genetic engineering: technical challenge or moral challenge?

waitbutwhy |  He is very, very concerned about AI. I quoted him in my posts on AI saying that he fears that by working to bring about Superintelligent AI (ASI), we’re “summoning the demon,” but I didn’t know how much he thought about the topic. He cited AI safety as one of the three things he thinks about most—the other two being sustainable energy and becoming a multi-planet species, i.e. Tesla and SpaceX. Musk is a smart motherf---er, and he knows a ton about AI, and his sincere concern about this makes me scared.

— The Fermi Paradox also worries him. In my post on that, I divided Fermi thinkers into two camps—those who think there’s no other highly intelligent life out there at all because of some Great Filter, and those who believe there must be plenty of intelligent life and that we don’t see signs of any for some other reason. Musk wasn’t sure which camp seemed more likely, but he suspects that there may be an upsetting Great Filter situation going on. He thinks the paradox “just doesn’t make sense” and that it “gets more and more worrying” the more time that goes by. Considering the possibility that maybe we’re a rare civilization who made it past the Great Filter through a freak occurrence makes him feel even more conviction about SpaceX’s mission: “If we are very rare, we better get to the multi-planet situation fast, because if civilization is tenuous, then we must do whatever we can to ensure that our already-weak probability of surviving is improved dramatically.” Again, his fear here makes me feel not great.

— One topic I disagreed with him on is the nature of consciousness. I think of consciousness as a smooth spectrum. To me, what we experience as consciousness is just what it feels like to be human-level intelligent. We’re smarter, and “more conscious” than an ape, who is more conscious than a chicken, etc. And an alien much smarter than us would be to us as we are to an ape (or an ant) in every way. We talked about this, and Musk seemed convinced that human-level consciousness is a black-and-white thing—that it’s like a switch that flips on at some point in the evolutionary process and that no other animals share. He doesn’t buy the “ants : humans :: humans : [a much smarter extra-terrestrial]” thing, believing that humans are weak computers and that something smarter than humans would just be a stronger computer, not something so beyond us we couldn’t even fathom its existence.

— I talked to him for a while about genetic reprogramming. He doesn’t buy the efficacy of typical anti-aging technology efforts, because he believes humans have general expiration dates, and no one fix can help that. He explained: “The whole system is collapsing. You don’t see someone who’s 90 years old and it’s like, they can run super fast but their eyesight is bad. The whole system is shutting down. In order to change that in a serious way, you need to reprogram the genetics or replace every cell in the body.” Now with anyone else—literally anyone else—I would shrug and agree, since he made a good point. But this was Elon Musk, and Elon Musk fixes s--t for humanity. So what did I do?

Me: Well…but isn’t this important enough to try? Is this something you’d ever turn your attention to?

Elon: The thing is that all the geneticists have agreed not to reprogram human DNA. So you have to fight not a technical battle but a moral battle.

Me: You’re fighting a lot of battles. You could set up your own thing. The geneticists who are interested—you bring them here. You create a laboratory, and you could change everything.

Elon: You know, I call it the Hitler Problem. Hitler was all about creating the Übermensch and genetic purity, and it’s like—how do you avoid the Hitler Problem? I don’t know.

Me: I think there’s a way. You’ve said before about Henry Ford that he always just found a way around any obstacle, and you do the same thing, you always find a way. And I just think that that’s as important and ambitious a mission as your other things, and I think it’s worth fighting for a way, somehow, around moral issues, around other things.

Elon: I mean I do think there’s…in order to fundamentally solve a lot of these issues, we are going to have to reprogram our DNA. That’s the only way to do it.

Me: And deep down, DNA is just a physical material.

Elon: [Nods, then pauses as he looks over my shoulder in a daze] It’s software.

optogenetics meets crispr

thescientist |  The CRISPR gene-editing system just got even better: a new light-activated Cas9 nuclease could offer researchers greater spatial and temporal control over the RNA-guided nuclease activity, according to a study published today (June 15) in Nature Biotechnology.

“This is an effective new system for extremely precise control of gene editing via light,” Paul Knoepfler, a stem cell biologist at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the research, told The Scientist in an e-mail. “Any technological advancement that can add in the precision and control of genetic modification is an important advance,” he added, noting that “this is one of many such efforts.”

Recently, University of Tokyo chemist Moritoshi Sato and his colleagues developed pairs of photoswitching proteins called Magnets, which use electrostatic interactions to come together when activated by light. The team has also used photoactivatable technology to develop a light-activated CRISPR-based transcription system to target specific genes for expression. Now, Sato’s group has taken this one step further, using its Magnet proteins to create a photoactivatable Cas9 nuclease (paCas9) for light-controlled genome editing.

“The existing Cas9 does not allow to modify genome of a small subset of cells in tissue, such as neurons in the brain,” Sato told The Scientist in an e-mail. “Additionally, the existing Cas9 often suffers from off-target effects due to its uncontrollable nuclease activity. . . . We have been interested in the development of a powerful tool that enables spatial and temporal control of genome editing.”

 

focus less on the hon.sis.rachel and more on what her example illuminates

dailynous |  Rebecca Kukla: First off, I am befuddled by how many people are interested in describing what was in Rachel Dolezal’s head and are willing to offer armchair diagnoses of her purported mental illness or condemnations of her motives. Not only do I not know what was in her head, but in fact, the more the conversation focuses on this particular person’s inner life, the less interesting I find the whole issue. The interesting question, I take it, is how to think and talk in general about people who identify and present as belonging to a race other than that assigned at birth, whatever their reasons and causes. I will focus on some meta-concerns about how we are talking about that question.

I am disappointed in how quickly almost everyone, including friends of mine who are strong anti-racist and trans allies, have been willing to engage in (1) ridicule and body-shaming – unabashedly mocking her hair and skin tone for instance; (2) confident descriptions of her as a liar who is choosing to pretend to be something she is not; and (3) fast and confident claims that she can’t claim black identity because she is appropriating a culture, hasn’t grown up with the black experience, can opt out at any time, etc. My main reaction to all this is that it’s surprisingly historically short-sighted and lacking in epistemic humility. So many times, ‘we’ (those of us with a recognizable and reasonably well-established embodied, socially positioned identity) have encountered a new way of being, and have responded with ridicule, shaming, and charges of lying. So often we think that forms of identity that have no clear social place are hilarious and clearly a pretense and that their bearers are fair game for humiliation. Honestly, I don’t know if Dolezal experienced herself as lying, or as making a voluntary choice to deceive, and more generally I don’t know whether or how there might be a legitimate place for transracial identities, as opposed to, in effect, race ‘drag,’ which is what almost everyone seems to assume is going on in Dolezal’s case. But I have learned from experience that body shaming and ridicule are always unhelpful and problematic, and that what we shame and dismiss one year we often come to understand and defend ten years later. I also know that people are driven to lie and deceive in seemingly incomprehensible ways when they find themselves without any socially recognizable way of being. As for the confident claims that Dolezal, or people like her, have no right to black identities because they didn’t have a lifetime of black experience, or because they are being appropriative of the experience and identity markers of an oppressed group, or because they want access to a community that their bodies preclude them from properly joining, or that their presence in black spaces threatens the integrity of those spaces for ‘real’ black people: well, I feel the pull of those arguments for sure, and I don’t want to dismiss them. But boy do they sound exactly analogous to ‘feminist’ arguments that were used to vilify and undercut the entire reality of trans women back in the not-too-long-ago day. I just don’t have the confidence that would allow me to proclaim immediately that this time the critique fits, that there is no real phenomenon here, no human need or way of being that requires understanding and a reconfiguration of my settled concepts. Can’t we learn from the past and proceed a little more slowly?

One final point: I’ve seen several philosophers online say that before we can settle what to think about the possibility of transracial identity, we need to know more about the metaphysics of race. I think this is exactly wrong. The question is not what race ‘really’ is, because whatever the difficult answer to that, we are all walking around with a phenomenological sense of self that does not hinge on or even include this answer, and race has a powerful social life independent of its proper metaphysics. Whether transracial identity is possible and should be given social uptake strikes me as a thoroughly political question about how various ways of claiming and recognizing identity do and don’t do harm to individuals and to communities. I can’t imagine how this hinges on metaphysics. Even if there was some real thingamajig in people that constituted their race, such that if they claimed to have a different one then they were saying something false (and does anyone think that, seriously?), I can’t see how that would settle any of the interesting questions about how people experience themselves and what sorts of identity-building we should acknowledge, support, or challenge.

the root's entire staff is so up in its feelings - that they're incoherent...,

the root |  My mother handled these issues and raised me well, so I don’t need you to cry for me, wannabe Teena Marie. But do know that the last act I performed to honor her life—which, true to the experience of all too many American women who actually possess African genes, ended a good 15 years earlier than a white woman’s life expectancy—was to change the race on her death certificate from white, which the hospital assumed that she was (the daily presence of her brown-skinned children be damned; at least they could have asked), to black, since that’s how she both identified and lived.

Yes, Rachel, I know that there’s a way in which that act was just as crazy as the one-drop rule, but I fought the last fight she couldn’t fight for herself. Plus, how can you be born colored and die white? May the good Lord bless my mother (and father).

So this, Rachel, is why I am challenging you to do better, for these reasons and the fact that mixed in with your very human and understandable identity issues is your racial privilege, multiplied by your opportunism, to the cultural-appropriation power. (That’s my hairstyle you’re wearing, sweetie, but it probably never occurred to you that some of us, in order to wear it and other natural styles, have to overcome a cultural beauty standard that tells us that the way God made us is ugly.)

For the most part, I think you mean well, and I don’t want to minimize the good deeds that you’ve done. But please do “the work” and become a true ally and stop playing the community that you say you love, as though we’re not intelligent enough to peep your B.S. Instead, please support us by doing the things you can do that we can’t, from your identity position as a white woman.

It may be a while before you gain that level of insight. Until then, I do understand that membership has its privileges. I’m not a wagering woman, but if I were, I’d bet that you will be on the speaking circuit soon, getting paid rates that rival, if not exceed, those paid to highly qualified speakers of color, some of whom I could name-check by tagging them, but I won’t. Oh, and you’ll probably get a book deal, too. But if any sistah I know helps you write it (ahem!), trust and believe that we will call in the Drop Squad. I’m quite sure you watch movies and know what that is.

rachel discrimination is a butt-hurt weak negroe thang, you wouldn't understand....,

historymatters |  As for the literature, painting, and sculpture of Aframericans—such as there is—it is identical in kind with the literature, painting, and sculpture of white Americans: that is, it shows more or less evidence of European influence. In the field of drama little of any merit has been written by and about Negroes that could not have been written by whites. The dean of the Aframerican literati written by and about Negroes that could not have been written by whites. The dean of the Aframerican literati is W. E. B. Du Bois, a product of Harvard and German universities; the foremost Aframerican sculptor is Meta Warwick Fuller, a graduate of leading American art schools and former student of Rodin; while the most noted Aframerican painter, Henry Ossawa Tanner, is dean of American painters in Paris and has been decorated by the French Government. Now the work of these artists is no more “expressive of the Negro soul”—as the gushers put it—than are the scribblings of Octavus Cohen or Hugh Wiley.

This, of course, is easily understood if one stops to realize that the Aframerican is merely a lampblacked Anglo-Saxon. If the European immigrant after two or three generations of exposure to our schools, politics, advertising, moral crusades, and restaurants becomes indistinguishable from the mass of Americans of the older stock (despite the influence of the foreign-language press), how much truer must it be of the sons of Ham who have been subjected to what the uplifters call Americanism for the last three hundred years. Aside from his color, which ranges from very dark brown to pink, your American Negro is just plain American. Negroes and whites from the same localities in this country talk, think, and act about the same. Because a few writers with a paucity of themes have seized upon imbecilities of the Negro rustics and clowns and palmed them off as authentic and characteristic Aframerican behavior, the common notion that the black American is so “different” from his white neighbor has gained wide currency. The mere mention of the word “Negro” conjures up in the average white American’s mind a composite stereotype of Bert Williams, Aunt Jemima, Uncle Tom, Jack Johnson, Florian Slappey, and the various monstrosities scrawled by the cartoonists. Your average Aframerican no more resembles this stereotype than the average American resembles a composite of Andy Gump, Jim Jeffries, and a cartoon by Rube Goldberg.

Again, the Aframerican is subject to the same economic and social forces that mold the actions and thoughts of the white Americans. He is not living in a different world as some whites and a few Negroes would have me believe. When the jangling of his Connecticut alarm clock gets him out of his Grand Rapids bed to a breakfast similar to that eaten by his white brother across the street; when he toils at the same or similar work in mills, mines, factories, and commerce alongside the descendants of Spartacus, Robin Hood, and Erik the Red; when he wears similar clothing and speaks the same language with the same degree of perfection; when he reads the same Bible and belongs to the Baptist, Methodist, Episcopal, or Catholic church; when his fraternal affiliations also include the Elks, Masons, and Knights of Pythias; when he gets the same or similar schooling, lives in the same kind of houses, owns the same Hollywood version of life on the screen; when he smokes the same brands of tobacco and avidly peruses the same puerile periodicals; in short, when he responds to the same political, social, moral, and economic stimuli in precisely the same manner as his white neighbor, it is sheer nonsense to talk about “racial differences” as between the American black man and the American white man. Glance over a Negro newspaper (it is printed in good Americanese) and you will find the usual quota or crime news, scandal, personals, and uplift to be found in the average white newspaper—which, by the way, is more widely read by the Negroes than is the Negro press. In order to satisfy the cravings of an inferiority complex engendered by the colorphobia of the mob, the readers of the Negro newspapers are given a slight dash of racialistic seasoning. In the homes of the black and white Americans of the same cultural and economic level one finds similar furniture, literature, and conversation. How, then, can the black American be expected to produce art and literature dissimilar to that of the white American?

Consider Coleridge-Taylor, Edward Wilmot Blyden, and Claude McKay, the Englishmen; Pushkin, the Russian; Bridgewater, the Pole; Antar, the Arabian; Latino, the Spaniard; Dumas, père and fils,the Frenchmen; and Paul Laurence Dunbar, Charles W. Chestnut, and James Weldon Johnson, the Americans. All Negroes; yet their work shows the impress of nationality rather than race. They all reveal the psychology and culture of their environment—their color is incidental. Why should Negro artists of America vary from the national artistic norm when Negro artists in other countries have not done so? If we can foresee what kind of white citizens will inhabit this neck of the woods in the next generation by studying the sort of education and environment the children are exposed to now, it should not be difficult to reason that the adults of today are what they are because of the education and environment they were exposed to a generation ago. And that education and environment were about the same for blacks and whites. One contemplates the popularity of the Negro-art hokum and murmurs, “How-come?”

This nonsense is probably the last stand or the old myth palmed off by Negrophobists for all these many years, and recently rehashed by the sainted Harding, that there are “fundamental, eternal, and inescapable differences” between white and black Americans. That there are Negroes who will lend this myth a helping hand need occasion no surprise. It has been broadcast all over the world by the vociferous scions of slaveholders, “scientists” like Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard, and the patriots who flood the treasure of the Ku Klux Klan; and is believed, even today, by the majority of free, white citizens. On this baseless premise, so flattering to the white mob, that the blackamoor is inferior and fundamentally different, is erected the postulate that he must needs be peculiar; and when he attempts to portray life through the medium of art, it must of necessity be a peculiar art. While such reasoning may seem conclusive to the majority of Americans, it must be rejected with a loud guffaw by intelligent people.

too black, too strong - weak negroes not gonna get it

newyorker |  The easy presumption about Dolezal, who has two white parents and light skin and eyes—and hair that has ranged from blond to brown, though she has worn it in ways that are culturally associated with black women—is that this is an instance in which someone finally pointed out the obvious: the emperor is naked. But, in truth, Dolezal has been dressed precisely as we all are, in a fictive garb of race whose determinations are as arbitrary as they are damaging. This doesn’t mean that Dolezal wasn’t lying about who she is. It means that she was lying about a lie.

Dolezal’s name has been added to a running discussion of racial appropriation. Two weeks ago, Chet Haze, the putative rapper and son of the actor Tom Hanks, took to Instagram with a questionable syllogism. Because hip-hop is, in his view, “not about race,” and because he so closely identifies with the genre, he should be allowed to use the word “nigger” (or its variant “nigga”) without recrimination. His comments recalled the feeble musings of John Mayer, five years ago, when he lamented to Playboy that his level of black cred was high enough, his standing within the race so unimpeachable, that he ought to be able to toss the epithet with the same sort of entitlement as Jay Z. And last week, the Washington Post published a timeline of the career implosion of Iggy Azalea, the white Australian rapper notable for her transparent racial affectations.

Among African-Americans, there is a particular contempt, rooted in the understanding that black culture was formed in a crucible of degradation, for what Norman Mailer hailed as the “white Negro.” Whatever elements of beauty or cool, whatever truth or marketable lies there are that we associate with blackness, they are ultimately the product of a community’s quest to be recognized as human in a society that is only ambivalently willing to see it as such. And it is this root that cannot be assimilated. The white Negroes, whose genealogy stretches backward from Azalea through Elvis and Paul Whiteman, share the luxury of being able to slough off blackness the moment it becomes disadvantageous, cumbersome, or dangerous. It is an identity as impermanent as burnt cork, whose profitability rests upon an unspoken suggestion that the surest evidence of white superiority is the capacity to exceed blacks even at being black. The black suspicion of whites thus steeped in black culture wasn’t bigotry; it was a cultural tariff—an abiding sense that, if they knew all that came with the category, they would be far less eager to enlist.

raised by christian cultists, touched by "Jesus", and sheltered in immaculate complexion

denverpost |  Joshua Dolezal is accused of assaulting a child who was about 6 years old in 2000 or 2001 in Clear Creek County where the Dolezals lived at the time, according to an arrest affidavit. The alleged victim told investigators Joshua Dolezal also abused another person. 

The affidavit shows that after the allegations were reported in July 2013, a detective interviewed someone in Spokane as part of the investigation. The person's name is redacted in the report.

The alleged victim told investigators Joshua Dolezal warned, "Don't tell anyone or I'll hurt you," according to the affidavit. It also says the person decided to come forward after the birth of Joshua Dolezal's daughter because of concerns about the child's well-being.

He was charged in March 2014 and is free on $15,000 bail, according to court records.
Joshua Dolezal is scheduled to face trial in August. Neither Dolezal nor his Denver-based lawyers responded to messages seeking comment. Fifth Judicial District Attorney Bruce Brown also declined to comment.

Ruthanne and Larry Dolezal, in an interview about their daughter with Spokane television station KHQ last week, avoided questions about any family legal matters in Colorado.

"It's better if we don't (comment)," Larry Dolezal told the station. "It's a separate matter."
On NBC's Today, Dolezal's parents said Monday they disclosed their daughter's true race because they didn't want to lie to an inquiring reporter.

"I think Rachel has tried to damage her biological family," Ruthanne Dolezal said. She said Rachel began to "disguise herself" after her parents adopted four African-American children more than a decade ago.

history will not be kind to rachel discriminators...,

Michael Jackson bleached his skin and had his face reconstructed to the point of unrecognizability to become more white, and nobody accused him of being a fraud or a huckster.

Rachal Dolezal seems clearly dedicated to Black folks and the extent of her identification with Black folks seems beyond reproach. She has caused no harm and done much good. No serious person would claim that working on behalf of the NAACP and as a temporary adjunct in Africana studies is for the money?

Throughout this purely political, purely schadenfreud laden episode, all the Rachel discriminators have only picked at what will serve their own agendi. Negroes losing their minds about her in that elected NAACP office remind me of nothing so much as teatards losing their minds about the elected Hon.Bro.Preznit in the White House.  How dare that Muslim/Kenyan non-citizen ascend to the highest prestige echelon this patriot's country has to offer! Puh-leeze.....,

There is very obviously a serious underlying issue with her Ken Hamm cultist parents at the root of her estrangement from them, and, likely involved as the source/initiator of her choosing to identify with being Black. The mainstream narrative is working overtime to keep this as the great invisible elephant in the room. Though some may believe that the power of propaganda and the pervasiveness of mass stupidity so great that everyone can be kept distracted from this indefinitely. I don't think so. Based on the way she handled herself with Matt Lauer, I firmly believe that the real reason(s0 why she did what she did will eventually come out and be properly understood. F'zample, why does she have custody of Isaiah adopted by the Hammcultists?

Anyway, the other dimension of schadenfreud attendent to this story is the forbidden desire to discuss identity and genetic determinism in the light of the currently highly propagandized and forced acceptance of the Kardashian-related science project.

black like me

wikipedia |  Black Like Me is a nonfiction book by journalist John Howard Griffin first published in 1961. Griffin was a white native of Dallas, Texas and the book describes his six-week experience travelling on Greyhound buses (occasionally hitchhiking) throughout the racially segregated states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia passing as a black man. Sepia Magazine financed the project in exchange for the right to print the account first as a series of articles.

Griffin kept a journal of his experiences; the 188-page diary was the genesis of the book.

At the time of the book's writing in 1959, race relations in America were particularly strained and Griffin aimed to explain the difficulties that black people faced in certain areas. Under the care of a doctor, Griffin artificially darkened his skin to pass as a black man.

In 1964, a film version of Black Like Me starring James Whitmore was produced.^[1]

Robert Bonazzi subsequently published the book Man in the Mirror: John Howard Griffin and the Story of Black Like Me.

The title of the book is taken from the last line of the Langston Hughes poem "Dream Variations".

insatiable rachel discrimination by hot, itchy, hair-hats finally takes its toll....,

facebook |  Dear Executive Committee and NAACP Members, 

It is a true honor to serve in the racial and social justice movement here in Spokane and across the nation. Many issues face us now that drive at the theme of urgency. Police brutality, biased curriculum in schools, economic disenfranchisement, health inequities, and a lack of pro-justice political representation are among the concerns at the forefront of the current administration of the Spokane NAACP. And yet, the dialogue has unexpectedly shifted internationally to my personal identity in the context of defining race and ethnicity.

I have waited in deference while others expressed their feelings, beliefs, confusions and even conclusions - absent the full story. I am consistently committed to empowering marginalized voices and believe that many individuals have been heard in the last hours and days that would not otherwise have had a platform to weigh in on this important discussion. Additionally, I have always deferred to the state and national NAACP leadership and offer my sincere gratitude for their unwavering support of my leadership through this unexpected firestorm.

While challenging the construct of race is at the core of evolving human consciousness, we can NOT afford to lose sight of the five Game Changers (Criminal Justice & Public Safety, Health & Healthcare, Education, Economic Sustainability, and Voting Rights & Political Representation) that affect millions, often with a life or death outcome. The movement is larger than a moment in time or a single person's story, and I hope that everyone offers their robust support of the Journey for Justice campaign that the NAACP launches today!

I am delighted that so many organizations and individuals have supported and collaborated with the Spokane NAACP under my leadership to grow this branch into one of the healthiest in the nation in 5 short months. In the eye of this current storm, I can see that a separation of family and organizational outcomes is in the best interest of the NAACP.

It is with complete allegiance to the cause of racial and social justice and the NAACP that I step aside from the Presidency and pass the baton to my Vice President, Naima Quarles-Burnley. It is my hope that by securing a beautiful office for the organization in the heart of downtown, bringing the local branch into financial compliance, catalyzing committees to do strategic work in the five Game Changer issues, launching community forums, putting the membership on a fast climb, and helping many individuals find the legal, financial and practical support needed to fight race-based discrimination, I have positioned the Spokane NAACP to buttress this transition.

Please know I will never stop fighting for human rights and will do everything in my power to help and assist, whether it means stepping up or stepping down, because this is not about me. It's about justice. This is not me quitting; this is a continuum. It's about moving the cause of human rights and the Black Liberation Movement along the continuum from Resistance to Chattel Slavery to Abolition to Defiance of Jim Crow to the building of Black Wall Street to the Civil Rights and Black Power Movement to the ‪#‎BlackLivesMatter‬ movement and into a future of self-determination and empowerment.

With much love and a commitment to always fight for what is right and good in this world,
Rachel Dolezal

I view a Black man in rather the same way I view an Oxford man...,

Cobb |  The new hashtag #PassingForBlack is thus ironically manifest by those calling foul. An honest Black man, and let us use the James Baldwin standard, would be not only accepting but embracing of Rachel Dolezal. For in 1963 he said of white people:

The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them, indeed, know better, but, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case, the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of their identity. Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shining and all the stars aflame. You would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature. Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one's sense of one's own reality.

It is hard for me to imagine that Rachel Dolezal is the sort of person who fears the loss of her white identity or labors under an understanding of history that gives her innumerable reasons to believe that black men are inferior to white men. She doesn't impress me as one with any fear of acting upon what she knows, and she certainly understands that she is in danger. 

Nevertheless some media Negroes and their accomplices and masters have decided that a few genes must inevitably seal one's fate, and they call this the attitude of a proper Black man. What kind of man assigns his fate to his genes in a nation dedicated to Liberty?

couple of husky rascals pretending to be women engaging in rachel discrimination...,

squeeze your eyes tightly shut and pretend as hard as you can, or else...,

ETonline |  It's been just over a week since Caitlyn Jenner's big reveal in Vanity Fair, and already she's giving back to her community.

The former Olympian is returning to motivational speaking and her first stop was at the Los Angeles LGBT Youth Center on Tuesday.

In these exclusive photos, Jenner is seen braving the rain with a big umbrella, while rocking a pair of figure-hugging skinny jeans, a fitted black blouse, knee-high boots and an Elisabeth Weinstock Tokyo cross-body bag.

Looking very jovial and relaxed, Jenner stayed at the LGBT Center for about two hours and arrived with her camera crew and bodyguards in tow.

The LGBT Center's mission is to build "a world where LGBT people thrive as healthy, equal and complete members of society," and their message seems to fit right in with Caitlyn's views.

"So many people go through life and they never deal with their own issues," the 65-year-old reality star said in a promo for her upcoming eight-part docu-series, I Am Cait. "No matter what those issues are -- ours happen to be gender identity -- but how many people go through life and just waste an entire life because they never deal with themselves? To be who they are."

taking on devils in spokane/couer d'alene ain't no joke!

niot |  It is said that there is power in numbers, but when an increasing number of injustices were committed in Hayden Lake, Idaho, it was a small group of  concerned citizens that stunted the growth of an American Nazi movement.   Three decades later, the story of the campaign for human rights that brought down the Aryan Nations--a once powerful organizing force that incorporated a white supremacist ideology with a frightening mix of anti-Semitism, racism, and Christianity--is now told in a one-hour documentary, The Color of Conscience. (To watch the full-length documentary, click here.)   Director Jay Krajic (left) and producer Marcia Franklin pose with two of the founding members of the Kootenai County Task Force on Human relations,

Lady T remind these hostile weavehead haters what's really real....,

hell hath no fury like ken hamm creationists scorned....,

physorg |  But people feel uncomfortable with an incomplete model. They want to feel as if they know what's going on. So if you create a gap, you need to fill the gap with an alternative fact.

For example, it's not enough to just provide evidence that a suspect in a murder trial is innocent. To prove them innocent – at least in people's minds – you need to provide an alternative suspect.

However, it's not enough to simply explain the facts. The golden rule of debunking, from the book Made To Stick, by Chip and Dan Heath, is to fight sticky myths with even stickier facts. So you need to make your science sticky, meaning simple, concrete messages that grab attention and stick in the memory.

How do you make science sticky? Chip and Dan Heath suggest the acronym SUCCES to summarise the characteristics of sticky science:

Simple: To paraphrase a quote from Nobel prize winner Ernest Rutherford: if you can't explain your physics simply, it's probably not very good physics.

Unexpected: If your science is counter-intuitive, embrace it! Use the unexpectedness to take people by surprise.

Credible: Ideally, source your information from the most credible source of information available: peer-reviewed scientific research. 

Concrete: One of the most powerful tools to make abstract science concrete is analogies or metaphors.

Emotional: Scientists are trained to remove emotion from their science. However, even scientists are human and it can be quite powerful when we express our passion for science or communicate how our results affect us personally.

Stories: Shape your science into a compelling narrative.

understanding the total enemy

libraryofsocialscience |  In his diary from the years 1947-51, Glossarium, Schmitt explains the difference between conventional and absolute enmity by the different behaviour of the German army on the Western and Eastern front during WW2. Against the West-European (state) enemies, Nazi-Germany fought a basically non-discriminatory war, where the rules of combat were by and large upheld and the enemy was considered an equal; and then a discriminatory against the East-European and Russian absolute enemies, where all rules of combat and morality were systematically violated and the enemy was considered inhuman (Schmitt 1991: 117). As always, Schmitt neglects to deal with the plight of the European Jewry, where Nazi-Germany fought an all-out discriminatory war. 

Schmitt failed to ever really engage with the concept of the ‘total enemy’, though the ideological radicalization in the absolute enemy directs our attention to the limitlessness of such an enmity. But in the post-war years Schmitt devoted his attention on enmities to the partisan or political struggle enmity forms while failing to really explore what it means when ideological radicalization merges with a state machinery. In his Clausewitz – Philosopher of War, Raymond Aron has a chapter on the partisan inspired by Schmitt. 

But he criticizes him, not least for the concept of the absolute enemy, which Aron wants to differentiate further between a biologically absolute enmity: ‘Ludendorff-Hitler’, that is, an enmity based on a biological or racist philosophy: “I would call this ‘absolute hostility’ as it alone deserves the term ‘absolute’, since it ends logically in massacre and genocide” (Aron 1983: 368); and ideologically absolute enmity: ‘Mao-Lenin-Stalin’ and In a letter to Schmitt on October 1, 1963 he also mentioned ‘politically absolute enmity (Carthago for Cato)’ (Müller 2003: 100). Aron is, of course, aware that Mao and Stalin murdered more people than Hitler, but that was no logical or necessary consequence of the ideological enmity:

Hostility based on the class struggle has taken on no less extreme or monstrous forms than that based on the incompatibility of races. But if we wish to ‘save the concepts’ there is a difference between a philosophy whose logic is monstrous and one which can be given a monstrous interpretation. (Aron 1983: 369)

In his book Democracy and Totalitarianism, Aron differentiates the “aim of the Nazi Party” which was “to remake the racial map if Europe and to eliminate certain peoples”, whereas the “aim of Soviet terror is to create a society which conforms completely to an ideal, while in the Nazi case, the aim was pure and simple extermination.” (Aron 1968: 203). With Aron we get not only a differentiation of the totalitarian state enemy but also – like Schmitt but applied to the totalitarian state – a differentiation in stages of enmification or as he calls it “three kinds of terror” (Aron 1968: 187). They seem to follow Hannah Arendt’s differentiation elaborated below and we can conclude this section by noting that Aron, while inspired by Schmitt, saw a clear and evident failure on Schmitt’s part to apply his enemy theory on the totalitarian state. Once a real totalitarian state came into being in Germany – a qualitatively total state as Schmitt would call it – he suspended his reflections on the enemy, only to return to it in the partisan setting.

In order to understand the peculiarities of the total enemy we have therefore to depart from the premier theorist of the enemy and to take from him only the reflection on the decisive difference between an interstate, codified and hedged ‘conventional enmity’ and then various forms of unhinged, uncontained enmities, of which Schmitt failed to grasp the most important one. What he basically didn’t understand was that the state too could be carrier of a completely limitless enmity. To him it was always state-subversive forces, of which the British Empire was one, that carried such a universalist enmity, never the territorial state. Unlike Schmitt – but with decisive common points of departure (Sluga 2008; Bates 2010) – Hannah Arendt made the total enemy a key concept in her explorations of both war and post-war ideological and geopolitical constellations.

blackest bish on the planet has achieved her truth!!! accept no substitutes....,

 

thehutchinsonreport |  In February, 2015, the Spokane, Washington NAACP chapter sought action on job discrimination and civil rights violations complaints, took on Comcast, secured legal support for a transgender sexual assault victim, filed police racial profiling complaints, demanded an investigation of KKK literature in the area, and an FBI investigation of other hate crimes, and backed several job discrimination lawsuits. In addition, the Spokane NAACP branch has aggressive, activist committees on education, health care, and criminal justice reforms. That month was typical of the strong work it has done on civil rights.

These actions plopped Spokane NAACP President Rachel Dolezal squarely in the hate monger’s bulls-eye. She received threats and hate mail, and there was a reported break-in at her home. Dolezal was undaunted, "I stand by the work that I do for civil rights, and I should be able to do that work that needs to be done here in Spokane." Dozens agreed with her. They expressed their support at a Spokane City Hall rally in March.

Dolezal is back on the hot seat again. This time the heat is on not from unreconstructed bigots but many African-Americans who rail at her for allegedly being a white woman who claims to be African-American. The issue ostensibly is that she lied and misrepresented herself as black as the NAACP leader. But the real issue is whether a non-black is fit to lead a branch of the nation’s oldest civil rights organization. This is a spurious, silly, and nonsensical concern especially since many of the NAACP’s original founders were white and Jewish. In its more than a century of existence, the organization has fought for civil and equal rights—barring color.

In that light, Dolezal has done a phenomenal job. She’s taken a small chapter in a neck of the woods that in times past has been near an area well-known as a hotbed of white supremacist and armed militia organizing, and made it a true fighting organization. Dolezal should ignore the criticism and keep doing the great job she’s done.

She has proven again that actions, not race, are what counts in the civil rights battle.

walter francis white

wikipedia |  Walter Francis White (July 1, 1893 – March 21, 1955) was an American civil rights activist who led the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for almost a quarter of a century and directed a broad program of legal challenges to segregation and disfranchisement. He was also a journalist, novelist, and essayist. He graduated in 1916 from Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University), a historically black college.

In 1918 he joined the small national staff of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in New York at the invitation of James Weldon Johnson. He acted as Johnson's assistant national secretary and traveled to the South to investigate. White later succeeded Johnson as the head of the NAACP, leading the organization from 1931 to 1955.

White oversaw the plans and organizational structure of the fight against public segregation. He worked with President Truman on desegregating the armed forces after the Second World War and gave him a draft for the Executive Order to implement this. Under White's leadership, the NAACP set up the Legal Defense Fund, which raised numerous legal challenges to segregation and disfranchisement, and achieved many successes. Among these was the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which determined that segregated education was inherently unequal. White also quintupled NAACP membership to nearly 500,000.

White used his appearance to increase his effectiveness in conducting investigations of lynchings and race riots in the American South. He could "pass" and talk to whites, but also identified as black and could talk to members of the African-American community. Such work was dangerous. “Through 1927 White would investigate 41 lynchings, 8 race riots, and two cases of widespread peonage, risking his life repeatedly in the backwaters of Florida, the piney woods of Georgia, and in the cotton fields of Arkansas.”^[14]

In his autobiography, A Man Called White, he dedicates an entire chapter to a time when he almost joined the Ku Klux Klan undercover. White became a master of incognito investigating. He started with a letter from a friend that recruited new members of the KKK.^[15] After correspondence between him and Edward Young Clark, leader of the KKK, Clark clearly tried to interest White joining.^[15] Invited to Atlanta, to meet with other Klan leaders, White declined, fearing that he would be at risk of his life if his true identity were discovered.^[15] White used this access to Klan leaders to further his investigation into the "sinister and illegal conspiracy against human and civil rights which the Klan was concocting."^[15] After deeper inquiries into White's life, Clark stopped sending signed letters; White was threatened by anonymous letters stating his life would be in danger if he ever divulged any of the confidential information he had received.^[16] By this time, White had already turned the information over to the US Department of Justice and New York Police Department.^[16] He believed that undermining the hold of mob violence would be crucial to his cause.

objective enemies

agingrebel |  What happened in Waco was much more sordid and cynical than the American public has yet been allowed to know and it represents a terrible, possibly fatal, cancer in the body of the American Republic. What happened in Waco will likely seem incredible to the mainstream public. It will seem at least plausible to anyone with knowledge of the motorcycle club world.

What happened in Waco was the tragic culmination of an ongoing, international war against motorcycle clubs that is a logical outgrowth of the Global War on Terror. This secret war is aimed at a fringe counterculture that easily fulfills the role of what totalitarian regimes call an “objective enemy:” which is to say an enemy that is prosecuted mostly for its potential criminality rather than its actual criminality. The war is a manifestation of a sadistic state – a state that can no longer accomplish the basic tasks of government but that projects its power mostly by its unique entitlement to punish its objective enemies and other citizens.

One facet of the war on motorcycle clubs is the exploitation by government officials of what might be called alternative motorcycle clubs. Throughout their area of operation, the Bandidos Motorcycle Club has had repeated conflicts over the last three years with two alternative motorcycle clubs.

speaking of greedy for-profit hospitals...

Washington Post | Fifty hospitals in the United States are charging uninsured consumers more than 10 times the actual cost of patient care, according to research published Monday.

All but one of the facilities are owned by for-profit entities and the largest number of hospitals — 20 — are in Florida. For the most part, researchers said, the hospitals with the highest markups are not in pricey neighborhoods or big cities, where the market might explain the higher prices.

Topping the list is North Okaloosa Medical Center, a 110-bed facility in the Florida Panhandle about an hour outside of Pensacola. Uninsured patients are charged 12.6 times the actual cost of patient care.

Community Health Systems operates 25 of the hospitals on the list. Hospital Corporation of America operates 14 others.

“They are price-gouging because they can,” said Gerard Anderson, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, co-author of the study in Health Affairs. “They are marking up the prices because no one is telling them they can’t.” He added: “These are the hospitals that have the highest markup of all 5,000 hospitals in the United States. This means when it costs the hospital $100, they are going to charge you, on average, $1,000.”

The researchers said other consumers who could face those high charges are patients whose hospitals are not in their insurance company’s preferred network of providers, patients using workers’ compensation and those covered by automobile insurance policies.

Carepoint Health-Bayonne Med­ical Center in Bayonne, N.J., for example, also charges rates 12.6 times the actual cost of patient care. State law limits the maximum that hospitals can charge uninsured patients to 115 percent, a spokesman said.

By comparison, the researchers said, a typical U.S. hospital charges 3.4 times the cost of patient care.

Officials representing the 50 hospitals disputed the findings, saying that they provide significant discounts to uninsured and underinsured patients.

Understanding hospital pricing and charges is one of the most frustrating experiences for consumers and health-care professionals. It is virtually impossible to find out ahead of time from the hospital how much a procedure or stay is going to cost. Once the bill arrives, many consumers have difficulty deciphering it.

Most hospital patients covered by private or government insurance don’t pay full price because insurers and programs such as Medicare negotiate lower rates for their patients. But millions of Americans who don’t have insurance don’t have anyone to negotiate for them. They are most likely to be charged full price. As a result, uninsured patients, who are often the most vulnerable, face skyrocketing medical bills that can lead to personal bankruptcy, damaged credit scores or avoidance of needed medical care.

Researchers said the main factors leading to overcharging are the lack of market competition and the fact that the federal government does not regulate prices that health-care providers can charge. Only two states, Maryland and West Virginia, set hospital rates.

if bruce gets to live her truth, why can't rachel live hers?

cliven bundy says: anyone who resists arrest will be treated accordingly...,

theroot |  As of this writing, almost 500 people—138 of them African American—have been shot and killed by police in the United States this year. These numbers come from The Guardian’s investigation that is literally counting the dead.

Outrage against the epidemic of police killings of unarmed black men helped spark a national #BlackLivesMatter protest movement that called for comprehensive reform of the criminal-justice system. The Obama administration’s Task Force on Policing in the 21st Century is, so far, the major policy response to these shootings.

But as many have pointed out, police violence against black women, girls and transgender people of color is often missing from national discussions. In response, thousands of people have taken to the streets, social media and elsewhere to affirm that the lives of black girls and women matter as much as those of black men. The latest case of police brutality against unarmed black people took place in McKinney, Texas, on Friday, when a police officer brutalized a group of black teens attending a pool party. A camera phone caught McKinney Police Cpl. Eric Casebolt pummeling a 15-year-old black girl on the lawn of a suburban neighborhood and pulling out his gun and pointing it toward unarmed teenagers.

Systematic police violence against black and Latino communities, in the form of killings, overt brutality and general harassment, requires a national database. Anecdotal evidence from social media, personal stories and public documents suggests that we have only scratched the surface of widespread illegal use of force by law enforcement that is directed against the African-American community.

A federal database—one that could be publicly accessed by law enforcement, community activists and citizens—is vital to comprehending the depth of police misconduct and fashioning a cure to a national crisis that new technology has made visible to the world.

Our heightened national sensitivity to anti-black violence is a direct result of information sharing, or crowdsourcing, on social media that has turned small cities such as Ferguson, Mo., into a metaphor for racial injustice in the 21st century.

Information, during the civil rights era and now, is power.

to "protect and serve" you must always give those inside your tribe full benefit of the doubt...,

salon |  people continue to deploy the “one bad apple spoils a bunch” analogy as though the predicate of the sentence is of no consequence. Spoils. The analogy is less about the singular bad apple and more about its multiplicative bad effects on those it keeps company with. I agree that David Casebolt was particularly out of control. I agree that the other officers saw that and got him to stop waving his gun. They did not keep him from kneeling on top of the girl or berating and intimidating the other youth. This means that in a scenario where multiple children were being unfairly treated, the presence of multiple officers did not offer them substantial protection in the face one officer becoming entirely rogue.

Those officers did not demand that their colleague take a breather while they got the situation under control. They let him go on and on, half-cocked and ridiculous. The material impact of that was a bunch of children feeling unsafe and traumatized by those sworn to protect them.

The 15-year-old white kid who recorded this incident on his smartphone made it clear that what he saw was a bunch of police mistreating his Black friends, while leaving him alone entirely. For the white people who need to hear it, yes, his presence indicates that “not all white people” are racist. Clearly his parents are doing a good job raising an anti-racist teen. But if the white people who need to hear such things hope to float their consciences to safety on the back of this one kid, the ride might be bumpy. Again we don’t combat racism just by raising our children to have anti-racist attitudes. We also have to confront the systematic residential segregation and privatization that makes pools inaccessible to children who don’t have the privilege of living in suburbs.

Few white people have stood up and called out the white adult women who harassed a fellow neighbor having a pool party with her friends, and with her mother’s permission. But many white people have watched the video and concluded that the officer’s treatment of the 14-year-old girl was justified. The gender dynamics in this moment are interesting. There is no universe in which a police officer would drag a young white girl in a two-piece bathing suit by her hair, demand she put her face on the ground, and then kneel for several minutes on top of her adolescent body. If such a thing occurred, it would elicit massive moral outrage on the part of white people (and Black people, too).

But Black girls are never deemed feminine enough for their sexual and adolescent vulnerability to register for white people. They are frequently viewed as aggressors by both police and regular citizens alike, even for doing very adolescent things like mouthing off to those in authority. This is the reason why education scholars suggest that Black girls are suspended from school six times as often as white girls, because even simple adolescent forms of testing boundaries are perceived as far more aggressive based on race.

And let me be clear: Citizens have the right to “mouth off” to police. We have the right to question how we are being treated, why we are being arrested, why we are even being approached. Far too many police deploy accusations of disturbing the peace or obstructing justice to quiet citizens who question them within legal bounds. As long as we don’t threaten or enact physical harm on police officers, we can “mouth off” all we want. We don’t have to be polite to police officers, and they clearly have very little interest in being polite to us. And for those who keep demanding that we act civilly, the point is, “incivility” is not a crime.

.........

To continue to tell Black people — as many white folks and respectable black folk on the social media threads I participated in have said — that if these children “would have just done what the officers said, none of this would have happened,” is to be deeply invested in exercises of racial ignorance. Proper behavior has never, ever protected Black people from police.

Most of these children came to a pool party with an invite, got harassed and physically assaulted by white residents who didn’t want them to be there, and then mistreated by the police. The ones who didn’t have an invite came because perhaps it was a rare opportunity to get in a clean, safe swimming pool in the heat of a Texas summer. Good policing could have dealt with this matter sans violence and without incident.

But that didn’t happen here.

Instead, the police mistreated these teens (including those who had been invited) because they started by giving the white residents the benefit of the doubt, even though good credible evidence suggests that white racial aggression spurred this incident in the first place. But Black children and Black people are never given the benefit of the doubt. We are policed first, and only ever apologized to later, if at all.

White people in the aggregate value the “safety” of their private, segregated, residential spaces far more than they value a system of policing that protects and values all lives equally.

undermining everyone outside your tribe establishes the superiority of everyone inside your tribe...,

guardian |  Black male recruits make up only 6.86% of the 2015 police academy class. At the end of civil rights movement in 1970 it was 7.3%. When Eric Adams was a lieutenant with the New York police department, he took a white rookie into public housing in their precinct. When they got on the elevator, they saw a puddle of urine in the corner.

“You see, lieutenant,” the officer said to him, “these people are all animals; they don’t deserve anything.”

“Only one person pissed in the elevator,” Adams responded. “The people in this building are just as upset over that piss as you are.”

Adams, who is black, was an officer for 22 years. On the force, he spoke out against police brutality and served as president of the black fraternal NYPD Guardians Association; he was a captain when he left in 2006 to enter politics.

Now the Brooklyn borough president, Adams says officers and management must stop making assumptions about poor communities based on the “numerical minority” that commits most of the offences.

The majority of residents in every community, Adams says, want the “same thing as a millionaire”, that is, “an environment where they can raise a healthy child”. And most work hard. “They may not go to a high-paying job on Wall Street, but they go and clean the streets. But if the police don’t have interaction with the healthy people in that community, then they’ll never know how to properly police it.”

Ray Benitez, who retired in 2004 after 20 years, mostly in Bedford-Stuyvesant, agrees. He watched officers stereotype entire neighborhoods. “You’ve got to know that 95% of the people in the community have no dealing with the police at all. None.” That includes positive interactions, adds the Flatbush native who identifies as black Hispanic.

Benitez is blunt about how some officers view majority-black and Hispanic neighborhoods: “I’m talking about a thinly veiled disgust … simply because they appear to be in distress, with a different station in life. Maybe the sociological condition is that somehow those cops feel they’re more entitled, that they’re better.”

Both men say this often unconscious bias makes policing harder: those cops are not building relationships that, in turn, can yield the intelligence they need. When a cop tells a mother about a program for kids, or even says “good morning, ma’am”, she may reciprocate. “She’ll tell you, ‘You know, I saw somebody carrying a gun.’”

u.s. on cuba like caitlyn jenner on a strapping 16 yr old pool boy...,

wired |  Cuba has for several years had a promising therapeutic vaccine against lung cancer. The 55-year trade embargo led by the US made sure that Cuba was mostly where it stayed. Until—maybe—now. 

The Obama administration has, of course, been trying to normalize relations with the island nation. And last month, during New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s visit to Havana, Roswell Park Cancer Institute finalized an agreement with Cuba’s Center for Molecular Immunology to develop a lung cancer vaccine and begin clinical trials in the US. Essentially, US researchers will bring the Cimavax vaccine stateside and get on track for approval by the Food and Drug Administration.

“The chance to evaluate a vaccine like this is a very exciting prospect,” says Candace Johnson, CEO of Roswell Park. She’s excited, most likely, because research on the vaccine so far shows that it has low toxicity, and it’s relatively cheap to produce and store. The Center for Molecular Immunology will give Roswell Park all of the documentation (how it’s produced, toxicity data, results from past trials) for an FDA drug application; Johnson says she hopes to get approval for testing Cimavax within six to eight months, and to start clinical trials in a year.

How did Cuba end up with a cutting edge immuno-oncology drug? Though the country is justly famous for cigars, rum, and baseball, it also has some of the best and most inventive biotech and medical research in the world. That’s especially notable for a country where the average worker earns $20 a month. Cuba spends a fraction of the money the US does on healthcare per individual; yet the average Cuban has a life expectancy on par with the average American. “They’ve had to do more with less,” says Johnson, “so they’ve had to be even more innovative with how they approach things. For over 40 years, they have had a preeminent immunology community.”

Despite decades of economic sanctions, Fidel and Raul Castro made biotechnology and medical research, particularly preventative medicine, a priority. After the 1981 dengue fever outbreak struck nearly 350,000 Cubans, the government established the Biological Front, an effort to focus research efforts by various agencies toward specific goals. Its first major accomplishment was the successful (and unexpected) production of interferon, a protein that plays a role in human immune response. Since then, Cuban immunologists made several other vaccination breakthroughs, including their own vaccines for meningitis B and hepatitis B, and monoclonal antibodies for kidney transplants.