11 August 2016
Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell: Genetic Engineering Will Change Everything Forever – CRISPR
Designer babies, the end of diseases, genetically modified humans that never age. Outrageous things that used to be science fiction are suddenly becoming reality. The only thing we know for sure is that things will change irreversibly.
Vox: Hillary Clinton doesn't want to abolish the Second Amendment. Here's what she DOES want to do.
But late in the 2008 Democratic primary, as then-Sen. Barack Obama was being roundly condemned for saying Rust Belt voters "cling to guns or religion," his rival Hillary Clinton joined in, saying that Obama’s comments offended her on a personal level, as she came from a family of gun owners. [...]
This time around, her stated position on the issue is clear. She wants comprehensive, universal background check legislation. She wants to repeal civil immunity for gun manufacturers. She wants to ban assault weapons, ban the severely mentally ill and domestic abusers from buying guns, and use executive powers to limit the current gun show loophole to background checks. She attacked Bernie Sanders repeatedly for being excessively pro-gun. [...]
By the 2000 race, then, Clinton had put together a very consistent and strong pro–gun control record. She didn’t call for anything out of the political mainstream, like a handgun ban. But universal licensing and registration and mandatory smart guns were about the outer limit of what Democrats could propose on guns in the late '90s and early '00s. [...]
Clinton's official plan on guns calls for universal federal background checks, closing the "Charleston loophole," wherein sales can proceed if a background check is not complete within three days, closing the gun show and internet sales loopholes, repealing civil immunity for the gun industry, making it a federal crime to buy a gun with the intent to give it to a felon, banning domestic abusers from buying and owning guns, and reviving an assault weapons ban. She also has a plan for an executive action to expand background checks and undo the gun show and internet sales loopholes slightly.
Al Jazeera: Swaziland and HIV: Redrawing what it means to be a man
"I thought a man was somebody who's got a family, somebody who's got authority, power, that kind of thing," says Lungelo Fakudze, one of the roughly 100,000 orphans in Swaziland, which is home to 1.3 million people.
It is a difficult image to break in Africa's last absolute monarchy, ruled by King Mswati III - who has 15 wives and can pick a new one yearly from thousands of virgins presented to him during an annual ceremony - and which is blighted by the world's highest rates of HIV, TB and intimate partner violence. [...]
The men also stay away from health clinics, which tend to be female-centred, where they could get a diagnosis and treatment. As a result, while more women contract HIV, more men die as a result of it.
"They believe that they should be big and strong and solitary and authoritative. Reasons you're less likely to go to the clinic and get a check-up and seek out medical services until it's too late," says Tom Churchyard, the director of the charity Kwakha Indvodza (KI), which means Building a Man. [...]
Researcher Bekhie Sithole believes that men's withdrawal from healthcare is a result of the "moralising" of HIV and the way that men have been painted as the perpetrators and women as their victims.
Quartz: There’s an awful cost to getting a PhD that no one talks about
It’s common knowledge that getting a PhD is hard. It’s meant to be. Some even say that if you’re not up all night working or skipping meals, you’re doing it wrong. But while PhD students are not so naive as to enter the program expecting an easy ride, there is a cost to the endeavor that no one talks about: a psychological one. [...]
I might not have felt so alone had I known how many people struggle with mental health issues in academia. A 2015 study at the University of California Berkeley found that 47% of graduate students suffer from depression, following a previous 2005 study that showed 10% had contemplated suicide. A 2003 Australian study found that that the rate of mental illness in academic staff was three to four times higher than in the general population, according to a New Scientist article. The same article notes that the percentage of academics with mental illness in the United Kingdom has been estimated at 53%.
But the stiff-upper-lip attitude that pervades the ivory tower can prompt many people who struggle with mental health problems to keep their problems hidden, while others simply accept depression as par for the course. And in the often-Darwinian culture among graduate students competing for a handful of professorial jobs, too many people assume that psychological problems are only for the weak. [...]
In essence, many PhD students are so accustomed to hard work and self-discipline that they beat themselves up when their efforts to manage depression fail to generate perfect results.
Salon: Sexist Trump revolt: His nomination is a reaction to women’s growing social and economic power
Overt misogyny of this sort is rarely heard in the more official channels of political discourse. (Though not always, as Peterson made headlines in 2012 when he argued, on Fox News, that women shouldn’t have been allowed the vote.)
But, as these quotes — collected from just the past week, the tip of a misogyny iceberg — make it quite clear, when right wingers chafe against “political correctness,”it isn’t just racism that they want to express more freely. It’s misogyny, as well. [...]
While the feminist revolution has been going on for decades now, in the past decade, there’s been a quiet but profound shift of social and economic power towards women, allowing unprecedented levels of autonomy. For the first time in American history, half of American workers are women. In 64% of these families, the mother is either the primary or a co-breadwinner. In over 40% of families with children, the mother is the main breadwinner.
Even amongst traditional nuclear families, with married parents and kids at home, the shift has been dramatic. In a quarter of these homes, the wife makes more than her husband. While most couples tend to have the same educational level, it used to be that, when there was a difference, the husband had more education. But about a decade ago, that trend reversed. Now wives have more education. [...]
Instead, many men are turning to Trump, finding reassurance of their own masculinity in his cheesy bombast and gleeful disrespect of women. In a year when we’re likely to elect the first female president, provoking even more angst over men’s declining dominance, Trump’s gross misogyny has even more appeal.
The Huffington Post: 6 Things Christians Should Stop Saying To People Who Doubt
According to the center’s 2014 Religious Landscape Study, about 34 percent of American adults have participated in religious switching, meaning their current religious identity is different from the one in which they were raised.
As a whole, Christianity loses more followers than it gains through religious switching. Although 85.6 percent of American adults say they were raised as Christians, more than a fifth of that group (19.2 percent of all U.S. adults), no longer identify with Christianity. The exception to this trend is evangelical Protestantism, which actually gains more adherents through switching than it loses. [...]
For some of my friends and family, religious identity is a matter of heaven or hell. When your religion has such stark eternal consequences, it makes sense that when you see a loved one doubting, your instinct is to find a way to bring that person back into the fold as quickly as possible. But to achieve that goal, perfectly well-meaning Christians sometimes do more harm than good ― even though they may not be aware of it. [...]
At first glance, phrases like these appear to give people permission to doubt. In reality, it’s only permission to doubt in a certain way, within a specific set of boundaries. Telling someone that they can “doubt but not deny” reveals an inability to step outside of your own worldview and into a space where the very existence of God is up for debate.
CityLab: Would Germany Be Wealthier if Berlin Didn't Exist?
Before we look at why Germany’s figures skew differently, it’s worth looking more fully at the figures the report provides. They don’t, for instance, actually suggest any inherent relation between the size of a capital’s contribution to national GDP and the overall prosperity of a country. Of all capitals surveyed, it’s actually Athens that shows the greatest national dominance. If that city and its habitants were removed from national figures, then Greece’s GDP per capita would drop by 19.9 percent. The Paris region shows similar levels of national contribution: its absence would slash French per capita GDP by 15 percent. In the U.K., no London would mean a drop of 11.2 percent in per capita GDP. A Madrid-free Spain’s per capita GDP would drop by 6 percent, while even Rome—known for playing second fiddle to the economic powerhouse of the North Italian Plain—would cause Italy’s per capita GDP to drop 2.1 percent if it were removed from the country’s economy.
It’s only in Berlin that these figures appear to suggest Germany would actually be better off without it. Removing Berlin and its residents from German economic tallies would, according to the report, actually boost the country’s per capita GDP, albeit by a meager 0.2 percent. [...]
Does all that mean the city is failing to pull its weight? Not necessarily. While the cost of running Germany’s Berlin-based government are high, so are the benefits that effective government reaps—they just happen to be reaped elsewhere in Germany rather than in the city itself. Having a capital evenly split between the former eastern and western sectors has been invaluable in making reunification smoother, while Berlin’s boost to its country’s international prestige is huge. Without Berlin, Germany would likely be damned outside its borders as a boring, conservative place, a broad-brush stereotype that’s still not entirely without foundation. The rest of Germany may be contributing to keeping Berlin afloat rather than vice versa, but when you think about it, they’re still getting a pretty good deal.
CityLab: It Could Take 2 Centuries For Racial Wealth Disparities to Dissipate
That’s according to a new report by the Corporation for Enterprise Development and Institute for Policy Studies, which estimates future wealth disparities among U.S racial groups using data from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finance (SCF). The total amount of money in the average person’s pockets, or their net worth, is obtained by adding up assets like housing, bank deposits, financial securities, insurance plan values, stocks and mutual funds, and equity, and then from that sum, subtracting liabilities like mortgage, consumer, and educational debts. (This measure is based on a 2014 working paper by New York University economist Edward N. Wolff, and doesn’t take into account the value of goods like cars, electronics, and furniture.)
Using that methodology, the authors calculated the net worth of racial groups for 30 years before 2013, and then projected those trends into the future. They found that the economic rift between whites and minorities is widening dramatically: By 2043, when people of color overtake whites as the majority in the U.S. population, blacks and Latinos will likely lag even further behind them, wealth-wise, than they do now. These two minority groups will have around $1 million less than whites, on average, compared to $500,000 in 2013. [...]
If average Black family wealth continues to grow at the same pace it has over the past three decades, it would take Black families 228 years to amass the same amount of wealth White families [had in 2013]. That’s just 17 years shorter than the 245-year span of slavery in this country. For the average Latino family, it would take 84 years to amass the same amount of wealth White families [had in 2013]—that’s the year 2097.
The Washington Post: Seas aren’t just rising, scientists say — it’s worse than that. They’re speeding up.
However, scientists have long expected that the story should be even worse than this. Predictions suggest that seas should not only rise, but that the rise should accelerate, meaning that the annual rate of rise should itself increase over time. That’s because the great ice sheets, Greenland and Antarctica, should lose more and more mass, and the heat in the ocean should also increase.
The problem, or even mystery, is that scientists haven’t seen an unambiguous acceleration of sea level rise in a data record that’s considered the best for observing the problem — the one that began with the TOPEX/Poseidon satellite, which launched in late 1992 and carried an instrument, called a radar altimeter, that gives a very precise measurement of sea level around the globe. (It has since been succeeded by other satellites providing similar measurements.) [...]
In a new study in the open-access journal Scientific Reports, however, Fasullo and two colleagues say they have now resolved this problem. It turns out, they say, that sea level rise was artificially masked in the satellite record by the fact that one year before the satellite launched, the Earth experienced a major cooling pulse.
The cause? The 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, which filled the planet’s stratosphere with aerosols that reflected sunlight away from the Earth and actually led to a slight sea level fall in ensuing years as the ocean temporarily cooled.
The Atlantic: How the Baltimore Police Department Abuses African Americans
The document lays out, in often sickening detail, the many ways Baltimore police abused the law, the people they were meant to serve, the public trust, and their own brothers in arms. In the wake of the failed prosecution of six officers for the death of Freddie Gray, the report serves as a reminder that rather than an isolated crime, the Gray case was symptomatic of a force that regularly arrested people for insufficient reasons, or no reasons at all, and used excessive force against them—but particularly, and uniquely, black citizens of the city. The Justice Department makes clear that African Americans in Baltimore were targeted and abused by the police, making this report a twin to the department’s report on Ferguson, Missouri, which my colleague Conor Friedersdorf wrote indicated a “conspiracy against black citizens.” [...]
Baltimore police routinely trample on First Amendment rights, arresting “members of the public for engaging in speech the officers perceive to be critical or disrespectful.” Supervisors have encouraged “facially unconstitutional” arrests for trespassing. One shift commander emailed a template for such arrests to officers and a sergeant. [...]
Other charges seem to be reserved entirely for African Americans. Of 657 people arrested for “gaming” or playing “cards or dice,” 99 percent were black. The report drily comments, “Although we are not aware of any data tracking the precise rate at which people of different races play cards or dice, it is extremely unlikely that African Americans comprise 99 percent of those doing so.” [...]
“BPD discourages members of the public from filing complaints against officers through the procedural requirements BPD has imposed on filing complaints, and BPD officers and supervisors have actively discouraged community members from filing complaints,” the report states. If people do make it over those hurdles, “BPD investigators frequently misclassify those complaints or administratively close them with little attempt to contact the complainant.”
The Guardian: Vladimir Putin may believe time is ripe for another invasion
The new Crimea crisis has come from nowhere. Over in the east there have been daily clashes between pro-Russia rebels and Ukrainian government forces in Donestk and Luhansk, with a spike in recent weeks. But the Perekop isthmus, the rustic sliver of territory between Crimea and Ukraine’s southern Kherson province, has been quiet. There was no fighting here even in 2014, when Putin staged his land grab.
All of this leads to the suspicion, voiced by Carl Bildt, Sweden’s former prime minister and others, that Russia may be about to invade again.
When it comes to the month of August, Putin has form. His previous invasions have coincided with Olympic Games, a time when the international community is distracted or on holiday - Georgia in 2008 after Beijing, and Ukraine in 2014 (after the Winter Games in Sochi).
There are other propitious circumstances this summer. The presidential election is paralysing the US, and the Republican candidate, Donald Trump, has hinted that as president he might recognise Russia’s annexation of Crimea. He seems uncertain as to where Ukraine actually is. Europe meanwhile is in disarray in the wake of the Brexit vote and an ongoing migration crisis. [...]
At this point there seem to be three possible scenarios. One is that Putin will try to leverage this latest crisis to persuade EU countries to drop the sanctions imposed over the Ukraine conflict. Another is that he is preparing a limited military incursion, possibly to set up a security corridor, which doubtless would include the electricity station in the nearby Ukrainian city of Kherson. A third is that he is planning something bigger.
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