180 Degree Reversal: I'm Now With Jeff Sessions On The Danger Of SkunkWeed!!!

Independent |  What is really needed in dealing with cannabis is a “tobacco moment”, as with cigarettes 50 years ago, when a majority of people became convinced that smoking might give them cancer and kill them. Since then the number of cigarette smokers in Britain has fallen by two-thirds. 

A depressing aspect of the present debate about cannabis is that so many proponents of legalisation or decriminalisation have clearly not taken on board that the causal link between cannabis and psychosis has been scientifically proven over the past ten years, just as the connection between cancer and cigarettes was proved in the late 1940s and 1950s.

The proofs have emerged in a series of scientific studies that reach the same grim conclusion: taking cannabis significantly increases the risk of schizophrenia. One study in The Lancet Psychiatry concludes that “the risk of individuals having a psychotic disorder showed a roughly three times increase in users of skunk-like cannabis, compared with those who never used cannabis”.  

As 94 per cent of cannabis seized by the police today is super-strength skunk, compared to 51 per cent in 2005, almost all those who take the drug today will be vulnerable to this three-fold increase in the likelihood that they will develop psychosis. 

Mental health professionals have long had no doubts about the danger. Five years ago, I asked Sir Robin Murray, professor of psychiatric research at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, about them. He said that studies showed that “if the risk of schizophrenia for the general population is about one per cent, the evidence is that, if you take ordinary cannabis, it is two per cent; if you smoke regularly you might push it up to four per cent; and if you smoke ‘skunk’ every day you push it up to eight per cent”. 

Anybody wondering what happens to this 8 per cent of the skunk-smoking population should visit any mental hospital in Britain or speak to somebody who has done so. Dr Humphrey Needham-Bennett, medical director and consultant psychiatrist of Cygnet Hospital, Godden Green in Sevenoaks, explained to me that among his patients “cannabis use is so common that I assume that people use or used it. It’s quite surprising when people say ‘no, I don’t use drugs’.” 

The connection between schizophrenia and cannabis was long suspected by specialists but it retained its reputation as a relatively benign drug, its image softened by the afterglow of its association with cultural and sexual liberation in the 1960s and 1970s.

Both Gaming And Pocket Rectangles Are Process Addictions

WaPo |  For many people, leisure time now means screen time. Mom’s on social media, Dad’s surfing the Web, sister is texting friends, and brother is playing a multiplayer shooting game like Fortnite.

But are they addicted? In June, the World Health Organization announced that “gaming disorder” would be included in its disease classification manual, reigniting debates over whether an activity engaged in by so many could be classified as a disorder.

Experts were quick to point out that only 1 to 3 percent of gamers are likely to fit the diagnostic criteria, such as lack of control over gaming, giving gaming priority over other activities and allowing gaming to significantly impair such important areas of life as social relationships.

Those low numbers may give the impression that most people don’t have anything to worry about. Not true. Nearly all teens, as well as most adults, have been profoundly affected by the increasing predominance of electronic devices in our lives. Many people suspect that today’s teens spend much more time with screens and much less time with their peers face-to-face than did earlier generations, and my analysis of numerous large surveys of teens of various ages shows this to be true: The number of 17- and 18-year-olds who get together with their friends every day, for example, dropped by more than 40 percent between 2000 and 2016. Teens are also sleeping less, with sleep deprivation spiking after 2010. Similar to the language in the WHO’s addiction criteria, they are prioritizing time on their electronic devices over other activities (and no, it’s not because they are studying more: Teens actually spend less time on homework than students did in the 1990s). Regardless of any questions around addiction, how teens spend their free time has fundamentally shifted.

If teens were doing well, this might be fine. But they are not: Clinical-level depression, self-harm behavior (such as cutting), the number of suicide attempts and the suicide rate for teens all rose sharply after 2010, when smartphones became common and the iPad was introduced. Teens who spend excessive amounts of time online are more likely to be sleep deprived, unhappy and depressed. Nor are the effects small: For example, teens who spent five or more hours a day using electronic devices were 66 percent more likely than those who spent just one hour to have at least one risk factor for suicide, such as depression or a previous suicide attempt.

It's Nothing Like A Broken Leg

Guardian |  When I am well, I am happy and popular. It is tough to type these words when I feel none of it. And sometimes when I am most well I am… boring. Boring is how I want to be all of the time. This is what I have been working towards, for 12 years now.

When friends decades older tell me off for saying that I am old, at 28, what I mean is: I haven’t achieved all the things I could have done without this illness. I should have written a book by now. I should have done so many things! All the time, I feel I am playing catch-up. Always. I worry, and most of the literature tells me, that I will have this problem for life. That it will go on, after the hashtags and the documentaries and the book deals and Princes Harry and William – while the NHS circles closer to the drain.

Maybe it’s cute now, in my 20s. But it won’t be cute later, when I am older and wearing tracksuits from 20 years ago and not in an ironic hipster way but because I no longer wash or engage with the world, and it’s like: my God, did you not get yourself together already?

When I left appointments and saw the long-term patients, walking around in hospital-issue pyjamas, dead-eyed (the kind of image of the mentally ill that has become anathema to refer to as part of the conversation, but which in some cases is accurate), four emotions rushed in: empathy, sympathy, recognition, terror. It’s one of those things you can’t really talk about with authenticity unless you’ve seen it, not really: the aurora borealis, Prince playing live and the inpatient wards.

Maybe my prognosis will look up, maybe I’ll leave it all behind. I’ve noticed a recent thing is for people to declare themselves “proud” of their mental illness. I guess I don’t understand this. It does not define me.

It’s not something that, when stable, I feel ashamed of, or that I hide. But I am not proud of it. I’d rather I didn’t have it – so I wasn’t exhausted, so I wasn’t bitter about it – despite the fact that I know some people, in all parts of the world, are infinitely worse off.

I want it gone, so that I am not dealing with it all the time, or worrying about others having to deal with it all the time. So I don’t have to read another article, or poster, about how I just need to ask for help. So that when a campaigner on Twitter says, “To anyone feeling ashamed of being depressed: there is nothing to be ashamed of. It’s illness. Like asthma or measles”, I don’t have to grit my teeth and say, actually, I am not OK, and mental illness couldn’t be less like measles. So that when someone else moans about being bored with everyone talking about mental health, and a different campaigner replies, “People with mental illness aren’t bored with it!” I don’t have to say, no, I am: I am bored with this Conversation. Because more than talking about it, I want to get better. I want to live.

The Omnigenic Model Of Complex Human Traits

quantamagazine |  The question most of genetics tries to answer is how genes connect to the traits we see. One person has red hair, another blonde hair; one dies at age 30 of Huntington’s disease, another lives to celebrate a 102nd birthday. Knowing what in the vast expanse of the genetic code is behind traits can fuel better treatments and information about future risks and illuminate how biology and evolution work. For some traits, the connection to certain genes is clear: Mutations of a single gene are behind sickle cell anemia, for instance, and mutations in another are behind cystic fibrosis.

But unfortunately for those who like things simple, these conditions are the exceptions. The roots of many traits, from how tall you are to your susceptibility to schizophrenia, are far more tangled. In fact, they may be so complex that almost the entire genome may be involved in some way, an idea formalized in a theory put forward last year.

Starting about 15 years ago, geneticists began to collect DNA from thousands of people who shared traits, to look for clues to each trait’s cause in commonalities between their genomes, a kind of analysis called a genome-wide association study (GWAS). What they found, first, was that you need an enormous number of people to get statistically significant results — one recent GWAS seeking correlations between genetics and insomnia, for instance, included more than a million people. 

Second, in study after study, even the most significant genetic connections turned out to have surprisingly small effects. The conclusion, sometimes called the polygenic hypothesis, was that multiple loci, or positions in the genome, were likely to be involved in every trait, with each contributing just a small part. (A single large gene can contain several loci, each representing a distinct part of the DNA where mutations make a detectable difference.)

How many loci that “multiple” description might mean was not defined precisely. One very early genetic mapping study in 1999 suggested that “a large number of loci (perhaps > than 15)” might contribute to autism risk, recalled Jonathan Pritchard, now a geneticist at Stanford University. “That’s a lot!” he remembered thinking when the paper came out.

Over the years, however, what scientists might consider “a lot” in this context has quietly inflated. Last June, Pritchard and his Stanford colleagues Evan Boyle and Yang Li (now at the University of Chicago) published a paper about this in Cell that immediately sparked controversy, although it also had many people nodding in cautious agreement. The authors described what they called the “omnigenic” model of complex traits. Drawing on GWAS analyses of three diseases, they concluded that in the cell types that are relevant to a disease, it appears that not 15, not 100, but essentially all genes contribute to the condition. The authors suggested that for some traits, “multiple” loci could mean more than 100,000.

Evolution Is Cleverer Than You Are

theatlantic |  But chimeras are not just oddities. You surely know one. In pregnant women, fetal stem cells can cross the placenta to enter the mother’s bloodstream, where they may persist for years. If Mom gets pregnant again, the stem cells of her firstborn, still circulating in her blood, can cross the placenta in the other direction, commingling with those of the younger sibling. Heredity can thus flow “upstream,” from child to parent—and then over and down to future siblings.

The genome, Zimmer goes on to reveal, eludes tidy boundaries too. Forget the notion that your genome is just the DNA in your chromosomes. We have another genome, small but vital, in our cells’ mitochondria—the tiny powerhouses that supply energy to the cell. Though the mitochondrial genes are few, damage to them can lead to disorders of the brain, muscles, internal organs, sensory systems, and more. At fertilization, an embryo receives both chromosomes and mitochondria from the egg, and only chromosomes from the sperm. Mitochondrial heredity thus flows strictly through the maternal line; every boy is an evolutionary dead end, as far as mitochondria are concerned.

Beyond the genome are more surprises. Schoolchildren learn that Darwin’s predecessor, the great French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, got heredity wrong when he suggested that traits acquired through experience—like the giraffe’s neck, elongated by straining and stretching to reach higher, perhaps tenderer, leaves—could be passed down. The biologist August Weismann famously gave the lie to such theories, which collectively are known as “soft” heredity. If Lamarckism were true, he said, chopping the tail off mice and breeding them, generation after generation, should eventually produce tailless mice. It didn’t. Lamarck wasn’t lurking in the details.

Recent research, however, is giving Lamarck a measure of redemption. A subtle regulatory system has been shown to silence or mute the effects of genes without changing the DNA itself. Environmental stresses such as heat, salt, toxins, and infection can trigger so-called epigenetic responses, turning genes on and off to stimulate or restrict growth, initiate immune reactions, and much more. These alterations in gene activity, which are reversible, can be passed down to offspring. They are hitchhikers on the chromosomes, riding along for a while, but able to hop on and off. Harnessing epigenetics, some speculate, could enable us to create Lamarckian crops, which would adapt to a disease in one or two generations and then pass the acquired resistance down to their offspring. If the disease left the area, so would the resistance.

All of these heredities—chromosomal, mitochondrial, epigenetic—still don’t add up to your entire you. Not even close. Every one of us carries a unique flora of hundreds if not thousands of microbes, each with its own genome, without which we cannot feel healthy—cannot be “us.” These too can be passed down from parent to child—but may also move from child to adult, child to child, stranger to stranger. Always a willing volunteer, Zimmer allowed a researcher to sample the microbes living in his belly-button lint. Zimmer’s “navelome” included 53 species of bacteria. One microbe had been known, until then, only from the Mariana Trench. “You, my friend,” the scientist said, “are a wonderland.” Indeed, we all are.

With this in mind, reconsider the ongoing effort to engineer heredity. The motto of the Second International Eugenics Congress, in 1921, was “Eugenics is the self-direction of human evolution.” Since then, controlling heredity has become technically much easier and philosophically more complicated. When, in the 1970s, the first genetic engineering made medical gene therapy feasible, many of its pioneers urged caution, lest some government try to create a genetic Fourth Reich. In particular, two taboos seemed commonsense: no enhancement, only therapy (thou shalt not create a master race); and no alterations in germ-line tissues, only in somatic cells (thou shalt not make heritable modifications).

Jenny Frum Da Block Aint...,

Breitbart  |  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic Party’s rising socialist star, describes herself as “a girl from the Bronx” to project a working-class image. However, this claim is only half true – to borrow a phrase from the left-wing website PolitiFact.

“Well, you know, the president is from Queens, and with all due respect — half of my district is from Queens — I don’t think he knows how to deal with a girl from the Bronx,” Ocasio-Cortez said this week on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

She similarly told the Washington Post: “I wasn’t born to a wealthy or powerful family — mother from Puerto Rico, dad from the South Bronx. I was born in a place where your Zip code determines your destiny.”

The congressional candidate, who pulled off an upset win against high-ranking establishment Rep. Joe Crowley (D-NY), was indeed born in New York City’s Bronx borough. She currently lives there, too.

So what’s the issue? For most of her formative years, Ocasio-Cortez was actually raised in one of the United States’ wealthiest counties.

Around the age of five, Alexandria’s architect father Sergio Ocasio moved the family from the “planned community” of Parkchester in the Bronx to a home in Yorktown Heights, a wealthy suburb in Westchester County. The New York Times describes her childhood home as “a modest two-bedroom house on a quiet street.” In a 1999 profile of the area, when Ocasio-Cortez would have been ten years old, the Times lauded Yorktown Heights’ “diversity of housing in a scenic setting” – complete with two golf courses.

The paper quoted Linda Cooper, the town supervisor, describing Yorktown as ”a folksy area where people can come, kick off their shoes, wander around, sit in a cafe, listen to a concert in the park, or go to the theater.”

DNC Pretending To Feel The Heat From Below...,

consortiumnews |  Conventional wisdom said that powerful Congressman Joseph Crowley couldn’t be beat. But his 20-year career in the House of Representatives will end in January, with the socialist organizer who beat him in the Democratic primary in the deep-blue district of the Bronx and Queens poised to become Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. 

 

In a symbolic twist of fate, the stunning defeat of Crowley came a day before the Rules and Bylaws Committee of the Democratic Party voted on what to do about “superdelegates,” those unelected Democratic Party elite who’ve had an undemocratic and automatic vote in presidential nominations since 1984 to prevent leftwing candidates from being nominated.    

Crowley’s defeat shows how grass-roots movements can prevail against corporate power and its pile of cash. The Crowley campaign spent upward of $3 million in the Democratic Party primary. The Ocasio-Cortez campaign spent one-tenth of that. He wielded the money. She inspired the people. 

As the 28-year-old Ocasio-Cortez was quick to say after her Tuesday night victory, her triumph belongs to everyone who wants social, economic and racial justice. She ran on a platform in harmony with her activism as a member of Democratic Socialists of America and an organizer for the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign.

Conventional wisdom said superdelegates—who exerted undemocratic power over the selection of the party’s presidential nominee in 2016—couldn’t be stopped from once again putting the establishment’s thumbs on the scale.

But on Wednesday afternoon, the party committee approved a proposal to prevent superdelegates from voting on the presidential nominee during the first ballot at the 2020 Democratic National Convention. (The last time the party’s convention went to a second ballot was 1952.)

As NPR reported, the committee “voted to drastically curtail the role ‘superdelegates’ play in the party’s presidential nominating process. The DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee voted 27 to 1 to block officeholders, DNC members and other party dignitaries from casting decisive votes on the first ballot of presidential nominating conventions.”

Make no mistake: Those in the top echelons of the Democratic Party aren’t moving in this direction out of the goodness of their hearts. Grass-roots pressure to democratize the party—mounting since 2016—is starting to pay off.

Harley John Wayne Got Real Life Imitating A Rob Zombie Movie...,

KansasCity |  "I’m glad my clients can finally put this nightmare behind them," Hinrichs said. "The last few years have been really difficult. This (settlement) has provided them some closure."

The suit named E.I.E. LLC, the company doing business as Whiskey Tango, as a defendant. It also named five men who worked there or continue to work there: Shawn Brown, the owner of E.I.E.; Harley Jon Wayne Akin, a manager of security overseeing the bouncers; Michael Anthony Malick, a bouncer; Cody Reese Atchley, a bouncer; and Fredrick R. Failing, a bouncer.

Four of the men have pleaded guilty to criminal charges or face trial: Akin, Atchley, Malick and Failing. Brown was not charged.

The country bar, at 401 S. Outer Road, hosts poker, beer pong and flip cup tournaments, according to its website. It has a mechanical bull. Blake Shelton made an appearance there a few months before the women were wrongly imprisoned.

The website advertises the bar as the best nightclub in Kansas City and a top spot to meet people. 

Around midnight on the night of the incident, the sisters were at a restaurant in a different city when an unknown woman bought a Bud Light with the counterfeit bill, the suit says.

About 90 minutes later, the sisters arrived at the bar with their cousins. 

Around 3 a.m., shortly before the bar's closing time, a man approached Mariel and accused her of using the fake bill. She adamantly denied the accusation, the suit says.

As the sisters left, multiple bouncers wearing skull or camouflage masks pursued them into the parking lot and "restricted them from leaving," the suit and criminal records say.

Back in the bar, Akin accused Mariel of using the fake bill. Audrey grabbed Akin by the front of his shirt and told her sister to run, according to criminal records.

Mariel fled, dashing into the woods toward a gas station about a half-mile away.

Security supervisors Justin Wilson and Akin told Atchley, Malick and Failing to "pursue her," the suit says.

Read more here: https://www.kansascity.com/news/local/crime/article213899559.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: https://www.kansascity.com/news/local/crime/article213899559.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: https://www.kansascity.com/news/local/crime/article213899559.html#storylink=cpy

The Choice America Is Making Now

eand |  Predatory capitalism has long fuelled the American economy — the middle class hollowed out to make the rich richer. But they don’t have any money, savings, or income left to give. And yet the only thing that American economy was built to do was prey. So whom will it prey on now?

Do you see the problem? The machine was built to generate “growth” by taking things from people — their money, their time, their imagination, their courage, their empathy — and in return jacking up the price of the basics of life, healthcare, education, finance, to astronomical prices. Not exactly a fair trade to begin with. But people now have nothing left to give. They have been bled dry. So what happens now? What will the machine consume to keep itself going?

Well, whom can it prey on now? Maybe more camps will have to be built, and more kids put in them, and each one made a profit center. Maybe all those private prisons will have to be filled up with dissidents. Maybe all those tech companies will start reporting you as dangerous. Maybe all those TV shows you watch will be used to make a profile of whether or not you are a good citizen. It’s not a coincidence they built concentration camps in old Walmarts — it’s a perfect metaphor for an implosive economy.

The point is this. Profits have to propped up, by more and more violent and coercive means, because America’s economy isn’t really capable of producing much that is real or valuable anymore. Nobody in the world really wants to buy what America has to sell — guns, Facebook ads, and greed, to put simply. But America’s own broken middle class doesn’t have anything left to give now. So the ways that such a predatory economy can “grow” are few now: by imprisoning people for profit, by abusing them for profit, by expropriating their wealth, or by putting them to work. What are those ways, in particular?

So the third thing “implosion” implies is a violent, spectacular process. When a society is collapsing, it is run by plutocrats. But when a society is imploding, it is run by mafias and warlords. That is basically where America is, though maybe it wouldn’t like to admit it. What other kinds of people smile as kids are shot in schools? Mafias and warlords exact their tribute. It doesn’t matter who pays, or whether payment is made in gold, silver, or bodies — it only matters that the mafias are paid.

That is why predation is now taking on a very different tone now. It is going from the hidden, soft predation of crap jobs and raiding pension funds and shifting debt from bailed out hedge funds onto students — to something harder, something more lethal, whose teeth and claws are finally being revealed. So implosion means, in this second sense, that predatory institutions are ready to use hard force, real violence, to accomplish their means. They are ready to consume everything that is left now, with very real abuse and systematic human rights violations. Hence, the camps.

But the camps are just a beginning. For an economy which has no good way left to grow, which makes mostly nothing the world wants, and whose people are too poor to buy what the world makes, the endgame is clear. Such an economy is going to have start resorting to more and more spectacularly violent means of repression and subjugation, to alleviate fast-spreading poverty. So today’s camps, as terrible as they are, are only a starting point, not an end point.

He Who Has A Why Can Bear Any How Everything Else Is Merely Consumerism...,

NYTimes |  It wasn’t long ago that the term “middle class” suggested security, conformity and often complacency — a cohort that was such a reliable feature of postwar American life that it attracted not just political pandering but also cultural ridicule. The stereotype included everyone from men in gray flannel suits to the slick professionals of “Thirtysomething,” stuck or smug in their world of bourgeois comforts.

“Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America,” a timely new book by the journalist and poet Alissa Quart, arrives at a moment when members of the middle class are no longer a robust demographic but an embattled and shrinking population, struggling to hold on to their delicate perch in an unforgiving economic order. These aren’t the truly poor but those in the “just-making-it group,” or what Quart also calls “the Middle Precariat.” The people she talks to believed their educations and backgrounds (most of them grew up in middle-class homes) would guarantee some financial stability; instead, their work is “inconstant or contingent,” and their incomes are stagnant or worse.

“They are people on the brink who did everything ‘right,’” Quart writes, “and yet the math of their family lives is simply not adding up.”

Quart describes her own experience of slipping into the “falling middle-class vortex” after the birth of her daughter seven years ago, a time when she and her husband were freelance writers facing new child care costs and hospital bills. She eventually became the executive editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, a nonprofit organization founded by the journalist Barbara Ehrenreich, but her family had a “few years of fiscal vertigo.” Quart includes herself in the group she’s writing about; her book succeeds and suffers accordingly.

As she puts it in her introduction, the concerns of her subjects “were not abstract to me.” Quart is a sympathetic listener, getting people to reveal not just the tenuousness of their economic situations but also the turbulence of their emotional lives. A chapter on middle-age job-seekers who once worked as computer programmers or newspaper reporters captures the fallout of a discriminatory job market, which tells older unemployed people they should buck up and start over while also making them feel superfluous.

“I’ve tried to reinvent myself so many times,” an aeronautical-engineer-turned-website-designer-turned-personal-chef tells her. “To be honest, it hasn’t worked.” The woman is now in her 50s, with two grown daughters and plenty of debt from culinary school. “The world has evolved beyond me,” she says.

The Surveillance State Exists To Destroy The Lives Of The Poor

prospect |  During the last two decades, policing has become synonymous with surveillance: the intense scrutiny of persons in public spaces. Poverty and the symptoms of drug addiction signify criminality to the police in ways similar to race. This surveillance targets the most vulnerable people in American society: people of color and poor whites. L. experienced a form of social oppression well known to people of color, targeted because their presence is considered a threat to others, because of their appearance, race, or presence in certain public spaces. 

Mass incarceration in the U.S., is largely thought of as a problem for black and brown communities. But this characterization risks masking the pervasive injustice that befalls others who live in and around those communities. The threat of surveillance has fallen disproportionately on African Americans and Latinos for decades. But during the era of mass incarceration, surveillance has increasingly become further disconnected from any legitimate suspicion of criminal behavior.  

The new approach makes surveillance seem like a primary responsibility of government. But this purported governmental “responsibility” (which does not appear in the Constitution) is rapidly overtaking the right to be free from surveillance, a protection that the Fourth Amendment to the Bill of Rights guarantees. 

We live in a country where the poor are often presumed guilty, since they have failed to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. This “failure” has profound consequences. As Barton Gellman and Sam Adler-Bell, a senior fellow and senior policy advocate at the Century Foundation, noted in the 2017 Century Foundation report, “The Disparate Impact of Surveillance,” the gaze of the state is “heaviest in communities already disadvantaged by their poverty, race, religion, ethnicity, and immigration status.” 

How Many Deeply Impoverished Americans Are There?

WaPo  |  The Trump administration says the United Nations is overestimating the number of Americans in “extreme poverty” by about 18.25 million people, reflecting a stark disagreement about the extent of poverty in the nation and the resources needed to fight it.

In May, Philip G. Alston, special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights for the U.N., published a report saying 40 million Americans live in poverty and 18.5 million Americans live in extreme poverty.

But in a rebuke to that report on Friday, U.S. officials told the United Nations Human Rights Council there only appear to be approximately 250,000 Americans in extreme poverty, calling Alston's numbers “exaggerated.”

The rift highlights a long-running debate among academics over the most accurate way to describe poverty in America, one with enormous implications for U.S. policy-making and the nation's social safety net. It also sheds light on the ongoing feud between Trump and U.N. officials over Alston's report on American poverty, with U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley last week calling the report “politically motivated” and arguing it “is patently ridiculous for the U.N. to examine poverty in America.”

But who is right about the number of Americans in extreme poverty?

It depends on how you define it.

The U.N.'s numbers come from the official Census definition that has been kept for decades by the U.S. government, defining extreme poverty as having an income lower than half the official poverty rate, Alston said in an interview. (For 2016, that was about $12,000 a year for a family of four.) By this criteria, the poverty rate in America has only slightly ticked downward since the mid-1960s.

Ocasio-Cortez Did Not Take Any Corporate Money Yet....,

vogue |  But Ocasio-Cortez’s challenge goes far beyond surface level; Ocasio-Cortez is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, a leftist organization that has helped buoy the campaigns of dozens of outsider candidates running on very progressive platforms in places where Democrats like Crowley are used to winning—handily. Some of Ocasio-Cortez’s positions include fighting for Medicare for All and a federal jobs guarantee, abolishing ICE, and insisting on much more severe policing of luxury real estate development (part of the reason she has refused corporate donations). Her push on economic justice has exposed ways that Crowley, as a powerful Democrat who sits on the House Committee on Ways and Means, pays lip service to the post–Donald Trump resistance while maintaining largely centrist politics. Newcomers like Ocasio-Cortez and Cynthia Nixon, who is hoping to unseat Governor Andrew Cuomo (Nixon and Ocasio-Cortez have endorsed each other), have already helped spur a leftward shift in some of the stances of their opponents.

Ocasio-Cortez spoke to Vogue on the phone last week before heading to a child detention center in Tornillo, Texas. Trump’s family separation policy has been a flash point not just along partisan lines, but also between Democrats: those who denounce ICE’s action but refuse to call for its dismantling, like Crowley, and those who believe it should not exist. It’s an issue that has also created a debate around “civility,” as pundits squabble over whether or not Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, for example, should have been heckled out of a Mexican restaurant last week. As the people’s millennial challenger, Ocasio-Cortez weighed in on what needs to change in New York, in elections, and in how we talk about holding those in power accountable.

Corporatist Nihilism With A Happy Ending?

truthdig |  The Trump administration did not rise, prima facie, like Venus on a half shell from the sea. Donald Trump is the result of a long process of political, cultural and social decay. He is a product of our failed democracy. The longer we perpetuate the fiction that we live in a functioning democracy, that Trump and the political mutations around him are somehow an aberrant deviation that can be vanquished in the next election, the more we will hurtle toward tyranny. The problem is not Trump. It is a political system, dominated by corporate power and the mandarins of the two major political parties, in which we don’t count. We will wrest back political control by dismantling the corporate state, and this means massive and sustained civil disobedience, like that demonstrated by teachers around the country this year. If we do not stand up we will enter a new dark age.

The Democratic Party, which helped build our system of inverted totalitarianism, is once again held up by many on the left as the savior. Yet the party steadfastly refuses to address the social inequality that led to the election of Trump and the insurgency by Bernie Sanders. It is deaf, dumb and blind to the very real economic suffering that plagues over half the country. It will not fight to pay workers a living wage. It will not defy the pharmaceutical and insurance industries to provide Medicare for all. It will not curb the voracious appetite of the military that is disemboweling the country and promoting the prosecution of futile and costly foreign wars. It will not restore our lost civil liberties, including the right to privacy, freedom from government surveillance, and due process. It will not get corporate and dark money out of politics. It will not demilitarize our police and reform a prison system that has 25 percent of the world’s prisoners although the United States has only 5 percent of the world’s population. It plays to the margins, especially in election seasons, refusing to address substantive political and social problems and instead focusing on narrow cultural issues like gay rights, abortion and gun control in our peculiar species of anti-politics.

This is a doomed tactic, but one that is understandable. The leadership of the party, the Clintons, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Tom Perez, are creations of corporate America. In an open and democratic political process, one not dominated by party elites and corporate money, these people would not hold political power. They know this. They would rather implode the entire system than give up their positions of privilege. And that, I fear, is what will happen. The idea that the Democratic Party is in any way a bulwark against despotism defies the last three decades of its political activity. It is the guarantor of despotism.

Trump has tapped into the hatred that huge segments of the American public have for a political and economic system that has betrayed them. He may be inept, degenerate, dishonest and a narcissist, but he adeptly ridicules the system they despise. His cruel and demeaning taunts directed at government agencies, laws and the established elites resonate with people for whom these agencies, laws and elites have become hostile forces. And for many who see no shift in the political landscape to alleviate their suffering, Trump’s cruelty and invective are at least cathartic.

Democratic Party's Fraudulent Identity Politics FAIL

downwithtyranny  |  How cynical is the Democratic Party's support for identity politics? To this observer, it seems impossible not to notice that those in control of the Democratic Party care about "identity politics" — about supporting more women, more people of color, more LGBTQ candidates, etc. — only when it suits them. Which means, if you take this view, that their vocal support for the underlying principles of "identity politics" is both cynical and insincere.

As I said, this has been apparent for some time. I've never seen it documented so well in one place, however, until this recent piece by Glenn Greenwald. 

The Past as Prologue: Cynthia Nixon

Apparently, however, Democratic Party interest in electing strong progressive women (Hillary Clinton includes herself on that list) has dissipated in the smoke of the last election. As Greenwald notes, "Over and over, establishment Democrats and key party structures have united behind straight, white male candidates (including ones tainted by corruption), working to defeat their credible and progressive Democratic opponents who are women, LGBT people, and/or people of color. Clinton herself has led the way."

The article is replete with examples, from the Brad Ashford–Kara Eastman battle in Nebraska, to the Bob Menendez–Michael Starr Hopkins–Lisa McCormick three-way contest in New Jersey,  to the Ben Cardin–Chelsea Manning primary in Maryland. In all cases, the Party backed the white male candidate (or in Menendez's case, the whiter male candidate) against the woman, the person of color, and the LGBTQ candidate. Not even the smoke of 2016's identity fire remains. 

The Ocasio-Crowley Battle Is a Very High-Leverage Fight

A second point: I recently wrote about the importance of progressives involving themselves heavily in high-leverage races — like the Bernie Sanders 2016 race, for example — where the payoff would have been huge relative to the effort. (You can read that piece and its argument here: "Supporting Aggressive Progressives for Very High-Leverage Offices".)

The Ocasio-Crowley contest is similarly high-leverage — first, because he's perceived as vulnerable and acting like he agrees, and second because it would, to use a chess metaphor, eliminate one of the most powerful (and corrupt) anti-progressive players from House leadership in a single move.

Again, Crowley is widely seen as the next Democratic Speaker of the House. He would be worse by far than Nancy Pelosi, and he's dangerous. He has blackmailed, as I see it, almost all of his colleagues into supporting him by the implicit threat of, as Speaker, denying them committee assignments and delaying or thwarting their legislation. He also controls funding as Speaker via the leadership PAC and the DCCC. Even Mark Pocan, co-chair of the CPC and normally a reliable progressive voice and vote, is reportedly whipping support for Crowley among his colleagues.

Crowley plays for keeps. Taking him off the board entirely, removing him from the House for the next two years, would produce a benefit to progressives far in excess of the effort involved. 

Pelosi/Schumer: "Maxine Are You Out Of Your Cotton-Picking Mind?!?!?!"

DailyCaller |  California Rep. Maxine Waters burst into tears Monday on MSNBC as she used “the children” to deflect away from the harassment comments she made over the weekend.

“I did not call for harm for anybody. The president lied again,” Waters said.

She then turned to “the children.”

“But let’s not talk about that. Let’s focus on the children. That’s what this is all about. It is about the fact that children have been snatched from their parents’ arms,” Waters said, moving away from the controversy over her comments.

Waters then burst into tears after being confronted with the fact that major Democrats are denouncing her harassment claims.

“They don’t really say I’m out of line. What they do is try to find a way talk about civility without attacking me or anybody else as the leader of the Democratic Party, I expect that she would do everything that she could to make sure nobody believes that Democrats are out here harassing anybody or causing any violence,” Waters said of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who denounced Waters’ harassment comments Monday.

Waters made comments over the weekend about getting out and pushing back on people with differing political ideologies, saying, “If you see anybody from that cabinet in a restaurant, in department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. Tell them they’re not welcome any more, anywhere!”

Be Careful What You Wish For Maxine...,

WashingtonTimes |  President Trump slammed Rep. Maxine Waters on Monday afternoon, after her speech calling for supporters to heckle members of the Trump administration went viral over the weekend.

Congresswoman Maxine Waters, an extraordinarily low IQ person, has become, together with Nancy Pelosi, the Face of the Democrat Party. She has just called for harm to supporters, of which there are many, of the Make America Great Again movement. Be careful what you wish for Max!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 25, 2018

Mr. Trump and Ms. Waters have crossed each other several times. The president has called Ms. Waters “a low IQ individual” at a rally for Rick Saccone in March 2018, and she has repeatedly called for his impeachment.

Ms. Waters told her supporters to “push out” members of the Trump administration from public spaces.

“If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere,” Ms. Waters said Saturday during a rally in Los Angeles.

Maxine Waters calls for attacks on Trump administration: “If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.” pic.twitter.com/jMV7wk48wM

— Ryan Saavedra 🇺🇸 (@RealSaavedra) June 24, 2018 

Fellow California lawmakers House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi have both denounced Ms. Waters’ statement.

Tuning Up Political Antagonism In The U.S.

Independent |  American citizens now own 40 per cent of all guns in the world - more than the next 25 top-ranked gun ownership countries combined - with the number only set to grow, according to new research.

According to a decade-long survey released by the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, not only do Americans own the highest number of guns per capita, but also between 2006 and 2017, US gun owners acquired some 122 million new guns. That represented more than half of the 207 million new civilian-owned firearms around the world during that time.

“The biggest force pushing up gun ownership around the world is civilian ownership in the United States,” said Aaron Karp, one of the authors of the report.

Kunstler |   It’s one thing to ignore the economically foundering, traditional working-class constituency of actual US citizens who are having a tougher time every year making a living; it’s another thing to bring in a several-millionfold population of non-citizens to replace them.

Anyway, it’s a pretty poor strategy for success in the coming mid-term election. The effort got a boost over the weekend from Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-Cal) who called for Trump administration employees to be thrown out of department stores and other retail establishments as well as restaurants. Why stop there? Why not enslave Trump employees and supporters? Force them to work without pay in the Chick-Fil-A regional distribution warehouses? One wonders what House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi thinks of Ms. Waters’ proposal. Other Democratic party leaders zipped their pie-holes about it.

The trouble is that the entities waiting to replace both the useless, careless, feckless Democrats and Republicans are chaos and violence, not reconstituted parties with coherent political programs. The US, and really all the so-called advanced nations on earth, are heading into an era of scarcity and austerity that is likely to present as mortal conflict.

Like Slaves, Illegal Aliens Are Profitable As Hell To Somebody

wikipedia |  The economic impact of illegal immigrants in the United States is challenging to measure and politically contentious. Since it is a challenging field to quantify, it leaves room for varying methodologies of study, and so the definitive results of the economic impact can change^[1]

One possibility is that foreign workers entering the country illegally can lower wages and increase overall costs of production. This comes from the theory that when there are more illegal immigrants in the country, there will be more immigrants looking for employment because most illegal immigrants prefer to work.^[2] This increases competition among low-skilled local workers, and this will push wages for the domestic low-skilled labor market down. Simultaneously the increased supply in unskilled illegal migrants can offset technological developments and "reduce the country's economy's competitiveness in the international market".^[3] The opposing theory is that even though this can happen in some areas with more low-skilled employment, on the net illegal immigration increases the welfare of domestic workers because their additional consumption outweighs the costs of welfare.^[4] Along the same lines it is argued that illegal immigrants work for lower wages, then domestic residents recognize these profits and can choose to either spend or save this new revenue,^[5] so the net outcome can be decided by the net of these two economic forces. Studies have shown that overall in the long run illegal immigration benefits the country in terms of its general production, but introducing many people in the labor market can lead to income distribution that can tend towards domestic workers and immigrant workers on other occasions. The net short-term impacts of some aspects of illegal immigration can be inconclusive.^[6] Though this net effect changes, the number of immigrants crossing the border illegally is less unclear.

There were approximately 11.3 million unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. in 2016, roughly unchanged from the prior year but well below the 12.2 million peak in 2007. There were an estimated 8 million unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. civilian workforce in 2016, roughly 5%.^[7] The Congressional Budget Office reported in 2007 that "the tax revenues that unauthorized immigrants generate for state and local governments do not offset the total cost of services provided to them" but "in aggregate and over the long term, tax revenues of all types generated by immigrants—both legal and unauthorized—exceed the cost of the services they use."^[8] Unauthorized immigrants demand goods and services^[9] while an estimated 50 to 75 percent pay taxes.^[10] Due to cheaper labor, they contribute to lower prices in the industries where they work, such as agriculture, restaurants, and construction.^[9]

Any Minute Now - Dookie Pie Will Start To Fly

WaPo |  OVER THE WEEKEND there was a fair bit of argument about the decision by a small restaurant in Lexington, Va., not to serve dinner to President Trump’s press secretary. It wasn’t the first time recently that strong political feelings have spilled into what used to be considered the private sphere. We understand the strength of the feelings, but we don’t think the spilling is a healthy development.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders was dining with a few other people at the Red Hen in Lexington Friday night. Several of the restaurant’s staff are gay and objected to Ms. Sanders’s defense of Mr. Trump’s discriminatory policies against transgender people. The staff also objected to the administration’s recent actions leading to the separation of thousands of children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. Respecting her staff’s wishes, the restaurant owner politely asked Ms. Sanders to leave, and Ms. Sanders politely acceded. She then tweeted about the episode, turning it into a public controversy.

This followed by a few days the very public heckling of two architects of that border policy, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, at Washington restaurants. Last month a Nebraska sociology professor was found guilty of vandalism for spraying false blood at the home of a National Rifle Association lobbyist in Alexandria.

It’s not a new tactic for protesters of one sort or another to target a public official’s home or private life. But never-at-rest social media have blurred the line between work hours and private time. Cellphone cameras make it ever easier to intrude and broadcast.

Maxine Waters NEVER Caped This Hard For A Black Constituent

thehill |  Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) on Saturday called on her supporters at a rally to confront Trump Cabinet officials in public spaces like restaurants and department stores to protest the administration's policies. 

"I have no sympathy for these people that are in this administration who know it is wrong what they're doing on so many fronts but they tend to not want to confront this president," Waters said at a Los Angeles rally on Saturday. 

"For these members of his cabinet who remain and try to defend him they're not going to be able to go to a restaurant, they're not going to be able to stop at a gas station, they're not going to be able to shop at a department store, the people are going to turn on them, they're going to protest, they're going to absolutely harass them until they decide that they're going to tell the president 'no I can't hang with you, this is wrong this is unconscionable and we can't keep doing this to children,'" she continued.

Waters' call comes as the Trump administration faces major backlash over the handling of its "zero tolerance" immigration policy, which has resulted in the separation of immigrant families. 

Protesters confronted Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen at a Mexican restaurant in Washington, D.C., last week, yelling “shame” at Nielsen and “End Texas concentration camps.”

Demonstrators in a separate incident on Friday blasted audio of crying migrant children who had been separated from their parents outside Nielsen's home. 

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders has also faced public backlash for her work in the administration, recently being told by one of the owners of the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Va., to leave due to her role in the administration. 

“I’m not a huge fan of confrontation,” co-owner Stephanie Wilkinson told The Washington Post. “I have a business, and I want the business to thrive. This feels like the moment in our democracy when people have to make uncomfortable actions and decisions to uphold their morals.”

ICE Linkedin Profiles

archive |  As ICE continues to ramp up its inhumane surveillance and detention efforts, I believe it’s important to document what’s happening, and by whom, in any way we can.

To that end, I’ve downloaded and made available the profiles of (almost) everyone on LinkedIn who works for ICE, 1595 people in total. While I don’t have a precise idea of what should be done with this data set, I leave it here with the hope that researchers, journalists and activists will find it useful.

'

You can find the full data set, including profile photos, previous employment info, schools, and more, on this GitHub repository. Details of each user are located in the “profiles” folder as .json files, each containing whatever information ICE workers have chosen to make publicly available about themselves on LinkedIn.

You can also see a very simple overview of the data at https://archive.fo/lfh98  

I find it helpful to remember that as much as internet companies use data to spy on and exploit their users, we can at times reverse the story, and leverage those very same online platforms as a means to investigate or even undermine entrenched power structures. It’s a strange side effect of our reliance on private companies and semi-public platforms to mediate nearly all aspects of our lives. We don’t necessarily need to wait for the next Snowden-style revelation to scrutinize the powerful — so much is already hiding in plain sight.

Of course, ICE has a presence on many online platforms besides LinkedIn, each are worth investigating. For example, they publish b-roll and propaganda videos on the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service, videos which I’ve previously explored in an attempt to provide a birds-eye view of how the institution positions itself in the public narrative.

Judaism's Strange Gods

thesaker |  The Saker: Now, turning to your books on Rabbinical Phariseism, could you please summarize the main theses of your books on this topic? What is, in your opinion, the true nature of Rabbinical Phariseism, what are its core tenets/beliefs? What would you say to an average person are the myths and realities about what is referred to as “Judaism” in our society?

Hoffman: Orthodox Judaism, which is the scion of the religion of the ancient Pharisees, is above all, self-worship, and pride is the paramount destroyer. In the occult scheme of things, the ideology closest to it was Hitler’s National Socialism, in that it shares this predominant characteristic of pathological narcissism. Christians and many other goyim (gentiles) have been deluded into imagining that Judaism, while being somewhat flawed due to rejecting Jesus, nonetheless manages to be an ethical religion reflective of the prophets of the Old Testament. Hillel, the first century A.D. Pharisee who is believed to have been a contemporary of Jesus, and Moses Maimonides (“Rambam”), the medieval philosopher and theologian, are most often held up as exemplars of this supposed ethical Judaism.

The myth of the benevolence of these two can only be sustained by ignorance. The problem is, that when a scholar begins to unearth facts that undermine pious media legends about men like Hillel and Maimonides, they enter “anti-Semitism” territory: if they dare to retail the truth, their ability to earn a living and keep their good name and reputation will be damaged, sometimes irreparably by the myth-makers who have the power to permanently stigmatize them as “haters and anti-Semites.”

I’m beyond those fears, so I can venture to say that Hillel offered theological grounds for the molestation of children and invented a “prozbul” escape clause for evading the Biblical command that no loan shall be in force more than seven years. Maimonides detested Jesus Christ with a volcanic hatred that led him in his writings to urge the murder of Christians when it is possible to do so without being detected. These facts are documented in my books Judaism Discovered and Judaism’s Strange Gods.

Meanwhile, if you google “Hillel” or “Maimonides,” or you consult Wikipedia, you’ll find them described in terms of saccharine sainthood and humanitarian benevolence.

Orthodox Judaism, I regret to say, is a religion of lying and deceit. Duplicity and mendacity are formally inculcated. They are not incidental. There isn’t even a great deal of trust among Talmudists themselves. Witness what Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, one time head of the reconstituted Sanhedrin in Tiberias, and premier translator of the Babylonian Talmud, has pronounced on this matter: “Rabbis are liable to alter their words, and the accuracy of their statements is not to be relied upon.” (The Talmud: The Steinsaltz Edition [Random House], Vol. II, pp. 48-49). In BT Yevamot 65b permission is given to lie “in the interests of peace,” a category so broad it is capable of serving as an alibi for countless situations in which scoundrels wish to conjure excuses for their falsehoods. There is also the general permission to lie to a gentile (BT Baba Kamma 113a).

These facts are not published in major media such as the New York Times. Yet the Times does not shy from insinuating that Shiite Islam is a religion of liars: “…there is a precedent for lying to protect the Shiite community…part of a Shiite historical concept called taqiyya, or religious dissembling.” (New York Times, April 14, 2012, p. A4).

Another defining theological aspect of Orthodox Judaism is its dogma that non-Jews are less than human. This is how the goyim are viewed in the Talmud and its sacred successor texts. In certain branches of Kabbalistic Judaism, such as the politically powerful and prominent Chabad-Lubavitch sect, their founder, Rabbi Shneur Zalman, formally promulgated the doctrine that goyim are not just less than human, they are non-human trash — “supernal refuse” — which is a reference to their Kabbalistic status as kelipot who possess “no redeeming qualities whatsoever.”

The Saker: My personal research has brought me to the conclusion ever since the recognition by Christ as the Messiah promised by the prophets of the Old Testament by one part of the first century Jews and the rejection of Him by the other part, the latter group began by developing an “anti-Christian scriptural toolkit” which included, of course, the forgery of the so-called Masoretic text, the development of the Talmud and the various commentaries, interpretations and codification of these texts. The goal was to develop a “polemical arsenal” so to speak. At the same time, the first kabbalistic concepts were developed for the internal use inside the anti-Christian communities. Would you agree with this (admittedly summarized) description and would you then agree with my personal conclusion that Rabbinical Phariseeism is at its core simply a religion of “anti-Christianity”?

Hoffman: I think you’re correct up to the Renaissance, which is the point at which members of the Roman Catholic hierarchy including many popes, were secretly initiated into Kabbalistic mysticism. The belt of that transmission is chronicled in detail in The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome. Rabbinic Phariseeism is more than a religion opposed to Jesus for this reason: in its beginnings in the time before Christ, it had existence as a creed founded upon esoteric oral teachings that nullify the Bible itself.

Orthodox Judaism is an anti-Biblical religion. Yes, it has a “Moses” and a “Noah” as its patrons and it names other patriarchs too, but these are not the Moses and Noah of the Bible. These are radically falsified figures who bear those names. Pharisac Judaism is contemptuous of the Biblical Noah about whom, in the Midrash, it makes scurrilous claims. There is even contempt for Moses. About Isaiah, who said that Israel has filthy lips, the Talmud teaches that Isaiah was justly killed by having his mouth sawed in half for “blaspheming Israel.”

In both Left-wing New Age and Right-wing neo-Nazi circles, the heresy of Marcion is alive and well and the Old Testament is execrated. It is equated with the Talmud (most famously on the Right by Douglas Reed in The Controversy of Zion). The problem with that tack is that the Old Testament is absolutely not a book of self-worship of the Jews. It is radically different from the Babylonian Talmud. The Bible is an antidote to self-worship. The Old Testament excoriates Israelites in the strongest possible terms.

Feminism, New Age, and Satanism

insightjournal |  Gloria Steinem (1934-) has long been celebrated as one of the world’s leading feminists, and so seems to have always been in the public eye, with every aspect of her life scrutinized.  A look at a less examined chapter in her life finds that in addition to her many efforts on behalf of women, she managed to find the time and the energy to become involved in the craziest episode in the history of modern psychiatry, which actually victimized thousands of women.

In the 1980s, there was a three-pronged epidemic that shook up psychotherapy in the English-speaking world. This affair started with the dubious idea of recovering “repressed” memories. Trauma is something you cannot shake off, but over the past 50 years, some self-described trauma experts have claimed that many trauma survivors have lost their memories to dissociation or repression. The step was the more dubious idea that the phenomenon of multiple personality is widespread, but unrecognized.

Dissociative phenomena include such things as loss of memory (amnesia), or temporary loss of identity. In extreme cases, individuals have been described as suffering from identity fragmentation, or multiple personality. For 100 years, dissociative disorders, if at all real, were considered extremely rare. Following a wave of claims about memories of sexual abuse, recovered during psychotherapy, there was a meteoric rise in the number of individuals diagnosed with multiple personality disorder (MPD).  Whereas before 1980 the number of cases in the literature was under 100, by 1995 there were tens of thousands of such cases. The number of reported personalities in one body skyrocketed and the record was 4,500. Ninety-five percent of the cases were diagnosed in North America, and 95% of them were women.

In tandem, the International Society for the Study of Multiple Personality and Dissociation (ISSMPD) was founded in 1984  by the psychiatrist Bennet Braun. Braun attracted a number of mental health professionals and a movement was formed. Soon dissociation was not only a movement, but a cause.

The ISSMPD was responsible for the next stage of the epidemic. The assumption was that MPD was the result of a massive childhood trauma. In 1988, Bennet Braun connected MPD with Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA).  Leaders of ISSMPD started educating the public about an underground intergenerational network of Satanists, responsible for killing thousands of children every year. Children born into Satanic families witnessed their siblings, or other children, being sacrificed, and were subject to other forms of abuse. The resulting trauma led to dissociation and MPD.  The therapists who were telling the world about dissociation, trauma, and Satanism were supposedly relying on evidence from clients who, during intensive treatment, recovered memories of childhood abuse. Braun and his colleagues suggested that the uncovered connections, which had been neglected or overlooked, between childhood trauma, repressed and recovered,  MPD and SRA, was a major breakthrough in the history of psychiatry.

In 1989 Braun’s partner, the psychiatrist Richard Kluft, expressed concern about a “hidden holocaust” perpetuated by Satanic cults. (Kluft remains a believer and in 2014 he stated “I remain troubled about the matter of transgenerational satanic cults”).

How is Gloria Steinem tied to these events?