Tag Archives: top stories

Documents Reveal the Fearmongering Local Cops Use to Score Military Gear From the Pentagon

by JerryBourchier Posted on August 9, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Mother Jones obtained more than 450 police department requests for armored tactical vehicles from the Pentagon. Did your police force request one? Browse all of them here.

One year ago this week, hundreds of camouflaged officers in Ferguson, Missouri bore down on residents protesting the police shooting of an unarmed black teenager named Michael Brown.

Riot cops, their faces sometimes concealed by gas masks, fired off tear gas canisters, and as they stood on top of hulking, mine-resistant vehicles, they appeared to train their assault rifles on the crowds. On some nights, they greeted demonstrators with a storm of rubber bullets.

Images of this chaos provoked a furious debate over the billions of federal dollars that have helped local police forces amass combat style weapons, trucks, and armor. Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), echoing concerns from across the political spectrum, fumed that “lawful, peaceful protesters did not deserve to be treated like enemy combatants.”

Law enforcement agencies responded by stoking old fears. No community, they argued, not even the smallest one, is safe from worst-case scenarios like mass shootings, hostage situations, or terrorist attacks. The use of this military equipment has resulted in “substantial positive impact on public safety and officer safety,” Jim Bueermann, the president of the Police Foundation, a research group, said in a 2014 Senate hearing on police militarization. He cited hostage situations, rescue missions, and heavy-duty shootouts where the vehicles had come in useful.

But in private, police justify these same programs in radically different ways.

Mother Jones obtained more than 450 local requests, filed over two years, for what may be the most iconic piece of equipment in the debate over militarizing local police: the mine resistant ambush protected vehicle, or MRAP.* And an analysis of these documents reveals that in justifying their requests, very few sheriffs and police chiefs cite active shooters, hostage situations, or terrorism, as police advocates do in public.

Instead, the single most common reason agencies requested a mine-resistant vehicle was to combat drugs. Fully a quarter of the 465 requests projected using the vehicles for drug enforcement. Almost half of all departments indicated that they sit within a region designated by the federal government as a High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area. (Nationwide, only 17 percent of counties are HIDTAs.) One out of six departments were prepared to use the vehicles to serve search or arrest warrants on individuals who had yet to be convicted of a crime. And more than half of the departments indicated they were willing to deploy armored vehicles in a broad range of Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) raids.

By contrast, out of the total 465 requests, only 8 percent mention the possibility of a barricaded gunman. For hostage situations, the number is 7 percent, for active shooters, 6 percent. Only a handful mentioned downed officers or the possibility of terrorism.

Continue Reading »

Link to original – 

Documents Reveal the Fearmongering Local Cops Use to Score Military Gear From the Pentagon

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Documents Reveal the Fearmongering Local Cops Use to Score Military Gear From the Pentagon

Donald Trump Won’t Say If He’ll Support the Republican Nominee—Unless It’s Him

by JacelynZ96 Posted on August 7, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

It took just a few minutes for the first GOP 2016 debate to get testy. Fox News’ Bret Baier started off the night by asking the 10 Republicans on the main-stage event whether they would pledge to support whoever wins the Republican nomination and guarantee that they wouldn’t run an independent bid next fall.

Everyone knew the answer in advance. When Wallace asked the candidates to raise their hand if they wouldn’t take that pledge, current frontrunner Donald Trump—who has previously said he would consider a third-party presidential bid if he lost the GOP nomination—predictably raised his hand. “I cannot say I have to respect the person if it’s not me,” Trump said.

“I want to run as the Republican nominee,” he continued, saying he wouldn’t run as an independent—just so long as he’s the one who wins the nomination, an outcome that he sees as a foregone conclusion.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) quickly pounced. “He buys and sells politicians of all stripes,” Paul jumped in, noting Trump’s past donations to Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation.

The moderators were teed up to put Trump in the hot seat from the start. Soon after that first question, Fox’s Megyn Kelly questioned Trump on whether he could run against Hillary Clinton in the general election given his litany of disparaging comments against women. “It was only Rosie O’Donnell,” Trump tried to interrupt Kelly, earning loud applause from the crowd in Cleveland. And even then, it was all just “fun” and “kidding,” in Trump’s assessment. “I don’t have time for total political correctness,” Trump said. “To be honest with you, this country doesn’t either.”

Keep doing you, Donald.

View post: 

Donald Trump Won’t Say If He’ll Support the Republican Nominee—Unless It’s Him

Posted in Anchor, Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Donald Trump Won’t Say If He’ll Support the Republican Nominee—Unless It’s Him

Scientists Just Came Up With the Craziest Way to Protect Your Kale

by ManuelK44fz Posted on August 6, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

A version of this story was originally published on Gastropod.

Farmers searching for an eco-friendly way to combat pests in their fields might someday have a surprising new weapon: speakers. It may seem crazy, but scientists hope that sound systems bumping just the right noises can prime plants to pump up the levels of their own, innate chemical protection.

That’s just one of the ways that researchers are eavesdropping on the sounds of the farm in order to improve agriculture, as we report on this episode of Gastropod, a podcast about the science and history of food. From James Bond-inspired spy devices that can capture the wing-beats of hungry insects, to microphone-equipped drones patrolling henhouses in search of sick chickens, we discover that sound has the potential to help reduce pesticide use, make our vegetables even more nutritious, and even improve animal welfare.

Mozart for Plants
The idea that plants can hear and respond to music has a long and checkered history. Charles Darwin made his son, Francis, play the bassoon in front of an herb while he watched to see whether its leaves twitched (the plant was unmoved); Barbra Streisand caused a veritable explosion of color when singing to her tulips in the musical On a Clear Day You Can See Forever; and, as recently as the 1970s, UNC Greensboro physicist Dr. Gaylord Hageseth claimed that his experimental “pink” noise could make turnips sprout much faster.

While the claims that playing Mozart in a cornfield will lead to a dramatic increase in yield have proved impossible to replicate, scientists are sure that plants do respond to sounds in their environment, with small changes in gene expression, for example, or slightly different germination rates. But, as Heidi Appel, senior research scientist at the University of Missouri, told Gastropod, “We never understood why plants would have that ability.”

Pest Sounds
Intrigued, Appel teamed up with her colleague Reginald Cocroft, a behavioral ecologist, to focus on a sound that, they thought, might be particularly useful to plants: the vibrations caused by insect feeding. “These are one of the earliest and most quickly transmitted signals plants have that they’re being attacked,” said Appel. And while plants can’t hear insects the same way we do—they don’t have ears, after all—they can sense vibrations, much like club-goers feel the thump of bass or worshippers hear an organ reverberate through a church. “In that case, your body is a substrate,” picking up the sound vibrations, Appel explained. “That’s much more like what plants experience.”

To test their theory, Appel and Cocroft used lasers to measure the minute leaf tremors, about 1/10,000th of an inch, that caterpillars make when they munch on Arabidopsis (rockcress), a spindly relative of cabbage and broccoli that is commonly used in plant research. Next, they played those sounds back to one set of plants, and left the control group in peace. Finally, they let the caterpillars loose on both plant populations. Astonishingly, they found that the plants that had undergone audio training actually responded to the attack by producing much higher levels of mustard oil, their innate pesticide—which made them much less appetizing to the hungry caterpillars.

“That was very exciting and we were very happy,” Appel said. “But, at one level, we thought, ‘So what?’ Plants might respond to everything.” So they tested the plants again, this time using recordings of wind and treehoppers, a bug that looks like a thorn and sings with a high-pitched whine but does not like to dine on Arabidopsis. In response to these vibrations, however, the plants produced no increase in mustard oil. With this elegant experiment, Appel and Cocroft had solved a basic question of plant evolutionary biology: Plants evolved the ability to respond to sound vibrations in order to recognize and ward off attackers.

Musical Mustard
In doing so, Appel and Cocroft may have also hit upon a potent environmentally-friendly pesticide. Perhaps a field full of speakers blasting the sounds of crunching caterpillars might help terrified crops prime themselves to ward off a real attack, removing the need to apply chemical pesticides. This summer, Appel and Cocroft are testing commercially useful Arabidopsis relatives in the brassica family, such as kale and Brussels sprouts, to see if they demonstrate the same response.

But, as Appel pointed out to Gastropod, the use of sound might have an even more direct impact on our health. While plants evolved these chemical responses to deter pests, for humans, they often provide both flavor and health benefits. In fact, the sulfurous compounds produced by Arabidopsis and its fellow brassicas form the basis of America’s favorite hot dog condiment, mustard. And those same chemicals are actively being studied by cancer researchers for their potent health benefits. Maybe, by playing predator sounds in the field, farmers could actually grow more healthful plants.

Appel is testing this hypothesis with an African plant that is currently harvested for medicinal use, to determine whether caterpillar feeding increases the plants’ production of beneficial chemicals. If so, she can then test whether playing predator sounds has the same effect. “When we look at a plant as a source of flavor or medicine, what we are looking at is the product of millions of years of evolution of the plant interacting with its own pests—and those are largely insects,” said Appel. Insects that, it turns out, plants can hear.

This is the first of a two-part series exploring the relationship between sound and food. Listen to this episode of Gastropod for much more on the experimental history and emerging science of acoustic agriculture, from the perfect bovine playlist to the lost rhythms of Southern farming. And, if you like what you hear, subscribe to make sure you don’t miss out on hearing the difference between hot and cold tea, learning how the sound of tiny bubbles in soda changes its taste, and discovering the science behind pairing wine with music.

See the article here:

Scientists Just Came Up With the Craziest Way to Protect Your Kale

Posted in Anchor, eco-friendly, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Sprout, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Scientists Just Came Up With the Craziest Way to Protect Your Kale

9 Supermarket Staples That Were Created by the Military

by EulahDittmer Posted on August 6, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Go down an aisle in your supermarket and pick up a packaged item. Chances are, the contents of that can, bag, box, or pouch were designed in a US military building in the suburbs of Boston.

According to Anastacia Marx de Salcedo’s insightful new book, Combat-Ready Kitchen: How the US Military Shapes the Way You Eat (Current), the effort to nourish faraway GIs with portable, nonperishable, and edible (if not tasty) food has shaped the landscape of our modern food system. How so? Since World War II, the US military’s well-funded food science lab in Massachusetts, the Natick Center, has dominated the development of new food science and technology to create meals with longer shelf life, better flavor and texture, and more convenient packaging. But the Natick Center doesn’t keep its findings to itself. It partners with private corporations (à la ConAgra, General Mills, Hershey, Hormel, Tyson, and Unilever, to name a few) to produce this food for the general public, as well. It’s a win-win for both sides: Corporations get a leg up on the latest and greatest processing and packaging techniques, and the military is ensured a massive supply of rations if war ever breaks out.

If you are feeling queasy about eating food originally created for soldiers, you better watch out: Just about any processed food with a shelf life of more than a couple of days probably has its origins in the Natick Center. Below we outline a few of the biggest military food breakthroughs that you can find in your local grocery store or bodega:

Canned food: The effort to preserve meat for troops in combat began in the United States in earnest during the Spanish-American War, but it took years before the military understood the science of germs, bacteria, and how food spoils, and could successfully can meat and other perishables.
Energy and granola bars: After trying trying in vain during World War II to create a chocolate bar that wouldn’t melt, the army developed a fortified fruit bar that was sweet and of “intermediate moisture.” The “fruit bar” evolved into the granola bars and energy bars found in every grocery store and gas station today.
Packaged, boneless meat: Meat is expensive, especially when you need to feed an entire army. Thus the development of restructured meat: taking the ignored meat chunks and scraps and creating a new, longer-lasting meat. Now many Americans prefer restructured nuggets, patties, and slices over fresh meat from the bone.
Sliced bread: Making bread is labor-intensive, and the product goes stale and moldy quickly, which is a problem for feeding soldiers who spend days and weeks far from kitchens with ovens. So military food scientists came up with anti-staling additives to make shelf-stable bread, which, after World War II, entered households everywhere, becoming the best thing since, well…
Dehydrated cheese: Soldiers had such a huge appetite for cheese during the world wars that suppliers had difficulty packaging and shipping enough to meet demand. So the Natick Center went to work to find a better way process cheese for troops. The result? Dehydrated cheese powder. Now it’s found everywhere from the cheese packets in our mac ‘n’ cheese to the Cheeto dust stuck to our fingers.
TV dinner packaging: In its search for more flexible packaging resistant to changes in temperature and pressure, the Natick Center had a breakthrough when it combined the flexibly of plastic and the vapor-resistance of foil. This led to the plastic and foil “retort pouches” used for everything from heat-and-serve TV dinners to juice pouches, sauce packets, squeeze yogurts, and pet food.
Nonrefrigerated juice: Ever wonder why the bottles of juice lining the beverage aisle don’t need to be refrigerated? It turns out their long shelf life owes itself to a military-invented food technology called high-pressure processing. Essentially, pressure is applied to foods at such a high volume that it breaks the bonds holding together bacteria molecules. This process is also used for smoothies (like Odwalla), salsa, guacamole, and “100 percent natural, no preservatives” cold cuts.
Packaged, prewashed salad: To transport fresh greens to troops, the military developed a way to package produce that controlled oxygen and carbon dioxide levels, slowing down ripening and spoilage.
Instant coffee: A freeze-drying process initially used for transporting blood and vaccines to battlefield medics during World War II was repurposed as a way to make familiar foods long-lasting and lightweight. That’s how we got instant coffee, as well as the fruit bits in your cereal, the vegetables chunks in your instant noodles, and cake mix—convenient, long lasting, tasty, and brought to you by the US military.

Follow this link: 

9 Supermarket Staples That Were Created by the Military

Posted in alo, Anchor, Everyone, FF, Free Press, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, oven, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on 9 Supermarket Staples That Were Created by the Military

This Man Sat in Jail for 110 Days—After He Already Did His Time

by ErnestGross86 Posted on August 6, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Eric Wyatt was looking forward to his upcoming release from Georgia’s Douglas County Jail one day in March last year. With past convictions for thefts, traffic offenses, and a probation violation, he had an insider’s knowledge of the criminal-justice system; so when the day came, he was more than a little surprised when the authorities, instead of setting him free, escorted him over to Ben Hill County, where he was served with an old arrest warrant for borrowing a truck and failing to return it on time. Wyatt was very familiar with this theft charge: He had already been arrested, roughly three years earlier, for the crime. In fact, he had already served 179 days in jail in Clayton County as punishment for it. Obviously, somebody had made a mistake.

But no one was treating it like a mistake. When Wyatt appeared before a Ben Hill County magistrate three days later, he was denied bond. According to Wyatt’s sworn affidavit, he was called out of his cell the following day to meet with a lawyer from the public defender’s office and fill out an application saying that he couldn’t afford counsel and was thereby eligible for free criminal representation. Wyatt said that when he tried to talk about the gross mix-up, the public defender stopped him cold: “I am not going to be your attorney,” he said. The whole encounter lasted five minutes.

Continue Reading »

Credit: 

This Man Sat in Jail for 110 Days—After He Already Did His Time

Posted in FF, GE, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on This Man Sat in Jail for 110 Days—After He Already Did His Time

Three Top Rand Paul Associates Were Just Indicted

by ClayBrandon Posted on August 5, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

After years of investigation by the Department of Justice, three top Rand Paul associates, including the senator’s nephew-in-law, were indicted for their role in an alleged attempt to buy an influential Iowa state senator’s endorsement of Ron Paul during his 2012 presidential campaign. None of these operatives, who served as top Ron Paul campaign aides, is currently on the payroll of Rand Paul’s presidential campaign. But two of them—Jesse Benton, who is married to Paul’s niece, and John Tate—run a pro-Rand Paul super-PACs that has raised $3.1 million to support Paul’s presidential campaign.* The third man indicted, Dimitri Kesari, has served as an aide to both Rand Paul and his father.

Last year, former Republican Iowa state Sen. Kent Sorenson pleaded guilty to campaign finance charges accusing him of helping to cover up a scheme for the Ron Paul campaign to pay him more than $70,000 to switch his endorsement immediately before the 2012 Iowa caucus, from Michele Bachmann to Ron Paul. Sorenson has been awaiting sentencing pending his cooperation in a further investigation, but it hasn’t been clear who on Ron Paul’s staff would be caught up in the scandal. At the time Benton served as the campaign’s chairman, Tate as the campaign manager, and Kesari as the deputy campaign manager.

All three men were charged with criminal conspiracy and federal charges related to falsification of government records. Tate and Benton face charges of making false statements to federal investigators; Kesari was indicted on one count of obstruction of justice for allegedly trying to persuade Sorenson to deny the scheme when pressed by prosecutors.

Continue Reading »

Excerpt from:

Three Top Rand Paul Associates Were Just Indicted

Posted in Anchor, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Three Top Rand Paul Associates Were Just Indicted

Puerto Rico Crisis Goes From Bad to Worse

by AYZShantell Posted on August 5, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Puerto Rico’s economic crisis has only gotten worse in the month since Gov. Alejandro García Padilla told the New York Times the island’s $72 billion in debts was “not payable.” Earlier this week, the island missed a key bond payment, making history and setting the stage for a bruising and protracted battle with creditors. There are many reasons Puerto Rico finds itself in this quandary, including its murky political status, and the situation seems to be deteriorating as time goes on.

Here are the direst problems facing Puerto Rico—and the impact they could have on the upcoming presidential election:

Default: In June, when García Padilla called on Congress to pass legislation that would allow Puerto Rico to get its debt in order under the US bankruptcy laws that apply to the 50 states, the idea that the island would default on loan payments was mostly theoretical. That’s not the case anymore. The island’s government paid just $628,000 of a $58 million debt payment due this week, triggering the first default since the island was taken over by the US in 1898. No state has defaulted since Arkansas failed to make its bond payments during the Great Depression in 1933.

The default complicates an already complicated situation. Since current law doesn’t allow Puerto Rico to authorize its cities and publicly owned entities to seek bankruptcy protection through the courts, the island’s government has to negotiate with each of its lenders individually. As anybody who has ever borrowed money knows, interest rates go up when your credit goes down. Puerto Rico’s default, without any congressional intervention to change the bankruptcy laws, will likely lead to much more expensive borrowing in the future. “The default is consistent with our belief that Puerto Rico does not have the resources to make all of its forthcoming debt payments,” Moody’s Investors Service Vice President Emily Raimes said in a statement this week. “This is a first in what we believe will be broad defaults on commonwealth debt.”

No Help From Congress: When American cities and political entities such as towns, water districts, counties, and publicly run corporations face similar financial problems, they reorganize their debt under Chapter 9 of the US Bankruptcy Code. Detroit, which filed for bankruptcy in 2013, is perhaps the best-known example of this, but according to Governing magazine, it has happened nearly 50 times in the US since 2010. Federal bankruptcy law specifically excludes Puerto Rico, which means that the island’s government is forced to negotiate directly with a range of lenders, all of whom have different requirements and some of whom recommended closing schools, cutting university subsidies, and firing teachers to repay the debt.

Pedro Pierluisi, Puerto Rico’s non-voting representative in Congress, has more than once introduced legislation that would allow Puerto Rico to be treated like the states when it comes to US bankruptcy laws, but it has gone nowhere. More recently, Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) introduced an identical bill to Pierluisi’s, but some Republicans continue to oppose the idea on the grounds that it’s a backdoor bailout, so any relief coming from Congress is unlikely.

Medical Issues: Puerto Ricans face a host of problems as a result of the economic implosion, but a looming health care crisis might be the most serious. As the New York Times reported over the weekend, Puerto Rico is bracing for large cuts to a Medicare program called Medicare Advantage, which is being pared back under the Affordable Care Act. The result is that tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans are expected to face higher copays, reduced services, and a shrinking network of already stressed doctors. Puerto Rico’s Medicaid program, which serves nearly 1.6 million people, is also in danger of running out of federal grant money by the end of 2016. If the financially strapped government can’t come up with funding, as many as 900,000 people could get dropped from the program, according to the Times—and funds are hard to come by these days.

The lack of Medicaid funding is partly responsible for $25 billion of the island’s $73 billion debt burden, because the government has had to borrow to make up Medicaid funding gaps. Puerto Ricans pay Medicare taxes (along with many other federal taxes), but the federal government’s funding to the island is capped, forcing Puerto Rico to try to make up the difference.

All of this helps explain the mass exodus of doctors from the island, who are leaving at a rate of about one per day for work in Florida, New York, or other states. The rate is expected to climb, further exacerbating the health care woes of a place that already has too few doctors serving the population.

The Effect on Mainland Politics: Doctors aren’t the only ones abandoning the island. As US citizens, Puerto Ricans can freely move to the US mainland, so now, there are more Puerto Ricans living on the mainland than on the island. The growing number of Puerto Ricans moving to the US, mainly Florida, will likely play a big role in the coming presidential election. As the Washington Post reported last week, politicians hoping to win Florida will face problems if they don’t have Puerto Ricans backing them up at the polls. “Puerto Ricans are the swing voters in the swing region of a swing state,” former Puerto Rico Secretary of State Kenneth McClintock told Mother Jones in July. “So, come March of next year, the presidential primaries in Florida will be very important in terms of what is done with Puerto Rico in the future.“

Read the article:  

Puerto Rico Crisis Goes From Bad to Worse

Posted in alo, Anchor, Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Puerto Rico Crisis Goes From Bad to Worse

Stop Worrying That Everyone’s Having More Sex Than You

by LeaMichalski Posted on August 5, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

When Rachel Hills tells men that she wrote a book called The Sex Myth, she typically gets one response.

“Hah, sex isn’t a myth to me,” she recounts, deepening her voice in mimicry. “Yeah, you definitely get the eye roll from the men.”

But for Hills, a New York-based magazine writer, the way people talk about sex is plenty mystifying. While working as an opinion columnist in her native Australia nearly a decade ago, Hills began to notice how the media seemed obsessed with the idea that young people only wanted no-strings-attached sex—and lots of it. “What was being said about young people and sex very much did not fit my own life,” says Hills. “And I felt a sense of insecurity around that.”

She wasn’t alone, as she soon discovered by talking to hundreds of people about the topic. Over the next eight years, Hills became something of a “sexpert” through her columns for Cosmopolitan and Huffington Post. Her research culminated in her first book, The Sex Myth: The Gap Between Our Fantasies and Reality, which went on sale Tuesday from Simon & Schuster.

So what is the Sex Myth? For Hills, it’s the misconception that people need to be good in bed in order to be “adequate human beings.” “We internalize this idea of sex as something that is constantly available and that everyone is doing, and if you’re not doing it, there’s something wrong with you,” she explains. The book intertwines anecdotes, scientific research, and occasional moments of self-reflection to make the argument that people too often allow their sexuality to be defined by factors outside themselves.

Here are some of the other myths Hills debunks:

Myth No. 1: If you’re not having tons of sex as a young adult, there’s something wrong with you.
During her younger years, Hills writes, “sex was an unspoken assumption…I, on the other hand, had made it not only through high school a virgin, but through four years of college as well.” But research shows college students might be having less sex than we are led to believe. For example, the Online College Social Life Survey, a project out of New York University, found that 72 percent of college students “engage in some kind of hookup at least once by their senior year.” But forty percent said they hooked up with three or fewer people during their college career, and only a third of the students had engaged in intercourse during their most recent encounter. One in five students hadn’t hooked up during college at all.

Myth No. 2: Your desires aren’t normal.
Hills interviewed young adults from all types of backgrounds across Canada, the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom. The one thing they all had in common is that each felt that their sex life wasn’t “normal” in some way. Whether it was not reaching climax, not having sex frequently enough, expressing interests in kink, identifying as LGBTQ—no one was 100 percent sure that they were doing it “right.” Hills thinks the media plays a big role in fortifying this insecurity. Though progress has been made with shows such as Orange is the New Black and Transparent, the majority of mainstream entertainment portrays a very narrow spectrum of sexuality. “The ideal world that I’d like to see us move to, the liberated world, if you will, is the one where people aren’t made to feel shame about their sex lives, whether they’re being shamed for being considered too ‘slutty’ or ‘freaky’ or ‘weird’ or ‘prudish’ or too much of a ‘loser,'” Hills says. “So if you can remove that weight, then those decisions become less stigmatized.”

Myth No. 3: You’re not hot because Hollywood said so.
Hills points out that those who would be considered unattractive by Hollywood standards are also typically considered less sexual. Sex “serves as a proxy for our physical attractiveness and how well we fit in with the people around us,” Hills writes. The key to overcoming this attitude, she says, is introspection, and being much more critical of messaging about sex and how it applies to our own reality.

Myth No. 4: Men don’t worry about sex.
Perhaps the most surprising section of The Sex Myth is the chapter on male sexuality. Hills, a feminist, goes directly to where many feminist writers don’t—right into the hearts, rather than the hormones, of men. She writes sympathetically about unbidden erections and the pressure men face to perform sexually. “The absence of straight men from public conversations about sexuality also means that expectations of what men should do, be, and desire when it comes to sex often go unchallenged,” she writes. Hills argues that men are confined to a single definition of sexuality, which makes them “arguably more vulnerable to the Sex Myth than young women.”

The one weak spot in Hills’ analysis of male sexuality is her discussion of male sexual aggression in the context of rape culture. “The really ugly side of masculinity is a small part of it,” Hills writes. She adds that because rape is a well-covered topic at the moment, she didn’t feel compelled to dwell on it.

Myth No. 5: “Female sexual dysfunction” is all your fault.
How many jokes have been made about the female ability (and necessity) to fake an orgasm? Another aspect of the Sex Myth, as Hills describes it, is the pressure to turn pleasure into a performance. Hills thinks this impulse distracts from deeper issues. “If there’s anything ‘dysfunctional’ about our current approach to sex, it does not reside in our bodies,” she writes. But instead of drilling down on the nuances of female desire, companies would rather treat female sexual dysfunction as a problem that only medication can fix. As health journalist Ray Moynihan argued in a piece in the British Medical Journal, pharmaceutical companies are searching to “build markets for new medication” in the wake of Viagra’s financial success. Endless procedures and prescriptions have ensued, all of which lead to what one researcher describes as a “corporate-sponsored” disease.

So how best to avoid letting these myths creep into our consciousness and dictate our desires? Hills often turns to the antics of such comediennes as Amy Schumer and Tina Fey, who never shy away from sex as less-than-glamorous. “I feel like in making a joke about something, it creates permission for it,” she says. “The fact that you can say it makes it okay.”

More:

Stop Worrying That Everyone’s Having More Sex Than You

Posted in alo, Anchor, ATTRA, Casio, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, Mop, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Stop Worrying That Everyone’s Having More Sex Than You

Police Shootings Won’t Stop Unless We Also Stop Shaking Down Black People

by AzucenaLander0 Posted on July 30, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

In April, several days after North Charleston, South Carolina, police officer Michael Slager stopped Walter Scott for a busted taillight and then fatally shot him, the usual cable-news transmogrification of victim into superpredator ran into problems. The dash cam showed Scott being pulled over while traveling at a nerdy rate of speed, using his left turn signal to pull into a parking lot and having an amiable conversation with Slager until he realized he’d probably get popped for nonpayment of child support. At which point he bolted out of the car and hobbled off. Slager then shot him. Why didn’t the cop just jog up and grab him? Calling what the obese 50-year-old Scott was doing “running” really stretches the bounds of literary license.

But maybe the question to ask is: Why did Scott run? The answer came when the New York Times revealed Scott to be a man of modest means trapped in an exhausting hamster wheel: He would get a low-paying job, make some child support payments, fall behind on them, get fined, miss a payment, get jailed for a few weeks, lose that job due to absence, and then start over at a lower-paying job. From all apparent evidence, he was a decent schlub trying to make things work in a system engineered to make his life miserable and recast his best efforts as criminal behavior.

More MoJo coverage on policing:


Video Shows Arrest of Sandra Bland Prior to Her Death in Texas Jail


How Cleveland Police May Have Botched a 911 Call Just Before Killing Tamir Rice


Native Americans Get Shot By Cops at an Astonishing Rate


Here Are 13 Killings by Police Captured on Video in the Past Year


The Walter Scott Shooting Video Shows Why Police Accounts Are Hard to Trust


Itâ&#128;&#153;s Been 6 Months Since Tamir Rice Died, and the Cop Who Killed Him Still Hasn’t Been Questioned


Exactly How Often Do Police Shoot Unarmed Black Men?


The Cop Who Choked Eric Garner to Death Won’t Pay a Dime


A Mentally Ill Woman’s “Sudden Death” at the Hands of Cleveland Police

Recently, two more deaths of African Americans that have blown up in the media follow a pattern similar to Scott’s. Sandra Bland in Texas and Samuel DuBose in Cincinnati were each stopped for minor traffic infractions (failing to use turn signal, missing front license plate), followed by immediate escalation by the officer into rage, and then an official story that is obviously contradicted by the video (that the officer tried to “de-escalate” the tension with Bland; that the officer was dragged by DuBose’s car). In both cases, the perpetrator of a minor traffic offense died.

When incidents of police violence come to light, the usual defense is that we should not tarnish all the good cops just because of “a few bad apples.” No one can argue with that. But what is usually implied in that phrase is that the “bad” officers’ intentions are malevolent—that they are morally corrupt and racist. And that may be true, but they are also bad in the job-performance sense. These men are crummy cops, sometimes profoundly so. Slager had a record for gratuitously using his Taser. Timothy Leohmann, who leapt from his car and instantly killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice, had been deemed “weepy” and unable to “emotionally function” by a supervisor at his previous PD job, who added: “I do not believe time, nor training, will be able to change or correct these deficiencies.” Ferguson’s Darren Wilson was also fired from his previous job—actually, the entire police force of Jennings, Missouri, was disbanded for being awful.

Continue Reading »

Read original article: 

Police Shootings Won’t Stop Unless We Also Stop Shaking Down Black People

Posted in Anchor, Citizen, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Oster, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Police Shootings Won’t Stop Unless We Also Stop Shaking Down Black People

Democratic Rep. Chaka Fattah Just Got Indicted. Here’s What He’s Accused Of.

by HyeNelmsamd Posted on July 29, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The Department of Justice dropped 29 federal racketeering charges on Rep. Chaka Fattah (D-Pa.) and a handful of close associates this morning, claiming that he diverted campaign and charitable funds to cover the cost of a failed mayoral run and to pay off his son’s student loans. Investigators have been circling Chattah for years. Last year, a top aide pleaded guilty to helping Fattah divert the money towards his son’s student loan debt, and Fattah’s son is awaiting trial on federal charges of his own in connection to the scheme.

Fattah is the second Democratic member of Congress to be indicted on corruption charges by the Department of Justice this year. New Jersey’s Sen. Bob Menendez was indicted in April, stemming from accusations he helped a campaign donor obtain benefits from the federal government in exchange for favors. Fattah, who was first elected in 1995, is the third sitting member of Congress to be indicted on corruption charges in the last two years. Former Republican Rep. Michael Grimm (R-N.Y.), who represented Staten Island, was charged with fraud and tax evasion in April 2014 and was sentenced to eight months in prison earlier this month.

In this case, Fattah and his associates face a slew of charges, including mail fraud, bank fraud, and money laundering. In announcing the charges, the DOJ assembled a laundry list of alleged misdeeds, including:

Using a secret $1 million loan from a wealthy supporter to back his 2007 run for mayor of Philadelphia.
Repaying the donor’s loan through a nonprofit Fattah controlled that had received funding from the federal government.
Attempting to steer a $15 million federal grant to a political consultant who Fattah’s campaign owed $130,000.
Using campaign funds to pay a consulting company, which then paid off $23,000 in student loans for Fattah’s son.
Taking an $18,000 bribe from an associate in exchange for attempting to secure him an ambassadorship and masking the bribe in the form of a fake car sale.

Fattah and his alleged co-conspirators could face decades in prison if convicted.

Fattah represents Pennsylvania’s 2nd congressional district, an overwhelmingly Democratic district that encompasses much of the city of Philadelphia and its close suburbs. Despite his son’s indictment and the guilty plea by his aide last summer, Fattah easily won reelection last fall with 88 percent of the vote.

Link – 

Democratic Rep. Chaka Fattah Just Got Indicted. Here’s What He’s Accused Of.

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Democratic Rep. Chaka Fattah Just Got Indicted. Here’s What He’s Accused Of.