#i am banned listening to this podcast while driving

[qde-jiko]

Re-listening to taz balance, i miss the tres horny boys so much man

Also i thought avi was a half elf until halfway through finishing the piece, it was exhausting trying to fix 😪

[smokeybrand]

Mutiny

I’m not a fan of Joe Rogen. I find a lot of what he says to be problematic as f*ck but the way he says it, is FAR more damaging. Dude pushes some wild, dangerous, nonsense under the guise of “free speech”, disingenuous “debate”, and insidiously leading questions. Rogen is the Frat Boy version of Tucker Carlson in a lot of ways and that sh*t just doesn’t appeal to me. Beta males who think too highly of themselves listen to this due and take him seriously. These are people who are not self-actualized, who’s entire personality is based on their car or their sneakers or some other superficial bullsh*t they confuse for a personality, and that’s what Rogen’s entire show is; Superficial bullsh*t. So when he pushes dumb-f*ckery like “Don’t get the shot if you’re young and healthy”, these idiots who are either teenagers or have the mentality of teenagers, f*cking listen and we have a spike in cases. Because Joe Rogen said so.

The other day, this asshole bought into that whole “White Fear” sh*t, talking about how the Straight White Male is the most persecuted demo in America and i just groaned. This is the same exact sh*t Carlson does on his show, verbatim, just slightly less racist. It’s the current strategy of what is fast becoming the American Fascist Party, Republicans. It’s hypocritical f*cking nonsense and i hate it. How the f*ck would Joe Rogen, a Straight White Male with a whole ass podcast, be silenced or censored or persecuted/ He’s a multi-millionaire with one of the most popular platforms on f*cking Spotify. How the f*ck would any White person, especially Straight White Males, get silenced in the US? The bones of this country are built to uphold a very specific form of White Supremacy. Hell, cats talk about all these rights and liberties but, in the very beginning, those rights were only extended to White Male Landowners; basically Rich White Men, and guess who the f*ck Joe Rogen is? The constitution had to be amended to include every one else which means this country was designed to be a haven for objective White Supremacy. The fact that they replaced Straight with Rich is just a misnomer used to broaden that division and you have assholes with real audiences buying into that dangerous bullsh*t, disseminating that poison to their followers. And they just drink that persecution complex kool-aid, up. It’s f*cking absurd.

The irony in all of this is the fact that the country is getting younger and browner. Statistically, by the time Gen Z’s kids come of age, we’ll outnumber White people. The margin will be slight but they’ll be the overall minority in this country and that’s why we have all of this fear-mongering and treasonous tantrums. That system the Founding Fathers built to protect their power, is falling apart. It's all a matter of time. Why do you think they're fighting so hard to keep DC and Puerto Rico from becoming actual States? I can guarantee those cats who signed the Constitution never anticipated the influx of melanated people over the years, interbreeding with their lily White sensibilities, or the homogeneity desegregation would bring to society or the way Black culture ended up shaping the entire American zeitgeist or how the Internet just blew the doors off any illusion US citizens had about our true status in the world at large. I was born in 1984. Ten years before i existed, the South was still heavily segregated. My generation, the Millennials, were the very first to be completely free from the social consequences of the Civil Rights Movement. We were far enough removed from that to just see people, not race. I was exposed to so many more cultures, religions, and people, as a kid, than my ma had been when she was young. It wasn’t like, all of a sudden, we were singing kumbaya together, but it was definitely a start, one that has only gained more and more momentum as the Generations who came after mine, started coming of age in a world whose borders are just ceremonial at this point because of the Tech age.

I met my chick and made friends across the globe in a chatroom. One of my closest friends lives in New Zealand. Another stays in Finland. My birthday twin lives in England. She’s a year older than i am and has a beautiful family. My Puerto Rican sister met her dude around the same time i met my chick. He’s from Alabama. She moved from the island to be with him and they've settled down in Georgia where they share a beautiful daughter. My best friend became so close with an Asian girl from Australia, that he adopted her as his own sister. They spoke at least twice a week for the next fifteen years, all the way up until he passed away. The world is much smaller, much clearer, than it has ever  been before, and it turns out that it’s full of color. Color these Straight White Men are, apparently, terrified of. That’s got to be it. That’s got to be why they’re throwing these big ass tantrums and constantly fear-mongering about it. I don’t understand. When Brie Larson said what she said, it was the truth. There are THOUSANDS of films about White dudes you can watch. The entirety of film history is Straight White Males. What is so bad abut getting some chicks or People of Color or some LBGTQ representation in a few leads? Why can't we have strong Black performances in movies where we don't play the “magical Negro” or f*cking Slave? Why can't we have an all Asian cast when the principals aren't constantly fetishized? What is so terrible about giving a role to a Muslim that isn't linked to some ridiculous terrorist trope? Who’s really offended by this and why are they so goddamn fervent about it? Straight White Males, bud.

It’s because their grip on the reins is slipping. The power and the privilege they’ve had for so long, too long, is started to tip in the other direction. The playing field is, ever so slowly, evening out and these Straight White Males are losing their sh*t. They’ll talk about “being racist against white people” and “it's fine to interview everyone but hire cats who are qualified” with one breath but then absolutely savage voting rights directly focused on crippling the Black vote and desperately cling to the idea that 45 still deserves to be president, even though a steady stream of his criminal incompetence has been flowing out of the the White House since he’s left. The level cognitive dissonance is f*cking hilarious. It’s as bad as the GOP complaining about “cancel culture” while literally silencing Liz Cheney. Are you f*cking kidding me? I gotta sit here and listen to a very vocal minority complain about the direction of the MCU because they’ve decided to add a plethora of female and POC roles going forward into Phase Four. They keep asking “who's this for?” and it's obvious it's for everyone, not just Straight White Males. That, to them, means it's going to be bad. Just because the focus has shifted from three White dudes in leading roles, suddenly the MCU has lost it's way. It’s like, all of a sudden, just because the MCU wants to represent their audience as a whole, not just a narrow and shrinking part of it, we’re not supposed to trust in Feige anymore. Are you kidding me? The Green Knight is slated to be another massive hit for A24. The cat who wrote that film was bounced from studio to studio because he created that story specifically as a vehicle for Dev Patel and no major studio wanted to make it with him in the lead. Dev Patel is a f*cking Oscar winner and a brilliant actor but this movie, draped in surreal and beautiful imagery, driven by a visceral, bloody, focus, wasn’t going to get made because the lead this plot was specifically written for, happens to be brown. But Straight White Males are the ones being silenced? Okay, bud.

Joe Rogen is a symptom of a greater problem and it’s the problem of White Fragility. White Fragility fuels the worst of our society. It's the genesis of racism and bigotry. It drives Nationalism and is fertile ground for cults of personality which blossom into whole ass dictatorships. These motherf*ckers are in they’re feelings and will burn this country to the ground if it means they will stop getting their way. Brie Larson calls out the ridiculousness of the race bias in Hollywood? They attack. Arizona flips Blue because Indigenous people and Black folks come out to vote in droves? Voter fraud and four recounts, one months after the election has been called and Biden has already taken office. Jordan Peele says, out loud, to the entire country, that he’s not interested in telling stories with White people in the lead? Shadow banned from Hollywood. Dude was the toast of Hollywood after Get Out and Us. He said what he said and cat's been trapped behind the camera as a Producer ever since. It’s nuts because these people complaining about how hard it is to be and how unfair the current social climate is to Straight White Males, have called Twatter NPCs whiny, SJW, children, for years. Bro,you’re the same, just racist! You are the Trump to their Obama. You are the thermodynamic reaction to their Civil action. You assholes are arguing the same merit, just on the opposite ends of the spectrum so, if they’re whiny assholes, wouldn’t you have to be, too? The only difference is that the Twatter assholes have a zeal for inclusion while you Rogen Bros have a penchant for White Supremacy and, given the choice, I'd have to agree with the Blue Checkmarks in this regard.

Straight White Males have had the run of this country since before it was a country and look what they’ve done with it. Look where we are, right now, in the year of our lord, 2021. This is as far as we have come under their stewardship. It’s time for a new captain, i think. Sorry if that hard truth hurts your feelings. Now please steer us away from those very obvious rocks. I’d rather not violently crash into that reef and sink into a watery grave before we can get our hands on the wheel to right this ship, all because you assholes are in your feelings, thank you.

[denisehil0]

Another Glass Box: The Stalinist “Bunker” Edition

March 26, 2018 at 7:40 pm

cityscape

Another Glass Box: The Stalinist “Bunker” Edition

Mayoral foibles, Google's urban charm offensive, finalists for George Brown's new wood building, and how many avocado toasts will you need to give up?

By Dan Seljak

1

The Stalinist “bunker” in question.

Please don’t poke the mayor – Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson found himself criticized in light of calling George Bemi’s award-winning Ottawa Library a “Stalin-ist bunker”. Watson’s rebuke wasn’t so elegant, but the following debate explored how contemporary ideas of wellness and accessibility requires real investment in restoration and renovation.

Here in Toronto, Mayor John Tory was sent an open letter by a large contingent of the city’s urbanist intelligentsia, protesting his decision regarding REimagining Yonge, a proposal that would see changes to the streetscape in North York Centre. In short, the Mayor Tory has suggested a scheme that costs approximately $20 million more and retains the current number of car lanes, while the recommended plan (that has the support of city staff and the local councillor) removes one lane in each direction to add things like wider sidewalks and bike lanes.

2

A rendering of Google’s plan for Quayside. Image courtesy of Sidewalk Labs.

Big data city – Sidewalk Toronto, the massive project from Alphabet (aka Google’s parent company) proposed for the Waterfront, held two public roundtables late last week. It’s the first of many such meetings, where the public’s input will help shape the face of the development. For some context, over on Spacing, John Lorinc broke down the history of consultation on Toronto’s Waterfront.

Also released as a component of the meeting was a new app that maps historical photographs from Toronto’s archives all over the city. The initial reaction was largely positive, but as people used it, glaring errors and other issues provoked questions as to whether an incomplete but high profile app devalues the hard work of Toronto historians.

Google’s use of data on the site also came under scrutiny. Their mission is a bit of a tough sell as the public comes to terms with the Cambridge Analytica big data manipulations and Uber’s self-driving fleet killing its first pedestrian. I predict there will be some sort of larger reckoning as North American cities come to terms what it means to be part of a living lab. Arguably, social and economic theory has been tested in a living lab since organized government has been able to mandate policy, but I concede that argument is hard to make when crushed under 5,000 lb of autonomously propelled steel.

Now I’m truly on a tangent – but ICYMI here’s a compelling New York Times’ visual opinion piece on why autonomous vehicles may not benefit city design.

3

Shigeru Ban and Brock McIlRoy’s proposal for the new George Brown campus building, to be made from wood.

TIMBER!!! – George Brown has released renderings of the four designs proposed for a wood structure at its Waterfront campus. Contenders will present their designs on April 27. Early reactions on Reddit featured the eminent authority of internet commenters who worry this building is going to be destroyed by an errant cigarette butt before cooler heads prevailed – the entire thread is interesting exercise in individuals educating each other on a new building type.

Who are the players?

Moriyama & Teshima and Acton Ostry: Moriyama Teshima has historically provided Toronto with solid institutional design dating back to the Toronto Reference Library – a project that is still capturing cultural imagination. Acton Ostry is BC based and  recently completed an 18-storey wood tower there.

Patkau and MJMA: Patkau is BC based research/design firm, with a focus on institutional work like the recently completed Audain Art Museum. You might know MJMA for their community and athletic centres locally. MJMA won RAIC’s firm of the year in 2016 and has been putting out consistent institutional work for some time now.

Provencher Roy (this is a link to ArchDaily; as of this writing the firm’s website appears to be down and redirecting to ads) and Turner Fleischer: Provencher Roy is a Montreal-based firm and I personally am stoked to see some representation from Quebec. They recently won the National Urban Design Award from the RAIC in 2016. To my knowledge, Turner Fleischer is known for condominiums and big retail (like high profile Loblaws projects). Not to speculate too much, but their newly rebranded website and presence on this team might signal something.  

Shigeru Ban and Brook McIlroy: Arguably the team with the highest profile international firm on it. Shigeru Ban is a Japan-based firm with wood and design accolades – here’s their design for the Aspen Art Museum.  Brook McIlroy has done a lot of institutional and urban design work, and recently got a nod from the Wood Design and Excellent awards for their work on The Orillia Waterfront Centre.

Michael Green Architecture had some big news earlier this week with a mass timber complex being proposed stateside. Green set the record for largest mass timber project with T3 at 220,000 sq ft – this one more than doubles that. For those who don’t know him, Michael Green’s work has created a lot of momentum for tall wood buildings, with a popular 2013 TED talk that still inevitably comes up every time you mention the subject.

If you want to see some engineered wood here in Toronto relatively soon, The Star recently published an opinions piece by Christopher Hume featuring 80 Atlantic and its developer, Hullmark (full disclosure: I work at Quadrangle, the firm designing this project). The project is currently a hole in the ground but the structure is coming soon. And, while not wood, just a down the street Sweeney and Co. has another commercial complex coming.

4

Run the numbers – Realtor David Fleming broke down the costs and profits of the average Toronto developer. It’s a thorough take and worth reading. If you scroll down to the comments and you can see for yourself that the results basically proved what many already know: some people think developers make too much money and other people don’t think they make enough.

Mike Rosenburg, out of the Seattle Times, took a shot at patronizing millennial financial advice by noting that Seattle housing has gone up $266/day on average, meaning you’d have to give up 33 pieces of avocado toast every day to keep up. Apparently Curbed has also been at it with an entire instagram devoted to the subject. How does Toronto fare? Using TREB’s data from Dec 2017 and April 2016 in this CBC report, it looks like home prices across all types, on average, $521 every day. Assuming avocado toast is about $12, in that time period that’s:

43 avocado toasts/day

(Please check my math.)

Filed under urban design, Another Glass Box, Architecture, avocado toast, George Brown campus, Jim Watson, Ottawa Public Library, Sidewalk Labs, timber, wood, wood buildings

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[dougmeet]

Tyler Mahan Coe presents Cocaine & Rhinestones”  «Addicting Country Pōdcast & Coe» Season II | |||| |||| || |||| || |||| |||||| ( ||| i have worked on this project long and hard.  I only hope that its author and subject enjoy its fervency as I now celebrate its final end || ). | | ?| by Sarah Larson, The New Yorker Sarah Larson is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her column, Pocasting Depo appears on newyorker.com. Addicting Cocaine, Country, & Rhinestones       On one episode of “Cocaine & Rhinestones,” we learn why Loretta Lynn’s song “The Pill” was banned  in 1975.           In 1975, Loretta Lynn, by then an established country singer-songwriter for more than a decade, released her single “The Pill.”           At that point, Lynn had won hearts and raised eyebrows with songs like “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ (with Lovin’ on Your Mind),” whose themes are self-evident, and “Fist City,” warning a woman to stay away from her husband.               (“You’d better move your feet / if you don’t want to eat / a meal that’s called Fist City.”)           “I was the first one to write it like the women lived it,” she has said.           “The Pill,” which she didn’t write but performed with gusto, is a wife’s celebration of freedom:               “I’m tearin’ down your brooder house, ’cause now I’ve got the pill.”           The song—like several of Lynn’s singles—was banned.           In “Blow & Sparklers,” an opinionated, feverish, in-po-tain-cast about twentieth-century American country music, written and hosted by TyManCo, we learn why, from a progressive guy with an arsenal of doggedly presented research.           The Co. Man, thirty-three, grew-up country; his father is the outlaw David Allan Coe.           In childhood, T traveled with his Coe-dad’s outlaw band; in young adulthood, he played rhythm guitar and shredded a little.           He now lives in Nashvegas.           When asked how he turned out so centered after moving all the time AND his peripatetic, outlaw upbringing among musicians, he paused and said,               “Well, I’ve done a lot of acid.”           Also, books: as a kid on the road, he’d disappear into stuff like James Clavell’s “Shōgun;” he’s still  obsessive, often his books have never been digitized and may never be published.           “Cōgun & Rōgun” references a thorough bibliography.               For “The Pill,” this includes Lynn’s memoir, “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” and the collection “Feminists Who Changed America, 1963-1975.”               (Cōgun, who is currently working on the second season of the PC, was recently invited to use the private archives in the Country Music Hall of Fame, where he wrote a digitized, secret e-mail.               “THERE are at least 500 unwritten books in that data, and probably closer to 1,000 . . . Half-or-more of those books are not even written.”           The pōd has a distinct, essayist sound, narrated entirely by PōdCōe, delivered in a tone between that of a new anchor, or TMC's mentor-brōcaster-teacher, Malcolm Gladwell,  or a prosecutor WAITING FOR A JURY TO COME BACK.           I often laugh while listening.           In the “Pill” episode, PōCō begins by talking about the “Streisand effect,” in which an attempt to stop the public from being exposed to something makes it go viral, THEN goes on to discuss the Comstock laws, on obscenity; the history of contraception in the U.S.; a bit of Lynn’s biography, and the lyrics and authorship of the song—all to set up why “The Pill” was banned.               “I’m about to prove it wasn’t a knee-jerk reaction to a country song about birth control,” he says.           He forensically plays songs by men about birth control and abortion TO WOMEN.           “Pretty gross,” he says of callous Harry Chapin lyrics.           “But it was not banned.” None of the men’s songs were. There’s a double-standard in music, he explains:           “Men have to go way over the line.   All women have to do is get near it.” He plays FURTIVE samples of banned songs by women, including Jeannie C. Riley’s hit “Harper Valley P.T.A.,” about a mother telling off a bunch of small-town hypocrites. (Mindbogglingly, Cosign gives that song a three-episode deep-dive in season UNO.)           By the end of the episode, he’s proved his point, case closed:               “Female artists have their songs banned simply for standing up to society, or for fighting back.”           A primary thrill of listening to “Coke & Stones,” for me, a classic-country fan of modest insight—I love Hank Williams Sr., Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, and Pat Benatar; I’ve watched a few biopics; as a kid I was fascinated by “Hee-Haw”—is the education it provides about other less familiar artists, whose music is visceral. (if you can explain that sentence, i'll blow ya - ed.)           (Plenty of music lovers know all about the Louvin Brothers and Doug and Rusty Kershaw; I do not.)           Another provides cultural context; each story reflects larger themes about the artistry and business of country music. And MC CoCo’s writing—like a good country song—is provocative.           “Those bastards deregulated radio in the Telecommunications Act of 1996;” Buck Owens’s vocal delivery is “stabbed-in-the-back-sincere;” a racist song about school desegregation “ends with a chorus of, I assume, ghost-children, singing ‘My Country ’Tis of Thee.’ ” As the acid kicks in, we both laugh at the absurdities of life.  I question my own journalism and wish I could be more like Hunter T.           In one of my favorite episodes, about Bobbie Gentry’s eternally mysterious “Ode to Billie Joe,” from 1967, Coe develops a catarrh in one eye, an inward view of his "self;" eyes stare through distance, presciently decoding a past recording session on a dark night before his birth.                “You can tell it isn’t going to be a normal song right away, from those wheezing violins'  intro.”           The arranger “was working with an unusual crew of four violins and two cellos.” One of the cellists pizzicatied his unwell beast, “while the others weave in and out, like Steve McQueen in Bullit, responsive to drama.” The denouement is unknown to the A-team; cinematic, the strings rise up, up to the bridge “with the narrator up on Choctaw Ridge to pick flowers,” and down, “when the he throws the flowers down.” I get a chill. Suddenly Tyler the Oracle's chin hits his chest --his breathing shallow. He continues weakly, "We hear them, falling eerily, and they chill us. In the past I tried resolving my internecine preoccupation with “Ode to Billie Joe,” a childhood oldies station still plays in my head, trying to discover the protagonist, Billie Joe, and the package.  What were they throwing off the Tallahatchie Bridge; searching for Gentry; watching for inchoate clues, the horrible 1976 movie mocking the song’s success. No one was satisfying my quest, until listening to “Coke & Tone,” TMC both celebrated the song’s mystery and provided to me insight into its strange power.           I ask Podcone about his style; he doesn’t sound like many other P-ghosts.           “I would describe it as performative,” he mutters, "explicitly performative!" "You're [hereby] fired."                   "I now pronounce you man and wife."                   "I order you to go!" "Go—that's an order!"                   "Yes" – answering the question. "Do you promise to do the dishes?"                   "You are under arrest" – putting  me under arrest.                   "I christen you."                   "I accept your apology."                   "I sentence you to death."                   "I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you" (Islamic: see: Talaq-i-Bid'ah)!                   "I do – wedding."                   "I swear to do that." "I promise to be there."                   "I apologize."                   "I dedicate this..." (...book to my wife; ...next song to the striking Stella Doro workers, etc.).                   "This meeting is now adjourned." "The court is now in session."                   "This church is hereby de-sanctified."                   "War is declared."                   "I resign" – employment, or chess.                   "You're [hereby] fired."           He was influenced by “the Radio”—dramatic radio shows from his childhood—“specifically Paul Harvey, ‘The Rest of the Story’" —which, when I heard it in the eighties, felt like it had been beamed there from the forties—“and Art Bell, the guy who does ‘Coast to Coast AM,’ which has gotten super political and weird now, but when I was a kid it was on AM radio overnight, which meant clear airwaves; you could pick it up in most of the country.”           Bell had a “weird voice,” Coe said, and listeners would call in to talk to him about normal things like about ghosts, alien abductions, and telepathy.           “We had a driver who loved listening to it,” he said. “You’d be driving through the night to the next town, through the middle of nowhere, just headlights on the road  in bitumen-molasses-darkness, and all the adults are on the radio having conversations about stuff, and they sound dead serious.”           That mood made an impact.           On “Coe & Rye,” he wants to evoke of it.           He records his vocals overnight in a basement when it’s quiet outside. “Just me alone in the dark, talking to a microphone.  I'm nobody.  My father was a rusty nail!

“Cocaine & Rhinestones,” An Addictive, Sparkling Podcast About Country Music | The New Yorker  - guest-edited by mrjyn

[acequeenking]

and I got tagged by @cantfakethecake, who has literally one of the best usernames on tumblr.

Rule: Tag nine people you want to get to know better!

Relationship status: Not looking

Favorite color: Purple, forever and always, from lilac and lavender to velvet and aubergine.

Lipstick or chapstick: You will pry my red lipstick from my cold, dead lips.  My favs are Besame's Red Velvet and Rimmel's Provacalips in Kiss Me, You Fool. The former will make you feel like you're a forties bombshell, and the latter will stay on your lips for literally a day and a half if you don't take it off. Red lipstick + mascara = face made.

Last song I listened to: Song up on my phone is Wooly Clouds by Little Auk, a supersweet love song; the other top four in heavy rotation are One Caress by Depeche Mode (not a supersweet love song), Maybe You're Not the Worst Thing Ever from Galavant (a twisted kind of falling in love song), Lefty's Lament by Busdriver (which was my political anthem 2005-2008 that has been resurrected because ...reasons), and Regina Spektor's cover of While my Guitar Gently Weeps (classic song made newish with the use of a clever arrangement).

Last movie I watched: In Theaters? Rogue One. Which I loved! Jyn Erso was just...amazing, and while I was disappointed with how few other women were in the movie, I love love loved her, and came out wanting all the AU's for all the characters. I think the last movie I saw all the way through at home was Deadpool, which I liked more than I thought I would – probably the most open minded movie I've seen? Also made me a big fan of Collosus.

Top 3 TV shows:  The three I've been watching in a can't miss way are the Daily Show, Last Week Tonight, and Full Frontal with Samantha Bee. Because...reasons. My all time three are Star Trek: The Next Generation, Futurama, and the IT Crowd, all of which convince me that despite the difficulties in space, life, and society, life will go, and we will laugh again.  

Top 3 characters: Just 3? Ouch. I'm putting a limit on one-per-Fandom, otherwise we'll never get anything done:

- Lee Chaolan from Tekken: I adore him, always. A man who rose from nothing, from an abusive, literally demonic family, to become a self-made millionaire and the only Mishima to ever walk away from the saga. Tekken has plot holes you could drive an entire convoy of semi's through, but I will love it all the same.

- Tali'Zorah from Mass Effect: Clever, brave, and vulnerable all at once; deeply a patriot to her people, but also open-minded to other cultures. Tali is everything I want to be; her ability to open up to people not just like Shepard, but EDI and Legion is just breathtaking. Real'Zorah's daughter will be remembered as the hero of the fleet.

- Leia Organa from Star Wars – Brave, pigheaded, righteous, revolutionary. Leia Organa is, perhaps, every girl's sci-fi fantasy who grew up between 1977 and now, but she was so much so for me. So much of my early fanfic was based on her, so much of her has helped me highlight who I want to be. Leia will always be my fav.

Top 3 ships: UGH HARD. Once again, limiting  it to one per fandom, and trying not to use the characters that I used in favorite characters -

- Female Shepard/ Garrus Vakarian – I'm really a tenderheart for friends-to-lovers, and despite the awkwardness in Mass Effect 2, it's a damn good version of that trope, and I love it. I'm hoping there's a romance that I'll fall for even harder in andromeda!

- Main Character/Canderous Ordo – Spoiler-free here. I'll forever be irritated that Bioware keeps making this merc trope I go weak in the knees for, then leaving them unromancible. But before there was Zaeed, there was this guy, and I will forever miss the idea of Canderous and the Main Character going off into space to kick ass together for all time.

- Female Hawke/Merrill – Sweet, tender, caring, magic!!!, elves.  I love Merrill and Hawke. Who would have thought the romance between an apostate and a blood-mage could be so sweet? 30,000% my DA OTP. I adore them, and I always spare Hawke so she can go home to Merrill and their three thousand elven refugee children.

Books I’m currently reading:

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline – Wow, I hate this book. I hate this book so much. The only thing stopping me from not reading this is that I hate to leave a book unfinished. The main character is a smarmy nice guy, the references are more cringy than entertaining, and the plot is just “CORPORATE BAD!!!!” which, I mean, they're not wrong but there's no tension since the main character reveals who won the competition in the first chapter. This is an audiobook, and I still have three hours left. Ugh.

Shadow of Night by Deborah Harkness – The second in her all-souls trilogy, about a star-crossed witch and vampire falling in love. I really liked the first in parts but felt the pacing was brutal; that's something that seems much-resolved in the second novel. This one, which takes place mostly in Elizabethean times so far, is much faster paced, with entertaining historical tidbits scattered along the way. These are huge books but I am enjoying reading a chapter or so a night. About 110 pages in.

Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer. I loved Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation so I had to read this, given that it combined an author whose style I liked, a genre I loved, and a focus I can't resist. This is really a quite good collection, though a few of the stories have been featured in other books. My favorite so far is the first story, The Forbidden Words of Margaret A by L. Timmel Duchamp (Note: author has released this story online for free), which is a legal history of a woman whose speech is so persuasive as to be banned from speaking.

Songs of Love and Death: All-Original Tales of Star-Crossed Love edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner R. Dozois. I've picked up a few good recommendations to this one; I'll definitively be picking up a book by Jacqueline Carey after reading her story in this collection, 'You and You Alone'. It's a poly love story in a fantasy land, between a princess, her spy-master brother, and the prince of another kingdom they both fall for. Things proceed to get Games of Throne-y, and the results are well and truly devastating. I'm also quite fond of 'Hurt Me' by M.L.N. Hanover (note: Author sanctioned this podcast version!), which is a ghost story, but the ghost is not the one doing the haunting. (Warning: This story features domestic abuse, is dark as fuck, and frequently disturbing. But if you can get past that, it's so, so good and twisted.)

Tagging: Whoever wants to do it of course!!! And uh, no pressure if you don't.

but, bc peer pressure: @proserpine-in-phases, @lady-halibuts-chambers, @buhnebeest, @feedthedamnfish, @barbex, @spinninglenny, @graceonwing, and @ninalanfer. 

[thetrumpdebacle]

French yellow vest protesters set fires along a march route through Paris on Saturday to drive home their message to a government they see as out of touch with the problems of the poor: that rebuilding the fire-ravaged Notre Dame Cathedral isn’t the only problem France needs to solve. Like the high-visibility vests the protesters wear, the scattered small fires in Paris appeared to be a collective plea to the government to “look at me — I need help too!” Police fired water cannon and sprayed tear gas to try to control radical elements on the margins of the largely peaceful march, one of several actions around Paris and other French cities. The protesters were marking the 23rd straight weekend of yellow vest actions against economic inequality and President Emmanuel Macron’s government, which they see as favoring the wealthy and big business at the expense of ordinary workers. Protesters see themselves as standing up for beleaguered French workers, students and retirees who have been battered by high unemployment, high taxes and shrinking purchasing power. Associated Press reporters saw a car, motorbikes and barricades set ablaze around the Place de la Republique plaza in eastern Paris. The smell of tear gas fired by police mixed with the smoke, choking the air. Paris firefighters — who struggled earlier this week to prevent the 12th-century Notre Dame from collapsing — quickly responded to extinguish the flames at Saturday’s protest. One masked protester dressed in black jumped on a Mercedes parked along the march route, smashing its front and back windshields. Paris police headquarters said authorities detained 137 people by early afternoon and carried out spot checks on more than 14,000 people trying to enter the capital for Saturday’s protests. The tensions focused on a march of several thousand people that started at the Finance Ministry in eastern Paris to demand lower taxes on workers and retirees and higher taxes on the rich. Another group of about 200 people tried to march to the president’s Elysee Palace in central Paris, but riot police blocked them at the neo-classical Madeleine Church. Yet another group tried to demonstrate yellow vest mourning over the Notre Dame blaze while also keeping up the pressure on Macron. They wanted to march to Notre Dame itself, but were banned by police, who set up a large security perimeter around the area. One protester carried a huge wooden cross resembling those carried in Good Friday processions as he walked on a nearby Paris embankment. Many protesters were deeply saddened by the fire at a national monument . But at the same time they are angry at the $1 billion in donations for Notre Dame renovations that poured in from French tycoons while their own economic demands remain largely unmet and they struggle to make ends meet. “I think what happened at Notre Dame is a great tragedy but humans should be more important than stones. And if humans had a little bit more money, they too could help finance the reconstruction work at Notre Dame. I find this disgusting,” said protester Jose Fraile. Some 60,000 police officers were mobilized for Saturday’s protests across France. The movement is largely peaceful but extremists have attacked treasured monuments, shops and banks and clashed with police. The heavy police presence meant subway stations and roads around Paris were closed Saturday, thwarting tourists trying to enjoy the French capital on a warm spring day. “Paris is very difficult right now,” said Paul Harlow, of Kansas City, Missouri, as he looked sadly at the damaged Notre Dame. He and his wife Susan were in Paris only for a few days and didn’t make it in time to see the cathedral. On Saturday, their efforts to visit museums were derailed by closed subways and barricaded roads. “I don’t think we’ll be back,” he said. Other visitors showed solidarity with the yellow vest cause. “I am not interested in joining them, but I can understand what they’re angry about,” said Antonio Costes, a retiree from the Paris suburb of Montreuil who came Saturday to see the damage to Notre Dame. “There is a lot of injustice.”

Macron had been scheduled to lay out his responses to yellow vest concerns on Monday night — but canceled the speech because the Notre Dame fire broke out.

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via The Trump Debacle

[jeroldlockettus]

There’s a War on Sugar. Is It Justified? (Ep. 285 Rebroadcast)

(Photo Credit: MattyFlicks / flickr)

Some people argue that sugar should be regulated, like alcohol and tobacco, on the grounds that it’s addictive and toxic. How much sense does that make? We hear from a regulatory advocate, an evidence-based skeptic, a former F.D.A. commissioner — and the organizers of Milktoberfest.

Listen and subscribe to our podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere. Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for readability. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

*      *      *

This week we’re bringing you one of our most popular episodes from the archive. Because we’re traveling. Our American listeners know why. To the rest of you: this is the week we all drive hundreds of miles to eat turkey — which isn’t that great, honestly — and pie, which is great. So we thought it’d be a good time to re-release this episode, called “There’s a War on Sugar. Is It Justified?”

[MUSIC: Jonathan Still, “Lederhosen”]

Surely you’re familiar with the beloved autumn festival that revolves around folk dancing and lots and lots of drinking …

LAYTON: Milktoberfest! The holiday for drinking milk and doing homework.

Okay, not what you were expecting. Bavaria has Oktoberfest; Brigham Young University, in Provo, Utah, has Milktoberfest — Brigham Young being a Mormon university, and therefore prohibiting the consumption of, among other substances, alcohol.

LAYTON: People don’t drink, but we still like to have a lot of fun.

Roger Layton, communications manager at the B.Y.U. library, helps produce Milktoberfest.

LAYTON: And so we thought, “Let’s just embrace that. Let’s just enjoy it.” We had a very energetic group of German folk dancers come in and perform, and we brought in cases and cases of chocolate milk. As soon as the milk was there and we said, “Go!” — it basically became a free-for-all.

OLDROYD: People love it because Milktoberfest was almost B.Y.U. lite or something like that.

That’s Brenna Oldroyd, a B.Y.U. student who helped put together Milktoberfest.

OLDROYD: Like, “Hey, this is what we love to drink all the time!”

The chocolate milk they’re drinking isn’t just any chocolate milk. It’s some pretty legendary chocolate milk, made in B.Y.U.’s own creamery.

LAYTON: If you show up at a party with chocolate milk, no one’s going to complain. It may seem a little childish, but people will drink it. It’s friendly, it’s safe, and it’s happy.

OLDROYD: And one of the great things about partying with chocolate milk is if you’re smart, you’re not going to throw up later. That’s a plus.

This all sounds pretty awesome, right? And wholesome, too — swapping out beer for chocolate milk. But is chocolate milk really as wholesome as it seems? Do you know how much sugar there is in one cup of chocolate milk? The answer is 24 grams — a bit more than you’d find in a standard serving of soda. And there are those who argue that the detriments of sugar — well, they’d argue that, from a metabolic standpoint at least, Milktoberfest isn’t much better than Oktoberfest.

Robert LUSTIG: We started comparing what sugar did versus what alcohol did, and we realized, you know what, sugar and alcohol do the exact same thing.

If you’ve been following health news in the last decade, you’ve likely noticed that there’s a war on sugar.

Belva DAVIS in a clip from KQED’s This Week in Northern California: An alarming rise in the rate of obesity and related health problems has prompted a nationwide movement to ban or restrict sugary drinks …

How justified is that war? Today’s episode was inspired by a question we received …

Saul ARNOW: Dear Freakonomics, My name is Saul Arnow, and I’m an 11-year-old listener from Chicago. I was wondering why sugar isn’t considered a drug even though it is addictive and stimulates the brain. Sincerely, Saul.

Okay, Saul — we’ll do our best to answer your question. Along the way, we’ll learn some sugar history:

Elizabeth ABBOTT: St. Thomas Aquinas, way back in the 13th century, pronounced sugar a medicine.

We’ll hear from some people who fully agree with you:

Robert LUSTIG: Now alcohol, tobacco, morphine and heroin clearly meet these four criteria.

Some people who don’t agree with you:

Richard KAHN: We have no clue, no real good evidence that it’s going to do any good whatsoever.

And we’ll hear about your sugar habits.

BOY: I tried to give it up once, but it didn’t work out at all because I’m addicted to sugar. I can’t help it.

*      *      *

[MUSIC: Paul Freitas, “Sugar Daddy” (from Salon de Cabaret)]

Before we get into the nitty-gritty on sugar, let me offer a sort of caveat.

KAHN: In general, nutrition studies are not very robust compared to many other fields in biological science.

That’s Richard Kahn.

KAHN: I’m the former chief scientific and medical officer of the American Diabetes Association.

So what’s the problem with nutrition studies?

KAHN: There are often no controls, no randomization, small number of subjects — it’s very difficult to conduct very robust, long-term studies on nutrition.

Okay, this is a really important point. It’s the kind of thing we talk about all the time on this program — the legitimacy of data, yada yada. But with nutrition, there are a few things going on that make it particularly tough. No. 1: this is about something that we all put in our mouth every day. Which means we all think of ourselves as experts. Unlike particle physics or financial engineering, this is something we all do all the time, so of course we know what we’re talking about. No. 2: most nutrition science is built on survey data — that is, asking people about what they’ve eaten, or asking them to keep food diaries, things like that. If you’ve been paying any attention at all to Freakonomics Radio over the years, you know this is a surefire way to gather some not-so-realistic, or at least not-so-robust data. And so, as Richard Kahn said, it can be a real challenge to run a really convincing nutrition study.

KAHN: Because people do not want to participate. They don’t want to alter their diet patterns for a long time and they don’t comply with the regimen of the instructions in the randomized trial.

Now, if we could take a few thousand people, and randomize them, and then control every single thing they ate and drank for a few years — well, that that’d be great. But, absent that, we do our best. We look for data. We ask questions. Starting here:

Stephen J. DUBNER: As a public health official in New York and at the national level, you’ve tried to stem AIDS and T.B. and pandemic flu. You’ve tried to prepare the public for a potential bioterror attacks. How, in light of those dangers, would you rank the consumption of sugar?

HAMBURG: Well, they’re very different threats. But we have to recognize that — while acute public health crises really demand all of our attention and get a lot of response — that how we live, what we eat, if we exercise, many aspects of our daily lives have the greatest impact on health and disease.

That’s Margaret Hamburg.

HAMBURG: I am a medical doctor and a public health professional who has served in government at many levels over many years now including most recently as the U.S. F.D.A. commissioner.

DUBNER: I wanted to ask you briefly about some F.D.A. definitions. When I read them I have to say they are somewhere between comical and incomprehensible. When the F.D.A. defines food, food additives, drugs and, then “substances generally regarded as safe.” So those are the categories. Which of these definitions apply to sugar?

HAMBURG: You know, I have to agree with you that many of the definitions are hard to penetrate.

DUBNER: I didn’t mean to slam you. I assumed you didn’t write them and that there were 40 lawyers between whoever wrote them and—

HAMBURG: No, no! Congress is responsible for some of it, and the F.D.A. lawyers for some of it. And, of course, many of these laws and regulations and guidances and definitions have evolved over many, many years. But it is complicated and confusing and it’s why there are almost as many lawyers as scientists at the F.D.A.

DUBNER: For instance, the very first thing: “food.” No. 1, “articles used for food or drink for man or other animals.” I can imagine that could easily fit within F.D.A. guidelines then, if it were used for food. Yep?

HAMBURG: It’s really hard to answer a question like the one you just posed to me. Sugar is intrinsic to many food products. It’s not going to be regulated in the same way that a completely exogenous additive to a food product can be regulated.

DUBNER: But technically, the categories under which sugar falls, however, are “food additive” and G.R.A.S., “generally regarded as safe,” and not food itself. Correct?

HAMBURG: This is my point. I’m not going to answer your question because I don’t have my lawyers here.

DUBNER: I see.

HAMBURG: But there are sugars in fruits and vegetables, there are sugars in dairy products, there’re sugars in various grasses that people consume. It’s intrinsic to the food product itself.

[MUSIC: Paul Freitas, “A Little Crazy” (from Again Spring)]

For instance, let’s get back to chocolate milk for a minute. As we said, it’s got 24 grams of sugar per one-cup serving, more than some soda. But regular old milk, without the chocolate, has about 12 grams of sugar — it’s naturally sweet from the lactose. And then there’s the sugar that’s added to many foods.

HAMBURG: Products that you think are actually very healthy — yogurt — the levels of sugar are astonishingly high. Things like barbecue sauce and spaghetti sauce and soup actually have much higher levels of sugar than you would ever imagine. Not to mention the levels that are in you know pies and cakes and ice cream and things where you would expect to see sugar.

So how much sugar, overall, do we actually consume?

LUSTIG: Right now we are about 60 to 65 percent over our limit, and that’s average.

That’s Robert Lustig.

LUSTIG: I’m a professor of pediatrics at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine, also a member of their Institute for Health Policy Studies. My job is to try to treat obese children and now, also, alter the global food supply.

DUBNER: Easy picking the low hanging fruit for yourself, I see.

LUSTIG: Easier said than done. In both cases.

The data vary — again, this is nutrition science we’re talking about here — but the most recent estimates show that Americans consume between 20 and 30 teaspoons of added sugar per day. That’s down a bit from our peak consumption, sometime around the early 2000’s, but Americans still consume more added sugar than anyone else. This has turned Lustig into one of the most outspoken sugar critics you will find. He came to this position over many years.

LUSTIG: I’m a pediatric endocrinologist. I take care of glandular hormonal problems in children. I was doing that pretty seamlessly for a good two-to-three decades. Then the kids started getting fat on me. The question was, “What’s going on?” We started looking at what sugar did to the body, and what we realized was it caused this thing called insulin resistance and particularly in the liver. We started comparing what sugar did versus what alcohol did, and we realized, you know what, sugar and alcohol do the exact same thing, and it makes sense that it should, because after all, where do you get alcohol from? Fermentation of sugar. We were now seeing the diseases of alcohol without the alcohol. That started my, shall we say, advocacy in this field of obesity and public health.

KAHN: If you are indeed overweight or obese, you want to lose weight, the first place to start is to reduce sugar consumption.

That, again, is Richard Kahn, formerly of the American Diabetes Association.

KAHN: The reason being that we get plenty of energy from other carbohydrates, we don’t have to rely on sugar to get our energy. And the second reason is that sugar itself does not come along with any other essential nutrients, vitamins or minerals.

So you might think that Kahn and Lustig are in precisely the same camp. But there you’d be wrong.

KAHN: There’s no question that there is a real obesity epidemic throughout the world. That, I think is very real. It’s very important. It’s very serious. It has clear adverse health consequences. In addition, that has led directly to a dramatic increase in the incidence of diabetes throughout the world. We first saw this in the United States. We’ve seen it in European countries. We’re now seeing it in Asian countries. Diabetes is clearly a serious disease. It has quite serious complications and that’s a problem. Then the question becomes, “What has caused the obesity epidemic?” And that is, to use the euphemism, the $64,000 question.

There are many potential contributors to the rise in obesity.

KAHN: There’s been some evidence that with the increased use of psychotropic drugs, anti-depressive drugs, drugs for schizophrenia and other mental disorders — those drugs tend to promote weight gain. Another possibility is that we’ve seen, clearly, smoking cessation in a large proportion of the population. And when people stop smoking, that’s usually been associated with weight gain. Psychotropic drugs, smoking cessation, potential infections have been attributed to a rise in obesity.

There’s also a lot of research arguing the rather obvious point that we consume more calories today than we used to — for a lot of reasons. The relative low cost of food; the deliciousness of food; the availability of food — especially the availability of cheap, delicious, sweet food.

KAHN: Many people do believe that sugar consumption has been the cause, is the cause, of our obesity epidemic and then, subsequently, diabetes. But I believe that the evidence for this is pretty weak.

When the City of San Francisco wanted to add warning labels to soda, Kahn submitted an expert report on behalf of, among others, the American Beverage Association. He wrote: “There is no scientific consensus that added sugar (including added sugar in beverages) plays a unique role in the development of obesity and diabetes.”

KAHN: If we look as an analogy, for example, to cigarette smoking, and try to make the link between sugar and obesity or diabetes, and cigarette smoking to cancer. What are the differences?

Okay, what are the differences?

KAHN: In the cigarette-smoking realm, the lowest smoking rate produced an enormous incidence of lung cancer. The highest rate of smoking was just simply off the charts in terms of the likelihood of developing lung cancer. Conversely, with sugar consumption, it’s less than a two-fold increase at the highest levels.

This gets into tricky territory. As Kahn says, some studies do find a two-fold increase in diabetes at the highest level of sugar consumption — but other analyses, including one by Robert Lustig, argue it’s considerably higher. That said, the relationship between sugar and obesity is nowhere near as strong as the relationship between smoking and lung cancer. According to the NIH, even “light smoking” results in a nine-fold increase.

KAHN: The next one is something called temporality. In other words, is there association in time between sugar consumption and obesity? That held pretty true from about 1985 to the year 2000. Where obesity levels went up, sugar consumption went up. But thereafter starting in the year 2000, even to today, sugar consumption has declined somewhere around 15 to 20 percent, whereas obesity rates continue to rise. We don’t see that at all with smoking, the analogous situation. Cigarette smoking rises, cancer rises. Cigarette smoking declines, cancer declines.

This, of course, doesn’t mean that sugar doesn’t contribute to obesity. Just that, again, the relationship isn’t so definitive. Kahn points to another difference between smoking and sugar.

KAHN: In cigarette smoking, we found a link between cigarette smoking and cancer in every population, every ethnicity, both genders, all kinds of tobacco use and even in bystanders. Conversely, with sugar, we don’t have that consistency whatsoever.

For instance: some studies show a strong relationship between weight gain and sugar-sweetened beverages — S.S.B.’s — but that relationship is most consistent when the S.S.B.’s are consumed in addition to a person’s regular diet. So the problem might simply be the extra calories, not the sugar per se. It could also be that people who drink a lot of sugary drinks do other things that lead to weight gain. There’s also the fact that, as Richard Kahn said earlier …

KAHN: In general, nutrition studies are not very robust compared to many other fields in biological science. In sugar consumption, most of [the studies have] either no controls, a very small number of subjects … They’ve only lasted for days or weeks at the most. The experimental studies have not been robust.

So in Kahn’s view, the science on sugar is not settled. Which means that the notion of regulating sugar is, at best, premature.

KAHN: I don’t think that there is any absolute amount of sugar that we should be under in our consumption. It all relates to eating a well-rounded diet.

To Robert Lustig, meanwhile, the time for regulation is now.

[MUSIC: Ruby Velle & The Soulphonics, “It’s About Time” (from It’s About Time)]

DUBNER: This episode was inspired by a listener, who wrote in to say, “If sugar is as bad for us as a lot of people are now saying it is, why isn’t it regulated the way other potentially harmful substances, like alcohol or tobacco, are regulated?” How do you answer that question?

LUSTIG: Well, the public health community has identified four separate criteria that are needed to be fulfilled before a substance can be considered for regulation. No. 1: ubiquity, that is, can’t get away from it. No. 2: toxicity, that it’s dangerous. No. 3: abused, that increased consumption is inherent in the molecule itself. Finally, No. 4 is externalities. That is, your consumption hurts me. Now alcohol, tobacco, morphine, and heroin clearly meet these four criteria. The question is, “Does sugar meet them?” And the answer is, yes, it does, absolutely.

Okay, let’s look at those four criteria for sugar. Ubiquity? That’s pretty much a no-brainer. But what about toxicity? Lustig’s hypothesis has to do with how the body handles fructose.

LUSTIG: When you consume dietary sugar, the glucose molecules can go anywhere in the body; only about 20 percent hit the liver. But the fructose molecules have to be handled in the liver, because there’s a specific transporter called the GLUT5 transporter; it is only in the liver. When you consume a soda, you are flooding your liver, and your liver can’t handle the flood. The liver has no choice but to turn that fructose into liver fat. It’s that liver fat that causes the chronic metabolic disease. We have the data that demonstrates that it’s the liver fat made from dietary sugar that is at the nidus, at the beginning of type-2 diabetes, heart disease, fatty liver disease. We’re starting to ferret out the links between dietary sugar and cancer and dementia as well.

DUBNER: But I know there’s other research that says that the toxicity argument may be overstated. That it’s not an acute toxin but a chronic one.

LUSTIG: You are absolutely right that sugar is not an acute toxin. Chronic toxins are still toxins even though they don’t make you keel over and die. Is benzene a toxin? We regulate it as such. Benzene doesn’t kill you acutely.

DUBNER: What about alcohol?

LUSTIG: Alcohol is both. It’s an acute toxin. You can die on a bender. Or it’s a chronic toxin — you can fry your liver. It’s both. The point is that the F.D.A. regulates acute toxins, because it’s in their charter, The Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act of 1938. Very specifically, it does not say anything about chronic toxins. The F.D.A. does not regulate chronic toxins.

Criteria No. 3 for regulation: the potential for abuse.

LUSTIG: It turns out that there is no biochemical reaction in any vertebrate on the planet that requires dietary fructose. Now, it happens to be sweet. It happens to signal our brain reward centers that we like the stuff. We happen to crave it. We happen to really enjoy it, and a little too much. In fact, now we have data that shows that it happens to be addictive as well.

Nicole AVENA: The question about whether sugar can meet the criteria for an addiction or an abused substance is something that I’ve been studying for many years now. It’s something that I think has become of interest to a lot of people.

That’s Dr. Nicole Avena. She’s a research neuroscientist at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.

AVENA: The way in which we’ve been studying this and the way in which others have studied this is to use these D.S.M. criteria for addiction and ask the question, “Can sugar, when it’s consumed in excess, produce some of these behavioral indications and neurochemical indications that you would typically see with a substance of abuse?”

The D.S.M. is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It defines addiction or substance abuse along four main criteria: impaired control; social impairment; risky use; and pharmacological indicators like tolerance and withdrawal.

AVENA: You certainly don’t need to meet all of them and many people who are addicts don’t meet all those criteria. But you do need to meet a certain number of them for a protracted period of time. What the research has suggested in both animal models and in clinical studies is that the criteria for addiction as we classically define it in the DSM can be met when the substance of abuse is a sugar or a palatable food, in many cases. We see evidence of bingeing, withdrawal, craving. We also see changes in the brain.

Now, it’s worth pointing out that some of the most troubling studies are animal studies, which can be problematic on two fronts. One: the lab animals aren’t people, so they process sugar differently. Two: the doses of sugar they receive in the lab are often so large as to not be comparable to what most people would consume. Moreover, sugar isn’t the only thing we consume that has “addictive” qualities: pizza and french fries are also at the top of the list. So how well does this emerging model of sugar addiction line up to the addictive criteria for the sort of drugs that we do regulate?

AVENA: It’s a difficult question, because sugar is safe when it’s used in moderation. But the problem is that most people are unaware of how much sugar they’re consuming. Also, if the data suggests that the sugar is producing addictive-like changes in the brain, then we’re talking about something very different. Because if you’re no longer be able to have full volitional control over your decision to eat or not eat the sugar, then that becomes a different type of discussion.

The fourth criteria for regulation, that Robert Lustig was telling us about: externalities.

LUSTIG: That is, your consumption hurts me.

A classic case of externalities is auto travel. Every time you drive, it costs me something whether I’m driving or not. More pollution; more congestion; more risk of accident. We share all those costs, regardless of my actions.

LUSTIG: The question is, “Does this fit for sugar? Do I have anything to say about your consumption?” And the answer is, “Yeah, you’re costing me in obesity-related health care — whether I’m obese or not — because of your obesity.” It’s economic, but it’s real. 62 percent of all the health care costs in this country are shouldered by the federal government. Damn right, we share it!

[MUSIC: Ruby Velle & The Soulphonics, “My Dear” (from It’s About Time)]

*      *      *

[MUSIC: Vic & Gab, “When You Walk In The Room” (from Love of Mine)]

It’s hard to find anyone who doesn’t like sugar. And nearly just as hard to find anyone who doesn’t think they’re having too much of it …

YOUNG WOMAN: I really like sugar. I know it’s bad for you, but I like it.

SOUTHERN MAN: Right now, I am staying away from sugar, trying to eat a better, have a better diet.

MAN: I’ve tried to cut back on it, but I’ve never given it up. I think it tastes delicious in the right thing, and I think that, at this point, it’s probably an addiction that my body just needs to have. I’ve never tried to give it up, nor will I try any time soon.

GIRL: I’ve definitely eaten too much of it, because I had a sleepover at my friend’s, and for breakfast we had lollies!

It wasn’t always thus.

ABBOTT: Sugar started out as a minor commodity that was used for medicine and for spice, up into the Middle Ages.

That’s Elizabeth Abbott. She teaches history at Trinity College, University of Toronto, and is the author of Sugar: A Bittersweet History. She says the debate over what sugar is — a food, a drug, or something in between — is hardly new.

ABBOTT: St. Thomas Aquinas, way back in the 13th century, pronounced sugar a medicine. He said: “Though nutritious in themselves, sugared spices are nonetheless not eaten with the end in mind of nourishment, but rather for ease in digestion. Accordingly, they do not break the fast any more than the taking of any other medicine.”

One reason sugar was welcome in medicine was because a lot of medicine tasted terrible — a combination bitter roots, animal feces, even bits of corpse. So yeah, a spoonful of sugar really does make the medicine go down! Outside of medicine, however, sugar was decidedly aristocratic.

ABBOTT: For example, Persia — or Iran today — [sugar] was very popular among the elite. They are the ones that started this trend, this architecture of sugar. They would make beautiful sculptures often, for example, life-size trees.

Sugar was costly, and sugar was rare. But the sugar trade began to grow, built on the back of the slave trade.

ABBOTT: By 1680, sugar costs only half what it had in 1630. That was thanks to slavery. By 1700, the percentage of imported foodstuffs including sugar had more than doubled and they quadrupled between 1700 and 1740. England and Wales consumed 60 times more sugar — though their populations did not quite double.

Abbott argues it was the Industrial Revolution that helped turn sugar into an everyday thing.

ABBOTT: People started going from their farms and so on into cities and into factories. They couldn’t go home for lunch because they had maybe a 15-minute break. So sugared tea and a bun — or some sort of thing like that, often with jam on it — was offered instead, and that was what popularized it. It’s said that it fueled the Industrial Revolution because sugared tea — and it would be really sugary — has calories. They’re not nutritious but they are units of energy.

The sugar boom helped create another boom that we’re still living through.

ABBOTT: They had a lobby that was extremely powerful. We could say all the big heavy industrial lobbying probably stems from the success of the sugar lobby.

That’s right: it wasn’t enough to benefit from slave labor and huge demand for their product.

ABBOTT: The sugar plantations were profitable not just because of the demand but largely because of how they were politically strong. If they had failures, if they had hurricanes, if they had bad crops — which they often did — they could keep the price. They could get Parliament to help them out with good legislation and tariffs and so on that would favor them. By the way, the sugar lobby is still a very important on. It has a lot of weight still, and it now is an alliance of cane sugar planters and beet sugar planters. They get together to lobby when and when they feel that their interests are at stake.

It was only recently uncovered that in the 1960’s, the sugar industry paid three Harvard scientists to write a review that shifted the blame for heart disease from sugar to saturated fat. Much more recently, Coca-Cola spent millions of dollars on research arguing that the real culprit in obesity is lack of exercise, not sugary drinks. So you can’t blame people for being confused, maybe conflicted, about the degree to which sugar is a health risk. I brought this up with Robert Lustig.

DUBNER: Right now, we’re talking in the year 2017. A lot of people now are convinced that the U.S. government and many others erred terribly in declaring fat to be the cause of obesity. Many people now believe, as you argue, that sugar is a much bigger villain. How do we know you’re not the guy that’s wrong this time, that you’re not just another — perhaps well-intentioned — big-brained do-gooder who is making a massive mistake?

LUSTIG: An awfully good question. This is known as the pessimistic meta-induction theory. What it says is, “Everything we knew 10 years ago is already wrong, and everything we know today will be wrong 10 years from now. Why should we do anything differently when we know that whatever it is that we believe today will end up being wrong?” If you play that game, then you might as well never do any research, never do anything at all, and live with the current dogma.

There’s also the confounding fact, pointed out by former F.D.A. commissioner Margaret Hamburg, that a lot of time you’re eating sugar even when you don’t know you’re eating sugar.

HAMBURG: Things like barbecue sauce and spaghetti sauce and soup actually have much higher levels of sugar than you would ever imagine.

DUBNER: Talk to me for a moment about the Smart Choices program and what the F.D.A. did there.

HAMBURG: The Smart Choices program was an effort spearheaded by industry. A number of major food-producing companies came together to create a system where you would give different scores to different aspects of the nutritional value of a product. The total number would then either give you the green check, the smart choice, or not.

DUBNER: The name, I gather, was an industry name, yes?

HAMBURG: Right. Exactly. The problem with it was that you could score adequately high to get that “green smart choice check” without the food truly reflecting what any sensible nutrition expert would view as a healthy, smart choice. Some of the products that got the smart choice label were over 40 percent sugar. We joked that you could practically take sawdust and if you added enough nutrients to it and the fiber of sawdust, you could have it labeled as a healthy choice, a smart choice.

DUBNER: How long did that last?

HAMBURG: It was out there for a little while. We expressed our concerns to the group that had put this together and was implementing it. They listened and understood. They decided voluntarily to withdraw the program. There have been a number of efforts to look at other strategies for providing consumers with important information about foods. The nutrition facts label, of course, is one important aspect. The nutrition facts label that’s on most processed foods and beverages in this country was first put into place more than two decades ago. But then it was never updated. When I was commissioner, we decided it did need to be updated to reflect both deeper understandings about how people eat. Serving size for example. Also, advances in nutrition science. We embarked on a process to update it. I think the most important contribution that this updated nutrition facts label provides is in the area of added sugar.

DUBNER: As I understand it, food and beverage companies are already adjusting their products to consider the new labeling. Was that your intention?

HAMBURG: Absolutely. One of the goals of putting out that information is to encourage companies to reformulate foods towards healthier products. We’ve certainly seen that happen as we move towards this the implementation of this new nutrition facts label. Stonyfield Yogurt just recently decided to significantly reduce levels of sugar before the new facts label is actually in place. F.D.A., in some ways, has the opportunity to use both the carrot and the stick. Knowing that we could do mandatory guidelines on certain things often encouraged industry to work with us, to come to voluntary approaches. But there’s no doubt that there are tensions.

DUBNER: Robert Lustig and several others in that camp argue that sugar should be regulated substantially because it meets criteria for substances that should be controlled or regulated: unavoidability, toxicity, potential for abuse, and negative impact on society. I’m curious what your thoughts are on sugar fitting those criteria and whether you think that’s even a useful framework.

HAMBURG: We need to reduce excess sugar in our diets and in the products that we consume. Consumers need more education and information. But I’m not sure that I can really embrace the proposal to regulate sugar in that way.

DUBNER: Because it would be too overreaching? Because it would be too difficult? Why?

HAMBURG: It’s a complex area to regulate in that sugars are intrinsic components of many foods which should be part of a balanced nutritious diet. Fruits and vegetables and dairy products are good examples. I think that some of the concerns that have been raised may not be fully grounded in the best possible science.

“Not fully grounded in the best possible science.” That, you’ll recall, was Richard Kahn’s main objection to the idea of regulating sugar. But there’s another one too:

KAHN: If you reduce it or get rid of it or put policies and laws regulating it, what good is it going to do? We have no clue, no real good evidence that it’s going to do any good whatsoever. Therefore, unintended consequences become a very important factor.

Robert Lustig, meanwhile, is — as you’ve likely figured out by now — in favor of just about any kind of sugar regulation you can imagine. Taxes, for instance, and price hikes — both of which worked to reduce cigarette smoking, and are already being used on sugary drinks in a few places.

LUSTIG: The modeling studies that have been done suggests that you have to raise the price of a can of soda by about 20 percent in order to see any meaningful reduction in consumption.

Lustig’s also in favor of limiting the availability of sugar — removing vending machines from schools for instance. Also, banning TV commercials for products with added sugar. Also: getting rid of subsidies.

LUSTIG: Subsidies for food make no sense because subsidies distort the market.

DUBNER: One last question, perhaps ridiculous or impossible: let’s say we’re in a world where you could edit genes quite easily. It seems we’re not that far from it. Whether we’re talking about a 50-year-old person or a zygote. How would you consider editing the genes related to what seems to be a craving, perhaps even dangerous craving for sugar?

LUSTIG: That’s a really tough question. We don’t want to turn off our reward system entirely. If we do, we get into trouble. We actually did this. We did this experiment with a medicine back in the early 2000’s. That medicine was called Rimonabant. What it was was it was the anti-marijuana medicine. It blocked the endo-cannabinoid receptors in the brain, and by doing so reduced reward for alcohol and for food. In fact, people who took Rimonabant lost a fair amount of weight. It looked very promising. Until we started looking at the Phase 3 data and started realizing that a lot of these people became severely depressed, and many of them committed suicide. We didn’t realize it, until we did those Phase 3 trial. It was never approved here in the United States. Bottom line is, if you take away a reward, you take away the reason for living. Be careful about gene editing our rewards system.

Most of the regulatory measures Robert Lustig would like to see around sugar lie somewhere between unlikely and impossible, at least for now. In any case, we asked a bunch of people in Times Square what they thought of it …

YOUNG MAN: Most definitely shouldn’t ban sugar. Sugar’s one of the best things in the world. But I don’t think it should be taxed, either. I feel like it should just be accessible to everybody, because it’s a nice thing. It’s the best thing out there!

YOUNG WOMAN: Probably a tax, but not a ban. I don’t think a ban would work very well. There’s just too much sugar in the world. But maybe a tax would have people thinking more about what they’re buying a little bit more.

SOUTHERN MAN: A tax or ban on sugar? I feel that would backfire really bad. Look back at the Revolutionary War. The British put a tax on tea and people didn’t really like that too much!

SMALL GIRL: I would probably cry because I love sugar!

A love of sugar seems, from what we can tell, pretty universal. Including among the scientists and doctors we’ve been speaking with today. From Richard Kahn, formerly of the American Diabetes Association…

KAHN: One clear thing that comes to mind is just pleasure. Sugar is enjoyable to eat. It’s part of our culture, keeping our community together, our families together.

To Margaret Hamburg, former F.D.A. commissioner…

HAMBURG: I will admit to having a sweet tooth. Oatmeal cookies, I’ll tell you, are my particular vice.

To the most anti-sugar one of all, Dr. Robert Lustig:

LUSTIG: Sugar’s celebratory! Sugar’s fun! Sugar’s Apple Pie. Sugar is reward — but once a week.

[MUSIC: Stubborn Son, “Vixen” (from Birthright)]

*      *      *

Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC Studios and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Stephanie Tam with help from Eliza Lambert, Matt Fidler, and Sam Bair. Our staff also includes Alison Craiglow, Greg Rippin, Alvin Melathe, Harry Huggins and Zack Lapinski. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

Saul Arnow, the 11-year-old Freakonomics Radio listener who inspired this episode!

Elizabeth Abbott, senior research associate in the arts at Trinity College, University of Toronto.

Dr. Nicole Avena, research neuroscientist at at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

Margaret Hamburg, former commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Roger Layton, communications and public relations manager at Brigham Young University Library.

Robert Lustig, professor of pediatrics and member of the Institute for Health Policy Studies at The University of California, San Francisco; president of the Institute for Responsible Nutrition.

Richard Kahn, former chief scientific and medical officer of the American Diabetes Association.

Brenna Oldroyd, student at Brigham Young University.

RESOURCES

“A Big Tobacco Moment for the Sugar Industry,” James Surowiecki,  The New Yorker, (September 15, 2016).

“ Dietary Sugar and Body Weight: Have We Reached a Crisis in the Epidemic of Obesity and Diabetes?: Health Be Damned! Pour on the Sugar,” George A. Bray and Barry M. Popkin. (April 2014).

“Dietary Sugar and Body Weight: Have We Reached a Crisis in the Epidemic of Obesity and Diabetes?: We Have, but the Pox on Sugar Is Overwrought and Overworked,” Richard Kahn and John L. Sievenpiper. (April 2014).

“Evidence for Sugar Addiction: Behavioral and Neurochemical Effects of Intermittent, Excessive Sugar Intake,” Nicole M. Avena, Pedro Rada, and Bartley G. Hoebel (2008).

“How the Sugar Industry Shifted Blame to Fat,” Anahad O’Connor, The New York Times (September 12, 2016).

“Is Everything We Eat Associated with Cancer? A Systematic Cookbook Review,” Jonathan D. Schoenfeld and John P.A. Ioannidis (January 1, 2013).

“Isocaloric Fructose Restriction and Metabolic Improvement in Children with Obesity and Metabolic Syndrome,” Robert Lustig, Kathleen Mulligan, Susan M. Noworolski, Viva W. Tai, Michael J. Wen, Ayca Erkin-Cakmak, Alejandro Gugliucci, and Jean-Marc Schwarz (February 2016).

“The Public Health and Economic Benefits of Taxing Sugar-Sweetened Beverages,” Kelly D. Brownell, Thomas Farley, Walter C. Willett, Barry M. Popkin, Frank J. Chaloupka, Joseph W. Thompson, and David S. Ludwig (October 15, 2009).

“Public Health: The Toxic Truth about Sugar,” Robert Lustig, Laura A. Schmidt, and Claire D. Brindis (February 2, 2012).

“The Relationship of Sugar to Population-Level Diabetes Prevalence: An Econometric Analysis of Repeated Cross-Sectional Data,” Sanjay Basu, Paula Yoffe, Nancy Hills, and Robert H. Lustig (February 27, 2013).

“Resolved: There Is Sufficient Scientific Evidence That Decreasing Sugar-Sweetened Beverage Consumption Will Reduce the Prevalence of Obesity and Obesity-Related Diseases,” Frank Hu (August 2013).

“Sickeningly Sweet: Does Sugar Cause Chronic Disease? No,” John Sievenpiper (August 1, 2016).

“Sickeningly Sweet: Does Sugar Cause Type 2 Diabetes? Yes,” Robert Lustig (August 1, 2016).

Sugar: A Bittersweet History by Abbott, Elizabeth (The Overlook Press, 2011).

Sugar: The Bitter Truth by University of California Television (UCTV) (March 7, 2017).

“The Sugar Wars,” Daniel Engber, The Atlantic , (January/February 2017).

“Which Foods May Be Addictive? The Roles of Processing, Fat Content, and Glycemic Load,” Erica M. Schulte, Nicole M. Avena, and Ashley N. Gearhardt (February 18, 2015).

“You’re About to Find Out How Much Sugar Is Added to Your Food,” Deena Shankar Bloomberg.com , (August 9, 2016).

EXTRA

Fed Up, (Atlas Films, 2014).

“Healthy Diet,” World Health Organization.

Milktoberfest.

“Understanding and Addressing Food Addiction: A Science-Based Approach to Policy, Practice and Research” The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse.

The post There’s a War on Sugar. Is It Justified? (Ep. 285 Rebroadcast) appeared first on Freakonomics.

from Dental Care Tips http://freakonomics.com/podcast/sugar-rebroadcast/

[jozalynsharp]

How We've Let Politics Ruin the Art of Discourse & How I Made my Grandmother Think Differently

by Jozalyn Sharp, 9/18/2018 2:49 PM

My grandmother screams at the television. Sucked in by the 24 hour news cycle, she sits in her red recliner day in and day out pining for a Democratic president and cursing at representatives of the right. Flip the political affiliations either way and I bet each and every one of you reading this has someone in your family like this. Someone so caught up in the discourse they forgot that part of the human condition is coexisting. She screams again, my grandfather tells her to knock it off, and I tell my grandmother what I really think of it all. She listens. Maybe she’s changed, maybe she isn’t. We have a responsibility to keep discourse alive.

The left and the right conversation has permeated every day life for two years now. The far left screaming for social justice and the far right screaming for tradition. Then there’s those of us who are in the middle (however far right or left we may lean) quietly asking for compromise. The chess club kid at their first high school party trapped in the kitchen while two jocks fight it out for the head cheerleader. The whole time you’re quietly whispering to them as they pummel each other, “She’s fucking that college guy with the sports car…”, but no one hears you.

I have spoken openly on one of my podcasts, MetalSucks, that I do not think the way forward is exclusion. I do not think it is human to tell someone that because they support our current president or the right regime that they are a piece of garbage. If they are a piece of garbage, I’ll fucking take them to the dump myself. However, I was raised in a home of tolerance. Raised by ethical women and strong military men. People who taught me that tolerance isn’t just sitting down with people you agree with, but also sitting down with people you don’t agree with. Not just sitting with them, but listening to them with an open heart and an open mind because that’s what you would want them to do. People aren’t interested in that anymore. It seems as though everyone has inflated themselves to the point of righteousness. Crusaders battling it out for the morality of the world.

Why can’t I, as an open and proud Liberal, break bread with a Trump supporter? Why can’t I sit and have a beer with one? If I do, far right leaning liberals will call me a sympathizer. I probably am a sympathizer. I sympathize with humanity. I have my own personal feelings about the president, but I don’t let those close my mind. I cannot. It would go against everything I was raised to believe was right to discount someone based on that. There is no progress where minds are closed. We often do not want to open our minds to those we see as immoral because our innate fear is that we will be made immoral for the interaction. Or maybe we fear that we might agree. Maybe the fear is that we will have to justify the interaction to others on our side of the fence who may judge us for it. Fear. There is a common thread permeating the world today and it is fear. Fear causes families to tear themselves apart over a divisive political climate. Fear is a powerful emotion and I see it changing the way people look at each other. Changing the way fathers look at sons, they way brothers look at sisters. Fear is a powerful distraction. We have a chance to make real change in society, and we won’t for fear that our side won’t completely “win”. If fear drives the conversation, the solution will always be self-serving. Do not misread me. I sit on my couch at home and think, “How can people think this is good?!”. I want to bang my fists on the table as much as everyone else, but that’s not the way forward. I shouldn’t be asking “How can people think this is good?” with incredulity, I should be asking it with genuine curiosity. I should be trying to understand the people on the other side of the fence. I should be trying to understand them so I can communicate with them. When it comes to communication, lots of us want to make demands on how people communicate with us, but we balk when people ask us to communicate with them on their level if we deem it intellectually or morally beneath us. That isn’t open mindedness, that’s arrogance. That’s millions of people refusing to believe that we have something to learn from each other, that compromise is a possibility, and that you don’t have to own the same moral belief systems to co-exist. There are religions that believe I should be subservient to man. Like, FUCK THAT 100%, but that doesn’t stop me from sitting at a table with someone of that religion and smiling. Eating with them, speaking with them, learning from them. There are performance artists banning Trump supporters from their events. Far left people cry out in victory over this, but all I hear is intolerance. Would we pump our fists in the air if that same artist said they didn’t want Muslims in their events? No we’d tear them down for being ethnocentric and close minded. We’d tell them that just because someone was raised differently or had a different belief system doesn’t make them any less valid of a person. Why is an open mind only afforded to those who we deem as “right” or “good”? Who makes that choice? What judge and jury must I please to be deemed right or good? The right and the left both cover their ears and scream instead of asking each other questions. But, Jozalyn, there’s people on the right/left who don’t want to be educated, they share articles on social media without checking it’s validity, they spout things that aren’t true as if they’re facts, and there’s just no reasoning with them. I promise you if you were truly attempting to communicate that wouldn’t be the issue. Condescending comments of “You should check your facts” or PM’s letting them know how wrong they are, AREN’T COMMUNICATING. You cannot viably communicate about complex social issues in a Facebook comment thread. It’s impossible to do it on any intellectual level because it allows people to be too reactive and it also allows them to interpret your message any way they choose. If you really want to communicate do it over the phone, do it in person, do it in a way that makes you both see or feel some part of each other’s humanity. Facebook is the glory hole of human interaction. It’s great and fun, but whatever you’re picturing is on the other side of that hole is probably nothing like what actually is over there. (No, Mom, I’ve never done a glory hole.) But, Jozalyn, I don’t see this person in person and I don’t have their phone number because we’re no that close. Really? I challenge you to say that shit in the mirror and then explain to yourself why you care so much about someone you don’t even have in your phone contacts. This person is someone you barely know and you care so much about what they think that you HAVE to blow up their Facebook comments with your righteous knowledge? Do you not have Netflix? Do you live in a country where masturbation is illegal? Do you have that much time on your hands? Take a second look at how much you’re letting that person affect your emotional state. However “wrong” their opinions may be, if you don’t know them that well you’re not changing their mind. The aren’t close enough to you for you care about them either. If you do not CARE what that person thinks or believes or feels, are you communicating? No, you’re not because you have no reason to truly listen or reach agreement with that person. Then you have two people just screaming about how right they are. You’re just yelling your opinion into the void. She says writing a blog for 12 people to read. But, Jozalyn, how can I be close with someone who supports someone I literally think is evil!/destroying our country. Whatever side you are on, why in the world would you let political affiliations tear apart your family? In what reality would you feel good about that? My mother instilled a massive anxiety disorder in me both genetically and with her constant frenetic worrying. What I am thankful for is she did it in a way that makes me look at things differently. When you are constantly aware of how close to death we are at every moment of the day, things don’t really seem like that big of a deal. Don’t disown your dad because he voted for Trump, or your daughter because she voted for Hillary. Your moral indignation and inability to coexist with someone of a differing opinion is going to ruin your relationship with someone you love? Not worth it. If they fall tragically terminally ill you won’t be standing over their death bed, leaning down to whisper in their ear, “I bet you wish you voted for the other guy now.”

Coexisting with people of different belief systems is part of being an adult. That includes political beliefs. My grandfather is in his 70’s, a retired Navy Chief and high voltage electrician, and very white. He told me recently that the problem with the world is “old rich piece of shit white bigots”. I’m not saying he’s wrong, but I am saying that if I went to him and told him I couldn’t work with someone who was a Trump supporter he’d tell me to “sack up and quit my belly-acheing.” He’d tell me that that’s not the way adults behave. I’m passionate about this because I love the dialogue that’s happening. I am full of hope for the future that we are finally openly talking about the problems with racism and sexual assault in our country. That more and more of us are looking at guns and wondering if they are worth the lives of our children. The environment, the economy, foreign relations. These things are all conversations we should be having right now. But that’s just it, isn’t it? We’re not having conversations. We’re having meme wars, and making snarky comments. Highly visible political figures taking shots at each other and the issues on FUCKING TWITTER. What we have is millions of people standing in a courtyard. Each of them standing on a soap box. Screaming to be the loudest, hoping people will stop in front of their soap box. Screaming, never realizing that there’s no one to listen to your message. No one is going to stop because everyone is on their own box. The more of us who step off of ours and and spend more time listening, the quieter the screaming will become. Soon it will be heated yelling, and soon after that it will be calm chatter. Then and only then can we have conversations. Step off your soap box today, and challenge yourself to listen to someone you disagree with with an open mind. Watch them step off theirs to have a conversation with you. Maybe I’m too empathetic. I don’t know. Who am I to say?

I’m stepping off my soap box now. I’m ready to listen.

[be21zh]

Jun 13, 2018

these 2 dawns both dreamed of enemies and my revenge. yesterday on my jog route, the old sinister, an elder man, a mad cow, again challenged me physically, took a narrow way in advance me. he copied my route twice, always bragged his mule energetic and orthodox. It really disgusting me but I trusted God the killing upon profane, anytime anywhere. it took me longer to roam when I caught sight of my mission on the earth progresses so step by step and devising broken. God dad, enemies took our road to sabotage our beautiful world's descending. near my dorm, the neighbor room of my dorm, is a half size room previously for cleaner keeping tools, now occupied by dorm administrative staff, a likely lesbian. dorm authority previously never put woman among mans' area, but the cheap cow insisted lodging among all man dorms, just for steal and spying me. day by day it hided herself in the shabby shelter to surveillance me, to profane me. likely she arranged that to take advantage of public asset for private interest, or the SOE under PRC tyrant's direction to threaten me with the trick. as to larger aspect, these 2 weeks quite satisfying: dorm internet access upgrade to chinaunicom fiber optics, whose download speed stable at 2MB/s. upload speed almost the same. I completed downloading OSes on our raspberry pi within 2 hours for 2 or 4 system images. with the utility, I can safely try more Linux distributive and more prepared for Linux world which so attractive comparing Microsoft under PRC blackmail. now my son and my raspberry pi both equipped with more elegant OSes, ready to go further and higher on the ward free informative universe. the ISP in the pass week gradually picked up to surveillance me. it already blocked me 2 days last week, forced me surfing domestic sites includes its homepage, where I found cheap but gracious mobile phone number with modest data plan, 15 CNY/mon. I had already persuaded by its sms to have a free of charge deputy phone number, but later contact refuted me saying the data plan includes deputy card requires at lease 128CNY/mon consuming. but on the website, I saw an independent phone number only costs 30CNY, so I immediately ordered one, in rhythm of rain in an aimless night besieged by deadly blockage from open web. It's so meaningful and rewarding, that I can't wait to add the new asset to all my zhone GA contacts. Monday express informed me the arrival of the sim card and I fetched immediately, even the staff of the unicom missing and handled over her colleague. Sunday I busy with trying enable other 2 GA chrome device management within google admin panel before woz returning from his painting class his mom arranged years. even failed due to google policy, we glad the 2 GA didn't bundled with central administrative which usually bans full google play store access, as status quo. my son uncertain about my blame last Monday upon his adopting a corrective glasses his mom suggested in favor of Chinese so said innovation, but never trustworthy. he tried to flattered me by turning on English podcast proactive as I frequently urged while he always loosed to abid. but I don't care, and glad to reunite him in the fruitful weekend. his internet ISP once boasted speed of 30MB but never satisfying, rather just lagging and broken frequently, likely in PRC surveillance's ordain. I even can't update his Linux smoothly there. each time when I visit my son and launch update, it's bottle neck and upset our patience. God laughs the dirty trick and burning brains wasted among all ghosted communism China wholely in ash. God dad, I'm so contented by my new internet that I here end this post soon. grant my son satisfying web and rich content of play. grant us ward free web, for otherwise I see only darkness of dictator propaganda, coarse of manipulation of social consciousness. bring me sooner my Royal China, my Crown Queen from Japan, Asoh Yukiko. bring me closer my dream land and peace of God's mercy upon Chinese and China, my vested land from my glorious ancestor. thx for this sunny morning, Dad God.

May 29, 2018

dreamed with my son roamed in remote place near Tianjin, northern China, my university city. I carried my passed mother's corpse and search for service to bury it. we were refuted once for too expensive. then near country fair we met Gao Jun, my once alumnus who soon after army train in beginning of PRC campus migrated from our major Philosophy school into Economics, but stayed in dorm of our class girls. her husband or brother inquired our problem and extended his help, out of Chinese taboo, while Miss Gao remained her self-possessed normally among guests in her spacious house in my dream. we likely rested there and waited for more money remit from our relatives, or aided by Gao to settle our funeral. the northern China countryside scene lonely detailed in dream, different from my hometown, central China. last night it drizzled, left wet ground when I went to dorm canteen for breakfast. last night I put 2 pillows in stack and its the highest pillow I ever had with my own, for the cover of my pillar sent to laundry and no replacement. I always admire American family pillars in its episodes, large and soft and qualifies, but never found within domestic market includes online e-commerce. yesterday I half day roaming in dorm, except reading informative web as routine for one or 2 hours. my life more and more turned like an elder's, or even worse, like those retired gathered in gate ball game yard outside near my dorm window view. they found no fun in the game, no challenge, no exciting, but just gather and moving. still there are fights among common Chinese, like the dorm canteen. the operational couples loathed to invest more on food materials, but spare no efforts to advertise, to celebrate its anniversary. the result is fewer and fewer customers. I usually have less than a bowl meat in a week there together. it doesn't hurt me much as a mandated vegetarian, but let me slender. and the business possibly reined by PRC surveillance against me. recent months my throat more and more choked by phlegm, I had to cough hard to spit it. my backbone also turned inflexible: after standing up it takes quite few seconds to waist straight from sitting. usually the most exciting moment in a week is gathering my son, woz, on Sunday weekly. his sinful mom tentative separates us, frequently change my son's timetable to drive my son away from my side. God dad, the drizzle turns heavier. dad God, my life runs full and merry. no matter how sinister attempted to ruin it. grant us our web business booming and self-relies. bring us sooner Royal China for better future. bring me my Crown Queen from Japan, Asoh Yukiko, for my second baby, billing zhu. God dad last salary means so much for us. my worn shoes, which embarrassed me again last raining Sunday when it was wet being handled to spa keeper, now replaced by new one. my son glad with his new chromebook bag he chose his own. God dad, in coming alipay credit returning day, let us anxious free. thx God dad, for surfing hard time so smooth regardless PRC war time preparing period, thx for skipping us from trifle grudge in the failing and doomed authority.

May 26, 2018

this month my salary from QRRS exceptionally supportive: nearly 600 additional totals ￥3600, and my younger brother gifted me ￥200 for update my wrecked shoes. with it, I bought my son, woz birthday cake a dearest one, ￥128 fruits cake titled 和风莓语. we designated praying for Japanese spiritual and English.the cake shop near my dorm and kindly offered us a set of stainless steer cake knife and forks. my son lately returned from his school, near 7 pm, for his school forced even grade 7th students to have night class aiming better performance in rat race entrance exam of elite senior middle school. his mom this time actively joined us in celebration. woz, and all us likely enjoyed the delicacy, fruit cake. after first round of eating cake, my son lent himself to my planned task abrupt, setup his new account in google chrome for easy access family asset book. that lasted more than an hour and wonderfully done. I then left, urging my son listening and watching more English as cliche. on bus station, the last bus line missed. I walked 2 bus stops to return my dorm, and busy with publishing video and photo captured in the ritual birthday onto web till 11 am. in this deep sleep I dreamed 2 kind of different animals, 獾 badger and a kind of Chinese sound like "揉", both like sloth or pangolin. the training and performance of district summer sports game Qiqihar municipal requisites on going now again, near 8 am and loudly outside. I saw in these days how the expropriation costs, esp young lives, their decency and creativeness in change of collective cheap mob. dad, my son's class was lucky out of the chaos. guide us away from burning turbulence of PRC war time preparation. grant us our job meaningful and rewarding material and spiritual. in this windy morning, dad God, let the world witness how plenty our joys, perfections in our living spectrum.

[histormeme]

Tune In Next Blog For Another Great Point!

When it comes to our ever developing, fast paced society we never know what kind of new things can be invented or discovered at any given time or what can be thrown at us! The world can go from driving in complete silence to socializing with whoever kept you company during the trips to the store then next thing you know all we need is an aux cord and our premium membership of Spotify to keep us company on our ventures. Some people are known to have difficulty sitting in silence during their drives and others rely on some type of audio such as music, talk radio or podcasts blaring through their speakers to help keep them awake on late night commutes. The car stereo has become a hell of an invention that has certainly made it’s way into our hearts and cars as time progressed. It is something that certainly evolved and developed into surround sounds and booming bass sub woofers in the comfort of your own car! I know personally I hate going without having my aux cord in the car and don’t know what I would do without my Spotify account to keep me company on my drives. 

History: The first radio was introduced in 1922 by Chevrolet. It's price ranked up to $200 and had an antenna that covered the car’s entire roof, batteries that barely fit under the front seat and two gigantic speakers that attached behind the seat. You might as well have been taking the entire band that you were listening to along for the ride because of how excessive this whole set up was.

Monophonic AM radio has been the norm for a long time, beginning with the first in-car audio system. In 1930, Paul and Joseph Galvin and William Lear developed the first automobile dashboard radio and named it the "Motorola," otherwise known as motorized Victrola and in a Studebaker. A little along down the line, push button preset stations were created so the drivers weren’t taking their eyes off the road trying to shift between different stations before playlists ever became a thing. I couldn’t even imagine how unsafe this was and how crazy drivers went or what kind of cars we’d see cruising down in their ridiculous excessive set ups! 

During that time, this article starts to go on about comparing texting and driving to back then which was station searching and driving, the common ground being the ‘being distracted while driving’. 

Did you know in 1930 a law was proposed in Massachusetts and St. Louis that banned the radio while driving because it was argued that it distracted drivers and the tunes would make them fall asleep?!

It’s kind of ironic when you compare that to modern times, don’t you think? Now we use the radio to help keep us alert and aware while driving because driving in silence can be so tedious and just flat out tiring especially during late night commutes. It would be crazy to see people getting tickets or pulled over just because they’re bumping their tunes in their car. Obviously people would still do it but it’s a really silly reason and one of the most ridiculous if you think about it. Although, I do wonder how people who have the really loud bass heavy songs playing how they hear the different emergency vehicles sometimes...Anyways, it’s amazing to think just how simple yet advanced the type of sound systems we have in our time compared to the dials and knobs from the first ever car radio. 

Our mental state today as a society because of this certain invention & the wrap up: The car radio has a really vast and wide affect on our minds as people. It broadcasts sounds and songs that can take a toll on our emotions and affect our body as well. For example, if a very fast paced song would play, it could cause us to drive faster and start speeding because it would get our adrenaline pumping. A certain news announcement such as traffic on a certain freeway or a distressing political related headline could be reported and would cause us to feel anger and rage which would lead us to start speeding and becoming a very angry driver which of course would cause us to coin the term “road rage”!

As we all know our mental state as a society today would be very different if we never even had the blessing of what we call the radio today. Other than being a reliable source of entertainment and music, another reason why the radio is a great and beautiful invention is because it can be some of our daily news source and outlet such as finding out traffic updates and current affairs. Although a lot of it can talk about pointless things about celebrities and what’s going on in their lives, there’s those very few times and moments where it can talk about the current state of the world and events that happened nearby depending on what station we are tuning in to. Some of us may hate the radio only because we’re tired of hearing the same songs played throughout the day every hour on the hour but all in all we wouldn’t be the people we are today without them! 

[twenty9ish-blog]

I am Beautiful

Sunday Mass was a thing we did often in my family while I was growing up. If my father was working, we attended the 9am mass and treated ourselves to donuts. When I started driving, I could drive myself to the 5:30pm. It was co-run by the youth group and the music was better. If dad wasn’t working or we were at grandma’s house, we attended 7:30am mass.

7:30am mass was my least favorite of all the masses. Let’s be honest, people just wanted to get it out of the way so they had more time in the daylight. I never felt the homily was that inspiring, enlightening, or engaging. Everyone moved so slowly as we walked down the aisle to receive the blood and body of christ because none of us were awake. Then there was the singing. Singing was my favorite part about mass but at 7:30am everyone struggled to follow the notes, including the pianist.

So in my early highschool years I decided that if I was attending 7:30am mass, I was going to do it my way. I would wake up, roll out of bed, throw on the clothes that I had worn on Saturday because they were on the top of the pile of clothes that had accumulated through the week. I’d go to the bathroom and wash my face, brush my teeth, then throw some water on my hair. It was long, curly, frizzy, and untamed because high school wasn’t uncomfortable enough but it was my hair and I owned it. My dad would be yelling to me to get in the damn car or he was going to leave and if I didn’t go to church I would regret it later.

So at 7:20ish I’d run down the stairs and make it just in time for the longest 10ish minute drive while I was lectured about how my hair was too messy, my clothes didn’t match, and my overall disrespect for time and God. In those 10 minutes I wished nothing more than to already be at the church. If I tried to interject, the conversation only got louder. If I remained quiet, I wasn’t paying attention. It was this continuous loop where I couldn’t find an exit. I was stuck in this injustice. This was a continuous cycle in our home because I didn’t want to change my lifestyle and I think my dad thought if he got louder and meaner that would encourage me to change.

One Sunday, he opened my door and told me to wake up. I got out of bed and started my routine. He started yelling to me what time it was, probably to get me in gear faster. That morning I did something that forever changed our Sunday routine. I turned on my boombox, raised the volume, pressed play to my Christina Aguilera cd and sang along with her, “I am beautiful no matter what you say. Words can’t bring me down.” Had I known that song was a game changer I would have played it immediately.

I walked downstairs and both my mom and dad were laughing. They didn’t talk about my hair or the clothes I was wearing. My dad wanted to know what happened to all those singing lessons I had taken. He told me I was beautiful.

I had found a way to live life the way I wanted and make people laugh. That teen didn’t see herself in a corner instead she found a way to be seen for who she was even if the crowd wanted her to be someone else.

I sometimes forget she lives inside me but when I remember she’s really fun to hang out with. I want to hang out with her more in the next decade. Especially in this new administration. Lately, I find it hard to write and reflect because in my 20s I had Barack Obama. A man I voted for twice because I believed in him, I loved him, and he was my president. When hard times happened in our country, I looked forward to hearing a speech from him. I felt comforted and ready to for the next thing. Even when I didn’t find myself aligned or I wanted more from him, I never felt discouraged about the fate of our country.

In a month, I have marched, written postcards, called local representatives, and engaged in conversations about our country’s state. I’ve celebrated the small wins like the Uber shut down, two republican representatives changed their vote to “no for Betsy Devos” because their constituents called them and asked them to change their vote, protests convening around our country at different airports to protest the #muslimban and I started listening to Phoebe Robinson’s “So Many White Guys” podcast. That last one is more a new discovery for me and I really wanted to share it. It’s in it’s second season and has been really helpful during this past month.  

All of the small wins were necessary to celebrate but I haven’t forgotten that Betsy Devos was still voted in, that the Muslim ban is still a thing, and every morning I wake up and listen to news that makes me angry and upset. I get overwhelmed and think about what I can do. Do I need to be louder? Do I need to give more money towards a cause I believe in? If voting with my dollar is what will get these politicians to hear me where do I stop shopping? A week ago I listened to Christina’s song on the radio. I cried on my drive home. It reminded me about that Sunday morning where instead of staying stuck in a routine that didn’t make me feel good I tried something different. It reminded me that I have the tools and resources to heal, to rise, and to resist.

[dougmeet]

Addicting Cocaine, Country, Rhinestones        | |||| |||| || |||| || |||| |||||| ( ||| || ). | | ?|                Tyler Mahan Coe «Addicting Cocaine Country & Rhinestones Pōdcast & Coe» by Sarah Larson, The New Yorker, pōcast dept., filed March 7, 2018                Sarah Larson is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her column, Podcast Dept., appears on newyorker.com.        On one episode of “Cocaine & Rhinestones,” we learn why Loretta Lynn’s song “The Pill” was banned after its release, in 1975.            In 1975, Loretta Lynn, by then an established country singer-songwriter for more than a decade, released her single “The Pill.”            At that point, Lynn had won hearts and raised eyebrows with songs like “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ (with Lovin’ on Your Mind),” whose themes are self-evident, and “Fist City,” warning a woman to stay away from her husband.                (“You’d better move your feet / if you don’t want to eat / a meal that’s called Fist City.”)            “I was the first one to write it like the women lived it,” she has said.            “The Pill,” which she didn’t write but performed with gusto, is a wife’s celebration of freedom:                “I’m tearin’ down your brooder house, ’cause now I’ve got the pill.”            The song—like several of Lynn’s singles—was banned.            In “Blow & Sparklers,” an opinionated, wild, feverish, entertain-po-cast about twentieth-century American country music, written and hosted by TyManCo, we learn why, from a progressive guy with an arsenal of doggedly presented research.            The Co. Man, thirty-three, grew-up country; his father is the outlaw David Allan Coe.            In childhood, T traveled with his Coe-dad’s outlaw band; in young adulthood, he played rhythm guitar and shredded a little.            He now lives in Nashvegas.            When asked how he turned out so centered after moving all the time AND his peripatetic, outlaw upbringing among musicians, he paused and said,                “Well, I’ve done a lot of acid.”            Also, books: as a kid on the road, he’d disappear into stuff like James Clavell’s “Shōgun;” he’s still  obsessive, often his books have never been digitized and may never be published.            “Cōgun & Rōgun” references a thorough bibliography.                For “The Pill,” this includes Lynn’s memoir, “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” and the collection “Feminists Who Changed America, 1963-1975.”                (Cōgun, who is currently working on the second season of the PC, was recently invited to use the private archives in the Country Music Hall of Fame, where he wrote a digitized, secret e-mail.                “THERE are at least 500 unwritten books in that data, and probably closer to 1,000 . . . Half-or-more of those books are not even written.”            The pōd has a distinct, essayist sound, narrated entirely by PōdCōe and delivered in a tone between that of a new anchor, TMC mentor-brō-caster-teacher Malcolm Gladwell,  and a prosecutor WAITING FOR A JURY TO COME BACK.            I often laugh while listening.            In the “Pill” episode, PōCō begins by talking about the “Streisand effect,” in which an attempt to stop the public from being exposed to something makes it go viral, THEN goes on to discuss the Comstock laws, on obscenity; the history of contraception in the U.S.; a bit of Lynn’s biography, and the lyrics and authorship of the song—all to set up why “The Pill” was banned.                “I’m about to prove it wasn’t a knee-jerk reaction to a country song about birth control,” he says.            He forensically plays songs by men about birth control and abortion TO WOMEN.            “Pretty gross,” he says of callous Harry Chapin lyrics.            “But it was not banned.” None of the men’s songs were. There’s a double-standard in music, he explains:            “Men have to go way over the line.   All women have to do is get near it.” He plays FURTIVE samples of banned songs by women, including Jeannie C. Riley’s hit “Harper Valley P.T.A.,” about a mother telling off a bunch of small-town hypocrites. (Mindbogglingly, Cosign gives that song a three-episode deep-dive in season UNO.)            By the end of the episode, he’s proved his point, case closed:                “Female artists have their songs banned simply for standing up to society, or for fighting back.”            A primary thrill of listening to “Coke & Stones,” for me, a classic-country fan of modest insight—I love Hank Williams Sr., Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, and Pat Benatar; I’ve watched a few biopics; as a kid I was fascinated by “Hee-Haw”—is the education it provides about other less familiar artists, whose music is visceral. (if you can explain that sentence, i'll blow ya - ed.)            (Plenty of music lovers know all about the Louvin Brothers and Doug and Rusty Kershaw; I do not.)            Another provides cultural context; each story reflects larger themes about the artistry and business of country music. And MC CoCo’s writing—like a good country song—is provocative.            “Those bastards deregulated radio in the Telecommunications Act of 1996;” Buck Owens’s vocal delivery is “stabbed-in-the-back-sincere;” a racist song about school desegregation “ends with a chorus of, I assume, ghost-children, singing ‘My Country ’Tis of Thee.’ ” As the acid kicks in, we both laugh at the absurdities of life.  I question my own journalism and wish I could be more like Hunter T.            In one of my favorite episodes, about Bobbie Gentry’s eternally mysterious “Ode to Billie Joe,” from 1967, Coe develops a catarrh, an inward view of his "self;" his eyes stare through the distance, saying presciently of a past recording session which took place on a dark night before his birth,                “You can tell it isn’t going to be a normal song right away, from those wheezing violins on the intro.”            The arranger “was working with an unusual crew of four violins and two cellos.” One of the cellists plucked his notes, “while the rest of the strings weave in and out in response to the unfolding drama.” The end is “cinematic:” the strings go up “with the narrator going up on Choctaw Ridge to pick flowers,” and down, “when the narrator throws the flowers down off the bridge.” I get a chill, and suddenly his chin hits his chest and his breathing is shallow. He continues weakly, "We hear them, falling and eerie, and they give us chills. In the past I tried to resolve my interlining about “Ode to Billie Joe,” a staple on my childhood oldies station, trying to discover what the protagonist and Billie Joe were throwing off the Tallahatchie Bridge; reading about Gentry; watching the horrible 1976 movie made to capitalize on the song’s success for inchoate clues.  None of it was satisfying, but listening to  “Coke & Tone,” TMC both celebrates the song’s mystery and provides insight into its strange power.            I ask Podcone about his style; he doesn’t sound like many other p-hosts.            “I would describe it as performative,” he muttered, explicitly performatively, "You're [hereby] fired."                    "I now pronounce you man and wife."                    "I order you to go!" "Go—that's an order!"                    "Yes" – answering the question. "Do you promise to do the dishes?"                    "You are under arrest" – putting  me under arrest.                    "I christen you."                    "I accept your apology."                    "I sentence you to death."                    "I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you" (Islamic: see: Talaq-i-Bid'ah)!                    "I do – wedding."                    "I swear to do that." "I promise to be there."                    "I apologize."                    "I dedicate this..." (...book to my wife; ...next song to the striking Stella Doro workers, etc.).                    "This meeting is now adjourned." "The court is now in session."                    "This church is hereby de-sanctified."                    "War is declared."                    "I resign" – employment, or chess.                    "You're [hereby] fired."            He was influenced by “the Radio”—dramatic radio shows from his childhood—“specifically Paul Harvey, ‘The Rest of the Story’" —which, when I heard it in the eighties, felt like it had been beamed there from the forties—“and Art Bell, the guy who does ‘Coast to Coast AM,’ which has gotten super political and weird now, but when I was a kid it was on AM radio overnight, which meant clear airwaves; you could pick it up in most of the country.”            Bell had a “weird voice,” Coe said, and listeners would call in to talk to him about normal things like about ghosts, alien abductions, and telepathy.            “We had a driver who loved listening to it,” he said. “You’d be driving through the night to the next town, through the middle of nowhere, just headlights on the road  in bitumen-molasses-darkness, and all the adults are on the radio having conversations about stuff, and they sound dead serious.”            That mood made an impact.            On “Coe & Rye,” he wants to evoke of it.            He records his vocals overnight in a basement when it’s quiet outside. “Just me alone in the dark, talking to a microphone,” he said.

Addicting Cocaine, Country, & Rhinestones | |||| || |||| ||||||