Windows 10

Don’t know about you, but this past week I upgraded from Windows 7 to Windows 10. I reserved my upgrade months ago and looked forward to the free download. Finally it came, I was “excited”, but once downloaded, OMG! Between configuring, tech support, and upgrades, I found the, though welcomed, upgrade, time consuming. Thus, I won’t be able to post this week. However, I will post next week.

If you are upgrading I hope your experience was a bit smoother than mine. Now that I’ve got all the kinks out, I do like the new look and layout.

Have a great week!

Employers Can Fire For Off-Duty Pot Use

Lawyer for Dish Network employee fired after using medical pot to treat muscle spasms calls ruling "devastating"
 
Employers’ zero-tolerance drug policies trump Colorado’s medical marijuana laws, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled Monday.

In a 6-0 decision, the Colorado Supreme Court affirmed lower court rulings that businesses can fire employees for the use of medical marijuana — even if it’s off-duty.

With the ruling, which was a blow to some medical marijuana patients and a sigh of relief to employers, Colorado became the first state to provide guidance on a gray area of the law.

The decision came nine months after the state’s highest court heard oral arguments in Brandon Coats’ case against Dish Network. Coats was rendered a quadriplegic by a car accident and used marijuana to control leg spasms. He had a medical marijuana card and consumed pot off-duty. He was fired in 2010 after failing a random drug test.

Coats, who was a customer service representative for Dish, challenged the Douglas County satellite TV company’s zero-tolerance drug policy, claiming that his use was legal under state law. His firing had been upheld in both trial court and the Colorado Court of Appeals.

When the case went to the state Supreme Court, legal observers said the case could have significant implications for employers across Colorado. They noted that the ruling also could be precedent-setting as Colorado and other states wrangle with adapting laws to a nascent industry that is illegal under federal law.

At the crux of the issue was whether the use of medical marijuana — which is in compliance with Colorado’s Medical Marijuana Amendment — was”lawful” under the state’s Lawful Off-Duty Activities Statute.

That term, the justices said, refers to activities lawful under both state and federal law.

“Therefore, employees who engage in an activity, such as medical marijuana use, that is permitted by state law but unlawful under federal law are not protected by the statute,” Justice Allison H. Eid wrote in the opinion.

Current Colorado law allows employers to set their own policies on drug use.

Coats’ attorney Michael Evans, of Centennial-based The Evans Group, called the decision “devastating.”

He said he does not plan to take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“You need the Colorado Supreme Court to stand up for its own laws,” he said. “The U.S. Supreme Court is not going to do that.”
 

Coats and his mother, Donna Scharfenberg, spent all morning refreshing the Colorado Supreme Court’s website. When they finally read the ruling, there was 10 minutes of silence.

“It was just kind of shocking,” Coats said. “There was a silent moment there for a long while.”

It was a disappointing resolution to what has been a five-year battle for Coats, who is unemployed.

“This is a controversial issue,” he said. “This is a hard case, and it was going to be a hard case to win. I was defiantly hoping it would go the other way around.

“I was feeling like maybe, maybe, but it didn’t go that way.”

Officials with Douglas County-based Dish lauded the decision.

“We are pleased with the outcome of the court’s decision today,” officials said in a statement. “As a national employer, Dish remains committed to a drug-free workplace and compliance with federal law.”

Colorado Attorney General Cynthia H. Coffman said the decision gives companies the freedom to craft their own employment policies concerning marijuana.

“Not every business will opt for zero-tolerance, but it is important that the latitude now exists to craft a policy that fits the individual workplace,” she said.

When Colorado legalized recreational marijuana last year, employers across the state increased their drug testing, said Curtis Graves, an attorney for Mountain States Employers Council, referencing a workplace survey at the time. A year later, and with an unemployment rate below 5 percent, some employers have loosened the reins.

“We’ve seen a number of employers, particularly in hospitality … who are actually omitting THC from a pre-employment drug screen,” he said.

The market might dictate a further shift in the future. Until then, people like Coats will have to consider other treatments or find a position that does not enforce a zero-tolerance drug policy, said Austin Smith, managing shareholder of employment law firm Ogletree Deakins’ Denver office.

“It puts employees in a tough spot,” Smith said.

Sam Kamin, a University of Denver law professor, said the justices’ decision comes as no surprise.

“It’s easy to make too much of this decision,” he said. “It really comes down to interpreting this one word (‘lawful’) in this one statute.”

As a matter of statutory interpretation, the court got it right, he said.

But for Coats and medical marijuana advocates, this is a blow, Kamin said. He said he thinks the state legislature will take up the issue.

“I think (Coats’) case is very sympathetic, and I think his case would be quite compelling before the legislature,” Kamin said.

Six of the seven justices decided the case. Justice Monica Marquez recused herself because her father, retired Senior Judge Jose D.L. Marquez, was on the Court of Appeals panel that upheld Coats’ firing.

Alicia Wallace: 303-954-1939, awallace@denverpost.com or twitter.com/aliciawallace

Excerpts from the Colorado Supreme Court decision

• “Colorado’s ‘lawful activities statute,’ the term ‘lawful’ refers only to those activities that are lawful under both state and federal law.”

• “Nothing in the language of the statute limits the term ‘lawful’ to state law. Instead, the term is used in its general, unrestricted sense, indicating that a ‘lawful’ activity is that which complies with applicable ‘law,’ including state and federal law. We therefore decline Coats’s invitation to engraft a state law limitation onto the statutory language.”

• “Coats does not dispute that the federal Controlled Substances Act prohibits medical marijuana use. The CSA lists marijuana as a Schedule I substance, meaning federal law designates it as having no medical accepted use, a high risk of abuse, and a lack of accepted safety for use under medical supervision.”

• “Having decided this case on the basis of the prohibition under federal law, we decline to address the issue of whether Colorado’s Medical Marijuana Amendment deems medical marijuana use ‘lawful’ by conferring a right to such use.” -The Cannabist

Say Hello To The 'Identity Person' And Goodbye To Your Rights

The Supreme Court did more than fundamentally rewrite the Constitution in the case of Obergefell v. Hodges, they created an entity that doesn’t really exist. In a ruling largely devoid of actual legal reasoning, Justice Kennedy cobbled together his own sympathies, leftist social ideations, flowery rhetoric, pop culture and as Justice Scalia put it, the nonsense of a fortune cookie, to create a new entity that now shares constitutional rights with people -- identity. What is identity?  I have no idea, neither does Kennedy, or anybody else, and yet this constitutional thing now shares equal rights with the flesh and blood creatures our laws and institutions are meant to support and protect. And because “identity” is not a real organism, and not fully understood, it can spread without mercy or recourse, threatening to its host, just as surely as Ebola can bleed out a real human being.

There was never any serious doubt that the Court would force the states to sanction gay marriage, based on the obvious fact that four liberal justices favored it, and Kennedy, the Court’s swing vote, had already telegraphed his sympathies in matters concerning “gay rights.” What did surprise legal observers on both the left and right was how Kennedy chose to rationalize his decision. The obvious, less controversial route would have been to find that state laws prohibiting gay marriage violated equal protection under the 14th Amendment.

But to do that, Kennedy would have had to find that gay Americans were a protected class of people, and here he hit a logical roadblock. How can “gay” people be a protected class? Protected classes historically are readily identifiable people, based on race, or sex, or disability, or national origins. These are categories that are generally susceptible to some kind of objective proof, e.g., genetics, genitalia, birth certificate, physical impairment.

Homosexuality is not so easy. We have been told for a long time now that homosexuality is an innate orientation that most gay people don’t consciously control. I accept that. But we also know that this is not true in all cases, and also that many self-described homosexuals also engage in heterosexual activity, and vice versa. We also know that some people (homo or hetero) never engage in any sexual activity -- that their “sexual orientation” is an essentially an unrequited urge, or no urge at all. Indeed, sexuality is basically about urges or lack thereof. Most people have sexual urges toward the opposite sex, some have it towards their own sex, some have it toward both sexes, some don’t have urges, and some have urges that encompass inanimate objects, animals, children, ad infinitum.

The logical and legal problem for Justice Kennedy was that an urge is not a person. You can’t create a protected class for an urge, even if you called that urge “sexual orientation.”

Faced with a seemingly intractable problem, Kennedy “solved” it by creating a new legal notion called “identity.”  Kennedy understood “identity” could not be a protected class either, so instead he chose to make a person’s identity a “liberty.” Neat trick, huh? In a work of legal reasoning and scholarship straight out of the fortune cookie school, Kennedy turned an inchoate physical urge into a person’s identity, and then found (not in the wording of the Constitution) that a person’s right to choose an identity is a fundamental liberty under the 14th Amendment.

This bit of legal legerdemain will be a fount of endless mischief, so much so that it could prove to be single most devastating insult to the Constitution the Republic has yet endured. Even legal scholars on the left can see the potential for abuse. Writing in the Washington Post, Jonathan Turley, while cheering the legalization of gay marriage, correctly sees in Kennedy’s promotion of identity as a dignified “liberty” as dangerous to other fundamental liberties like free speech. If your identity and dignity is offended by my speech, that is now a violation of your liberties, which can neutralize my rights under the 1st Amendment.

Same with any other enumerated right, but most especially religion. It is no accident that religious freedom has been the first casualty of the gay rights movement, but the reason is not what the left would have us believe -- that intolerant religious people are being justifiably punished for violating the rights of gay people.

The concept of marriage is inextricably tied to religion. The first known marriage in ancient Mesopotamia was part of a religious rite. All civilizations (until relatively recently) tied marriage to religion, with the possible exception of Chinese civilization, which substituted Confucianism for religious dogma. And Confucianism is if anything, more patriarchal and limiting than most religious beliefs. Thus “gay rights” and religious rights (and rites) share the same space, and there likely isn’t room enough for both if Justice Kennedy’s ruling stands.

Being gay, in a legal and logical sense, is closer to being Christian than it is to being say black or Asian. It is not about a physically identifiable trait, it is about a gay person’s belief in their own identity, and their urges (both physical and emotional.) In the same way, devoutly religious people base their identities on their beliefs and emotional/moral/religious urges. The same psychologists that tell us “gayness” is innate say the same thing about religiosity for most people.  

It would have made more sense for Kennedy, determined as he was to vindicate gay marriage, to have analogized “gay rights” to religious belief. Under such a rationale gays could seek constitutional protection for their beliefs the same as any other confessional group, on an equal footing. But as Kennedy did it, they now have more rights than members of American confessional groups, as we are seeing in the legal clashes between gays and some Christians.    

No court could force a Christian church to conduct a Muslim wedding, or vice versa. Both religions stand on an equal footing before the law, so promoting one religion over the other would be a clear violation of the Constitution. But according to the Court, being gay is not a belief, it is an “identity,” expression of which is a “liberty” under the constitution. In “identity” Justice Kennedy created a constitutionally protected kind of person, impossible to either define, or effectively limit. The clash between gays and religious people is a fight between mere beliefs (ephemeral) and “identity people” (that is people with chosen identities -- which is really just belief but never mind.) Beliefs can’t win against “identity people” with rights (which are really only beliefs masquerading as rights.) People always win over beliefs.

For now, “identity people” are gay people. But this is a wobbly legal construction that can and will get out of hand. “Identity people” will not only trump rights, but other previously identifiable protected classes. If a white woman in Washington State has a black identity, shouldn’t that liberty be dignified with same privileges as any other member of that protected class? Same with Caitlyn Jenner, who regardless of his genitals is now an “identity woman.” Indeed, this decision is on its face a greater victory for so-called transgendered people than gays, never mind polygamists, and cat people. So claim your identity now, because your rights as a non-identity person are not likely to last. –American Thinker

The Urine Sample

One time, an elderly gentleman got sick and landed in the hospital, where one particular nurse just drove him crazy. Every time she came in, she would talk to him like he was a little child. She would often say in a patronizing tone of voice, “And how are we doing this morning?” ...or... "Are we ready for a bath? ...or... "Are we hungry?"

It got to the point where the old gentleman had enough of this particular nurse's condescension.

One day at breakfast, the old man took the apple juice off the tray and put it in his bedside stand. Later, he was given a urine sample bottle to fill for testing.

And you know where the juice went!

A while later, the down-talking nurse came in, picked up the urine sample bottle, looked at it, and said, “My, my, it seems we are a little cloudy today.”

At this, the old gent snatched the bottle out of her hand, popped off the top, gulped down every drop of the bottle's entire content, and then said, “Well, I'll run it through again. Perhaps, I can filter it better this time!”

The nurse almost fainted, while the old man feigned surprise.

DON'T MESS WITH OLD PEOPLE!

~Author Unknown/Contributed by Ralph

Their Flag And Ours

The Confederate side wasn’t the only one to indulge in postwar nostalgia—memorializing its heroes, victims, and symbols. But only one side kept fighting.

The stubborn attachment of traditional Southern whites to the flags, statuary, and street names of the Confederate past is usually explained to the puzzled rest of us as an anthropological quirk or regional ancestor cult, which outsiders cannot possibly fathom. But there is another explanation, which bears on a rival cult elsewhere in the United States. This is the cult of the flags and statuary and street names of the Union army and its own generals and their war against the Confederacy. The two cults, Union and Confederate, arose in tandem in the immediate aftermath of the war and, in both cases, did so for the purpose of mourning the dead, which was a vast obligation. But the two cults also arose because the war had failed to settle any of the underlying disputes over ideas and principles. The contending sides had every reason to go on slugging it out, which they went about doing in various ways; and one of those ways was by conducting a different sort of war, civic and otherwise, over how to commemorate the military war. This was a war of rituals and symbols, a morbid war, a war of cemeteries against cemeteries. And in the morbid war of symbols, the partisans of the Confederacy turned out to enjoy a certain advantage, which was visible from the outset—an enormous advantage, telling for the long haul.

The outset means 1866, when soldiers from the disbanded Union armed forces organized a veterans’ fraternal order called the Grand Army of the Republic, or GAR. The GAR’s purpose was to ensure that sacrifices and sufferings by the Union soldiers were appropriately recognized. The GAR was also something of a Republican party front, and it campaigned for Republican candidates. For a few years it campaigned for the voting rights of African-American veterans, until it gave up. But mostly the GAR marched in parades and listened to oratory, and these activities attracted hundreds of thousands of members. The GAR campaigned to make Memorial Day a holiday, and, on this issue, it enjoyed a lasting triumph. The GAR inscribed itself into the national geography. U.S. Route 6, which runs from California to Massachusetts, is officially called the Grand Army of the Republic Highway, than which nothing could be grander. Gen. John A. Logan of the Union army was an early commander of the GAR, and, in Washington, D.C., an equestrian statue of General Logan will preside forevermore over Logan Circle: another triumph. Those were the victories of a conventional fraternal organization.

In the South, veterans of the Confederate army meanwhile put together a fraternal organization of their own in the first months after the war—only their organization, more of a terrorist army than a civic association, was the Ku Klux Klan. The KKK faithfully served the Southern Democratic Party (the racist party in those days) precisely for the purpose of denying voting rights to African-Americans, along with obstructing anything else that might lead to a more democratic society. The Klan’s murders and violence were terrible, and similarly the violence of the Knights of the White Camelia and other Southern terrorist groups, and the federal government eventually responded by sending troops. The KKK was suppressed. But the damage was undeniable. A mythic aura attached to the terrorists. And in the 1920s, when a revived Klan burst back into bloom, the membership expanded to several million people, which made it one of the largest mass organizations in the history of the United States—a movement that was not merely anti-black but was also, on grounds of religious bigotry, anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic.

The KKK in those years was America’s counterpart to the fascist movements of Europe, drunk on its white-sheeted cult of Confederate ghosts and its parades and the sentimental hoodoo about virtuous womanhood and its ability to terrorize. And the Klan and the United Daughters of the Confederacy and their allies went about inscribing their own movement into the national geography. The original Grand Wizard of the Klan was Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate general who presided over the massacre of African-American Union soldiers surrendering at Fort Pillow, a shameful military record; and dozens of statues, busts, and official markers celebrating the Grand Wizard were erected across Tennessee and the South, together with street names, school names, and buildings: a Southern rejoinder to the Northern insistence on attaching the names of Lincoln and Grant and other generals to every possible thing.

In this fashion, the proponents of the Union and of the Confederacy recruited new armies, this time made of bronze, to go on confronting one another forevermore. The bronze Union army consisted of many hundreds of statues, typically of an ordinary soldier standing at “parade rest” with his hand on rifle barrel, together with the equestrian statues of generals and sometimes group statues and friezes, which were made to stand guard at town commons, courthouses and cemeteries across the old Union. The inscriptions on the pedestals of those statues sometimes draw from Lincoln’s austere Gettysburg Address, which counts as the founding Union text in the war over how to commemorate the war. Or they quote President James A. Garfield, a major general in the Union army, who said more pithily and less eloquently than Lincoln, “the war for the Union was right, everlastingly right, and the war against the Union was wrong, forever wrong.” But, as I learn from the historian Thomas J. Brown, who has composed a short documentary book called The Public Art of Civil War Commemoration, the Union inscriptions tend to be taciturn. One of the statues of Grant in Brooklyn says, “Grant,” and not another word. Only a handful of the memorials invoke the struggle against slavery. As for the African-American soldiers, even the greatest of the monuments to their struggles and sacrifices, which is the magnificent frieze on Boston Common commemorating the legendary 54th Massachusetts Regiment, celebrates mostly the 54th’s white commander—though it is true that, at the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Arch in Brooklyn, a sculpted black soldier occupies a heroic place front and center in one of the principal statues, holding a pistol and evidently in charge of a mortar.

The Confederate monuments, on the other hand—these are not exercises in taciturn restraint. The Confederate monuments, some of them, speak floridly of love—a mainstay of the statuary erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, whose specialty was statuary. A series of statues memorializes Southern white womanhood. Some of the monuments sentimentalize slavery. The partisans of the Confederacy mounted a major effort as late as 1923, which succeeded in winning Senate support but fortunately died in the House of Representatives, to erect a statue in Washington of the Southern “mammy,” the slave nurse. Gone with the Wind, the novel and the movie, was the product of this sort of kitsch and repulsive fantasizing—and the success of Gone with the Wind shows how deeply these ideas and fantasies entered into the popular mind, not only in the South.

Thomas Brown, the historian, tells us that quite a few of the Confederate statues contain inscriptions from the tone-deaf Confederate poet Abram J. Ryan, the author of “The Sword of Robert E. Lee,” whose most quoted lines include these:

    Gather the sacred dust
    Of the warriors tried and true.
    Who bore the flag of a Nation’s trust
    And fell in a cause, though lost, still just,
    And died for me and you.

A cause “still just”: Yes, that was the heart of it. The Southern memorials were erected by people who knew what they were celebrating. They were the champions of a nostalgia for martial white gentlemen, delicate white ladies, and servile and barely human blacks. The cruelest of social hierarchies was their ideal. Slavery was their cause, even if they tried to avoid saying so. Nothing anthropological entered into any of this. The determination to go on waving the flag of the Lost Cause was an ideological mania. It was a fanaticism swaddled in a sentimentality—a fanatical hatred for blacks—which accounts for the KKK’s terrorism and the cult of Grand Wizard Forrest. And a hatred for the principles of the Union. Fanaticism: This was the Confederate advantage.

What has kept alive the Union passion in the North for its own monuments and rituals and street names? I roam around Brooklyn, that most 19th-century of cities, and I see that, for some 60 years after the Civil War, something kept the Union passions alive. Brooklyn’s ardor for the respectable pomposities of the GAR and the austere patriotism of Lincoln and the practicality of Grant was immense during those many decades. In Richmond, Virginia, the partisans of the Confederacy erected the terrible and spectacular statuary of Monument Avenue: the imposing and intimidating statue of Robert E. Lee on horseback, the statues of Jefferson Davis, J.E.B. Stuart, Stonewall Jackson, and the rest, all of them perched on lofty pedestals as if to suggest a god-like quality: the barbarous Norse deities of a terrible paganism. And in Brooklyn, New York, the partisans of the Union, in the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Arch, constructed a Union and civic counterpart—a gigantic triumphal arch at Grand Army Plaza, modeled in part on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

The arch and the plaza, with its equestrian statues of Lincoln (holding his top hat) and Grant and the dramatic scenes of Union soldiers in battle, together with gods and goddesses overhead, as in Homer or Virgil, and other generals standing to the side, across the street—all of this is meant to define the center of a city in a more or less religious manner. And Brooklyn did more. A magnificent bronze Ulysses Grant (rumpled, exhausted, matter-of-fact) presides from a still more magnificent horse (proud, powerful, huge) over Grant Square in Crown Heights. A bronze Henry Ward Beecher, the abolitionist preacher, stands erect in Brooklyn Heights. Greenwood Cemetery memorializes the Union soldiers. The Brooklyn streets bear the Union names of Generals Slocum, Warren, Butler, Sherman, and Garfield, Admiral Farragut, Clara Barton (the Civil War nurse who founded the Red Cross), Lincoln, and the Union itself (though, in some kind of mistake, a General Lee Avenue has been allowed to amble past the Verrazano Bridge), as if the entire borough were a battlefield memorial.

Only who remembers any of this in our own time—who in the North? French patriotic parades march regularly under the Arc de Triomphe on the Champs-Élysée, and plainly the arch at Grand Army Plaza was designed for similar events in Brooklyn. One glance at that arch should suffice to tell you that, when the architects and sculptors designed it and the workmen erected it, their keenest hope was that, on the 100th anniversary of the Union victory, or the 150th, a parade of many thousands of people would pass under that arch, triumphantly heading into Prospect Park for a victory picnic and a delightful afternoon of windy oratory. Blue-hatted Civil War re-enactors, accompanied by marching bands and the rippling of banners and the applause of measureless democratic crowds—this was certainly the idea. Only the 150th anniversary came and went a few months ago, and nothing of the sort took place. The Civil War monuments of Brooklyn and of towns all over the North survive mostly as stony relics of a lost age. They resemble the Hellenistic ruins in the Middle East that are getting destroyed right now by the Islamic State. Brooklyn’s Grant Square with its grandiose statue, three stories tall, plays an insignificant role in the life of modern Brooklyn and New York and the United States. The street names: meaningless to everyone. Here, finally, is the reason why, in the South, large publics have maintained a stubborn attachment to the symbols and kitsch and rancor of the Confederate States of America—have maintained the attachment until today, and will doubtless go on doing so into the future, too, even after their political defeats of just now.

The nostalgics of the Confederacy have kept up their ancient attachment because, in the war over how to commemorate the war, the heirs of the Union, most of them, gave up the fight long ago, discouraged or distracted or bored or ignorant. Or was it the arrival of immigrants in the later 19th century and in the 20th century (yes, an anthropological possibility) that broke the cords of Union memory—the immigrants like my pious great-grandfather, who brought to Brooklyn a grudge against the czar but maybe knew not so much about Jefferson Davis? The weight of time: The GAR did not survive the death of its last member in 1956. In any case, the people who ought to have regarded themselves as the sons and daughters of the Union somehow allowed their attention to wander. Quietly and unconsciously they renounced the customs of the Grand Army of the Republic and its commemorations; renounced the original meaning of Memorial Day and its drums and bugles and the attention to the Union monuments; renounced the idea of trying to impose on the heirs of the Confederacy a better set of ideals and symbols; renounced the cult of Union memory that used to thrill to the names of Lincoln and his generals; renounced the patriotic displays that were anti-Confederate displays—and these several, silent, soft renunciations have turned out to be, for the United States, a grave and consequential error. –Tablet

World’s First Amethyst Crystal Hotel Being Built In China

Crystals & Geodes are one of nature’s most exquisite creations, and are now set to to be modeled as the inspiration of a new stunning hotel in China. The unique organic design is truly unlike any ever seen. Check out this set of mind blowing, gorgeous design photos!

The amazing designers of NL Architects are setting a new precedent in architecture, aesthetic and design. The hotel resembles a geode sliced in half to show off its shiny, crystal interior. The intention of such a design? To provide the hotel guests the soothing and relaxing, energetic properties of amethyst. A groundbreaking approach indeed, one that acknowledges and is inspired by the energetic qualities of a crystal.

The hotel rooms will be contained in the inner-crystalline structure, which will be illuminated by sunlight to sparkle and glisten like a true gem, while filled with a soft relaxing glow at night. Will this hotel be a trend for a new way to model nature and its properties in the future?

Well, there is talk of this hotel being the first in a potential series of chains, with the first to go up on a Chinese man-made island with the name Ocean Flower.  Keep an eye out, as these crystal hotel vacation spots may become a staple in vacation, resort like experience as they catch on! -Spirit Science And Metaphysics

 

Scientists Raise Alarm About The Long-Term Health Effects Of Cellphones

Children in particular may be vulnerable.

Are government officials doing enough to protect us from the potential long-term health effects of wearable devices and cellphones? Maybe not. A letter released today, signed by 195 scientists from 39 countries, calls on the United Nations, the World Health Organization (WHO), and national governments to develop stricter controls on these and other products that create electromagnetic fields (EMF).

"Based on peer-reviewed, published research, we have serious concerns regarding the ubiquitous and increasing exposure to EMF generated by electric and wireless devices," reads the letter, whose signatories have collectively published more than 2,000 peer-reviewed papers on the subject. "The various agencies setting safety standards have failed to impose sufficient guidelines to protect the general public, particularly children who are more vulnerable to the effects of EMF."

For decades, some scientists have questioned the safety of EMF, but their concerns take on a heightened significance in the age of ubiquitous wifi routers, the Internet of Things, and the advent of wearable technologies like the Apple Watch and Fitbit devices, which remain in close contact with the body for extended periods.

Cellphones, among the most studied emitters of electromagnetic radiation, remain the standard for judging health risks. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention maintains that "we do not have the science to link health problems to cell phone use." In a 2012 review of all available research, Timothy Moynihan, a doctor with the respected Mayo Clinic, concluded that "there's no consensus about the degree of cancer risk—if any—posed by cell phone use."

The WHO, on the other hand, classifies radio-frequency electromagnetic radiation (the type emitted by wifi routers and cellphones) as "possibly carcinogenic to humans" based on limited evidence associating cellphone use with an increased risk for glioma, a malignant type of brain cancer. "The conclusion means that there could be some risk," Dr. Jonathan Samet, a medical professor at the University of Southern California and chair of the WHO panel that made the determination, explained in 2011, "and therefore we need to keep a close watch for a link between cell phones and cancer."

Studies since then have highlighted the need for caution. Last year, French researchers found an almost three-fold increase in the incidence of brain cancer in people with more than 900 hours of lifetime cellphone use. Then, in March, Swedish researchers reported that the risk of being diagnosed with brain cancer increased by a factor of three in people who'd used cell or cordless phones for at least 25 years. Research on lab animals has caused similar concerns.

Respected medical groups are starting to pay attention. In 2013, the American Academy of Pediatrics urged the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates radiation levels in communication devices, to adopt cellphone standards that are more protective for children, and to better disclose products' EMF levels to consumers. In December, the California Medical Association urged regulators to "reevaluate microwave radiation exposure levels associated with wireless communication devices."

Most of the researchers who signed today's appeal letter believe that there's now enough evidence to classify radio-frequency EMF as "probably carcinogenic" or even just plain "carcinogenic," says Joel Moskowitz, director of the Center for Family and Community Health at the University of California-Berkeley, who played a central role in gathering the signatures. "All of them are clearly calling for the need for caution."

Reports about a lack of scientific consensus on the health effects of cellphones, which have appeared in Slate, Wired, the Verge, and elsewhere are somewhat misleading, Moskowitz contends. In a 2009 review for the Journal of Clinical Oncology, he parsed cellphone studies based on the funding source and quality of the science. He found that low-quality and industry-funded studies tended not to associate cellphone use with a heightened risk of tumors, while high-quality and foundation- or public-funded studies usually found the opposite result. "This is very much like studying tobacco back in the 1950s," he says. "The industry has co-opted many researchers."

In 2011, Moskowitz consulted for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors after it voted to pass the nation's first right-to-know cellphone ordinance. The law would have forced retailers to warn consumers about potentially dangerous radiation levels emitted by cell phones, but the supervisors agreed to effectively nix the law to settle a court challenge by the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association; the industry's lead trade group argued that the law violated its free speech rights. (The CTIA did not return a call from Mother Jones requesting comment on today's appeal letter and the health effects of cellphones.)

On Tuesday, the Berkeley City Council will vote on a right-to-know law that was carefully worded to thwart legal challenges. Harvard Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig, who helped craft the law, has volunteered to defend it in court pro bono. "We are really all part of a large biological experiment without our informed consent," says Columbia University EMF expert Martin Blank in a video released to coincide with today's letter. "To protect ourselves, our children, and our ecosystem, we must reduce exposure by establishing more protective guidelines." -Mother Jones

Chinese Dream: It's Surprisingly Familiar

In Beijing, the phrase "Chinese Dream" is everywhere. It can be found on propaganda posters around the city, in state media and on the lips of government officials.

But what does it mean? Is this about white picket fences? Or life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?

President Xi Jinping first began talking about the Chinese Dream nearly two years ago, calling it the "great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation."

State media has filled in some of the gaps, describing the Chinese Dream in collective rather than personal terms. It's about strengthening society, the military and bolstering China's brand of socialism.

It's a message that has resonated deeply with the public. Around 70% of Chinese say realizing the dream is important to them, according to a survey by brand research firm Millward Brown.

The emphasis on national glory -- rather than purely personal achievement -- is key, according to Ben Cavender, an analyst at China Market Research Group.

Chinese are "not just proud of their personal achievements, they're also proud of national achievements," he said. "The idea of China becoming more global, more recognizable, being involved in more discussions internationally, is important."

But Chinese also recognize that national success will help them reach personal goals.

"People pay a lot of attention to the overall rise of the country, the growth of the economy, what the government is doing, because as the nation goes, they go," Cavender said.

At the personal level, the Chinese Dream is largely consistent with that of other countries -- even if a nice apartment in Beijing is more important than a picket fence.

 The top Chinese individual goals include health, a good family life, happiness and success at work, according to the Millward Brown survey. Fifty-six percent say that the pursuit of happiness is an important goal.

Personal spending priorities include being able to invest and travel abroad.

Priorities have shifted for the Chinese as more people enter the middle class.

Chinese are saying, "I want to have a comfortable home, I want to have a lot of new experiences, I want my family to be taken care of. I want the environment to be better, because I'm worried about my surroundings, and I want to be safe," Cavender said.

Of course, there are still some substantial obstacles to achieving the Chinese Dream.

Health and safety concerns top the list of challenges, especially poor air and water quality, food safety, insufficient medical insurance and problems with the educational system, according to the Millward Brown survey.

There are also worries about financial security and retirement, which could be one of the drivers of the country's high savings rate, the study found. –Contributed by Mary/CNN Money

Pork Tenderloin With Kale And Kimchi

4 Servings

Ingredients:

1 pork tenderloin (about 1 ½ lb.)
Kosher salt and freshly ground pepper
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
½ small bunch kale, ribs and stems removed, leaves coarsely chopped (about 3 ½ cups)
1 cup chopped kimchi
1 tablespoon reduced-sodium soy sauce

Preparation:

• Preheat oven to 400°. Season pork with salt and pepper. Heat oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Sear pork until golden brown on bottom side (do not turn), 5–8 minutes.
• Add kale, kimchi, and soy sauce to skillet and toss to coat. Transfer skillet to oven and roast until an instant-read thermometer inserted into thickest part of tenderloin registers 140°, 10–15 minutes. Transfer pork to a cutting board and let rest at least 5 minutes before slicing.
• Serve pork with kale mixture.

~Bon Appetit

Ragbag Headliners

D.C. Residents Say Take Down Jefferson Memorial, Rename Washington, D.C.

District of Columbia residents and tourists weighed in on the controversy surrounding the Confederate flag, some saying the nation should go as far as renaming Washington, D.C.

CNN anchor Don Lemon recently floated the idea of re-thinking the Jefferson Memorial, dedicated to Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, since he was a slave owner.

“There may come a day when we want to re-think Jefferson, I don’t know if we should do that, but when we get to that point, I’ll be happy to partake in that particular discussion,” Lemon said.

“It should come down,” one D.C. resident told PJ Media, referencing the Jefferson Memorial in Washington.

“If we do that, though, George Washington owned slaves. Should we rename Washington, D.C.?” he was asked.

“You have to draw the line at some point, I guess, maybe take a poll across the country and see what people think about it and if they want to rename the city, do it,” he said. “I would support changing the American flag as well. America is based on a lot of mass killings and slavery and the history is just – look at the Germans, they own up to the Holocaust, nobody is proud of their history. Americans, at least, you should not be proud of any mass killing. You should not be proud of anything wrong that’s been done in the past or any symbols that represent that and that’s all.”

Another man suggested renaming Washington “Black City” or “Mixed City.” -PJ Media

Gay Couples Nationwide Have A Right To Marry

A deeply divided Supreme Court on Friday delivered a historic victory for gay rights, ruling 5 to 4 that the Constitution requires that same-sex couples be allowed to marry no matter where they live.

The court’s action rewarded years of legal work by same-sex marriage advocates and marked the culmination of an unprecedented upheaval in public opinion and the nation’s jurisprudence.

Marriages began Friday in states that had previously thwarted the efforts of same-sex couples to wed, while some states continued to resist what they said was a judicial order that changed the traditional definition of marriage and sent the country into uncharted territory. As of the court’s decision Friday morning, there were 14 states where same-sex couples were not allowed to marry.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who has written all of the court’s decisions recognizing and expanding gay rights, said the decision was based on the fundamental right to marry and the equality that must be afforded gay Americans.

“Under the Constitution, same-sex couples seek in marriage the same legal treatment as opposite-sex couples, and it would disparage their choices and diminish their personhood to deny them this right,” Kennedy wrote. He was joined in the ruling by the court’s liberal justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

All four of the court’s most conservative members — Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. — dissented, and each wrote a separate opinion.

The common theme in their dissents was that judicial activism on the part of five members of the court had usurped a power that belongs to the people.

“If you are among the many Americans — of whatever sexual orientation — who favor expanding same-sex marriage, by all means celebrate today’s decision,” wrote Roberts, who for the first time in his tenure marked his disagreement with a decision by reading part of his dissent from the bench.

“Celebrate the achievement of a desired goal. Celebrate the opportunity for a new expression of commitment to a partner. Celebrate the availability of new benefits. But do not celebrate the Constitution. It had nothing to do with it,” he wrote.

Scalia called the decision a “threat to American democracy,” saying it robs citizens of “the freedom to govern themselves.”

In a statement in the White House Rose Garden, President Obama hailed the decision: “This ruling is a victory for America. This decision affirms what millions of Americans already believe in their hearts. When all Americans are truly treated as equal, we are more free.”

It wasn’t until 2012 that Obama declared that same-sex couples should be able to marry, and it was only last year that he said he thought the Constitution provided such a right. But by Friday evening, the rainbow colors that gay rights activists have adopted were projected onto the north face of the White House. With the Supreme Court’s ruling, Obama said, “Today we can say in no uncertain terms that we have made our union a little more perfect.”

There were wild scenes of celebrations on the sidewalk outside the Supreme Court. Same-sex marriage supporters had arrived early, armed with signs and rainbow flags. They cheered at the announcement of a constitutional right for gay marriage, which did not legally exist anywhere in the world until the turn of this century. The first legally recognized same-sex marriages in the United States took place just 11 years ago, the result of a Massachusetts state supreme court decision.

Jim Obergefell, who became the face of the case, Obergefell v. Hodges, when he sought to put his name on his husband’s Ohio death certificate as the surviving spouse, said, “Today’s ruling from the Supreme Court affirms what millions across the country already know to be true in our hearts: that our love is equal.”

“It is my hope that the term gay marriage will soon be a thing of the past, that from this day forward it will be, simply, marriage,” he said.

But Austin R. Nimocks, senior counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom, a group that supports traditional marriage, said: “Today, five lawyers took away the voices of more than 300 million Americans to continue to debate the most important social institution in the history of the world. . . . Nobody has the right to say that a mom or a woman or a dad or a man is irrelevant. There are differences that should be celebrated.”

The Supreme Court used cases from Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee, where restrictions against same-sex marriage were upheld by an appeals court last year, to find that the Constitution does not allow such prohibitions.

Kennedy over the past 20 years has written the Supreme Court’s most important gay rights cases: overturning criminal laws on homosexual conduct, protecting gays from discrimination and declaring that the federal government could not refuse to recognize same-sex marriages performed where they were legal.

He often employs a lofty, ­writing-for-history tone, and Friday’s decision was no different.

Referring to the couples who brought the cases before the court, Kennedy wrote: “It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions.”

Kennedy did not respond directly to the court’s dissenters, but he addressed the argument that the court was creating a constitutional right. The right to marriage is fundamental, he said. The difference is society’s evolving view of gay people and their rights, he said.

“The limitation of marriage to opposite-sex couples may long have seemed natural and just, but its inconsistency with the central meaning of the fundamental right to marry is now manifest,” he wrote. “With that knowledge must come the recognition that laws excluding same-sex couples from the marriage right impose stigma and injury of the kind prohibited by our basic charter.”

As in previous decisions, Kennedy did not spell out how courts should scrutinize laws that treated gays differently. But Mary Bonauto, who argued the case for gay plaintiffs at the Supreme Court, said that message from Kennedy’s combined opinions “is one of inclusion: Stop making rules for gay people.”

Scalia was a sharp critic of Kennedy’s style, saying it was “as pretentious as its content is egotistic.”

“The Supreme Court of the United States has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie,” Scalia wrote.

Roberts wrote a lengthy dissent that was a point-by-point takedown of the majority opinion. Gay activists had wondered whether the 60-year-old justice might take note of the increasing public support for same-sex marriage and find a way to join the majority on what they called the “right side of history.”

But he and the other dissenters said the question was not whether same-sex marriage was a good idea, but who should decide.

“The court invalidates the marriage laws of more than half the states and orders the transformation of a social institution that has formed the basis of human society for millennia, for the Kalahari Bushmen and the Han Chinese, the Carthaginians and the Aztecs,” Roberts wrote. “Just who do we think we are?”

Roberts rejected a comparison to Loving v. Virginia, in which the court struck down bans on interracial marriage. That did not change the age-old definition of marriage as between a man and a woman, he said. He raised concerns that the decision could lead to polygamous marriages — he mentioned a married threesome of lesbians called a “throuple.”

He noted that voters and legislators in only 11 states had authorized same-sex marriages, and said it was better for gay marriage to be adopted through the democratic process than by judicial order. He said religious leaders could take little comfort from the majority opinion that their beliefs would be respected.

That theme was picked up by Alito in his dissent. He said there could be “bitter and lasting wounds” from the decision and warned that the decision will be “exploited by those who are determined to stamp out every vestige of dissent.”

The questions raised in the cases decided Friday were left unanswered in 2013, when the justices last confronted the issue of same-sex marriage. A slim majority of the court said at the time that a key portion of the Defense of Marriage Act — withholding the federal government’s recognition of same-sex marriages — was unconstitutional. In a separate case that year, the court said procedural issues kept it from answering the constitutional question in a case from California but allowed same-sex marriages to resume in that state.

Since then, courts across the nation — with the notable exception of the Cincinnati-based federal appeals court that left intact the restrictions in the four states at issue — have struck down a string of state prohibitions on same-sex marriage, many of them passed by voters in referendums. –Washington Post

Supreme Court Opinion-click here.

Six-Day Jail Erection Gets This Ex-Con $750K

Now that’s a stiff penalty.

A former inmate who sued the city for making him suffer through a painful six-day erection was handed a $750,000 settlement on Monday.

The hefty payout amounts to $125,000 for each day of hard time served by Rodney Cotton, 51, who said he was treated “worse than a dog” at the Manhattan Detention Complex while enduring the uncomfortable side effect of an anti-depressant medication.

Cotton said the lack of medical attention rendered him impotent.

“It just started hurting,” Cotton told The Post Monday of his ordeal, which began on July 4, 2011, near the start of a 2½-year sentence for a parole violation. “And I’m like, what the hell is going on? It wasn’t going down.”

Cotton had asked to be taken to a jail clinic, but a guard at the facility, known as The Tombs, told him he’d have to wait until after the holiday weekend.

Desperate, Cotton faked chest pains to get a doctor to see him, only to be given ice packs and Tylenol.

Days later, he was finally taken to Bellevue, and underwent surgery to relieve the swelling. The doctors said the stitches would dissolve on their own. They didn’t, he claims.

The stitches had become embedded in the skin, and no anesthetic was used when they were being removed, Cotton said in his Manhattan Supreme Court suit.

Cotton said he still gets it on with the ladies, but he has to be more creative, and appeal to their sensitive side.

“I put up a facade,” he said. “There’s a young lady in the building who likes me. I’m scared to try anything with her. I take her out. I take her to Red Lobster. I take her to Outback. I do things for her son. But I don’t think I’m going to try having sex with her. It would be too embarrassing.”

Doctors said a lasting erection is a side effect of Risperdal, and a warning about it is listed on the website of the manufacture, Janssen.

Cotton said he started taking Risperdal in 2003, the year after he finished a 12-year prison stint for manslaughter for killing a man during a 1989 fight over a sheepskin coat.

Now he’s going to take his money and move to Atlanta to be closer to his daughter.

“I can’t fix my situation, but I can soothe it,” he said.

A spokesman for the city’s Law Department, Nicholas Paolucci, said, “Settling this case was in the best interest of the city.”

In the meantime, the city has ended its contract with Corizon, the for-profit health care company that has drawn fire for the way it treated inmates such as Cotton. –NY Post

Chris Abani: On Humanity

Chris Abani tells stories of people: people standing up to soldiers, people showing compassion, people being human or reclaiming their humanity. And according to this critically-acclaimed Nigerian poet and novelist, these stories are a way of imparting something called "ubuntu." Meaning, the only way for me to be human is for you to reflect my humanity back at me. "...the world is never saved in grand, messianic gestures but in the simple accumulation of gentle, soft, almost invisible acts of compassion; everyday acts of compassion..." -Karma Tube

No, 'Good Intentions' Don't Give You A License To Censor Speech

The Supreme Court issued a momentous First Amendment decision. In Reed v. Town of Gilbert, Arizona, a unanimous Court invalidated a town sign code that subjected certain signs to harsher restrictions than others, depending upon what messages they conveyed. In doing so, it made plain that such "content-based" restrictions on speech are presumptively unconstitutional and must undergo strict judicial scrutiny.

The facts: The town of Gilbert has a sign code that restricts the size, duration and location of temporary signs. Under the sign code, the Good News Community Church's temporary signs promoting church services are subjected to far greater restrictions than temporary signs promoting political, ideological and various other messages. That is, the sign code facially discriminates on the basis of the content of the messages communicated by the signs.

The First Amendment broadly prohibits the enactment of any law "abridging the freedom of speech." It makes no exception for certain messages, ideas or subject matter, nor does it insulate legislation enacted with supposedly benevolent intentions. The Supreme Court has properly recognized the danger presented by laws that regulate speech based on its communicative content, holding that they are presumptively unconstitutional unless the government demonstrates, with reliable evidence, that they are narrowly tailored to compelling government interests.

But lower courts have held that laws that facially discriminate based on content are not necessarily content-based -- not only when evaluating sign codes, but also when evaluating restrictions on other forms of speech, such as occupational-speech licensing, panhandling bans and noise ordinances. In the decision below, the Ninth Circuit determined that Gilbert's sign code was "content-neutral" because of the town's assurances that it had no intention to discriminate. The Institute for Justice filed an amicus brief urging the Court to clarify that facially content-based statutes should not be given a pass because officials (allegedly) mean well.

In Reed, the Court squarely held that strict scrutiny applies either when a law is content-based on its face or if its purpose and justification are content-based -- and courts must inquire into each question. Writing for the Court, Justice Thomas explained, "A law that is content based on its face is subject to strict scrutiny regardless of the government's benign motive, content-neutral justification, or lack of 'animus' toward the ideas contained in the regulated speech." The Court easily determined that the sign code at issue classified signs on the basis of their content -- the restrictions applied to any given sign "depend entirely on the communicative content of the sign."

Of course, that did not end the analysis. The sign code could have passed constitutional muster if the town had been able to demonstrate that it furthered a compelling government interest and was narrowly tailored to that interest. The town was unable to do so -- and it wasn't even close. The town baldly asserted that the sign code furthered the ends of "preserving the Town's aesthetic appeal" and "traffic safety," despite "allowing unlimited numbers of other types of signs that create the same problem[s]" and without providing any reliable evidence that "directional signs pose a greater threat to safety than do ideological or political signs." The underinclusiveness of the sign code rendered the government's assertions completely implausible.

In rejecting the notion that the statement of a benign end is enough to insulate speech regulations from exacting judicial scrutiny, the Court cited NAACP v. Button (1963), a case involving a state's attempt to use a statute prohibiting "improper solicitation" to curtail the NAACP's advocacy of desegregation. In that case, the Court rejected Alabama's claim that its stated interest in the "regulation of professional conduct" was sufficient for the ordinance to pass muster. The Court articulated a broad principle: "[I]t is no answer... to say... that the purpose of... regulation [is] merely to ensure high professional standards and not to curtail free expression." That principle was affirmed today. The government should never be able to escape the burden of demonstrating the legitimacy of its ends with reliable evidence when it restricts our liberty. In Reed, the Court made clear that such judicial engagement is required to ensure that the government does not act as a censor. –Huffington Post

A Glass Of Milk

Years ago, when door-to-door sales was still popular, a poor young college student once went door-to-door selling various things to help pay for his living expenses and for his way through school. With his meager earnings, he often scrimped on food. One afternoon, he found himself down to his last dollar after having sold practically nothing for weeks. He was very hungry after hours of walking with just a small bowl of cornflakes for breakfast and no lunch.

In his hunger, he decided to swallow his pride and ask for a meal at the next house. However, he lost his nerve when a lovely young woman opened the door.

Instead of a meal, he asked for just a drink of water. She thought he looked quite tired and hungry so she brought him a large glass of milk instead.

He drank it so slowly, and after savoring the very last drop, he handed the empty glass to the young lady and said,

"Thank you very much. How much do I owe you?"

"Nothing! Mother always told me to never accept payment for an act of kindness," she replied.

"Then, I thank you from the bottom of my heart," came his response.

As the young fellow left that house, he not only felt stronger physically, but his faith in God and man was strengthened, too.

A few years later, the young woman became critically ill with some strange malady, which the physicians in her town's local hospital felt inadequate and ill-equipped to take care of, so they decided it best to send her to a better equipped hospital in the big city.

Dr. Howard Kelly was called in to consult on the case. As his custom, he would do a quick review of the patient's medical record before actually seeing the patient. For some uncanny reason, when he read the name of the town from where the patient came, his curiosity was instantly piqued.

Immediately, he rose and went over to the patient's hospital room. As soon as he saw the young woman, he instantly recognized her.

From that point, he determined to do his best for her, and he gave special attention to her case.
After a long struggle, the battle over the strange disease was won.

When the young lady was ready for discharge, Dr. Kelly requested the hospital's billing office to send him a copy of the patient's entire bill.

Like any patient, upon discharge from the hospital, the young lady worried about the cost of her hospitalization and how to pay for it. A few weeks later, the hospital bill finally arrived in her home. To her surprise, just below the total amount due were the words: "Paid in full with a glass of milk". –Author Unknwon/Contributed by Ralph

Will The Charleston Tragedy Serve As An Inflection Point For Race Relations?

On June 17, in Charleston, South Carolina, it was once again proven that – to some, at least – black lives don’t matter. But this time it wasn’t under color of authority. This time, it was in a church, and at the hands of a person who’s clearly and unambiguously racist.

What’s happened in the wake of the tragedy is as shocking in scope as it is in its swiftness. President Obama used it as an opportunity to remind us of the racism that continues to plague the nation. Further, the suspect’s affinity for the Confederate battle flag led to Governor Nikki Haley’s call for its removal from the State Capitol and on Monday July 6 the South Carolina Senate voted 37 to 3 to do just that. People of all racial hues took to the streets to protest the killings and their basis in racism.

All of this has led some to believe that what’s happening in South Carolina represents an inflection point when it comes to race: an opportunity to hit the “reset button” where racism is concerned in America.

Before we embrace this conclusion lock, stock and barrel, however, we need to take a closer look.

My experience writing on race, social movements and the postwar South suggests that we must look to the past for clues about the likelihood Charleston serving as a game changer.

The role of both domestic and international opinion

Whether we define racial progress in symbolic or substantive ways, history suggests that when whites use violence against blacks, it sometimes backfires, resulting in racial progress.

However, the conditions under which it happens are very specific.

Typically, there are at least two audiences – third parties, if you will – to which forces of change appeal: one domestic, the other international.

The sympathy of the domestic audience (generally non-Southern) has – for much of the past 60 years – resided with the progressive forces as they witnessed scenes in which peaceful black protesters, who simply wished to be treated in accordance with the law of the land, were brutalized by white southerners. Such scenes evoked moral revulsion and emotional shock.

The international audience was no less important.

In the context of the Cold War, during which the United States was engaged in a global ideological struggle with the Soviet Union, race and racism were crucial elements.

To the extent that both superpowers were in a competition for international influence, and the United States often advertised itself as a beacon for freedom and democracy, the continued oppression of 10% of its population rendered such a claim dubious at best.

Further, to the degree that much of the competition for strategic access and alliances, by the 1950s, took place among nations in which people of color were in the majority, Jim Crow – and African diplomats being kicked out of diners – didn’t play too well.

Of course, the Soviets took advantage of every act of violence and repression that took place in the South, denouncing such blatant hypocrisy to worldwide audiences. The violence associated with the Freedom Rides serves as one example of this. “Scenes of bloodshed in Montgomery are,” said Radio Moscow, “the worst examples of savagery…taking place in a country which has the boldness to declare that its way of life is…an example for other people.”

With these caveats in mind, let’s now consider the relationship between violence and racial progress, beginning with the civil rights legislation of 1957 and 1960.

Violence and racial progress

It was close on the heels of the murder of Emmett Till (1955) and the attempt to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas (1957) that civil rights bills were ratified with the intention of improving access to voting for black southerners.

Ultimately, however, both fell far short of the stated goal. For instance, as of 1958, only Tennessee could boast that more than 40% of its black eligible voters were actually registered.

What happened?

In the aftermath of Emmett Till’s murder and, especially the white resistance at Little Rock, the Eisenhower Administration was moved to push for civil rights legislation as a means of blunting continuing Soviet assaults on the “American way of life.” As the president himself said, after ordering the deployment of federal troops to protect the new black students at Little Rock’s Central High School:

    [I]t would be difficult to exaggerate the harm being done to the prestige and influence, and indeed to the safety, of our nation and the world. Our enemies are gloating over this incident and using it everywhere to misrepresent our whole nation.

On the domestic side, however, the audience was limited to white southerners, because civil rights failed to register on the national agenda in the 1950s. And since southern reactionaries and their representatives weren’t too keen on displacing white supremacy, it is hardly surprising that the civil rights legislation of 1957 and 1960 failed to achieve its goals.

Now go forward four years.

The racial progress achieved with the legislation of 1964 and 1965 also took place in the shadow of the Cold War.

These were the days of the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis. But the domestic audience also played an important role here – and this time it was nationwide.

The attacks on Freedom Riders and sit-in participants, the bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in which four young girls were murdered, the spectacle during which fire hoses and dogs were turned loose on women and children protesters, and the “Bloody Sunday” march from Montgomery to Selma: this violence was extensively covered by the national media with shocking photographs like that of protester Amelia Boynton lying unconscious on the Edmond Pettus Bridge in Selma.

Civil rights catapulted to the top of the American social and political agenda.

Many Americans were outraged at the behavior of many southern whites, law enforcement included. Ultimately, this outrage resulted in legislation that outlawed discrimination on the basis of race (among other factors), segregation, and expedited the implementation of the Brown decision.

Let us now return to the tragedy in Charleston.

Who is watching Charleston?

The domestic audience is certainly paying attention to South Carolina, as any glance at today’s media shows. What’s missing, however, is the international audience. This, in my judgment, is critical.

In the absence of an external existential threat to keep America honest, the impetus for racial progress lies squarely in the domestic sphere.

And this means that change is at the mercy of reactionary conservatives, people who, as my research and that of Matt Barreto into the Tea Party has shown, are fervent, disdainful of compromise and fearful of an existential threat to an American way of life in which mainly white Christians are the chosen group.

As I’ve argued elsewhere, these sentiments can be traced to the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, in which the return of the “New Negro” from World War I represented a threat to the existing racial order.

Dylann Roof is an outlier in terms of his actions, but his resentments are more widespread than may be generally acknowledged. Research I conducted in 2010 makes the case that the suspect isn’t the only one who harbors such sentiments; disdain for blacks is quite prevalent among contemporary reactionaries..

When it was discovered that Roof has an affinity for the Confederate battle flag, it further confirmed what many blacks have come to believe: that the Confederate flag represents the continued oppression of blacks.

This, then, is what needs to be kept in mind as we witness South Carolina’s lawmakers debate Governor Haley’s call to remove the flag from the State Capitol.

Yes, white-on-black violence, as it appears to prick the conscious of sympathetic whites, has resulted in adjustments in the past, and it may do so again.

However, we must remain mindful of the fact that more enduring progress has taken place when domestic sympathy was reinforced by the political pragmatism associated with the presence of an international pressure.

If we’re talking about a global military and ideological threat that has the capacity to threaten the existence of the United States or, at the very least, that claims to be interested in black lives, we’re fresh out of those at the moment: Islamist terrorism fails to meet either criteria.

What is more, as my own research confirms, the reactionary right only continues to grow. Today’s Republican Party has been forced to adopt positions on, say, comprehensive immigration reform that are at odds with the moderate wing of the party.

The fact is that GOP moderates and reactionaries significantly part ways on issues related to race. For instance, only 10% of reactionaries believed coverage of the George Zimmerman trial “raised important issues about race” warranting further discussion, compared to 40% of GOP moderates. In another example, when asked to evaluate the persistence of racial discrimination when it comes to voting in the wake of the 2013 Supreme Court rollback of voting rights for blacks, 50% of GOP moderates believe this to be true versus 37% of GOP reactionaries.

I for one, remain to be convinced that the popular outrage we see now will result in real change. –The Conversation

Heroin Use In U.S. Reaches Epidemic Levels

Heroin use has increased 63% in 11 years

Heroin use in the United States has skyrocketed, spreading to include groups who previously were less likely to abuse the drug.

New data released Tuesday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show that heroin use increased 63% between 2002 and 2013, and heroin-related overdose deaths have nearly quadrupled over the same time period. In 2013 an estimated 517,000 people reported that they had used heroin in the last year or had a heroin-related dependence, a 150% increase from 2007. More than 8,200 people died of heroin-related overdose in 2013, according to national surveys published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

While heroin use continues to be most common among men between the ages of 18 and 25 who make less than $20,000, the CDC researchers note that in recent years people in nearly every demographic group are using the drug more. For instance, heroin use has doubled among women and non-Hispanic white people.

“Heroin use has increased rapidly across the U.S. and throughout society,” said CDC director Dr. Tom Frieden during a press conference. “With that increase we are seeing a dramatic rise in deaths.”

Addiction to prescription pain killers may be fueling some of the rise in heroin use. As TIME has reported, people who are addicted to painkillers may make the switch to heroin since it’s cheaper, doesn’t require a prescription, and offers a similar high. According to the CDC, those who are addicted to prescription opioid painkillers are 40 times more likely to be addicted to heroin. “Most heroin users have a history of nonmedical use of prescription opioid pain relievers, and an increase in the rate of heroin overdose deaths has occurred concurrently with an epidemic of prescription opioid overdoses,” the study authors write.

The report also shows that Americans using heroin are likely to be using other drugs. People addicted to cocaine are also 15 times more likely to be addicted to heroin. And the latest data shows that 96% of people who used heroin in the last year reported using at least one other drug during the same period, with 61% reporting they used at least three different drugs.

The CDC says comprehensive interventions need to happen at the federal and state levels, and health care providers need to follow best practices prescribe pain killers responsibly. As part of that effort, the government is increasing access to substance abuse treatment under the Affordable Care Act and increasing education and training for providers. States can address the problem by implementing prescription drug monitoring programs and expanding access to opioid overdose antidote naloxone, the CDC says. –Time

A First Big Step Toward Mapping The Human Brain

It’s a long, hard road to understanding the human brain, and one of the first milestones in that journey is building a … database.

In the past few years, neuroscientists have embarked on several ambitious projects to make sense of the tangle of neurons that makes the human experience human, and an experience. In the UK, Henry Markram—the Helen Cho to Elon Musk’s Tony Stark—is leading the Human Brain Project, a $1.3 billion plan to build a computer model of the brain. In the US, the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative hopes to, in its own nebulous way, map the dynamic activity of the noggin’s 86 billion neurons.

Now, the Allen Institute for Brain Science, a key player in the BRAIN Initiative, has launched a database of neuronal cell types that serves as a first step toward a complete understanding of the brain. It’s the first milestone in the Institute’s 10-year MindScope plan, which aims to nail down how the visual system of a mouse works, starting by developing a functional taxonomy of all the different types of neurons in the brain.

“The big plan is to try to understand how the brain works,” says Lydia Ng, director of technology for the database. “Cell types are one of the building blocks of the brain, and by making a big model of how they’re put together, we can understand all the activity that goes into perceiving something and creating an action based on that perception.”

The Allen Cell Types Database, on its surface, doesn’t look like much. The first release includes information on just 240 neurons out of hundreds of thousands in the mouse visual cortex, with a focus on the electrophysiology of those individual cells: the electrical pulses that tell a neuron to fire, initiating a pattern of neural activation that results in perception and action. But understanding those single cells well enough to put them into larger categories will be crucial to understanding the brain as a whole—much like the periodic table was necessary to establish basic chemical principles.

Though researchers have come a long way in studying the brain, most of the information they have is big-picture, in the form of functional scans that show activity in brain areas, or small-scale, like the expression of neurotransmitters and their receptors in individual neurons. But the connection between those two scales—how billions of neurons firing together results in patterns of activation and behavior—is still unclear. Neuroscientists don’t even have a clear idea of just how many different cell types exist, which is crucial to understanding how they work together. “There was a lot of fundamental information that was missing,” CEO Allan Jones says in a video about the database project. “So when we got started, we focused on what we call a reductionist approach, really trying to understand the parts.”

When it’s complete, the database will be the first in the world to collect information from individual cells along four basic but crucial variables: cell shape, gene expression, position in the brain, and electrical activity. So far, the Institute has tracked three of those variables, taking high-resolution images of dozens of electrically-stimulated neurons with a light microscope, while carefully noting their position in the mouse’s cortex. “The important early findings are that there are indeed a finite number of classes,” says Jones. “We can logically bend them into classes of cells.”

Next up, the Institute will accumulate gene expression data in individual cells by sequencing their RNA, and the overlap of all four variables ultimately will result in the complete cell type taxonomy. That classification system will help anatomists, physicists, and neuroscientists direct their study of neurons more efficiently and build more accurate models of cortical function. But it’s important to point out that the database isn’t merely important for its contents. How those contents were measured and aggregated also is crucial to the future of these big-picture brain mapping initiatives.

To create a unified model of the brain, neuroscientists must collect millions of individual data points from neurons in the brain. To start, they take electrical readings from living neurons by stabbing them with tiny, micron-wide pipettes. Those pipettes deliver current to the cells—enough to get them to fire—and record the cell’s electrical output. But there are many ways to set up those electrical readings, and to understand the neural system as a whole, neuroscientists need to use the same technique every time to make sure that the electrical traces can be compared from neuron to neuron.

The Allen Institute, in collaboration with other major neuroscience hubs—Caltech, NYU School of Medicine, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and UC Berkeley—has made sure to use the same electrical tracing technique on all of the neurons studied so far (they call it “Neurodata without Borders”). And while the data for this first set of mouse neurons was primarily generated at the Institute, those shared techniques will make future work more applicable to the BRAIN Initiative’s larger goals. “In future releases, we’ll be working with other people to get data from other areas of the brain,” says Ng. “The idea is that if everyone does things in a very standard way, we’ll be able to incorporate that data seamlessly in one place.”

That will become increasingly important as the Institute continues mapping not just mouse neurons, but human ones. It’s easy to target specific regions in the mouse brain, getting electrical readings from neurons in a particular part of the visual cortex. It’s not so easy to get location-specific neurons from humans. “These cells actually come from patients—people who have having neurosurgery for epilepsy, or the removal of tumors,” says Ng. For a surgeon to get to the part of the brain that needs work, they must remove a certain amount of normal tissue that’s in the way, and it’s that tissue that neuroscientists are able to study.

Because they don’t get to choose exactly where in the brain that tissue comes from, scientists at Allen and other research institutes will have to be extra careful that their protocols for identifying the cells—by location, gene expression, electrical activity, and shape—are perfectly aligned, so none of those precious cells are wasted. All together, the discarded remnants of those human brains may be enough to reconstruct one from scratch. –Wired

Shrimp And Jalapeno Nachos

"What better way to 'fiesta' than with this beautiful plate of alternative nachos? This will make a very delicious change of pace to the traditional version. Each nacho is separate from the next so you don't end up with a plate containing one giant nacho that you have to pull apart." -Recipe by Chef John/All Recipes

Ingredients:

Recipe makes 50 nachos

1/2 cup sour cream
1/2 avocado, peeled and pitted
1/2 lemon, juiced
1 pound small Gulf shrimp (50 to 60 per pound), thawed and drained
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1/4 teaspoon ground dried chipotle pepper
salt and ground black pepper to taste
1 pinch cayenne pepper, or to taste
50 large (restaurant-style) tortilla chips, or as needed
2 jalapeno peppers, seeded and very thinly sliced
3 1/2 cups shredded pepperjack cheese, or as needed
15 cherry tomatoes, sliced - or as needed
1/4 cup chopped fresh cilantro

Directions:

• Combine sour cream, avocado, and lemon juice in a blender or food processor; blend until smooth and creamy. Transfer into a plastic decorating bottle with a long tip. Refrigerate avocado-cream sauce until needed.
• Place shrimp into a bowl; combine with vegetable oil, ground chipotle pepper, salt, black pepper, and cayenne pepper.
• Place a large nonstick pan over high heat. Cook shrimp in the hot pan in a single layer until barely cooked through and pink, about 1 minute per side. Transfer to a plate and let shrimp cool.
• Preheat the oven's broiler. Line a baking sheet with aluminum foil and lightly grease the foil.
• Lay tortilla chips onto the prepared baking sheet in a single layer. Place 1 shrimp onto each chip. Add 1 slice jalapeno and 1 large pinch pepperjack cheese on top of each shrimp.
• Broil under preheated broiler until cheese is melted and chips are lightly toasted, about 1 minute. Watch carefully; chips will burn quickly.
• Remove nachos from baking sheet and arrange onto a serving platter; drizzle with avocado-cream sauce and sprinkle with cherry tomatoes and cilantro before serving.