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Racism, Gun Ownership and Gun Control: Biased Attitudes in US Whites May Influence Policy Decisions - PMC

After accounting for all explanatory variables, logistic regressions found that for each 1 point increase in symbolic racism there was a 50% increase in the odds of having a gun at home. After also accounting for having a gun in the home, there was still a 28% increase in support for permits to carry concealed handguns, for each one point increase in symbolic racism. The relationship between symbolic racism and opposition to banning handguns in the home (OR1.27 CI 1.03,1.58) was reduced to non-significant after accounting for having a gun in the home (OR1.17 CI.94,1.46), which likely represents self-interest in retaining property (guns).

Empathy for the Pain of the Conflicting Group Is Altered Across Generations in the Aftermath of a Genocide - Neuroscience News

“But what was even more critical is that children from both former genocide perpetrators and survivors displayed the same intergroup bias as their parents, even though they did not experience the conflict themselves. This result might explain why some conflicts sometimes last over generations, as the children appear to have the same biases as their parents”, she adds.

How Getting Canceled on Social Media Can Derail a Book Deal - The New York Times

The clauses vary from publisher to publisher, and even from one literary agency to the next — every agency strikes its own deal with each publishing house — but the general principle is that they take aim at conduct that would invite widespread public condemnation or significantly diminish sales among the book’s intended audience, and that the publisher didn’t previously know about when it signed the deal. If an author has a propensity for getting in fistfights, for example, the book cannot be dropped because he or she gets in another one.

Economic Mobility Is Better in Rural Than Urban Areas - Bloomberg

In Iowa and the Dakotas, rural areas afford much greater prospects for upward mobility compared to urban centers. But in Georgia and the Carolinas, rural areas offer much less opportunity for economic mobility than urban centers.

How Science Explains Trump's Grip on White Males - Scientific American

“Individuals selectively credit and dismiss asserted dangers in a manner supportive of their preferred form of social organization,” wrote Slovic and collaborators in a 2007 research paper that rings no less true today. In other words, for certain individuals, supporting Trump is a psychologically palliative response to perceived risks.

Racial Bias in Pulse Oximetry Measurement | NEJM

Thus, in two large cohorts, Black patients had nearly three times the frequency of occult hypoxemia that was not detected by pulse oximetry as White patients. Given the widespread use of pulse oximetry for medical decision making, these findings have some major implications, especially during the current coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) pandemic. Our results suggest that reliance on pulse oximetry to triage patients and adjust supplemental oxygen levels may place Black patients at increased risk for hypoxemia. It is important to note that not all Black patients who had a pulse oximetry value of 92 to 96% had occult hypoxemia. However, the variation in risk according to race necessitates the integration of pulse oximetry with other clinical and patient-reported data.

James Baldwin, debating Buckley

The Mississippi, or the Alabama, sheriff, who really does believe when he's facing a Negro, a boy or a girl, that this woman, this man, this child, must be insane to attack the system to which he owes his entire identity. Of course, for such a person, the proposition of which, which we are trying to discuss here to night, does not exist. […] I am stating very seriously, and this is not an overstatement, that I picked the cotton, and I carried it to market, and I built the railroads, under someone else's whip, for nothing. For nothing.

For years, complaints about North Carolina’s hog pollution vanished in state bureaucracy | Food and Environment Reporting Network

A joint investigation by The Guardian, Food & Environment Reporting Network, and the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting backs up those residents’ assessments. In response to a public-records request, DEQ released only 33 public complaints against livestock operations in North Carolina from January 2008 to April 2018. Over the same period, other hog states have registered literally thousands. And then, abruptly, the DEQ reversed that policy this spring, saying it had validated 62 complaints against animal operations over a six-month period and then posting them online. The offenders included 11 industrial hog farms, some of which had let their waste discharge into ditches and streams. The change of policy meant that state regulators had publicly documented nearly twice as many violations in the six months ending April 2019 than in an entire decade. What happened?

Rigged card game 'Swap' sheds light on perceptions of inequality - ScienceBlog.com

Regardless of how many cards were exchanged and which version they played, winners were twice as likely as losers to describe the game as fair. When cards were exchanged to favor the winner, however, winners found the game less fair – an effect that became more pronounced when two cards per round were traded. In fact, the winners’ perceptions of the game’s fairness declined more sharply than losers’ as their advantage increased – “indicating that winners’ perceptions are more sensitive than losers’ to a system that is rigged in their favor,” according to the paper. Researchers termed this the “Warren Buffett effect,” because Buffett and some other billionaires advocate to pay higher taxes. “A possible reading of our results is that winners want the playing field to be tilted enough to guarantee the outcome but not so much that the game appears hopelessly rigged in their favor,” Macy said.

A Missed Opportunity to Address a National Shame: The Case of Sickle Cell Disease in the United States | Hematology | JAMA Pediatrics | JAMA Network

There are more than 100 000 persons in the United States with SCD, and 1:365 African American individuals are born with SCD.2 Although there have been limited, yet infrequent, local points of progress, at a national level the quality of care for children with SCD is shameful. Fundamental preventive care is not provided to most of these children despite overwhelming evidence of its effectiveness. For example, daily antibiotic prophylaxis for children younger than 5 years has been shown to markedly decrease the risk of sepsis and has been recommended by national authorities for more than 20 years.3 Yet, studies across several states have shown that less than 20% of children reliably receive such care, and rates have not improved significantly during the past decade.4 Similarly, annual transcranial Doppler screening is a proven effective mechanism to help prevent stroke in patients with SCD. However, only 22% to 44% of eligible children are screened each year,5 and no improvements have been seen in at least the past 5 years.

It’s Time to Let Classical Music Die | NewMusicBox

Western classical music is not about culture. It’s about whiteness. It’s a combination of European traditions which serve the specious belief that whiteness has a culture—one that is superior to all others. Its main purpose is to be a cultural anchor for the myth of white supremacy. In that regard, people of color can never truly be pioneers of Western classical music. The best we can be are exotic guests: entertainment for the white audiences and an example of how Western classical music is more elite than the cultures of people of color.

Harvard failing students by having them live in fantasy world

No one at Harvard batted an eye to learn that Sullivan has represented an actual murderer. But they lost their minds when Sullivan was hired by Harvey Weinstein. Harvard capitulated to a small band of protesters and announced that Sullivan and his wife, Stephanie Robinson, would no longer serve as faculty deans of Winthrop House, one of Harvard’s residential units. The unofficial leader of the student hysterics, Danu Mudannayake, doesn’t even live in Winthrop House and yet claimed it was “deeply trauma-inducing” to know that Sullivan represented Weinstein, which somehow proved Sullivan “does not value the safety of students he lives with in Winthrop House.” If these ding-dongs and the spineless, craven ding-dong enablers running Harvard had simply found some smelling salts and taken a few deep breaths, they would soon have learned that Sullivan was off the Weinstein case anyway: The law professor was expecting to work on the matter during his summer break, but a judge pushed the trial back to the fall, when Sullivan’s Harvard teaching duties would have precluded his representing Weinstein.

Harvard failing students by having them live in fantasy world

In the softest and most spoiled generation of humanity ever to exist (they feel threatened by Halloween costumes and the existence of Ben Shapiro; their forebears endured World War II and Vietnam and even riding bikes without helmets), the softest and most spoiled corner must be the Harvard student body, those little princelings and princesslings who have more expectations about how the world should accommodate their whims than Louis XIV. Last week, a handful of these toddler-brained undergrads got a distinguished Harvard dean fired for doing his job.

Commentator Andrew Sullivan Jeered at Hollywood Inclusion Event | Hollywood Reporter

“When you’re a struggling, white working-class person in say, Kentucky, and a Yale student says, ‘You have white privilege,’ what do you think happens? [Donald] Trump gets elected — that’s what happens. And they don’t seem to understand any of the lessons from the last time and I don’t want [Trump] to be re-elected, but I don’t think the left is helping and I don’t think Hollywood is helping.”

Reference genome is threatening dream of personalized medicine - STAT

In other cases, the reference genome is missing vast quantities of the DNA found in non-Europeans. Computational biologist Steven Salzberg of Johns Hopkins University and colleagues sequenced the genomes of 910 African Americans and measured how many pieces are present in all of them but are missing from the reference genome. Their count: 296,485,284 base pairs — nearly 10 percent of the human genome — they reported last November. One missing fragment is 100,000 base pairs long, and millions are at least 1,000 long.

The Media Must Learn From the Covington Catholic Story - The Atlantic

How could the elite media—The New York Times, let’s say—have protected themselves from this event, which has served to reinforce millions of Americans’ belief that traditional journalistic outlets are purveyors of “fake news”? They might have hewed to a concept that once went by the quaint term “journalistic ethics.” Among other things, journalistic ethics held that if you didn’t have the reporting to support a story, and if that story had the potential to hurt its subjects, and if those subjects were private citizens, and if they were moreover minors, you didn’t run the story. You kept reporting it; you let yourself get scooped; and you accepted that speed is not the highest value. Otherwise, you were the trash press.

The world eats cheap bacon at the expense of North Carolina’s rural poor — Quartz

The state’s General Assembly has proposed rules that would bar new residents in a neighborhood from filing nuisance lawsuits. Another proposed amendment would require residents who lose their nuisance cases to pay for the legal expenses of the farms sued. The state is getting a little less transparent—as of last year, the state government will no longer disclose how many total complaints have been made against hog farms. Instead, North Carolina only reports those that resulted in notices of violation. (Between the start of 2012 and the end of March this year, there were only 15 notices.)

The world eats cheap bacon at the expense of North Carolina’s rural poor — Quartz

There is little denying that whatever the impact of the hog lagoons, it is poorer rural communities of color that bear the effects the most. Almost all of the plaintiffs in the nuisance lawsuits are black Americans. A study released last year by UNCCH found that black North Carolinians were one and a half times as likely to live within three miles of an industrial hog operation as white residents. American Indians were twice as likely and Hispanic residents were 1.39 times as likely to live near these facilities in North Carolina. “This spatial pattern is generally recognized as environmental racism,” the study’s authors concluded.

Silent Sam at UNC | more arrests after protests | News & Observer

The Alamance County group discouraged trouble among its members, according to a post on its Facebook page. “We hope and pray for a peaceful and honorable service tomorrow,” the post said. “That being said, there will be a large amount of devilish and ungodly opposition.”

The group behind Confederate monuments also built a memorial to the Klan | Facing South

Declarations of white supremacy at UDC events were not an exception but regular occurrences. Monument dedications drew massive white crowds; for example, 15,000 to 20,000 people attended a 1907 dedication in Newton, North Carolina. Dedication pageantry was highly scripted. Banners of red and white, the colors of the Confederacy, and the Confederacy's four flags would festoon the town. An elaborate processional would parade into the square, complete with white children dressed all in white in neat lines following the UDC members and Confederate veterans. Little girls in white dresses and red ribbons lined the streets. Often, 13 young women in white and red, representing the 13 states of the Confederacy, surrounded the monument itself as the dedication speaker addressed the gathering. Monument dedications were milestone events for communities that would be remembered for decades. There would be no better venue to send a racially charged message to the populace. And politicians and business leaders often obliged.

This is why white evangelicals still support Donald Trump. (It’s not economic anxiety.) - The Washington Post

Rank-and-file white evangelicals have the most negative attitudes toward immigrants of all U.S. religious groups. That’s true despite the fact that conservative white evangelical leaders strongly favor a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. My research indicates white evangelical conservatism correlates strongly with their perceptions anti-white discrimination, even after taking into account economic status, party, age and region. Fully 50 percent of white evangelical respondents to our 2016 survey reported feeling they face discrimination that’s comparable to, or even higher than, the discrimination they believe Muslim Americans face. Those who hold this perception are more likely to hold conservative attitudes on issues as wide-ranging as climate change, tax policy and health-care reform.

America is Regressing into a Developing Nation for Most People

majority of the low-wage sector is white, with blacks and Latinos making up the other part, but politicians learned to talk as if the low-wage sector is mostly black because it allowed them to appeal to racial prejudice, which is useful in maintaining support for the structure of the dual economy — and hurting everyone in the low-wage sector.  Temin notes that “the desire to preserve the inferior status of blacks has motivated policies against all members of the low-wage sector.”

PC is for wussies (just don't call me a hick!)

Objecting to this sort of thing is for the coddled, the liberal, the élite. […] The ability to shrug off the mean crack, the sexist joke, the gratuitous jab at the weak is, in some quarters, seen as a form of strength, of “being flexible,” of “not taking shit serious.” A woman who wilts at a sexist joke won’t last long in certain workplaces. A guy who prioritizes the sensitive side of his nature will, trust me, not thrive in the slaughterhouse. This willingness to gloss over crudeness becomes, then, an encoded sign of competence, strength, and reliability. Above all, Trump supporters are “not politically correct,” which, as far as I can tell, means that they have a particular aversion to that psychological moment when, having thought something, you decide that it is not a good thought, and might pointlessly hurt someone’s feelings, and therefore decline to say it.

Willful Paranoia: The Classic Excuse for Willful Paranoia #IStandWithAhmed | Popehat

But to be blunt, school administrators were generally not the kid who built his or her own clock at 14. (Cops were generally the kid who beat up the kid who built the clock.) There are two ways for school administrators to deal with the unfamiliar, the unknown, the different: they can try to learn about it, and even nurture it, or they can react to it with fear and suspicion. We've told school administrators and police "we choose fear, and we want you to choose fear too."

Former Hungarian Prime Minister weighs in on surging refugee tide.

Today no one dares to say that immigration is not a cultural but an ethnic problem. Namely, millions arrive in Europe whose languages and skin colors are different from those of Europeans. It is important to note that they don’t just come from different cultures but their psychic apparatus, their biological and genetic endowments are different. It is a well-known fact that in Western Europe third-generation immigrants oppose the nations that took them in.

Why "black lives matter" matters

TL;DR: The phrase "Black lives matter" carries an implicit "too" at the end; it's saying that black lives should also matter. Saying "all lives matter" is dismissing the very problems that the phrase is trying to draw attention to.