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.

the fruits of fraud-free science...,

wikipedia |  CimaVax-EGF is the first therapeutic cancer vaccine developed to target non-small-cell lung carcinoma (NSCLC), the most common form of lung cancer. The vaccine was the result of a 25-year research project at Cuba’s Center of Molecular Immunology.^[1][2] The product has gone through 2 trial phases in Cuba and is currently in the process of going through a third trial, and there are agreements in place to test it in the United States (at Roswell Park Cancer Institute, subject to approval of a New Drug Application by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration), Japan, and some European countries.^[3] It is currently only available in Cuba.

CimaVax is an active vaccine in which patients are immunized with epidermal growth factor (EGF), thus raising antibodies targeting EGF itself. The product is also formulated with the Neisseria meningitidis outer protein P64k and Montanide ISA 51 as an adjuvant to potentiate the immune response.^[4] The epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) is hijacked by many types of cancer, including cancers of the lung, colon, kidney, and head and neck. By raising antibodies against EGF, which is EGFR's major ligand, the concentrations of EGF in the blood are reduced. Thus CimaVax does not target the cancer cells directly, but is expected to work against these cancers by denying the cancers the growth stimulus they require.^[4][5] For this reason, the Roswell Park group thinks that it may prove most useful as a preventive vaccine rather than as a cancer therapy per se.^[3]

Early trials showed a statistical trend towards an improved survival rate amongst vaccinated test subjects.^[4][6] A direct correlation between the level of antibodies that a vaccinated patient raises against EGF and survival has been observed in several trials,^[4] and in one of the largest trials^[5] there was also an age-dependence, with only subjects under the age of 60 benefiting in terms of survival.^[4] More antibodies are raised when the vaccine is formulated with Montanide ISA 51 rather than aluminum hydroxide as an adjuvant, and when patients receive a low dose of cyclophosphamide three days before vaccine administration.^[4] Cyclophosphamide is thought to temporarily block the body's natural immune tolerance to EGF, thereby increasing antibody titers.^[4]

CimaVax is relatively cheap to produce and store, and has low toxicity.^[3] Side effects of the vaccine appear to be mild, and include chills, fever, headache, nausea.^[7][4]

Researchers caution that the early results to date have been in relatively small, early-stage trials with patients that were carefully selected based on predefined inclusion and exclusion criteria, and given specialized oncology care; they may therefore not be representative of most patients who might benefit from the vaccine.^[4] It has been urged that CimaVax be tested in patients with earlier-stage NSCLC cancer and in patients who are not candidates for chemotherapy, and that research be conducted to determine which subgroups of NSCLC patients do and don't respond the vaccine.^[4] It has also been suggested that CimaVax may also be effective in other types of cancer that are dependent on EGF/EGFR, including many cases of prostate cancer.^[4]

costs of slipshod research in the $billions...,

npr |  Laboratory research seeking new medical treatments and cures is fraught with pitfalls: Researchers can inadvertently use bad ingredients, design the experiment poorly, or conduct inadequate data analysis. Scientists working on ways to reduce these sorts of problems have put a staggering price tag on research that isn't easy to reproduce: $28 billion a year.

"Better training for students, postdoctoral fellows, even principal investigators is in order here."

Leonard Freedman, molecular geneticist and president of Global Biological Standards Institute

That figure, published Tuesday in the journal PLOS Biology, represents about half of all the preclinical medical research that's conducted in labs (in contrast to research on human volunteers). And the finding comes with some important caveats.

The $28 billion doesn't just represent out-and-out waste, the team that did the research cautions. It also includes some studies that produced valid results — but that couldn't be repeated by others because of the confusing way the methods were described, or because of other shortcomings.

Leonard Freedman, who heads a nonprofit called the Global Biological Standards Institute, decided to undertake the study with two Boston University economists, Iain Cockburn and Timothy Simcoe. Their goal was to identify ways to make research more efficient.

"We initially were asking a very simple question," Freeman says. "We simply wanted to know how much money is being spent each year on basic preclinical research that is not reproducible."

That turned out to be a very difficult question; only a few studies have addressed the issue head-on, and they aren't directly comparable. The economists eventually homed in on a best estimate: $28 billion per year.

status-seeking within prestige hierarchies the antithesis of competence culture...,

physicstoday |  “The case against science,” wrote Richard Horton, editor of the medical journal the Lancet, “is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue.” Horton’s April commentary appeared weeks before news broke about Science magazine’s now widely analyzed retraction of a psychology paper about attitudes towards gay marriage. Much in the current media analysis, whether or not citing Horton specifically, aligns with his judgment—sometimes without much of the hopefulness he framed within this harshness.

Consider, for example, Charles Seife’s Los Angeles Times op-ed. The science journalist and New York University journalism professor discerns “a weakness at the heart of the scientific establishment,” which a “steady drip-drip-drip of falsification, exaggeration and outright fabrication [is] eroding.”

Science itself eroding? Horton leveled general accusations:

Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.… The apparent endemicity of bad research behaviour is alarming. In their quest for telling a compelling story, scientists too often sculpt data to fit their preferred theory of the world. Or they retrofit hypotheses to fit their data. Journal editors deserve their fair share of criticism too. We aid and abet the worst behaviours.

But in some ways—not always matched in the popular media—Horton placed hopefulness alongside the harshness. “The good news is that science is beginning to take some of its worst failings very seriously,” he wrote, though the “bad news is that nobody is ready to take the first step to clean up the system.” He described possible hopeful steps, including one inspired by physicists:

One of the most convincing proposals came from outside the biomedical community. Tony Weidberg is a Professor of Particle Physics at Oxford. Following several high-profile errors, the particle physics community now invests great effort into intensive checking and rechecking of data prior to publication. By filtering results through independent working groups, physicists are encouraged to criticise. Good criticism is rewarded. The goal is a reliable result, and the incentives for scientists are aligned around this goal. Weidberg worried we set the bar for results in biomedicine far too low. In particle physics, significance is set at 5 sigma—a p value of 3 × 10^–7 or 1 in 3.5 million (if the result is not true, this is the probability that the data would have been as extreme as they are).

Other scientists have also given the popular media cues for generalizing harshly about science overall from specific failings like the retracted Science paper. At Nature, Richard Van Noorden borrowed phrasing from Seife in reporting that delegates to the recent World Conference on Research Integrity in Rio de Janeiro saw in the retracted study only more of the “steady drip-drip of research misconduct.” In December 2013, the American Journal of Neuroradiology published a paper with a powerfully loaded title: “The fraud and retraction epidemic.” Last month at The Conversation, Laureate Professor of Mathematics Jonathan Borwein of the University of Newcastle published a piece called “The ‘train wreck’ continues: Another social science retraction.” The train-wreck analogy comes from 2012, when Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman called on psychologists to tighten up replicability in “social priming” research, as reported in Nature. Two years ago, Borwein coauthored a Huffington Post essay arguing that the “scientific world is suffering through a rash of examples of the sad consequences of the ‘hype now, hide later’ approach to scientific news.”

problems in PRR paradise...,

NYTimes |  Cheating in scientific and academic papers is a longstanding problem, but it is hard to read recent headlines and not conclude that it has gotten worse. Falsified or erroneous results have forced authors and editors to retract papers from journals that let themselves be duped into publishing them. Researchers at some of the nation’s most prestigious universities have been implicated. There are ways to minimize this kind of fraud, but it will require changing the process, from how scientists share their data to how their peers review it and who is allowed to enforce academic standards.

In the latest well-publicized case, the journal Science on Thursday retracted an article, published in December, which had purported to show that gay political canvassers could change conservative voters’ views on same-sex marriage in brief face-to-face conversations. The researchers could not produce the original data necessary to resolve questions about the work.

Cheating is thought to contaminate only a small portion of all the research in this country, but no one knows for sure. Cases that have emerged from the shadows are tracked by Retraction Watch, an independent blog that covers research. In an op-ed article in The Times on May 23, the blog’s co-founders noted that, in each of the past few years, the Office of Research Integrity, part of the Department of Health and Human Services, has sanctioned a dozen or so scientists for misconduct ranging from plagiarism to fabrication of results.

Clearly, this has not been a good year. The journal Environmental Science & Technology corrected a March paper on fracking because the lead scientist failed to disclose funding from an energy company. In May, The Journal of Clinical Investigation retracted a paper on cancer genetics from a young researcher at the National Cancer Institute because the data was fabricated.

How could this happen? Often a young researcher, driven by the academic imperative to “publish or perish,” fudges the data. In many cases, a senior scientist who is supposed to be monitoring the research pays little attention, content to be listed as one of the authors.

In theory, a journal’s peer reviewers are supposed to detect errors, but they often do not have the critical data needed to check the findings, nor the time to do so, particularly since they are seldom paid. Sometimes the cases only come to light when a whistle-blower, perhaps a student or researcher in the lab where the cheating occurs, points the finger. The scientific community clearly needs to build a better safety net.

...while germans laugh at the vampire squid

BBC | In a kitchen in rural South Carolina one night, Hunter Bliss told his mother he wanted to apply to university in Germany. Amy Hall chuckled, dismissed it, and told him he could go if he got in.

"When he got accepted I burst into tears," says Amy, a single mother. "I was happy but also scared to let him go that far away from home."

Across the US parents are preparing for their children to leave the nest this summer, but not many send them 4,800 miles (7,700km) away - or to a continent that no family member has ever set foot in.

Yet the appeal of a good education, and one that doesn't cost anything, was hard for Hunter and Amy to ignore.

"For him to stay here in the US was going to be very costly," says Amy. "We would have had to get federal loans and student loans because he has a very fit mind and great goals."

More than 4,600 US students are fully enrolled at Germany universities, an increase of 20% over three years. At the same time, the total student debt in the US has reached $1.3 trillion (£850 billion).

Each semester, Hunter pays a fee of €111 ($120) to the Technical University of Munich (TUM), one of the most highly regarded universities in Europe, to get his degree in physics.

Included in that fee is a public transportation ticket that enables Hunter to travel freely around Munich.

Health insurance for students in Germany is €80 ($87) a month, much less than what Amy would have had to pay in the US to add him to her plan.

"The healthcare gives her peace of mind," says Hunter. "Saving money of course is fantastic for her because she can actually afford this without any loans."

To cover rent, mandatory health insurance and other expenses, Hunter's mother sends him between $6,000-7,000 each year.

At his nearest school back home, the University of South Carolina, that amount would not have covered the tuition fees. Even with scholarships, that would have totalled about $10,000 a year. Housing, books and living expenses would make that number much higher.

The simple maths made Hunter's job of convincing his mother easy.

"You have to pay for my college, mom - do you want to pay this much or this much?"

vampire squid sucking the blood out of it's most productive...

Slashdot | 
There are some valid points raised in Lee Siegel's 1,100 word rant against college loans (if not so much against college education). There are also some bad ones. But two things are clear: the words "personal" and/or "responsibility" were used precisely zero times. Siegel, who described himself as "the author of five books who is writing a memoir about money," is hardly a glowing advertisement for the return on nearly a decade in university just to achieve a Master of Philosophy degree. (ed: emphasis mine)

New York Times | ONE  late summer afternoon when I was 17, I went with my mother to the local bank, a long-defunct institution whose name I cannot remember, to apply for my first student loan My mother co-signed. When we finished, the banker, a balding man in his late 50s, congratulated us, as if I had just won some kind of award rather than signed away my young life.

By the end of my sophomore year at a small private liberal arts college, my mother and I had taken out a second loan, my father had declared bankruptcy and my parents had divorced. My mother could no longer afford the tuition that the student loans weren’t covering. I transferred to a state college in New Jersey, closer to home.

Years later, I found myself confronted with a choice that too many people have had to and will have to face. I could give up what had become my vocation (in my case, being a writer) and take a job that I didn’t want in order to repay the huge debt I had accumulated in college and graduate school. Or I could take what I had been led to believe was both the morally and legally reprehensible step of defaulting on my student loans, which was the only way I could survive without wasting my life in a job that had nothing to do with my particular usefulness to society.

I chose life. That is to say, I defaulted on my student loans.

As difficult as it has been, I’ve never looked back. The millions of young people today, who collectively owe over $1 trillion in loans, may want to consider my example.

It struck me as absurd that one could amass crippling debt as a result, not of drug addiction or reckless borrowing and spending, but of going to college. Having opened a new life to me beyond my modest origins, the education system was now going to call in its chits and prevent me from pursuing that new life, simply because I had the misfortune of coming from modest origins.


Am I a deadbeat? In the eyes of the law I am. Indifferent to the claim that repaying student loans is the road to character? Yes. Blind to the reality of countless numbers of people struggling to repay their debts, no matter their circumstances, many worse than mine? My heart goes out to them. To my mind, they have learned to live with a social arrangement that is legal, but not moral.

bruce's brain just more at home in panties, a bustier, and mascara...,

NYTimes | “My brain is much more female than it is male,” he told her, explaining how he knew that he was transgender.

This was the prelude to a new photo spread and interview in Vanity Fair that offered us a glimpse into Caitlyn Jenner’s idea of a woman: a cleavage-boosting corset, sultry poses, thick mascara and the prospect of regular “girls’ nights” of banter about hair and makeup. Ms. Jenner was greeted with even more thunderous applause. ESPN announced it would give Ms. Jenner an award for courage. President Obama also praised her. Not to be outdone, Chelsea Manning hopped on Ms. Jenner’s gender train on Twitter, gushing, “I am so much more aware of my emotions; much more sensitive emotionally (and physically).”

A part of me winced.

I have fought for many of my 68 years against efforts to put women — our brains, our hearts, our bodies, even our moods — into tidy boxes, to reduce us to hoary stereotypes. Suddenly, I find that many of the people I think of as being on my side — people who proudly call themselves progressive and fervently support the human need for self-determination — are buying into the notion that minor differences in male and female brains lead to major forks in the road and that some sort of gendered destiny is encoded in us.

That’s the kind of nonsense that was used to repress women for centuries. But the desire to support people like Ms. Jenner and their journey toward their truest selves has strangely and unwittingly brought it back.

People who haven’t lived their whole lives as women, whether Ms. Jenner or Mr. Summers, shouldn’t get to define us. That’s something men have been doing for much too long. And as much as I recognize and endorse the right of men to throw off the mantle of maleness, they cannot stake their claim to dignity as transgender people by trampling on mine as a woman.

Their truth is not my truth. Their female identities are not my female identity. They haven’t traveled through the world as women and been shaped by all that this entails. They haven’t suffered through business meetings with men talking to their breasts or woken up after sex terrified they’d forgotten to take their birth control pills the day before. They haven’t had to cope with the onset of their periods in the middle of a crowded subway, the humiliation of discovering that their male work partners’ checks were far larger than theirs, or the fear of being too weak to ward off rapists.

For me and many women, feminist and otherwise, one of the difficult parts of witnessing and wanting to rally behind the movement for transgender rights is the language that a growing number of trans individuals insist on, the notions of femininity that they’re articulating, and their disregard for the fact that being a woman means having accrued certain experiences, endured certain indignities and relished certain courtesies in a culture that reacted to you as one.

identity, caste position, or procreative reality?

newyorker |  The dispute began more than forty years ago, at the height of the second-wave feminist movement. In one early skirmish, in 1973, the West Coast Lesbian Conference, in Los Angeles, furiously split over a scheduled performance by the folksinger Beth Elliott, who is what was then called a transsexual. Robin Morgan, the keynote speaker, said:

I will not call a male “she”; thirty-two years of suffering in this androcentric society, and of surviving, have earned me the title “woman”; one walk down the street by a male transvestite, five minutes of his being hassled (which he may enjoy), and then he dares, he dares to think he understands our pain? No, in our mothers’ names and in our own, we must not call him sister.

Such views are shared by few feminists now, but they still have a foothold among some self-described radical feminists, who have found themselves in an acrimonious battle with trans people and their allies. Trans women say that they are women because they feel female—that, as some put it, they have women’s brains in men’s bodies. Radical feminists reject the notion of a “female brain.” They believe that if women think and act differently from men it’s because society forces them to, requiring them to be sexually attractive, nurturing, and deferential. In the words of Lierre Keith, a speaker at Radfems Respond, femininity is “ritualized submission.”

In this view, gender is less an identity than a caste position. Anyone born a man retains male privilege in society; even if he chooses to live as a woman—and accept a correspondingly subordinate social position—the fact that he has a choice means that he can never understand what being a woman is really like. By extension, when trans women demand to be accepted as women they are simply exercising another form of male entitlement. All this enrages trans women and their allies, who point to the discrimination that trans people endure; although radical feminism is far from achieving all its goals, women have won far more formal equality than trans people have. In most states, it’s legal to fire someone for being transgender, and transgender people can’t serve in the military. A recent survey by the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force found overwhelming levels of anti-trans violence and persecution. Forty-one per cent of respondents said that they had attempted suicide.

we know we're awful, but they're sooo much worse...,

NYPost |  Oh, how the feminist movement has lost its way. And the deafening silence over ISIS’s latest brutal crimes makes that all too clear.

Fifty years ago, American women launched a liberation campaign for freedom and equality. We achieved a revolution in the Western world and created a vision for girls and women everywhere.

Second Wave feminism was an ideologically diverse movement that pioneered society’s understanding of how women were disadvantaged economically, reproductively, politically, physically, psychologically and sexually.

Feminists had one standard of universal human rights — we were not cultural relativists — and we called misogyny by its rightful name no matter where we found it.

As late as 1997, the Feminist Majority at least took a stand against the Afghan Taliban and the burqa. In 2001, 18,000 people, led by feminist celebrities, cheered ecstatically when Oprah Winfrey removed a woman’s burqa at a feminist event — but she did so safely in Madison Square Garden, not in Kabul or Kandahar.

Six weeks ago, Human Rights Watch documented a “system of organized rape and sexual assault, sexual slavery, and forced marriage by ISIS forces.” Their victims were mainly Yazidi women and girls as young as 12, whom they bought, sold, gang-raped, beat, tortured and murdered when they tried to escape.

In May, Kurdish media reported, Yazidi girls who escaped or were released said they were kept half-naked together with other girls as young as 9, one of whom was pregnant when she was released. The girls were “smelled,” chosen and examined to make sure they were virgins. ISIS fighters whipped or burned the girls’ thighs if they refused to perform “extreme” pornography-influenced sex acts. In one instance, they cut off the legs of a girl who tried to escape.

These atrocities are war crimes and crimes against humanity — and yet American feminists did not demand President Obama rescue the remaining female hostages nor did they demand military intervention or support on behalf of the millions of terrified Iraqi and Syrian civilian refugees.

An astounding public silence has prevailed.

waco witnesses call cops killers (MSM nowhere to be found on this)

agingrebel |  Schmall quotes three recent veterans who have the experience to hear the difference between gunshots from different caliber weapons. Marine veteran William English remembers two shots from a small caliber weapon followed by “a rapid succession of shots from what sounded to me like an assault rifle.”

Navy veteran Steve Cochran “heard one pistol shot. All the rest of the shots I heard were assault rifles.”

Schmall writes, “Ron Blackett, a Confederation of Clubs and Independents leader who is a former Army and Coast Guard officer, also reported hearing one or two pistol shots followed by a blast of assault rifle fire.”

Accounts of the exact number of pistol shots fired before the police fusillade vary. They vary  because witnesses are always surprised and alarmed and not only hear shots from different directions but also may or may not hear echoes. However the AP account is consistent with a recurring version in which one biker non-fatally shot another at close range and a second biker standing on the Twin Peaks patio brandished and possibly fired a second handgun. It is likely that police opened fire after seeing the biker on the patio pull his gun. The AP version would also explain how Vietnam veteran Jesus Delgado Rodriguez, who was not a member of any club and who had just gotten out his automobile was shot in the head and torso. And it explains how so many people were shot in such a brief time.

overseers shot those bikers in waco, anybody tell you different is lying...,

theatlantic |  As the Texas shootout that killed nine motorcyclists fades from national headlines, local newspapers and a few larger media organizations have broken a series of small stories that prompted one alert Houston Press journalist to predict,“in the coming years, the Waco authorities' handling of the Twin Peaks biker gang shootout will become a textbook example of how not to handle an emergency situation.”

Two weeks later, Waco authorities still aren’t telling how many of the dead bikers were shot by police officers, how many cops fired their weapons, or how many total rounds they discharged.

Yahoo News filed public records requests to try to learn more, but reported last night that Waco authorities have asked state officials for permission to withhold documents.

Police haven’t released any video of the shoot-out to the public.

But a few news outlets have seen footage from one security camera. The New York Daily News sums up part of it: “Most of the leather-clad patrons ran away from the shooting or ducked under tables to dodge violence, video showed. Some bikers tried to direct other people to safety. One camera angle showed people piling into the men’s bathroom for cover. When there was no more room left, the bikers dashed toward the kitchen.” That doesn’t much sound like everyone present was conspiring to fight.

And Brian Doherty argues that the AP’s coverage of the video it saw raises questions about police behavior. “Despite police reports that the fighting and shooting began inside the restaurant and spilled out, closed-circuit footage of the restaurant seen by AP and reports from the restaurateurs indicate the shooting began outside, which is where the police already were,” he writes. “Police were already surrounding the restaurant in force, ready for action. How and why they began firing on the bikers and what happened before then should not necessarily be trusted merely from their mouths.”

the science of scarcity

harvard |  scarcity had stolen more than flesh and muscle. It had captured the starving men’s minds.

Mullainathan is not a psychologist, but he has long been fascinated by how the mind works. As a behavioral economist, he looks at how people’s mental states and social and physical environments affect their economic actions. Research like the Minnesota study raised important questions: What happens to our minds—and our decisions—when we feel we have too little of something? Why, in the face of scarcity, do people so often make seemingly irrational, even counter-productive decisions? 

And if this is true in large populations, why do so few policies and programs take it into account?

In 2008, Mullainathan joined Eldar Shafir, Tod professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton, to write a book exploring these questions. Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much (2013) presented years of findings from the fields of psychology and economics, as well as new empirical research of their own. Based on their analysis of the data, they sought to show that, just as food had possessed the minds of the starving volunteers in Minnesota, scarcity steals mental capacity wherever it occurs—from the hungry, to the lonely, to the time-strapped, to the poor.

That’s a phenomenon well-documented by psychologists: if the mind is focused on one thing, other abilities and skills—attention, self-control, and long-term planning—often suffer. Like a computer running multiple programs, Mullainathan and Shafir explain, our mental processors begin to slow down. We don’t lose any inherent capacities, just the ability to access the full complement ordinarily available for use.

But what’s most striking—and in some circles, controversial—about their work is not what they reveal about the effects of scarcity. It’s their assertion that scarcity affects anyone in its grip. Their argument: qualities often considered part of someone’s basic character—impulsive behavior, poor performance in school, poor financial decisions—may in fact be the products of a pervasive feeling of scarcity. And when that feeling is constant, as it is for people mired in poverty, it captures and compromises the mind.

This is one of scarcity’s most insidious effects, they argue: creating mindsets that rarely consider long-term best interests. “To put it bluntly,” says Mullainathan, “if I made you poor tomorrow, you’d probably start behaving in many of the same ways we associate with poor people.” And just like many poor people, he adds, you’d likely get stuck in the scarcity trap.

why good pan-troglodytes do bad things...,

sciencedaily |  The study, "Anticipating and Resisting the Temptation to Behave Unethically," by University of Chicago Booth School of Business Behavioral Science and Marketing Professor Ayelet Fishbach and Rutgers Business School Assistant Professor Oliver J. Sheldon, was recently published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. It is the first study to test how the two separate factors of identifying an ethical conflict and preemptively exercising self-control interact in shaping ethical decision-making.

In a series of experiments that included common ethical dilemmas, such as calling in sick to work and negotiating a home sale, the researchers found that two factors together promoted ethical behavior: Participants who identified a potential ethical dilemma as connected to other similar incidents and who also anticipated the temptation to act unethically were more likely to behave honestly than participants who did not.

"Unethical behavior is rampant across various domains ranging from business and politics to education and sports," said Fishbach. "Organizations seeking to improve ethical behavior can do so by helping people recognize the cumulative impact of unethical acts and by providing warning cues for upcoming temptation."