99 Percent Invisible: Bundyville

By his own account, Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy never wanted to start a war with the federal government. To hear him tell the story, he is a folksy, rural Nevada rancher trying to eke out a living on a piece of land near Bunkerville. But in 2014, on the same piece of land Bundy claims is so peaceful, armed militias showed up and pointed guns at Bureau of Land Management agents who had come to round up his cattle because of Bundy’s unpaid grazing fees.

During the chaotic events that were broadcast on national television, Bundy took to the stage and gave a list of demands. He wanted federal parks officers to turn over their weapons to the crowd. He wanted federal buildings demolished. He wanted all public lands in Clark County, Nevada, turned over to local control. It was a stark contrast to the image Bundy paints of himself. Far from peaceful, Bundy was calling for an armed rebellion if he didn’t get his way.

And that’s essentially what happened. Militia members pointed their guns at BLM agents, and those agents backed off after being surrounded in a river wash near the ranch. Bundy got his cattle back and for years faced no consequences for his actions. He had, it seemed, beaten the federal government.

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The Atlantic: Why Trump Supporters Believe He Is Not Corrupt

The answer may lie in how Trump and his supporters define corruption. In a forthcoming book entitled How Fascism Works, the Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley makes an intriguing claim. “Corruption, to the fascist politician,” he suggests, “is really about the corruption of purity rather than of the law. Officially, the fascist politician’s denunciations of corruption sound like a denunciation of political corruption. But such talk is intended to evoke corruption in the sense of the usurpation of the traditional order.”

Fox’s decision to focus on the Iowa murder rather than Cohen’s guilty plea illustrates Stanley’s point. For many Fox viewers, I suspect, the network isn’t ignoring corruption so much as highlighting the kind that really matters. When Trump instructed Cohen to pay off women with whom he had affairs, he may have been violating the law. But he was upholding traditional gender and class hierarchies. Since time immemorial, powerful men have been cheating on their wives and using their power to evade the consequences. [...]

Why were Trump’s supporters so convinced that Clinton was the more corrupt candidate even as reporters uncovered far more damning evidence about Trump’s foundation than they did about Clinton’s? Likely because Hillary’s candidacy threatened traditional gender roles. For many Americans, female ambition—especially in service of a feminist agenda—in and of itself represents a form of corruption. “When female politicians were described as power-seeking,” noted the Yale researchers Victoria Brescoll and Tyler Okimoto in a 2010 study, “participants experienced feelings of moral outrage (i.e., contempt, anger, and/or disgust).”

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Nautilus Magazine: Beyond Sexual Orientation

As Diamond followed up every two years with the women she was studying, her hypothesis found new support. “They were moving in all possible directions,” says Diamond. In 2005, 10 years after she began her study, the pie charts continued to change, and about 67 percent of the women had changed their sexual identity labels at least once. Many self-labeled lesbians had unlabeled themselves. Most of the women who had initially preferred not to have a label had taken on the bisexual label. Some unlabeled women became lesbian, and others heterosexual. [...]

In her 2008 book Sexual Fluidity, Diamond says sexual fluidity is actually relatively common. It’s not a conclusion that everyone agrees with: Qazi Rahman, a senior lecturer of cognitive neuropsychology at King’s College London, for example, suggests that her study was too small to “tell us much about women in general.” But Charlotte Tate, a gender and sexuality psychologist at San Francisco State University, says that Diamond’s sample size is larger than the recommended sample size for qualitative research, and considers Diamond’s findings significant. “Sexual fluidity is a real phenomenon,” says Tate. “It is a part of the human experience.” [...]

If the narrative departure represented by bisexuality was discouraged, sexual fluidity—which denied the very idea of static orientation—was an even more remote afterthought, even though it had been observed in the academic literature by the late 1970s. “The notion of sexual fluidity is not a new one,” writes Diamond in Sexual Fluidity. A 1977 study of 156 bisexual male and female college students found that some had consistent patterns of attraction over time while others did not.1 The authors proposed that sexuality is not fixed at a young age, but could vary over a lifetime. A few other studies over the next decade made similar insights, underscoring the importance of time in measuring human attraction. At one point, some researchers devised a new model for quantifying sexuality that included the element of time.2 Yet the model, along with these early studies, failed to have much of an impact.

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Political Critique: Pride and Prejudice in Prague

Pride has become a commercial event. It still does a lot of good – events such as art happenings, lectures, and workshops that focus on education and showing the sexual minorities in a positive light definitely have their place in a country that prefers equality not to intrude the reality. It is easy to cheer for the tide of happy, colorful waving people, especially when their opposition consists of Catholic crackpots and neo-Nazi twits physically incapable of setting a flag on fire (quotes: “Burn, you bastard” and “Those assholes made them fireproof on purpose!”). But there is an element of protest in the march, a statement of identity: we are different, we are not ashamed of it and we deserve being treated equally, just like the rest of our society.

But what Prague Pride actually gets – as the media coverage shows – is tolerance; a rather different concept. Instead of pushing for equality, there is a sense of condescending acceptance of those weird colorful people and their quirks. Do what you want, kids, as long as it does not threaten us in any way. Again, make no mistake: this is a preferable state of events to that in other Eastern European countries; very few Czechs still feel the need to cure homosexuality through violence. The majority seems content to just pretend no political issues connected to sexual orientation exist. And while Prague Pride tried to address this, this year’s theme being familial life and labels pinned on LGBT people, the discussion somehow failed to reach past the people already involved. It’s like preaching to the choir.

This leaves the event somewhat devoid of a central message; a vacuum that many rush to fill with their own agenda. This year, two political parties – the Greens and the Pirates – took part in the events. They had their parade floats with nicely visible logos, they had their stands where politicians and volunteers handed out fliers and kept reassuring everyone of just how awesome they are. Pride by its very nature cannot be an apolitical event (if such a thing even exists) and both parties have profiled themselves as pro-LGBT, but there are time and place for scoring brownie points with potential voters and, apparently much to the surprise of our elected representatives, it might not be at an event aiming for equality.

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Deutsche Welle: Inequality - how wealth becomes power | (Poverty Richness Documentary)

Germany is one of the world’s richest countries, but inequality is on the rise. The wealthy are pulling ahead, while the poor are falling behind. [Online until: 17 September 2018]

For the middle classes, work is no longer a means of advancement. Instead, they are struggling to maintain their position and status. Young people today have less disposable income than previous generations. This documentary explores the question of inequality in Germany, providing both background analysis and statistics. The filmmakers interview leading researchers and experts on the topic. And they accompany Christoph Gröner, one of Germany’s biggest real estate developers, as he goes about his work. "If you have great wealth, you can’t fritter it away through consumption. If you throw money out the window, it comes back in through the front door,” Gröner says. The real estate developer builds multi-family residential units in cities across Germany, sells condominium apartments, and is involved in planning projects that span entire districts. "Entrepreneurs are more powerful than politicians, because we’re more independent,” Gröner concludes. Leading researchers and experts on the topic of inequality also weigh in, including Nobel-prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, economist Thomas Piketty, and Brooke Harrington, who carried out extensive field research among investors from the ranks of the international financial elite. Branko Milanović, a former lead economist at the World Bank, says that globalization is playing a role in rising inequality. The losers of globalization are the lower-middle class of affluent countries like Germany. "These people are earning the same today as 20 years ago," Milanović notes. "Just like a century ago, humankind is standing at a crossroads. Will affluent countries allow rising equality to tear apart the fabric of society? Or will they resist this trend?”

Motherboard: Researchers Built a Cat Paradise for Science

As detailed in a recent paper in the Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery, the research facility was created by University of Illinois researchers in order to study a new type of feline contraceptive that could drastically reduce feral cat populations. Although spaying and neutering cats is an effective way to control feline populations, the minor surgeries are expensive and invasive. An injectable contraceptive vaccine called GonaCon showed promise as an alternative population control mechanism in a variety of mammals, including laboratory-raised cats, but testing its effectiveness in the wild proved difficult. [...]

"Many facilities have come a long way in making research conditions more humane for the animals, but they still involve small enclosures without a lot of enrichment," said Amy Fischer, a researcher at the University of Illinois’ Department of Animal Sciences. "We wanted to make our cats' environment much more stimulating."

Of the 35 cats that live in the lab, 30 are female and all the cats were taken from local animal shelters. This in itself was a major departure from usual research protocols, which almost always use genetically identical, lab-raised cats. The hope was that this would provide better insight into the effectiveness of the vaccine as it would actually work in the wild.

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Politico: Berlin sees rise in Salafists, extreme right and radical left: report

The growing numbers in Berlin mirror a nationwide pattern that saw the number of Salafists — who espouse a hard-line interpretation of Islam, and in some cases embrace jihadist ideology — in Germany edge up to 10,800 in 2017 compared to 9,700 the previous year, according to an interior ministry report released last year.

In its report, the ministry describes Germany’s Salafism scene as “the main recruiting source for jihad” despite the fact that “political Salafists usually refrain from using violence.” It also noted that analysis of recent terror attacks in Germany and in Europe shows that “jihadist activities are very often preceded by Salafist radicalization.”

Berlin has also seen a rise in adherents of the extreme right Reich Citizens’ Movement, which advocates for a return to Germany’s pre-World War II borders and rejects the legitimacy of the modern German state. The movement counts 500 Berlin adherents, up from 400 the year before, according to the Berlin report. Roughly 100 are classified as far-right extremists.

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Politico: German foreign minister calls for revamp of EU-US ties

To “renew and preserve” the historic relationship, Germany, alongside France and its European partners, should seek a “balanced partnership” with Washington in which they “form a counterweight where the U.S. crosses red lines” and advance “where America retreats,” according to Maas.

He called on European allies to “strengthen the European pillar” of NATO — “not because Donald Trump is always setting new percentage targets [for defense spending], but because we can no longer rely on Washington to the same extent as before” — and to move forward with plans for closer security and defense cooperation among EU members. [...]

Maas also defended Europe’s efforts to legally protect its companies from U.S. sanctions linked to Iran. “It is of strategic importance that we say clearly to Washington: We want to work together. But we will not allow you to act over our heads at our expense,” he wrote.

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