Painkiller: America’s Fentanyl Crisis reminds us that there’s more than one epidemic to solve https://t.co/luZuc2dVj9
— The A.V. Club (@TheAVClub) July 14, 2020
• • • google suggested • • •
WORD SALAD: “…the artifact appears to be some sort of carbon-carbon shell wrapped around a zero-impedance containment field folded back on itself — in the form of a cube the size of a mountain…”
-Transmission from Hydra
Remote Vision is Don Tyler’s (Ascendant) new solo project featuring an atmospheric blend of deep cinematic space and minimal electronic ambience.
• • • some of the things I read in antisocial isolation • • •
Museums Once Coated Native Cultural Objects in Toxic Pesticides
Before you can decolonize a museum collection, you may need to decontaminate it.
Harvard University’s Peabody Museum was one of many museums that once used pesticides on Native American cultural objects. Embiggenable. Explore at home.
IN 1995, ELDERS FROM THE Hopi Tribe traveled to the Harvard Peabody Museum to retrieve three Hopi “Friends,” or ceremonial masks. It should have been a moment for celebration: After decades of being stored in stacks or displayed for the public, many of the items would finally be going home. But during the visit, the Hopi representatives were also given gloves and respirators, and cautioned against direct contact with the objects. The museum curators couldn’t be sure, but they thought the items might be contaminated with dangerous pesticides.
In museums across the country and the world, important and often sacred cultural items were blanketed in dangerous chemicals for the purpose of preservation. Tribes first encountered the extent of this contamination in the late 1990s. The Seneca Nation retrieved medicine masks that had been fumigated, and several tested positive for arsenic. The Hoopa Valley Tribe repatriated baskets, headbands and other ceremonial items, only to learn that nearly all the items were contaminated with mercury, DDT, and other dangerous chemicals.
The museums had not acted with malicious intent, but rather to preserve the materials from damage by pests. “We didn’t expect it to be like that,” says Lee Wayne Lomayestewa, the repatriation coordinator at the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office. Lomayestewa wasn’t present at the visit to Harvard, but he went on a similar trip to the American Museum of Natural History, and recalls the overpowering smell of the contaminated objects. “We were all happy to receive these items,” he says, but he later had to get himself tested for such elements as mercury and arsenic. (He ended up being fine, though his coworkers still tease him about glowing in the dark.)
The museum beetle, or Anthrenus museorum, is one of many pests that can affect museum collections. Embiggenable.
Under the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, known as NAGPRA, museums were required to inventory their collections and mark out which artifacts and ancestral remains belonged to which tribes. After the law took effect, the Hopi were contacted by 330 museums, some with collections that included more than 10,000 Hopi items. The problem was that poisonous objects were being sent back to tribal communities, and many would go back into rituals, coming in close proximity to a person’s skin, eyes, nose, and mouth. It seemed like a disaster waiting to happen—and one that demanded an immediate response. …
Stone Walks Free in One of the Greatest Scandals in American History
The amazing thing about the saga is how much of it happened in the full light of day.
Roger Stone’s best trick was always his upper-class-twit wardrobe. He seemed such a farcical character, such a Klaxon-alarm-from-a-mile-away goofball—who could take him seriously?
Aldrich Ames, Robert Hanssen: They had tradecraft. They didn’t troll people on Instagram or blab to reporters. They behaved in the way you would expect of people betraying their country: conscious of the magnitude of their acts, determined to avoid the limelight.
Stone could not have been more different. He clowned, he cavorted, he demanded limelight—which made it in some ways impossible to imagine that he could have done anything seriously amiss. Bank robbers don’t go on Twitter to announce, “Hey, I’m going to rob a bank, sorry, not sorry.” Or so you’d expect.
Yet Stone is a central figure in one of the greatest scandals in U.S. history. Ames, Hanssen, the Rosenbergs, Alger Hiss—none of them worked with a foreign intelligence service to help a candidate for president of the United States. Stone did. And now he will receive a commutation of his sentence from the president he served. …
Mask resistance during a pandemic isn’t new – in 1918 many Americans were ‘slackers’
Policemen in Seattle, Washington, wearing masks made by the Red Cross, during the influenza pandemic, December 1918.
We have all seen the alarming headlines: Coronavirus cases are surging in 40 states, with new cases and hospitalization rates climbing at an alarming rate. Health officials have warned that the U.S. must act quickly to halt the spread – or we risk losing control over the pandemic.
There’s a clear consensus that Americans should wear masks in public and continue to practice proper social distancing. While a majority of Americans support wearing masks, widespread and consistent compliance has proven difficult to maintain in communities across the country. Demonstrators gathered outside city halls in Scottsdale, Arizona; Austin, Texas; and other cities to protest local mask mandates. Several Washington state and North Carolina sheriffs have announced they will not enforce their state’s mask order.
I’ve researched the history of the 1918 pandemic extensively. At that time, with no effective vaccine or drug therapies, communities across the country instituted a host of public health measures to slow the spread of a deadly influenza epidemic: They closed schools and businesses, banned public gatherings and isolated and quarantined those who were infected. Many communities recommended or required that citizens wear face masks in public – and this, not the onerous lockdowns, drew the most ire.
In mid-October of 1918, amidst a raging epidemic in the Northeast and rapidly growing outbreaks nationwide, the United States Public Health Service circulated leaflets recommending that all citizens wear a mask. The Red Cross took out newspaper ads encouraging their use and offered instructions on how to construct masks at home using gauze and cotton string. Some state health departments launched their own initiatives, most notably California, Utah and Washington. …
A New Understanding of Herd Immunity
The portion of the population that needs to get sick is not fixed. We can change it.
Edward Lorenz was just out of college when he was recruited into World War II. He was assigned to be a weather forecaster, despite having no experience in meteorology. What Lorenz knew was math.
So he started experimenting with differential equations, trying to make predictions based on patterns in data on past temperatures and pressures. One day, while testing his system, he repeated a simulation with a few decimals rounded off in the data. To his surprise, a radically different future emerged.
He called this finding “the butterfly effect.” In a complex model, where each day’s weather influences the next day’s, a tweak in initial conditions can have wild downstream consequences. The butterfly effect became central to the emerging field of chaos theory, which has since been applied to economics, sociology, and many other subjects, in attempts to deconstruct complex phenomena. That field is now helping predict the future of the pandemic—in particular, how it ends.
Chaos theory applies neatly to the spread of the coronavirus, in that seemingly tiny decisions or differences in reaction speed can have inordinate consequences. Effects can seem random when, in fact, they trace to discrete decisions made long prior. For example, the United States has surpassed 125,000 deaths from COVID-19. Having suppressed the virus early, South Korea has had only 289. Vietnam’s toll sits at zero. Even when differences from place to place appear random, or too dramatic to pin entirely on a failed national response, they are not. …
Mail-In Voting Should Be The Norm
The last time I remember anyone hating the mail as much as Donald Trump hates mail-in ballots, it was Jerry Seinfeld railing against his meddling neighbor, Newman. Except, while Jerry’s gripes against all things stamped are fairly benign in consequence, it feels like Donald Trump and the Republican Party are just worried that mail-in balloting will hurt their election chances. Case in point, Donald Trump trying to link mail-in balloting with election fraud in tweets out like this:
….Absentee Ballots are fine because you have to go through a precise process to get your voting privilege. Not so with Mail-Ins. Rigged Election!!! 20% fraudulent ballots?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 10, 2020
There are a few things wrong this tweet, not the least of which is that mail-in ballots and absentee ballots are pretty much the same thing (absentee is requested by individuals, mail-in gets sent to every registered voter). But the main thing worthy of correcting is that wide-scale voter fraud is practically impossible with mail-in ballots. Each ballot would have to be tracked down in the mail, stolen, and then meticulously forged all for one vote. Compare that to hacking a voting booth, which gives access to thousands of votes, and suddenly mail-in voting seems the much safer alternative.
However, there is a serious issue in regards to mail-in ballots, and it’s a concern that runs in the opposite direction of Trump, much like any person, who has had the misfortune of seeing him naked. I’m talking, of course, about the prevalence of uncounted mail-in ballots. According to an NPR analysis in primary elections held so far this year, at least 65,000 absentee or mail-in ballots have been rejected because they arrived past the deadline, often through no fault of the voter.” …
RELATED: Voting By Mail Should Be The Norm Come November
California Governor Gavin Newsom just passed a large measure that will ensure every registered voter in the state gets a ballot in the mail for the November election. This will make them the first state to make it an automatic mailing in light of the coronavirus pandemic. It won’t replace in-person voting, but it should ultimately make things both easier and safer when the time comes. California is the biggest state in terms of electoral college votes, and it’s also got just as many challenges for its voters getting to the booth, so every other state should look at this and make vote-by-mail a priority.
California has every obstacle you can think of to prevent people from voting. Rural areas where the nearest booth is miles and miles away? Check. Crowded urban voting centers where the lines can be longer than the one at Space Mountain? Double-check. An unjust amount of people working ungodly hours that prevent them from getting to a booth? Triple-check. These problems exist around the country, so voting by mail would give people a chance to sit down at home, make sound, informed decisions, and then feel good about doing their civic duty.
The problem here is that the people who can reliably get to a voting booth for down-ballot elections tend to skew conservative — the elderly/retired, those wealthy enough that they can take off work, and your crazy uncle that blames Obama for the existence of the Soviet Union. The in-person voting stations will also likely take a hit in November, because if the Wisconsin primary is any indication, those same old/rich/nutjob people are also the main people volunteering to man the voting stations, and will likely stay home if/when the coronavirus still presents a threat.
Naturally, this has got President Trump throwing a fit. He hates the idea of voting by mail and has tweeted pretty clearly why he thinks that way. …
When the world changes under a political scientist’s feet
George Floyd’s death sparked a movement.
The scientific method isn’t easy to use during rapid social change.
Protests in response to George Floyd’s death spread to over 2,000 cities and towns across the U.S. People of all backgrounds are participating in this national uprising, demanding an end to racist policing.
As a political scientist, I investigate why police killings lead to protest. It is thrilling to watch this movement spark much-needed debates about race and policing.
Yet, because of the uprising, I am now facing a challenge that few political scientists ever do. Normally, the outcomes and causal factors that most political scientists study change slowly, over time.
Now, the protests I study have skyrocketed in number and participants. The beliefs I hypothesized were driving them could be changing as well. As more people join the protests and update their beliefs about race, the hypotheses I was planning to test could become outdated.
I am simultaneously watching welcome social change unfold, and watching events that could dramatically alter the work I’ve done for the last five years. …
Sound of the police: how US law enforcement uses noise as a weapon
Potentially harmful military-grade weapons such as flashbangs are being utilized with accelerating regularity at US protests.
A flashbang explodes next to Black Lives Matter protesters as they face the police in Beverly Hills, California.
In Silver Spring, Maryland, fireworks can still be heard months after they first began and well past the Fourth of July holiday. “When it comes to the theory of cops being involved, I wouldn’t put it past them,” says Ira, who participates in protests and activism there. Ira, who prefers to use only a first name because of fear of police reprisal, is referring to a theory that became especially popular on Twitter which posited police were supplying or abetting the recent onslaught of fireworks in major cities in an effort to exhaust and agitate protesters during the peak of the response to George Floyd’s murder.
The use of sound as a form of control is in the spotlight due to potentially harmful military-grade weapons such as flash-bangs and long-range acoustic devices (LRADs) being utilized with accelerating regularity at protests across the United States. Luna, an activist who is only using her first name out of fear of doxxing, has been on the frontlines of direct actions against police brutality in Portland, Oregon, for nearly two months. She says the Portland police’s use of flash-bangs, which can produce sounds as loud as 170 decibels – a jet taking off is 150 decibels, for comparison – has left her with symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.
“If I’m in public and I hear a loud bang, I’ll stop and duck and look around,” she says. Luna says the fireworks set off in Portland trigger the same response for her and the other protesters who rally each night. “It’s very exhausting, not just physically but mentally.”
Sound studies experts say that while LRADs and flash-bangs are worrisome tactical escalations that can permanently injure people by rupturing eardrums, they are rooted in the long, uncontested tradition of the state utilizing sound as a means of social, cultural and political control. …
Your coping and resilience strategies might need to shift as the COVID-19 crisis continues
Keeping your equilibrium can be a challenge in times of uncertainty.
As people in the U.S. mark six months of coronavirus, the challenges of coping with life during a pandemic continue to evolve. Most recently, reopening of parts of society under unsettled conditions and lingering threat are creating formidable demands on individuals and communities.
By looking at how people have reacted to mass traumas in the past – think the terrorist attacks of 9/11 or the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina – psychology researchers like us can learn about which coping strategies have historically been effective. For instance, people were able to boost their self-esteem and curtail negative thinking in the wake of 9/11 if they engaged in activities that fit their personal values, goals and responsibilities. They could find meaning in what they did, interpreting their actions in a positive manner.
So while traumas like these kinds of events can lead to anxiety and depression, they can also pave the way for resilience and recovery. As the coronavirus pandemic situation and stresses change, so do our recommendations for what coping strategies might be most helpful.
Does outdoor dining at a restaurant feel worth the risk to you?
Mental health challenges change over time
The particulars of this pandemic make it challenging to appraise risk. Unless you’ve lost an acquaintance, friend or, most tragically, a family member, the escalating numbers of people stricken by COVID-19 can feel like mere statistics, detached from the reality of the moment. For many people, the coronavirus lurks “out there.” How close or imminent the danger it poses is far from certain.
Individuals’ perceptions of risk are ensnared in a tangle of politics and information from competing sources. It’s hard to settle on a shared social narrative regarding what is fact or fiction, or overreaction or underreaction. And all of this is unwinding in a divided country roiled by protests and racial tension. …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
All President Trump needs is two weeks.
THANKS to SHOWTIME and VICE News for making this program available on YouTube.
Coronavirus cases surge across the country, Disney World opens back up to some serious thrill-seekers, Trump finally masks up, and the White House decidedly turns its back on Dr. Anthony Fauci.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Social Distancing Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
Trump puts pressure on schools to reopen for in-person learning despite COVID cases still surging in the U.S., and Michael Kosta proposes an alternative plan for keeping kids busy.
Instead of drafting a plan to address America’s spike in Covid-19 cases, President Trump has chosen to undercut the credibility of his public health experts and push public schools to reopen without a national plan for keeping kids, teachers and families safe.
THANKS to CBS and A Late Show with Stephen Colbert for making this program available on YouTube.
In Inside the Hill’s most uncomfortable interview yet, the hosts confront Rick Wilson on his past tweets as well as The Lincoln Project’s George W. Bush alum and overhead spending. Watch the full segment on CBS All Access.
Seth takes a closer look at President Trump trying to force students and teachers back to school without a plan to keep them safe.
THANKS to NBC and Late Night with Seth Meyers for making this program available on YouTube.
FINALLY . . .
Meet the Former Cook Who Draws His Every Meal
Itsuo Kobayashi’s art showcases the beauty of everyday Japanese food.
In Kobayashi’s drawings, his chopsticks often appear, lifting food off the page. Embiggenable. Explore at home.
A MARBLED SLICE OF TONKOTSU pork rests on a bed of yellow noodles, nestled next to three shiny green sheets of nori, some boiled spinach, and a few shreds of kikurage, or wood-ear mushroom. A pair of disposable chopsticks raises a tangle of noodles above the red bowl, as if headed to a waiting mouth just off the edge of the page. A description of the meal is printed next to the drawing, along with the price, date, and source: Family Mart, a Japanese convenience store.
Itsuo Kobayashi draws what he eats every single day. While his drawings are individually compelling, each discrete element rendered in loving detail, his body of work as a whole gives an intimate window into everyday Japanese food: not the haute cuisine that is lauded by international chefs, celebrated on foodie sites, and shown off by the Japanese government. Instead, these meals are picked up at a bento stand or a convenience store and scarfed on a rushed lunch break, or on a tray in front of the TV. It’s the inexpensive survival food of students, bachelors, and anyone without the time, tools, or inclination to cook from scratch.
Kobayashi’s drawings sometimes include written descriptions and occasionally the price tags.
Kobayashi sits on an adjustable bed in the living room in his home in Saitama, Japan, a table piled high with things in front of him: a cup filled with pens and markers; stacks of papers, flyers, and books; remote controls for the TV and air conditioner. Next to him are more wobbly hills of paper on the floor, the peaks reaching the height of the bed. Plastic bags filled with more papers and file folders are tied to the sides of the bed and tray table. “Come in, come in!” says Kobayashi, switching off the TV. “Sit wherever you can.”
Kobayashi worked in food service from a young age. Starting at age 18, he worked at the same soba shop for 18 years. He attended cooking school, worked a stint in a sushi shop, and prepared meals for the elderly in nursing homes. Altogether, he worked with food for more than 20 years, until a combination of company closures and physical disability caused him to retire. …
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.
breathe the farts of change
— Burger King (@BurgerKing) July 14, 2020
