Want to know what the risks of heart disease are in your community?
You could look at a whole range of factors, everything from dietary patterns to economics, and there’s a good chance you’ll find some correlations.
But a team of scientists from the University of Pennsylvania went looking for a new way to assess community risks that tops all the existing means of prediction, and they found it the social medium that has itself become the subject of intense scrutiny in the wake of Donald Trump’s toxic deployment of the medium — Twitter.
Here’s the abstract of their findings, just published in the academic journal Psychological Science [$35 to access for non-subscribers], and available free via this link from from the National Library of Medicine:
Hostility and chronic stress are known risk factors for heart disease, but they are costly to assess on a large scale. We used language expressed on Twitter to characterize community-level psychological correlates of age-adjusted mortality from atherosclerotic heart disease (AHD). Language patterns reflecting negative social relationships, disengagement, and negative emotions—especially anger—emerged as risk factors; positive emotions and psychological engagement emerged as protective factors. Most correlations remained significant after controlling for income and education. A cross-sectional regression model based only on Twitter language predicted AHD mortality significantly better than did a model that combined 10 common demographic, socioeconomic, and health risk factors, including smoking, diabetes, hypertension, and obesity. Capturing community psychological characteristics through social media is feasible, and these characteristics are strong markers of cardiovascular mortality at the community level.
Here’s more from the discussion of their findings at the end of their report:
Our study had three major findings. First, language expressed on Twitter revealed several community-level psychological characteristics that were significantly associated with heart-disease mortality risk. Second, use of negative-emotion (especially anger), disengagement, and negative-relationship language was associated with increased risk, whereas positive-emotion and engagement language was protective. Third, our predictive results suggest that the information contained in Twitter language fully accounts for—and adds to—the AHD-relevant information in 10 representatively assessed demographic, socioeconomic, and health variables
The following chart from their report reveals the specific words reflecting either a stronger risks for atherosclerotic heart disease [top] or for healthier hearts [bottom], Word size indicates relative frequency of use.:
Social media are magnifying lenses focused on our individual and collective psyches, and our choice of words reveals far more than we think.
By freeing up our ability to reveal the darkest and most hate-filled corners of of our hearts, Twitter, Facebook, and the rest may actually be killing us, and hate- and rage-spewing politicians like Donald Trump, Marjorie Taylor Green, and Tucker Carlson [yes, he’s a politician, just not the elected sort], may be literally killing their followers just as surely as their opposition to vaccines and masks is also killingmany of them.
As we discovered soon after we first started reporting in the Golden State, three stories are perennials on the West Coast, catastrophes certain to recur throughout a journalist’s career: Wildfires, earthquakes, and mudslides.
For various newspapers where I’ve worked, I’ve had many opportunities to interview people impacted by disasters, and the one thing most of them talk about after recounting their relief at surviving as a deep sense of loss, a loss inclusive of both material possessions and psychological security.
The loss of photo albums and mementos is literally a loss of the past, and a loss of the sense of security that comes with the loss of home and all its comforting associations can be devastating.
And now a new study reveals that, for many, the psychic loss from California wildfires continues long after the flames have been extinguished,
Poorer Mental Health Smolders After Deadly, Devastating Wildfire
In 2018, a faulty electric transmission line ignited the Camp Fire in Northern California, ultimately consuming 239 square miles and several communities, including the town of Paradise, which was 95 percent destroyed. At least 85 people died.
Structures have been rebuilt, but some things are worse. In a paper published February 2, 2021 in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, scientists at University of California San Diego, with colleagues elsewhere, describe chronic mental health problems among some residents who experienced the Camp Fire in varying degrees.
Direct exposure to large-scale fires significantly increased the risk for mental health disorders, particularly post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression, the scientists wrote.
“We looked for symptoms of these particular disorders because emotionally traumatic events in one’s lifetime are known to trigger them,” said senior author Jyoti Mishra, PhD, professor in the Department of Psychiatry at UC San Diego School of Medicine and co-director of the Neural Engineering and Translation Labs at UC San Diego. Pre-existing childhood trauma or sleep disturbances were found to exacerbate mental health problems, but factors like personal resilience and mindfulness appeared to reduce them.
“We show climate change as a chronic mental health stressor. It is not like the pandemic, in that it is here for a period of time and can be mitigated with vaccines and other measures. Climate change is our future, and we need immediate action to slow down the changes being wreaked upon the planet, and on our own wellbeing.”
Mishra, with collaborators at California State University, Chico and University of South Carolina, conducted a variety of mental health assessments on residents who had been exposed to the Camp Fire six months after the wildfire and those much farther away. Roughly two-thirds of those tested were residents who lived in or around Chico, a Northern California city located approximately 10 to 15 miles of the center of the Camp Fire. The remaining third were San Diego residents living approximately 600 miles from the wildfire and presumably unimpacted.
The researchers found that the Northern California residents experienced measurable increases in PTSD, depression and anxiety disorders, which were worsened by proximity and exposure to the Camp Fire or by previous adverse experiences involving childhood trauma, such as abuse and neglect.
Chronic mental health problems fanned by the wild fire were ameliorated, however, by physical exercise, mindfulness and emotional support, all of which may contribute to personal resilience and the ability to bounce back after stressful life events.
The worrisome thing is that stressful life events like the Camp Fire are becoming more frequent, due to climate change, said study co-author Veerabhadaran Ramanathan, PhD, Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric and Climate Sciences at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.
“Since the 1970s, fire extent in California has increased by 400 percent,” said Ramanathan. “While a faulty transmission line may have lit the Camp Fire in 2018, it is part of an overall disastrous multi-decadal trend fueled by human-caused climate warming. Through evaporative drying of the air, the soil and the trees, warming acts as a force multiplier. By 2030, the warming is likely to amplify by 50 percent. This surprising, if not shocking, study identifies mental illness as a grave risk for the coming decades.”
Not just in California, but the world, write the authors.
“Unchecked climate change projected for the latter half of this century may severely impact the mental wellbeing of the global population. We must find ways to foster individual resiliency,” wrote the study authors.
Co-authors include: Saria Silveira and Gillian Grennan,
Now add the impact of a lethal pandemic, and we suspect conditions are significantly worse than for the period covered by the study.
More than 2m guns were sold in January, a new record for that month. Both the Capitol riot and the start of Joe Biden’s presidency are thought to have contributed to the spike. Mr Biden promised to tighten gun control legislation during the campaign.
Sales increased 75 per cent compared to January 2020 when 1.2m guns were sold. According to the gun industry trade organisation National Shooting Sports Federation, three of the top ten weeks for FBI instant criminal background checks were in January 2021. According to figures from the FBI, over 4.3m firearms background checks were initiated last month.
Those concerned about gun rights tend to buy more firearms whenever a Democrat is elected to the White House, worried that a new president is going to clamp down on gun violence and enforce stricter gun control laws. Gun sales surged both when Barack Obama was elected in 2008 and after he was re-elected in 2012.
Mark Oliva, a spokesman for the National Shooting Sports Federation, told CNN that those who are worried about gun rights are “going to act while they can to be able to buy what they want”. Mr Oliva said that Mr Biden’s talk of banning AR-15 rifles and requiring gun owners to register their firearms have made some gun owners worried about being able to buy weapons and ammunition.
“It can’t be discounted that many of these background checks for the purchase of a firearm are attributed to threats by the Biden administration to enact the most radical and far-reaching gun control agenda ever proposed,” Mr Oliva said.
High-level Republican officials who entered government service under George W. Bush are staging an exodus from the Grand Old Party, dismayed at the extremist direction is taking, according to an investigation by Reuters:
Dozens of Republicans in former President George W. Bush’s administration are leaving the party, dismayed by a failure of many elected Republicans to disown Donald Trump after his false claims of election fraud sparked a deadly storming of the U.S. Capitol last month.
<snip>
“The Republican Party as I knew it no longer exists. I’d call it the cult of Trump,” said Jimmy Gurulé, who was Undersecretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence in the Bush administration.
Kristopher Purcell, who worked in the Bush White House’s communications office for six years, said roughly 60 to 70 former Bush officials have decided to leave the party or are cutting ties with it, from conversations he has been having. “The number is growing every day,” Purcell said.
<snip>
The unwillingness by party leaders to disavow Trump was the final straw for some former Republican officials.
“If it continues to be the party of Trump, many of us are not going back,” Rosario Marin, a former Treasurer of the U.S. under Bush, told Reuters. “Unless the Senate convicts him, and rids themselves of the Trump cancer, many of us will not be going back to vote for Republican leaders.”
There’s only one problem.
Why are these officials speaking out and making their exodus only now, after the damage has already been done?
Donald Trump did nothing that couldn’t be foreseen from the moment he announced his candidacy.
Trump was always a misogynistic racist, a pussy-grabbing pal of gangsters and thugs who made deals with the mob to further his real estate empire.
And while we can understand their prior reticence, we suspect history [if there’s anyone left to write it] will not look kindly on these ex-GOPers, who instead opted for the inner emigration of outer compliance and inward retreat.
Sometimes we need reminders that, despite our advanced technology and all dazzling diversions, we remain embodiments of the universe that gave us life.
Some fascinating new research reveals the depth of the connection in the powerful way the Moon influences one of life’s most precious necessities, sleep, that in the immortal words of the Bard of Avon, “knits up the ravell’d sleave of care, the death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath, balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, chief nourisher in life’s feast.”
And the connection holds for all people, whether they live in bright urban centers or dark rural retreats.
On nights before a full moon, people go to bed later and sleep less, study shows
For centuries, humans have blamed the moon for our moods, accidents and even natural disasters. But new research indicates that our planet’s celestial companion impacts something else entirely — our sleep.
In a paper published Jan. 27 in Science Advances, scientists at the University of Washington, the National University of Quilmes in Argentina and Yale University report that sleep cycles in people oscillate during the 29.5-day lunar cycle: In the days leading up to a full moon, people go to sleep later in the evening and sleep for shorter periods of time. The research team, led by UW professor of biology Horacio de la Iglesia, observed these variations in both the time of sleep onset and the duration of sleep in urban and rural settings — from Indigenous communities in northern Argentina to college students in Seattle, a city of more than 750,000. They saw the oscillations regardless of an individual’s access to electricity, though the variations are less pronounced in individuals living in urban environments.
The pattern’s ubiquity may indicate that our natural circadian rhythms are somehow synchronized with — or entrained to — the phases of the lunar cycle.
“We see a clear lunar modulation of sleep, with sleep decreasing and a later onset of sleep in the days preceding a full moon,” said de la Iglesia. “And although the effect is more robust in communities without access to electricity, the effect is present in communities with electricity, including undergraduates at the University of Washington.”
A graphic illustration of of sleep duration onset times and their correlation with the lunar cycle.
Using wrist monitors, the team tracked sleep patterns among 98 individuals living in three Toba-Qom Indigenous communities in the Argentine province of Formosa. The communities differed in their access to electricity during the study period: One rural community had no electricity access, a second rural community had only limited access to electricity — such as a single source of artificial light in dwellings — while a third community was located in an urban setting and had full access to electricity. For nearly three-quarters of the Toba-Qom participants, researchers collected sleep data for one to two whole lunar cycles.
Past studies by de la Iglesia’s team and other research groups have shown that access to electricity impacts sleep, which the researchers also saw in their study: Toba-Qom in the urban community went to bed later and slept less than rural participants with limited or no access to electricity.
But study participants in all three communities also showed the same sleep oscillations as the moon progressed through its 29.5-day cycle. Depending on the community, the total amount of sleep varied across the lunar cycle by an average of 46 to 58 minutes, and bedtimes seesawed by around 30 minutes. For all three communities, on average, people had the latest bedtimes and the shortest amount of sleep in the nights three to five days leading up to a full moon.
When they discovered this pattern among the Toba-Qom participants, the team analyzed sleep-monitor data from 464 Seattle-area college students that had been collected for a separate study. They found the same oscillations.
The team confirmed that the evenings leading up to the full moon — when participants slept the least and went to bed the latest — have more natural light available after dusk: The waxing moon is increasingly brighter as it progresses toward a full moon, and generally rises in the late afternoon or early evening, placing it high in the sky during the evening after sunset. The latter half of the full moon phase and waning moons also give off significant light, but in the middle of the night, since the moon rises so late in the evening at those points in the lunar cycle.
“We hypothesize that the patterns we observed are an innate adaptation that allowed our ancestors to take advantage of this natural source of evening light that occurred at a specific time during the lunar cycle,” said lead author Leandro Casiraghi, a UW postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Biology.
Whether the moon affects our sleep has been a controversial issue among scientists. Some studies hint at lunar effects only to be contradicted by others. De la Iglesia and Casiraghi believe this study showed a clear pattern in part because the team employed wrist monitors to collect sleep data, as opposed to user-reported sleep diaries or other methods. More importantly, they tracked individuals across lunar cycles, which helped filter out some of the “noise” in data caused by individual variations in sleep patterns and major differences in sleep patterns between people with and without access to electricity.
These lunar effects may also explain why access to electricity causes such pronounced changes to our sleep patterns, de la Iglesia added.
“In general, artificial light disrupts our innate circadian clocks in specific ways: It makes us go to sleep later in the evening; it makes us sleep less. But generally we don’t use artificial light to ‘advance’ the morning, at least not willingly. Those are the same patterns we observed here with the phases of the moon,” said de la Iglesia.
From the report, sleep duration and onset times in three different environments.
“At certain times of the month, the moon is a significant source of light in the evenings, and that would have been clearly evident to our ancestors thousands of years ago,” said Casiraghi.
The team also found a second, “semilunar” oscillation of sleep patterns in the Toba-Qom communities, which seemed to modulate the main lunar rhythm with a 15-day cycle around the new and full moon phases. This semilunar effect was smaller and only noticeable in the two rural Toba-Qom communities. Future studies would have to confirm this semilunar effect, which may suggest that these lunar rhythms are due to effects other than from light, such as the moon’s maximal gravitational “tug” on the Earth at the new and full moons, according to Casiraghi.
Regardless, the lunar effect the team discovered will impact sleep research moving forward, the researchers said.
“In general, there has been a lot of suspicion on the idea that the phases of the moon could affect a behavior such as sleep — even though in urban settings with high amounts of light pollution, you may not know what the moon phase is unless you go outside or look out the window,” said Casiraghi. “Future research should focus on how: Is it acting through our innate circadian clock? Or other signals that affect the timing of sleep? There is a lot to understand about this effect.”
Co-authors are Ignacio Spiousas at the National University of Quilmes; former UW researchers Gideon Dunster and Kaitlyn McGlothlen; and Eduardo Fernández-Duque and Claudia Valeggia at Yale University. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Leakey Foundation.
And while we’re on the subject of things lunar, how about a little moon music from the peerless Billie Holiday:
From the Washington Post‘s Fact Checker tracks the pulse of pusillanimous Presidential persiflage, showing the daily rates of discharge of the 30,573 false or misleading claims uttered, Tweeted, or otherwise flowing from the devious brain of Donald Trump for every day of his presidency. His peak prevaricational performance came on 1 November 2020, in a pre-electoral spew of no less than 503 whoppers [click on the image to enlarge]:
Two of the wingnut militias who breached the Capitol in the failed Trump Insurrection [also known as the Beer Gut Putsch] are busily abandoning their would-be Fuhrer in the wake of his ignominious disavowal of their efforts and his subsequent flight to Floridian exile.
We begin with QAnon, secular religion embraced by two new pistol-packin’ House Republicans.
The baseless QAnon theory suggests, without any evidence, that argued that a group of powerful, Satan-worshipping people running a cannibalistic child sexual abuse ring. It argues that Donald Trump is planning to take down the group – and that those plans could not be revealed publicly, but have been disseminated by an anonymous individual named Q.
In a series of posts, originally on website 4chan, Q laid out those theories in cryptic language. As those posts accrued, so did large numbers of followers, many of whom attended Mr Trump’s rallies and received some encouragement from him and his family.
QAnon’s adherents came to believe that the cabal would eventually be exposed and arrested in an event known as the Storm and orchestrated by Mr Trump. But despite repeated predictions of dates for such an event – including an initial indication from the person going by the name Q that it would happen in 2017 – and an insistence that it would eventually arrive, nothing happened.
The inauguration and Mr Trump’s final day in office came to symbolise for many the final opportunity for the beliefs within QAnon to be realised. Followers suggested that the ceremony would not go as planned: that Mr Trump was gathering people together so that they could be more easily arrested, for example, or even that Joe Biden was working on behalf of his predecessor.
Keeping the faith wasn’t easy when Inauguration Day didn’t usher in “The Storm,” the apocalyptic reckoning that they have believed was coming for prominent Democrats and Trump’s “deep state” foes. QAnon followers grappled with anger, confusion and disappointment Wednesday as President Joe Biden was sworn into office.
Some believers found a way to twist the conspiracy theory’s convoluted narrative to fit their belief that Biden’s victory was an illusion and that Trump would secure a second term in office. Others clung to the notion that Trump will remain a “shadow president” during Biden’s term. Some even floated the idea that the inauguration ceremony was computer-generated or that Biden himself could be the mysterious “Q,” who is purportedly a government insider posting cryptic clues about the conspiracy.
For many others, however, Trump’s departure sowed doubt.
“I am so scared right now, I really feel nothing is going to happen now,” one poster wrote on a Telegram channel popular with QAnon believers. “I’m just devastated.”
One QAnon channel on Telegram with 40,000 subscribers noted that the last sentence of Eric Trump’s farewell tweet — “ … the best is yet to come!” — was also a common slogan for QAnon adherents, failing to mention that the phrase is a commonly used cliche. Another QAnon channel with 35,000 Telegram subscribers, devoted to the “Great Awakening,” highlighted Trump’s final remarks as president: “We will be back in some form — Have a good life. We will see you soon.”
“It simply doesn’t make sense that we all got played,” one QAnon channel on Telegram said.
Some of the most notable figures in QAnon’s online universe said they were having a change of heart. After Biden’s inauguration, Ron Watkins — the longtime 8kun administrator who critics have suspected may have helped write Q’s posts himself, a charge he denies — said on Telegram that it was time to move on.
“We need to keep our chins up and go back to our lives as best we are able,” said Watkins, who in recent months had become one of the loudest backers of conspiracy theories suggesting Biden’s win was a fraud.
As Biden took the oath of office just before noon on Wednesday, a QAnon channel on Telegram lit up with laments.
“We’ve been lied to,” wrote one person. “I think we have been fooled like no other,” another responded, adding: “Hate to say it. Held on to hope til this very moment.” “I feel like I’m losing my mind,” said a third. “I don’t know what to believe anymore.”
“Anyone else feeling beyond let down right now?” read a popular post on a QAnon message board. “It’s like being a kid and seeing the big gift under the tree thinking it is exactly what you want only to open it and realize it was a lump of coal the whole time.”
QAnon adherents are used to dealing with predictions that have not come true. The conspiracy theory began in October 2017 when an anonymous internet user posing as a government insider posted on 4chan that Hillary Clinton was about to be arrested, that her passport had been flagged, and that the government was preparing for “massive riots”. None of that happened, nor did any of the myriad other arrests, declassifications, executions, resignations or revelations that the anonymous poster, who came to be known as Q, has promised believers for the past three years. But the movement has nevertheless grown in size and influence, becoming a meaningful force in theRepublican party and a motivating factor for many of the insurrectionists who attacked the US Capitol on 6 January.
Some were furious they had been led to believe the so-called ‘storm’ would occur on Inauguration Day.
‘Wake up. We’ve been had,’ one wrote. Another simply said: ‘It’s over.’
They described feeling duped, saying: ‘Been played like fools’, ‘the silence is deafening’ and ‘OMG none of this was real’. Another wrote: ‘Well I’m the official laughing stock of my family now. Awesome.’
‘Where was Trump? Where is the military? Where was the insurrection act? What about his EO’s? I’m losing my sh*t right now. Absolutely losing my sh*t’.
Proud Boys, too, jump off Trump bandwagon
The Proud Boys are the bellicose far-Right fanatics Trump incited during the 29 September Presidential debate. Asked to condemn violent extremists, the Republican candidate declared “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by, but I’ll tell you what, I’ll tell you what, somebody’s got to do something about antifa and the left, because this is not a right-wing problem.”
After the presidential election last year, the Proud Boys, a far-right group, declared its undying loyalty to President Trump.
In a Nov. 8 post in a private channel of the messaging app Telegram, the group urged its followers to attend protests against an election that it said had been fraudulently stolen from Mr. Trump. “Hail Emperor Trump,” the Proud Boys wrote.
But by this week, the group’s attitude toward Mr. Trump had changed. “Trump will go down as a total failure,” the Proud Boys said in the same Telegram channel on Monday.
As Mr. Trump departed the White House on Wednesday, the Proud Boys, once among his staunchest supporters, have also started leaving his side. In dozens of conversations on social media sites like Gab and Telegram, members of the group have begun calling Mr. Trump a “shill” and “extraordinarily weak,” according to messages reviewed by The New York Times. They have also urged supporters to stop attending rallies and protests held for Mr. Trump or the Republican Party.
The comments are a startling turn for the Proud Boys, which for years had backed Mr. Trump and promoted political violence. Led by Enrique Tarrio, many of its thousands of members were such die-hard fans of Mr. Trump that they offered to serve as his private militia and celebrated after he told them in a presidential debate last year to “stand back and stand by.” On Jan. 6, some Proud Boys members stormed the U.S. Capitol.
Proud Boys provocateur busted
The Proud Boys suffered another major setback Wednesday when a key organizer was arrested and hauled into court by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a key organizer of the group’s participation in the Capitol coup attempt.
The FBI on Wednesday arrested a Florida-based member of the right-wing Proud Boys group on charges of storming the U.S. Capitol two weeks ago in a crowd of Donald Trump supporters challenging his election defeat, the Justice Department said.
Joseph Randall Biggs, 37, faces charges of corruptly obstructing an official proceeding before Congress, unlawful entry, and disorderly conduct in the attack on the seat of government while lawmakers were certifying Democrat Joe Biden’s Nov. 3 election win.
Biggs was released on a $25,000 bond on Wednesday afternoon.
The FBI affidavit traced Biggs’ role in organizing the Proud Boys in the weeks leading up to the Capitol riot, as well as his movements through Washington, D.C., on the day that the attempted insurrection occurred.
The FBI said Biggs and Enrique Tarrio, the South Florida-based chairman of the Proud Boys, posted messages in late December to the social media site Parler, which had become popular as a right-wing alternative to mainstream social media sites, urging members to turn out in D.C. on Jan. 6
Unlike at past events, Tarrio and Biggs urged Proud Boys adherents to show up without the black-and-yellow attire they typically wear.
“[W]e will not be attending DC in colors. We will be blending in as one of you,” Biggs allegedly said, in a message directed at Antifa, the anti-fascist protest movement. “You won’t see us. You’ll even think we are you. … We are going to smell like you, move like you, and look like you.”
Jan. 6, he added, “is gonna be epic.”
On that date, agents said Biggs was spotted among other Proud Boys members on the east side of the U.S. Capitol, identified in a video — by name — by another member in an interview published online days later.
On InfoWars, Alex Jones—for whom the Trump era represented both a glorious rise and equally precipitous fall—seemed subdued. For commentary, he brought on Elmer Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers, who appeared sitting in his car, shot from below at the most unflattering possible angle, apparently on his cellphone. “We no longer have a legitimate sitting president,” Rhodes told Jones, who nodded, grimly.
Moments later, Jones, sounding especially hoarse, pivoted joylessly to one of his signature supplement ads. “With all these pressures, you need a high quality multivitamin,” he told his audience tonelessly.
The Trumpsters who terrorized the Capitol aren’t exactly criminal masterminds, as the British tabloid The Sun observes, and they’re being caught thanks to a woman who knows her dating aps:
Capitol rioters are now getting turned in to the FBI by some creative women matching with them on the Bumble dating app.
Realizing how many conservative men were on the app with photos of themselves at the failed coup attempt on January 6, some women have taken it upon themselves to match with them and send their information to the FBI.
“This is funny but actually serious. There are DOZENS of men on DC dating apps right now who were clearly here for the insurrection attempt yesterday,” wrote Alia Awadallah on Twitter.
“Some say it directly, others are obvious from MAGA clothing, location tags, etc. Is that info useful at all for law enforcement?”
She continued, saying dating apps update automatically depending on location, meaning she was able to see who was in DC during the week’s events.
Donald Trump is said to be furious at White House staffers for talking about Richard Nixon – the only president ever to resign – as his own administration ends in history-making ignominy.
He has banned all mention of the disgraced 37th commander-in-chief following an offhand comparison by an aide, a report claims.
Meanwhile, a separate report claimed Mr Trump had been back in touch with his former adviser Steve Bannon.
<snip>
A top aide to President Donald Trump was seen leaving the White House with a large framed photograph, stirring controversy as former officials alleged that the move was “illegal” and said the artwork belonged to the National Archives.
Peter Navarro, a top trade official in the Trump administration, was photographed by a Reuters journalist leaving the White House grounds earlier this week with the image of Mr Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping,
“Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.” — Children’s saying
“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will always hurt me. Bones mend and become actually stronger in the very place they were broken and where they have knitted up; mental wounds can grind and ooze for decades and be re-opened by the quietest whisper.” — Stephen Fry
No President has ever deployed violent language against his own people in the way Donald Trump has.
Samira Sarano, Kone Foundation Senior Researcher at the Migration Institute of Finland, examined Trump’s rhetoric in the 2016 election in The Meta-violence of Trumpism, research published in the European Journal of American Studies, an open-access academic journal.
Here’s a telling passage [emphasis added]:
Rather than denouncing violence, Trump frequently praised the “passion” and “energy” of his supporters, and he even promised to pay the legal fees of supporters caught in violent altercations.At a March 4, 2016 rally, he commented on a protestor’s removal: “Try not to hurt him. If you do, I’ll defend you in court. Don’t worry about it.” At times, Trump explicitly condoned the use of violence against protestors. On February 1, 2016, he stated: “If you see someone getting ready to throw tomatoes knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously. OK. Just knock the hell… I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees.” Though Trump himself wished he could “punch [a protestor] in the face,” he recognized that such tactics were unpopular: “Part of the problem and part of the reason it takes so long [to remove protestors] is that nobody wants to hurt each other anymore.” Trump praised violent action against protestors: “I love the old days, you know? You know what I hate? There’s a guy totally disruptive, throwing punches. We’re not allowed to punch back anymore. I love the old days. You know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They’d be carried out on a stretcher, folks.”
Donald Trump: Aggressive Rhetoric and Political Violence, a more recent study, published in October in the journal Perspectives on Terrorism, was authored by two Columbia University scholars, political scientist and journalist Brigitte L. Nacosis and Wallace S. Sayre Professor of Government and International and Public Affairs Robert Y. Shapiro, and Yaeli Bloch-Elkonis Senior Lecturer/Assistant Professor of Communications and Political Science at Bar Ilan University.
Here’s one key excerpt [emphasis added]:
Examining whether correlations existed between counties that were venues of Donald Trump’s 275 campaign rallies in 2016 and subsequent hate crimes, three political scientists found that “counties that had hosted a 2016 Trump campaign rally saw a 226 percent increase in reported hate crimes over comparable counties that did not host such a rally.” While cautioning that this “analysis cannot be certain it was Trump’s campaign rally rhetoric that caused people to commit more crime in the host county,” the researchers also found it “hard to discount a ‘Trump effect’ since data of the Anti-Defamation League showed “a considerable number of these reported hate crimes referenced Trump.” Moreover, investigative reporting identified 41 cases of domestic terrorism/hate crimes or threats thereof, in which the perpetrators invoked Trump favorably in manifestos, social media posts, police interrogations, or court documents. Almost all of this violence was committed by White males against minorities or politicians singled out frequently by Trump for rhetorical attacks, and journalists. The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker recorded a total of 202 attacks on U.S. journalists from 2017, Trump’s first year in office, through mid-2020.
Trumpspeak and the assault on the Capitol
And now another study parses Trump’s speeches in the lead-up to and in the aftermath of 6 January insurrection at the nation’s Capitol.
Two scholars from the University of Memphis, Roger J. Kreuz, Associate Dean and Professor of Psychology, University of Memphis, and Leah Cathryn Windsor, Research Assistant Professor, parse presidential speech in a report for The Conversation, the open access, plain language academic journal:
How Trump’s language shifted in the weeks leading up to the Capitol riot – 2 linguists explain
On Jan. 6, the world witnessed how language can incite violence.
One after another, a series of speakers at the “Save America” rally at the Ellipse in Washington redoubled the messages of anger and outrage.
This rhetoric culminated with a directive by the president to go to the Capitol building to embolden Republicans in Congress to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
“Fight like hell,” President Donald Trump implored his supporters. “And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
Starting with a speech he made on Dec. 2 – in which he made his case for election fraud – we analyzed six public addresses Trump made before and after the riot at the Capitol building. The others were the campaign rally ahead of the runoff elections in Georgia, the speech he made at the “Save America” rally on Jan. 6, the videotaped message that aired later that same day, his denouncement of the violence on Jan. 7 and his speech en route to Texas on Jan. 12.
Together, they reveal how the president’s language escalated in intensity in the weeks and days leading up to the riots.
Finding patterns in language
Textual analysis – converting words into numbers that can be analyzed as data – can identify patterns in the types of words people use, including their syntax, semantics and vocabulary choice. Linguistic analysis can reveal latent trends in the speaker’s psychological, emotional and physical states beneath the surface of what’s being heard or read.
This sort of analysis has led to a number of discoveries.
Textual analysis continues to offer fresh political insights, such as its use to advance the theory that social media posts attributed to QAnon are actually written by two different people.
The ‘official’ sounding Trump
Contrary to popular thinking, Trump does not universally use inflammatory rhetoric. While he is well known for his unique speaking style and his once-frequent social media posts, in official settings his language has been quite similar to that of other presidents.
Researchers have noted how people routinely alter their speaking and writing depending on whether a setting is formal or informal. In formal venues, like the State of the Union speeches, textual analysis has found Trump to use language in ways that echo his predecessors.
In addition, a recent study analyzed 10,000 words from Trump’s and President-elect Joe Biden’s campaign speeches. It concluded – perhaps surprisingly – that Trump and Biden’s language was similar.
Both men used ample emotional language – the kind that aims to persuade people to vote – at roughly the same rates. They also used comparable rates of positive language, as well as language related to trust, anticipation and surprise. One possible reason for this could be the audience, and the persuasive and evocative nature of campaign speeches themselves, rather than individual differences between speakers.
After studying Trump’s speeches before the storming of the Capitol building, we found some underlying patterns. If it seemed there was a growing sense of momentum and action in his speeches, it’s because there was.
Donald Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric may be his biggest gift to the new far-Right media channels his words have spawned.
By granting them access to his press conferences, endlessly tweets linked to their coverage, and his feud with Fox News, he has shoveled millions into the pockets of professional propagandists by vastly expanding their audiences.
According to Nielsen television-viewing figures shared with Press Gazette by Newsmax, its total audience reach grew from 9m in July 2020 to 24.3m during election month. In addition to these figures, Newsmax said it recorded 115m online streams on its free over-the-top (OTT) channel in November – a 511% increase on the previous month.
Newsmax said that December was its highest-rated month ever, and that the first week of January – a period that included the 6 January pro-Trump protests-turned-riots in Washington – set new prime-time records, although it did not provide specific figures.
The news group also says its app, Newsmax TV, has been downloaded 4.3m times since election day.
According to online analytics firm SimilarWeb, Newsmax.com attracted 63m visits in November – up from 15m in October. In December, it fell only slightly to 62m.
It was a similar story for Thegatewaypundit.com, which saw its traffic jump from 29m to 57m between October and November before dropping slightly to 56m in December.
One America News Network’s website traffic jumped from 6.5m in October to 18.4m in November and fell slightly to 17.6m last month.
Cultural Civil War 2.0
Communities are based on narratives, stories that shape and fine our identity.
We have personal narratives, family narratives, group narratives, and larger meta-narratives.
Back in the 1950’s during my childhood, the shapers of metanarratives were schools, churches, vlubs and other social organizations, and the news media, primarily community newspapers and radio at the time [television came later].
The news media focused on the community, covering politics, police news, clubs, schools sports, and other community activities, and newspapers covered community events in far greater depth than they do today, in part because of classified ad revenues [long since migrated to eBay and other online media] and the advertising dollars spent by locally owned and operated newspapers and radio stations [all local radio had news staff back then, unlike today].
But with the onset of the Internet, everything change, and far more sensationalistic.
On one level, news media became delocalized and politicized. But more critically, this meany that next-door neighbors no longer shared a common stream of information. Instead, each of us is presented, thanks to the targeting tools of the online media giants, with a news stream that contains little or nothing of the “news” consumed by out neighbors.
One indication of this stream of parallel news universes can be seen in a new study of online news media from the Pew Research center:
About half of U.S. adults (53%) say they get news from social media “often” or “sometimes,” and this use is spread out across a number of different sites, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted Aug. 31-Sept. 7, 2020.
Among 11 social media sites asked about as a regular source of news, Facebook sits at the top, with about a third (36%) of Americans getting news there regularly. YouTube comes next, with 23% of U.S. adults regularly getting news there. Twitter serves as a regular news source for 15% of U.S. adults.
Other social media sites are less likely to be regular news sources. About one-in-ten Americans or fewer report regularly getting news on Instagram (11%), Reddit (6%), Snapchat (4%), LinkedIn (4%), TikTok (3%), WhatsApp (3%), Tumblr (1%) and Twitch (1%).
These lower percentages for news use are in some cases related to the fact that fewer Americans report using them at all, compared with the shares who use Facebook and YouTube. If we consider news users as a portion of a site’s overall user base, some sites stand out as being more “newsy” even if their total audience is relatively small. Twitter, for example, is used by 25% of U.S. adults, but over half of those users get news on the site regularly. And 42% of Reddit users get news regularly on the site, though it overall has a very small user base (15% of U.S. adults say they use Reddit). On the other hand, YouTube, though widely used, sees a smaller portion of its users turning to the site for news regularly (32%).
Two charts illustrate the nature of the online mediascape.
The first graphic shows where folks seek out their news online:
The second, and more fascinating chart reveals how much we actually trust the content to the online news we peruse:
More form the report:
Most Americans do not say news on social media has helped them better understand current events. The largest segment, 47%, says it doesn’t make much of a difference, while 29% say that it has helped their understanding and 23% say it has actually left them more confused. This largely reflects responses to similar questions in 2018 and 2019, when a minority said that social media news helped them better understand current events.
Such is where we are, living in a world where the tools that once brought communities together now serve to divide us.
“I’m pickin’ up good vibrations,” sang the Beach Boys, and they may have been more right than they knew.
Except for the fact that those vibrations are happening their own heads, and in different parts of the brain at the same time, and new research reveals that those vibrations may be the way different brain regions communicate with each other.
By our lights this is one of the most fascinating discoveries we’re read about in a long time, and the implications may be profound.
A new means of neuronal communication discovered in the human brain
In a new study published in Nature Communications [open access], research groups of Professor J. Matias Palva and Research Director Satu Palva at the Neuroscience Centre of the University of Helsinki and Aalto University, in collaboration with the University of Glasgow and the University of Genoa, have identified a novel coupling mechanism linking neuronal networks by using human intracerebral recordings.
Neuronal oscillations are an essential part of the functioning of the human brain. They regulate the communication between neural networks and the processing of information carried out by the brain by pacing neuronal groups and synchronising brain regions.
High-frequency oscillations with frequencies over 100 Hertz are known to indicate the activity of small neuronal populations. However, up to now, they have been considered to be exclusively a local phenomenon.
The findings of the European research project demonstrate that also high-frequency oscillations over 100 Hertz synchronize across several brain regions. This important finding reveals that strictly-timed communication between brain regions can be achieved by high-frequency oscillations.
The researchers observed that high-frequency oscillations were synchronised between neuronal groups with a similar architecture of brain structures across subjects, but occurring in individual frequency bands. Carrying out a visual task resulted in the synchronisation of high-frequency oscillations in the specific brain regions responsible for the task execution.
These observations suggest that high-frequency oscillations convey within the brain ‘information packages’ from one small neuronal group to another.
The discovery of high-frequency oscillations synchronised between brain regions is the first evidence of the transmission and reception of such information packages in a context broader than individual locations in the brain. The finding also helps to understand how the healthy brain processes information and how this processing is altered in brain diseases.
The dreaded post-Christmas spike in coronavirus cases appears to be materializing in Los Angeles County, with a new rise in cases as hospitals are already in crisis from the Thanksgiving surge.
Los Angeles County posted its third highest single-day total for coronavirus cases on New Year’s Day, reporting 19,063 cases, and an additional 16,603 cases on Saturday, its fifth-highest tally on Saturday, according to an independent Times tally of local health jurisdictions. That means that over the last three days, there has been an average of more than 16,000 new coronavirus cases a day reported in the county — one of the highest such tallies on record.
Saturday’s tally pushed L.A. County’s cumulative number of coronavirus cases past 800,000. In a sign of how rapidly the coronavirus is spreading, more than 400,000 of those infections were reported since Dec. 1.
“This is the fastest acceleration of new cases than at any other time during the pandemic,” the L.A. County Department of Public Health said.
Longtime broadcaster Larry King, 87, is among the 806,210 people who have been infected with the disease, officials said Saturday. The 87-year-old former CNN host is hospitalized at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, according to reports.
Such cases have doubled in just over a month — the fastest rise of new infections throughout the pandemic’s 10-month siege.
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“Our deepest condolences go out to the many families mourning a loved one who passed away from COVID-19 and you remain in our thoughts as we begin this new year,” she said in an all-too tragically familiar Saturday statement. “The strategy for stopping the surge is fairly straightforward. When people stay away from other people, the virus cannot spread as it is doing now.”
With their ICU capacities at zero, local hospitals facing overtaxed oxygen systems for their most ill patients began getting some aid Saturday as expert teams from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers arrived.
With an unprecedented demand on again hospitals because of COVID-19, the facilities were struggling to maintain oxygen pressure while treating a huge surge patients with respiratory issues. Complicating the concern: Hospitals were facing shortages in oxygen tanks to send home with discharged patients.
Hospitals are war zones
A second Los Angeles Times story looked at the impacts on hospitals:
Many Californians spent New Year’s Eve in a safe place with immediate family. Dr. Nick Kwan, the assistant medical director of emergency services at Alhambra Hospital in Los Angeles County, spent it with a COVID-19 patient who went into code blue — cardiac or respiratory arrest — five separate times.
Code blue requires the medical staff to summon a quick and intense response to resuscitate the patient.
“It’s mentally, physically and emotionally draining,” said Kwan, who struggled to articulate the toll that a monthlong surge of COVID-19 patients is placing on his and other hospitals across Los Angeles County.
“This is a full-on Category 10. … It’s literally World War III,” he said.
“It’s not the volume of patients,” he said. “It’s the intensity and sickness of the patients. I’ve never thought some of these numbers are compatible with life, with patients coming in sicker than you can imagine.”
Deputies arrested dozens of people after shutting down five New Year’s Eve “super-spreader” parties across Los Angeles County, and also confiscated seven handguns, officials said Friday, Jan. 1.
Two of the gatherings happened in Los Angeles, Los Angeles sheriff’s officials said in a news release. The others took place in Hawthorne, Pomona and Malibu. The venues included rented homes, vacant warehouses, hotels and shuttered businesses.
A total of 90 people were cited for violations of the county’s Safer At Home order, officials said. More than 900 people were warned and reminded of the latest precautions to stem the spread of COVID-19.
More than 1,000 vehicles with thousands of Trump supporters caravanned New Year’s Day, Friday, Jan. 1, along the famed Rose Parade route on Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena.
Cars, trucks, SUVs and some older military vehicles were decorated with Make America Great Again signs, Old Glory and “Don’t Tread on Me” flags. Some were covered with roses. The group included various ages, from young children to senior citizens. Those in the caravan were honking loudly, playing the national anthem and “Proud to Be an American” by Lee Greenwood.
<snip>
By late afternoon, nearly three hours after it started, the procession was still jamming the boulevard, with police keeping an eye on things and the sparsely populated street’s onlookers taking it in. Also taking it in were joggers, cyclists and spectators who saw the large gathering at the Rose Bowl.
And such is Los Angeles, a city where hospitals are hellholes and deniers party in the streets.
They also tell pollsters they’re more convinced than other generations that White racism is the main factor in holding back the progress of Black Americans.
But a new survey reveals that while they make talk liberal, when it comes to some of their actual actions, that supposed enlightenment may be less than it appears.
Are millennials really as ‘post-racial’ as we think?
In attitude, millennials might be the least racially biased demographic in America, according to existing data about this this group. But a new study led by UCLA professor of sociology S. Michael Gaddis reveals that when it comes to actions — like judging who would make a good roommate — millennials still show strong racial bias and anti-Blackness.
American millennials — those between the ages of 24 and 39 — are more racially and ethnically diverse than any other demographic and have higher levels of education. Multiple surveys have found that these individuals typically respond to questions about their beliefs, hypothetical actions and attitudes about race in ways that have been deemed “post-racial,” or more accepting and progressive than previous generations.
Gaddis and co-author Raj Ghoshal of Elon University decided to test whether that body of evidence translated into how millennials behaved when making real-world decisions, like who to accept as a roommate.
For this experimental study, published in the open-access journal Socius, researchers responded to real Craigslist ads posted by millennials looking for roommates in Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia. The team used specific names that signaled the racial background of the room seeker, whether Asian, Black, Hispanic or white, and tracked responses to 4,000 email inquiries about the ads.
They found likely discrimination — in the form of fewer responses to their queries — against Asian, Hispanic and Black room seekers, even though each query about the open room included the same information on job and college-degree status. The only variable was the name of the applicants.
While queries from white-sounding names got the most responses, emails from Black-sounding names received the fewest.
“Essentially, when it comes to many racial issues, we cannot just ask people what they think and trust that their response is truthful,” Gaddis said. “Researchers must use a specific type of field experiment that requires us to engage in deception by pretending to be someone we’re not — for example, a Black room seeker — and examine how people react when they don’t know they are being watched.”
The Craigslist ads themselves provided a lot of information on the age, gender and socioeconomic status of the posters, though not definitive details on each poster’s race. Although Gaddis and his team presume many of these posters were white, it’s likely that other racial or ethnic groups were engaging in discrimination as well.
Rates of response to people with Asian or Hispanic names showed the most variation, depending on the first names that were used, the researchers found.
“Queries that used more ‘Americanized’ versions of first names, paired with a last name that implied Hispanic or Asian background got more responses than those with more typical-sounding Hispanic or Asian first names,” Gaddis said. “We think that probably comes across as a signal of assimilation.”
To select names for the made-up room seekers, Gaddis relied on a data-driven approach that uses names and information on race from real birth records and tests individuals’ perceptions of race from those names. He has previously explored how names that give a clue to race have an impact on the success of job seekers and college applicants.
Lt. Gen Michael Flynn as depicted by the Lynchburg Virginia News & Advance 19 Feb. 2017, six days after he was forced to quit as Donald Trump’s National Security Council after his pre-election contacts with the Russians were revealed.
Recently pardoned Michael Flynn, the former general who had to resign after 22 days as Donald Trump’s first National Security Advisor because of those Russia lies, has jumped aboard the QAnon bandwagon, peddling hats and T-shirts to the faithful.
Former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn is going all in on the QAnon conspiracy theory, promoting an online store to sell QAnon hats and T-shirts, the proceeds of which will benefit his partnership with a prominent QAnon booster.
Flynn’s drawn-out legal battle with Special Counsel Robert Mueller turned him into a hero for QAnon believers. Many QAnon supporters, who rely on mysterious online clues to construct a worldview where the Democratic Party and other institutions are controlled by a cabal of pedophile-cannibals, claim that Flynn is “Q”, the anonymous figure behind the conspiracy theory. They also took a previously obscure Flynn quote about the American military’s “digital soldiers” as their banner, adopting the phrase to refer to QAnon believers themselves.
Flynn started to more aggressively court his QAnon fans this year, taking the “QAnon oath” in July and appearing on QAnon podcasts after receiving a pardon in November. Along the way, Flynn once again became an adviser to Trump, reportedly urging the president to impose martial law in a recent, heated Oval Office meeting.
Flynn aligned himself even further with QAnon on Tuesday, endorsing a T-shirt website called “Shirt Show USA” that sells QAnon gear and other “official” Flynn-themed merchandise. The website’s offerings include camo trucker hats, T-shirts, and sweatshirts with the phrase “WWG1WGA,” a reference to the central QAnon motto, “Where we go one, we go all.”
From National Security Advisor to wingnut pitchman, the arc of success in Trumpian times.
Considering our previous story, we thought we’d repost a favorite item from several years ago, a case of anti-drug propaganda that turned on its funders.
Consider, for example, this 1971 piece of federally produced propaganda created to teach grade-schoolers about the evils of drugs by associating specific drugs with characters from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — a tale filled with hidden meanings familiar to its target audience in large part thanks to a version sanitized through the medium of a Walt Disney film.
This drug abuse educational film portrays an animated fantasy based upon the characters in “Alice in Wonderland.” The film shows Alice as she toured a strange land where everyone had chosen to use drugs, forcing Alice to ponder whether drugs were the right choice for her. The “Mad Hatter” character represents Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD), the “Dormouse” represents sleeping pills, and the “King of Hearts” represents heroin. Ultimately, Alice concluded that drug abuse is senseless.
Audrey Amidon of the National Archives writes of the film:
When I first saw a beat-up, faded print of Curious Alice, it was clear that whatever anti-drug sentiment the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) was trying to convey, it just wasn’t working.
In Curious Alice (1971), a film intended for eight to ten year olds, our young Alice falls asleep while reading a book. She encounters cigarettes, liquor, and medicines, and realizes that they are all types of drugs. When she sees the “Drink Me” bottle, she understands that it contains something like a drug, yet after a half-second’s consideration, she drinks the entire bottle and enters a fantasy world. In Drug Wonderland, Alice learns about the hard stuff from her new friends the Mad Hatter (LSD), the March Hare (amphetamines), the Dormouse (barbiturates), and the King of Hearts (heroin). The events of Curious Alice play out as an expression of Alice’s drug trip. Unfortunately, the trip is kind of fun and effectively cancels out the film’s anti-drug message.
The psychedelic Monty Python-style animation in Wonderland is one of the best things about Curious Alice. It’s also one of the biggest reasons that the film is an overall misfire. If one listens closely, Alice is saying plenty about why drugs are bad, but the imagery is so mesmerizing that it’s hard to pay attention to the film’s message. Further, the drug users are cartoon characters with no connection to real people or real drug problems. Why take the March Hare’s drug problem seriously when you know that Wile E. Coyote falls off a cliff and is always back for the next gag?
The film was directed by Dave Dixon for the U.S. Office of Education of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare and stars Elizabeth Jones, a remarkably talented young woman in what appears to have been her only professional role, in what was apparently her first and only appearance on the silver screen.
As the Lewis Carroll Society of North America notes, “The animation and voice work are really quite good. . .almost too good! Looking back now at this clip, the girl’s bouffant hair, and (ahem) eye shadow, is pretty trippy, too.”
Indeed, esnl is reminded of a song. . .this song, played live at Woodstock:
One psychedelic experience may lessen trauma of racial injustice
A single positive experience on a psychedelic drug may help reduce stress, depression and anxiety symptoms in Black, Indigenous and people of color whose encounters with racism have had lasting harm, a new study suggests.
The participants in the retrospective study reported that their trauma-related symptoms linked to racist acts were lowered in the 30 days after an experience with either psilocybin (Magic Mushrooms), LSD or MDMA (Ecstasy).
“Their experience with psychedelic drugs was so powerful that they could recall and report on changes in symptoms from racial trauma that they had experienced in their lives, and they remembered it having a significant reduction in their mental health problems afterward,” said Alan Davis, co-lead author of the study and an assistant professor of social work at The Ohio State University.
Overall, the study also showed that the more intensely spiritual and insightful the psychedelic experience was, the more significant the recalled decreases in trauma-related symptoms were.
A growing body of research has suggested psychedelics have a place in therapy, especially when administered in a controlled setting. What previous mental health research has generally lacked, Davis noted, is a focus on people of color and on treatment that could specifically address the trauma of chronic exposure to racism.
Davis partnered with co-lead author Monnica Williams, Canada Research Chair in Mental Health Disparities at the University of Ottawa, to conduct the research.
“Currently, there are no empirically supported treatments specifically for racial trauma. This study shows that psychedelics can be an important avenue for healing,” Williams said.
The researchers recruited participants in the United States and Canada using Qualtrics survey research panels, assembling a sample of 313 people who reported they had taken a dose of a psychedelic drug in the past that they believed contributed to “relief from the challenging effects of racial discrimination.” The sample comprised adults who identified as Black, Asian, Hispanic, Native American/Indigenous Canadian, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander.
A man in California has been accused of attempting to murder his brother-in-law, while wearing a rubberised mask resembling Donald Trump, a Santa Claus hat and a long curly white beard.
In a statement on Saturday, the Rohnert Park Department of Public Safety in California said that officers had arrested Gerald Jacinth, 75, on suspicion of attempted murder, after he shot his brother-in-law, 77, twice outside his home earlier that day.
The authorities confirmed that the victim, who has not been named, is recovering in hospital from the “serious non-life-threatening injuries” sustained in the attack.
The department said that the incident, which took place in Rohnert Park, California, occurred when Mr Jacinth approached his brother-in-law with a duffel bag and a separate package at around 11.30am on Saturday.
“He had parked his black Dodge car across the street from the victim’s house wearing an over the head mask resembling Donald Trump, white long curly beard and a Santa hat as he made his way up the driveway,” the Rohnert Park authorities said in the statement.
Clearly a case of not guilty by reason of in-Santa-ty.
But for fans of UFOs, there’ are extra reasons to celebrate.
I should note here that I’ve seen mysterious flying lights twice in myseven-and-a-half decades on earth. One, I later learned, was a bolide, but the second remains a mystery, a brilliant light that appeared high over the Rocky Mountain foothills near Fort Collins, Colorado, when I was 12. The light then plunged earthward several thousand feet [judging by visual reference points], then abruptly stopped, hovering for a few seconds before moving like a pendulum over an arc of about 20 degrees, stop[ed again, then tore off in a straight line in a southerly direction before fading out of sight. Six decades later, I still have no idea what I and my father saw that summer night.
But I’m a UFO agnostic in the sense that I have no idea what I saw, and many of the other “sightings” have turned out to have mundane causes.
Still, as a journalist, I’ve met plenty of reasonable people who’ve seen things they cant’t explain.
This year’s seen a bumper crop of UFO and the emergence of some believers, as well as the usual craziness.
The year of COVID-19 has also been a banner year for UFOs. Sightings worldwide grew by 42 per cent between January and September compared with last year. The picture in Canada is similar: The Mutual UFO Network, for instance, logged 276 Canadian reports between January and September – a 29-per-cent increase.
The Big Apple has seen a Big Spike, reports the New York Post:
UFO sightings across the city are up 31% from last year — 46, compared with 35 — and an eye-popping 283% from 2018’s measly dozen, according to the National UFO Reporting Center.
Brooklyn is tops in tin-foil hatters, with 12 close encounters. Not far behind are Manhattan with 11 and Queens with 10. Staten Islanders claim just eight — despite the borough’s rep for not social distancing. The Bronx is even more grounded, chalking up a mere five.
Two of the more memorable intergalactic incidents happened in the summertime, on Staten Island and in the Bronx.
Japan’s air force has never spotted a UFO, but the country’s top government spokesman said Tuesday he “definitely” believes they exist.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Nobutaka Machimura was speaking to reporters in response to demands lodged by an opposition lawmaker for an inquiry into “frequent reports of UFO sightings.”
The government said in an official reply that it had “not confirmed sightings of unidentified flying objects believed to be from outer space.”
Still, “I definitely believe they exist,” Machimura said as reporters erupted in laughter.
And Israel’s former space defense boss agrees [says Trump does too]
A former Israeli space security chief has sent eyebrows shooting heavenward by saying that earthlings have been in contact with extraterrestrials from a “galactic federation.”
“The Unidentified Flying Objects have asked not to publish that they are here, humanity is not ready yet,” Haim Eshed, former head of Israel’s Defense Ministry’s space directorate, told Israel’s Yediot Aharonot newspaper. The interview in Hebrew ran on Friday, and gained traction after parts were published in English by the Jerusalem Post on Tuesday.
A respected professor and retired general, Eshed said the aliens were equally curious about humanity and were seeking to understand “the fabric of the universe.”
According to Eshed, aliens from an organization called the Galactic Federation have been in touch with the governments of the U.S. and Israel. Understandably, the aliens wanted to keep a low profile.
“The UFOs have asked not to publish that they are here,” Eshed said, “humanity is not ready yet.”
“Trump was on the verge of revealing,” Eshed said, “but the aliens in the Galactic Federation are saying: ‘Wait, let people calm down first.’ They don’t want to start mass hysteria. They want to first make us sane and understanding.”
According to Eshed, aliens struck a deal with the U.S. government to do experiments on Earth. Eshed also claimed that aliens and American astronauts were working together at a secret underground base on Mars.
No one can say for certain what UFOs actually are, but a former director of the CIA said some of the recently unexplained phenomenon “might … constitute a different form of life.”
Speaking on a podcast with American economist Tyler Cowen, John Brennan said that while he did not know what the phenomenon was exactly, “It’s a bit presumptuous and arrogant for us to believe that there’s no other form of life anywhere in the entire universe.”
“… I think some of the phenomena we’re going to be seeing continues to be unexplained and might, in fact, be some type of phenomenon that is the result of something that we don’t yet understand and that could involve some type of activity that some might say constitutes a different form of life,” Brennan said, according to a transcript of the podcast.
Nick Pope, a former employee and UFO investigator for Britain’s Ministry of Defense, said Brennan’s comments are “intriguing,” given his former position.
“When I first heard the interview I thought he was going to play it safe, and his mention of weather phenomena reinforced that view,” Pope told Fox News via email. “But for him then to start speculating about something people ‘might say constitutes a different form of life’ was extraordinary. While it may have been a slip of the tongue and an inadvertent muddling of tenses, I was also fascinated to hear him mention not just the previous U.S. Navy UFO sightings, but ‘some of the phenomena we’re going to be seeing’, as if he was talking about future events.”
And the retired Senator who represented Area 51 is a true neliever
That would be former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who represented Nevada, home to Area 51.
Former senate majority leader Harry Reid has announced he believes in extraterrestrial life, maintaining the government should be doing more to research Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs).
“And I think that we as human beings have to be a little short-sighted if we think we’re the only species in the entire universe. In the entire universe there is for sure more than one [species].”
The former Senator developed two Pentagon programmes designed to look for and study UFOs, unidentified aerial phenomena, and advanced propulsion technologies.
Is coronavirus a visitor from beyond?
But arriving aboard a meteor, not from a spaceship, according to a new study from some very reputable authors and published in the scientific journal Advances in Genetics.
It’s almost a year into the Covid-19 pandemic and yet, the source of the virus is yet to be confirmed. Some say it was “developed” at China’s Wuhan lab, while some have argued that it’s a bat-borne virus. But here’s a strange theory that suggests the coronavirus, which has claimed millions of lives, in fact, dropped from space, landing on Earth on a meteorite.
A study published in July this year hypothesized that the virus came from space and had reached Earth on a space rock or a meteor. The researchers said, “…It [the outbreak] actually looks like a huge viral bomb explosion took place near or over Wuhan”.
Emphasising on the unique coronavirus-origin theory, the study explained an “alternate hypothesis” that Covid-19 arrived on a space rock — “via a meteorite, a presumed relatively fragile and loose carbonaceous meteorite” — which was struck North-East China on October 11, 2019.
The paper proposes that coronavirus isn’t the only alien suspect. The authors also note the mysterious appearance of a new a potentially lethal infectious yeast yeast infection as a second suspected alien invader.
Pentagon releases UFO videos
For serious UFO buffs, the big news came in April, when the Pentagon release pilot vidoes show of mysterious flying object.
The Department of Defense confirmed what seekers of extraterrestrial life have long hoped to be true: They’re real.
At least, these three videos are. What the videos show? The government isn’t so sure there.
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The videos, captured by naval aviators, show objects hurtling through the sky, one rotating against the wind, and pilots can be heard expressing confusion and awe.
<snip>
The Pentagon has never made any assertion about what exactly is going on in the videos, recorded in late 2004 and early 2015 over the Pacific and off the East Coast. “The Navy has confirmed that the three videos that are in wide circulation are indeed recordings made by naval aviators,” Susan Gough, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said last year. “The Navy has always considered the phenomena observed in those videos as unidentified.”
The agency stood by that characterization on Monday. It added that, “after a thorough review,” it had determined the videos did not reveal “any sensitive capabilities or systems,” and did not “impinge on any subsequent investigations of military air space incursions by unidentified aerial phenomena.”
Writing for Scientific American, astrophysicist Katie Mack threw a dash of cold water on ufologist euphoria:
I don’t think it’s completely impossible that hyperadvanced aliens could come to visit us on Earth—being careful for some reason to first evade every sky-monitoring system we have, and leaving no observable trace other than the confusion of a handful of Navy pilots.
I do think it’s incredibly unlikely, and I think when starting with only a few grainy hard-to-interpret videos, the jump to aliens is so extreme that it would take something much more compelling than what anyone has seen so far to get me to even begin to walk down that road. Even if I wanted to spend the time to dig up Navy aircraft camera manuals and work out the flight geometry, my reward would likely be a long and tedious debate with a dedicated audience spanning the spectrum from those who think UFOs are a fun idea to people dedicated to proving they’re real.
And, to conclude, the videos themselves, via CNBC:
Program notes:
The declassification of the videos late Monday was to “clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that has been circulating was real,” the Pentagon said in a statement Monday.
The footage, which shows unidentified objects flying at high speeds in the Earth’s atmosphere along with audio of Navy pilots expressing shock and awe, was initially leaked in 2007 and 2017. The U.S. Navy formalized a reporting process last year for pilots to report incidents of UFO sightings.
The Department of Defense released three videos taken by U.S. Navy pilots revealing mysterious flying objects that to this day remain unidentified. The declassification of the videos late Monday, one of which was taken in 2004 and the subsequent two taken in 2015, was meant to “clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that has been circulating was real, or whether or not there is more to the videos,” the Pentagon said in a statement Monday. The footage, which shows unidentified objects flying at high speeds in the Earth’s atmosphere along with audio of Navy pilots expressing shock and awe, was initially leaked in 2007 and 2017. The videos were taken during training flights and the 2017 leaks were published by the New York Times.
“The U.S. Navy previously acknowledged that these videos circulating in the public domain were indeed Navy videos,” the Pentagon’s statement read. “After a thorough review, the department has determined that the authorized release of these unclassified videos does not reveal any sensitive capabilities or systems, and does not impinge on any subsequent investigations of military air space incursions by unidentified aerial phenomena.” “The aerial phenomena observed in the videos remain characterized as ‘unidentified’,” it said.
Most people with with children taking their school lessons over a screen rather than in a classroom, is finding life much changed, and feelings of anxiety, depression, and sleeplessness are rife.
But if the children are having trouble with “distance learning,” the parents are much more troubled, as a new study from the journal of the American Educational Research Association makes abundantly clear:
More from the AERA:
When the emerging COVID-19 pandemic caused most U.S. schools to close and transition to distance learning last spring, many parents were forced into new roles as proxy educators for their children. A study published today in Educational Researcher, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association, finds that roughly 51 percent of all parents surveyed in March and April had at least one child struggling with distance learning and were themselves experiencing significantly higher levels of stress.
The study authors found that parents with at least one student struggling with distance learning were 19 percentage points more likely than other parents to report anxiety. These parents also were 22 percentage points more likely to experience depression, and were 20 percentage points more likely to have trouble sleeping. In addition, they were 20 percentage points more likely to feel worried and 23 percentage points more likely to have little interest or pleasure in doing things. The results of the analysis remain consistent even after accounting for other school and demographic characteristics.
The study found that these levels of heightened mental distress were felt by parents across all socioeconomic categories, regardless of family income, the number of children struggling (above one), or the number of days that had passed since school closure.
For this study, authors Cassandra R. Davis (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Jevay Grooms (Howard University), Alberto Ortega (Indiana University Bloomington), Joaquin Alfredo-Angel Rubalcaba (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), and Edward Vargas (Arizona State University) analyzed data from the National Panel Study of COVID-19, a nationally representative survey of 3,338 U.S. households collected in March and April. The multi-wave survey was conducted by the authors in collaboration with researchers across multiple U.S. universities.
“Students’ academic success ultimately relies on their parents’ emotional health during this fragile time, which sets the learning environment for their children,” said Ortega, an assistant professor at Indiana University Bloomington. “Without proper support, both parents and students will likely suffer.”
Prior research has shown that stressful learning environments tend to stifle students’ academic achievement.
The authors don’t support reopening schools until public health officers say it’s safe “Instead, schools and policymakers may want to create plans for providing mental health resources and virtual spaces to parents, in addition to helping them with questions about the schoolwork itself,” Ortega said. “And it is crucial for parents to be open about their needs and to communicate with their schools when they need additional help.”
eats shoots 'n leaves 
