 30+ years, notably Hugh LaFollette in his seminal essay, “Licensing Parents” (1980), and Peg Tittle, editor of Should Parents Be Licensed?
(2004). Their suggested reform—based on humanitarian concerns for the
rights of children—is always booed down hysterically with the shrill
vocabulary that I listed above.
But the reformers are right. Completely. Ethically. I agree with
Joseph Fletcher, who notes, “It is depressing…to realize that most
people are accidents,” and with George Schedler, who states, “Society
has a duty to ensure that infants are born free of avoidable defects.”
Traditionalists regard pregnancy and parenting as a natural right
that should never be curtailed. But what’s the result of this
laissez-faire attitude? Catastrophic suffering. Millions of children
born disadvantaged, crippled in childhood, destroyed in adolescence.
Procreation cannot be classified as a self-indulgent privilege—it needs
to be viewed as a life-and-death responsibility.
Look at it this way: adoption centers don’t allow knuckleheads to
walk out with a child; they maintain standards that we should apply to every wannabe parent.
Below I’ve compiled a list of deplorable situations caused by flawed
individuals who should not be allowed to impregnate, gestate, reproduce,
and parent because they’re mentally, physically, emotionally, or
genetically unsuitable for the ambitious task.
A Foundation of Joy
-
Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
on, either beating the fuck out of the tumor, or reattaching that slippery
eel ...
April Three
-
4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
Return of the Magi
-
Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
-
Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
-
sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...