The black political art of “working the refs” with constant and vociferous complaints of “liberal bias” in the media has a long and distinguished history. Few of its practitioners, however, have succeeded so frequently—and nakedly—as the ex-Drudge drudge and Arianna acolyte Andrew Breitbart. The estimable E.J. Dionne terms Breitbart to be the MSM’s virtual “assignment editor” and, indeed, it’s hard not to be impressed. Breitbart has already been exposed as a provocateur who cares not a whit for honesty or accuracy in his self-declared war on all things liberal. Yet reporters, editors and producers remain so frightened by his accusations that they continue to trumpet them as they search their souls to purge themselves of the bias that prevented them from seeing the world from a Tea Party point of view.
The power of this new view of stress — that our physical health is strongly linked to our emotional state — is that it connects a wide range of scientific observations, from the sociological to the molecular. On one hand, stress can be described as a cultural condition, a byproduct of a society that leaves some people in a permanent state of unease. But that feeling can also be measured in the blood and urine, quantified in terms of glucocorticoids and norepinephrine and adrenal hormones. And now we can see, with scary precision, the devastating cascade unleashed by these chemicals. The end result is that stress is finally being recognized as a critical risk factor, predicting an ever larger percentage of health outcomes.
To Sapolsky, the next step was obvious: Attack the condition head-on. In 2003, he proposed a vaccinelike treatment that protects people against stress. It’s a hugely ambitious attempt to combat a societal scourge at the level of our DNA. Although years of work remain, Sapolsky now insists that, given the public health consequences, it’s time to take the problem seriously, to move our treatments beyond talk therapy and Valium. “Sometimes it’s not enough just to tell people, ‘Jeez, you should really learn to relax,’” Sapolsky says. “If stress is half as bad for you as we currently think it is, then it’s time to stop treating the side effects. It’s time to go after stress itself.”
tapthatguy:
Cute piper playing “Scotland The Brave” near Glasgow Central train station
You know, if I’d wanted Dick Cheney as president I would have just voted for him.
— Kevin Drum, “Even Yet More Warrantless Searches”.
The public library system for Burlington County, New Jersey, has ordered that all copies of Amy Sonnie’s Revolutionary Voices: A Multicultural Queer Youth Anthology be removed from library shelves after the library director labeled the book “child pornography.”
Library director Gail Sweet ordered the book’s removal without having followed a formal book challenge process. Instead, she acted on a a complaint from a member of the local chapter of Fox commentator Glenn Beck’s 9.12 Project. Emails obtained by American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey show that the complaint was made by Beverly Marinelli, who is also credited with persuading Rancocas Valley Regional High School to ban the same book in May.
The book, which Marinelli describes as “pervasively vulgar, obscene, and inappropriate,” is a collection of essays by LGBT youth describing their struggles with coming out to themselves and their families.
The Tory solution to the West’s obesity problem: shame people more.
Richard Malone, bishop of the Diocese of Portland (which covers all of Maine), wrote an opinion piece in this weekend’s Maine Sunday Telegram, addressing climate change, and arguing that the interests of “a global community for which we all must care” require us to deal with the climate crisis.
His arguments are cogent and strong. Pity they don’t persuade him on another topic: same-sex marriage. Malone led the Maine fight against same-sex marriage, but his pontifications (sorry, bad pun) on climate change could easily be used to support same-sex marriage.
It was interesting timing. As soon as Franco decided his Hollywood career wasn’t enough, his Hollywood career exploded—which meant that his intellectual pursuits got picked up on the radar of the A-list Hollywood publicity machine. Which was, of course, baffled by all of it. Plenty of actors dabble in side projects—rock bands, horse racing, college, veganism—but none of them, and maybe no one else in the history of anything, anywhere, seems to approach extracurricular activities with the ferocity of Franco.
Take, for instance, graduate school. As soon as Franco finished at UCLA, he moved to New York and enrolled in four of them: NYU for filmmaking, Columbia for fiction writing, Brooklyn College for fiction writing, and—just for good measure—a low-residency poetry program at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina. This fall, at 32, before he’s even done with all of these, he’ll be starting at Yale, for a Ph.D. in English, and also at the Rhode Island School of Design. After which, obviously, he will become president of the United Nations, train a flock of African gray parrots to perform free colonoscopies in the developing world, and launch himself into space in order to explain the human heart to aliens living at the pulsing core of interstellar quasars.
