Matthew Connor

THE MORNING PLUM: A gunfight has erupted in the Democratic presidential primary. Over the weekend, the Hillary Clinton campaign escalated its attacks on Bernie Sanders over the Vermont Senator’s 2005 vote to shield gun manufacturers from liability, repeatedly calling on him to repudiate that vote. But this battle, at bottom, is about more than guns. […]

More people are identifying as bisexual, a CDC survey shows.

The post More People Are Identifying As Bisexual, National Survey Shows appeared first on ThinkProgress.

One of the horror world's favorite anthology TV series is set to be remade by one of mainstream cinema's most beleaguered directors, and I'm not sure how to react.According to Deadline, M. Night Shyamalan, the director of The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, has signed on with cable network TNT to executive produce a two hour horror block on the station that will be centered around a reboot of the HBO's Tales From the Crypt horror anthology series. The original Tales television show ran for seven seasons in the '90s and became one of the most popular horror related shows of all time. It consistently presented high production values and talent to match a wicked sense of humor and an envelope pushing mix of televised sex...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]

SURELY, the strangest turn on the music scene in recent years was a white Australian’s ascent to the pinnacle of American hip-hop. For a strange spell, Iggy Azalea was the Donald Trump of the rap game: racially divisive, prone to ugly rants — and confoundingly popular.

With her debut single “Fancy,” she became only the fourth solo female rapper to ever top the Billboard Hot 100. In 2014, the four-time Grammy nominee held both the first and second spots on the Billboard chart, a feat not even Beyoncé can claim.

The most remarkable thing about Azalea was the audiovisual gimmick: a towering blonde spitting in unmistakably black tones. Hip-hop, of course, has long transcended the African American community, and there is a path for white rappers to channel the music without drawing too many complaints of appropriation. But dialect, the shapes of one’s vowels and the rhythms of one’s speech, is a far more intimate marker of identity.

Many critics found it offensive that Azalea would appropriate an accent so clearly not hers. “It sounds like a big bite to me — the tone of voice,” R&B singer Jill Scott said on “Sway In The Morning.”

“The question is why? Why is her mimicry of sonic Blackness okay?” Brittney Cooper, a culture critic and assistant professor at Rutgers, said in an essay.

Others have compared Azalea’s vocal style to the transgressions of a minstrel act. Rapper Jean Grae described her voice as “verbal blackface.” Last December, Azealia Banks simply tweeted a picture of a minstrel performer with the caption “this is you.”

But if she’s an appropriator, Azalea is at least not a sloppy one.

The “blaccent” controversy, as the rapper Eve called it, recently attracted the attention of linguists Maeve Eberhardt and Kara Freeman, who listened to and analyzed Azalea’s entire discography. In a July paper for the highly regarded Journal of Sociolinguistics, they argue that the rapper’s songs reveal remarkable fluency in the sounds and syntax of what linguists call “African American English.”

Linguists have long identified unique styles of speaking in black communities. AAE has deep roots in American history, shaped by slavery and segregation, immigration and dimly remembered mother tongues. As Stanford linguistics professor John Rickford points out, the dialect is inseparable from African American culture, celebrated and memorialized by black authors such as Zora Neale Hurston, Paul Laurence Dunbar and James Baldwin. Rickford has compiled a catalog of features that are distinctive to AAE, as identified by decades of linguistics research.

Not all African Americans, of course, speak AAE, and not everyone who speaks AAE is black. Immigrants speak the dialect they learned in their home countries, perhaps Caribbean- or British- or Kenyan-inflected English. White people who grew up with African American friends may adopt aspects of AAE in their own speech.

Most people who speak AAE also tend to go back and forth between AAE and standard English, depending on the context — if they’re at a family reunion or at a job interview.

As with the dialects of any other group, such as the Pennsylvania Amish or the Cajun in Louisiana, AAE possesses its own subtle patterns of grammar and phonology, distinct from the kind of English heard on the evening news but no less difficult to get right. This is not something that outsiders can replicate easily.

As hip-hop became mainstream, bits of the dialect have spread through television and music. Many Americans have a passing knowledge of AAE, absorbed from hearing T-Pain sing about buying you a drank or RuPaul calling someone Miss Thang. Snatches of AAE now show up in unexpected, and sometimes awkward, places. The film “Superbad” made a joke of it in a scene where a white character embarrasses himself trying to say “fo sho.” Last week, upscale grocer Whole Foods used “errbody” in a tweet about cornbread, and Amtrak tweeted “#NoBiggie, it's an #Amtrak thang.”

According to this new study, Azalea’s songs reflect a far deeper, more sophisticated understanding of how black rappers speak. “We find her using this nuanced representation of African American English,” says Eberhardt, an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Vermont. “She does it very well. She uses the features in the right places and in the right contexts.”

Even if her mimicry is offensive, the research appears to confirm something Azalea has been saying all along. Call her culturally naive or overzealous, but she has been an earnest student of at least some aspects of rap.

“I don’t think the voice makes me fake; it makes me an artist,” Azalea, who still speaks in an Australian accent for interviews and did not respond to interview requests for this story, told Complex in 2013. “Voice is my medium. I should have creative rein to do whatever the [heck] I want with it.”

Iggy’s surprisingly solid mimicry

In their paper, the linguists catalog the ways in which Azalea transforms her voice to sound more like an insider. First, there is the configuration of her vowels and consonants, what linguists call phonological features.

Speakers of AAE often drop their “r's” — saying mista instead of “mister,” for instance. They also harden up their "th" sounds — mouf instead of “mouth,” dough instead of “though,” wit instead of “with.” These are well-known features of the dialect, and the linguists say that Azalea goes beyond them. She seems to be fluent with some of AAE's rarer and more subtle speech patterns.

For instance, she adeptly deploys a sound called “monophthongal ai.” Take a word like time, which features a hybrid sound called a diphthong. The word time has two vowels mashed into one. The word starts with an “ah”-sound as in "tar," but ends with an “ee”-sound like in "team." Taah-eeem. Time.

In African American English, the “ai” sound in words like "time" and "rhyme" is abbreviated. People only say the first vowel. So "time" becomes something like tahhm. You hear this several times in “Fancy,” when Azalea says:

Better get my money on time, if they not money, decline
And swear I meant that there so much that they give that line a rewind

But there is a tricky exception to this rule. AAE does not tend to abbreviate the “ai” sound if it comes before certain consonants. The word "life" for instance, is pronounced in AAE as it is in standard English.

Azalea knows exactly when to dip into the drawl, and when a drawl would sound inauthentic. You can hear the difference at the beginning of “Change Your Life”:

You used to dealing with basic [people]
Basic [stuff] all the time
I'm a new classic, upgrade your status
From a standby to a frequent flyer
Pop out your past life, and I'll renovate your future

It’s not just the way that Azalea forms the words in her mouth. The research finds that her lyrics also demonstrate styles of grammar that are common in AAE, but hard for outsiders to pick up on. Here are three examples.

— Tricky usage of “ain’t”: This word is well-known as a substitute for "are not" or "is not": “I ain’t going there,” for instance, or “He ain’t your friend.” But the linguists find that Azalea deploys “ain’t” in a rarer way, to indicate past events that never happened. She says things like “He ain’t even graduate.”

— Remote past “BEEN”: Azalea also correctly uses a grammatical construction that linguists call “remote past BEEN,” which indicates that a situation has been continuing for a long time. This is a feature that speakers of standard English often misinterpret. In 1975, Stanford's Rickford, then at the University of Pennsylvania, gave a survey to black and white English speakers. Among the questions was this one:

Someone asked, “Is she married?” and someone else answered, “She BIN married.” Do you get the idea that she is married now?

To most of the white people in the study, that sentence meant that the woman was once married but not anymore. To nearly all of the black people, it meant that the woman had been married for a while and continued to be married.

Azalea correctly uses this expression in her song “Lady Patra." The meaning here, with stress on the word been, is that Azalea has long been rich, not that she lost a fortune and regained it:

--- Warning: video contains explicit lyrics ---

Paper planes, roger that, 10-4
Got money, been had it, still gettin' more

— Habitual “be”: A distinctive feature of AAE is its use of the verb "be" in the unconjugated form. This grammar shows up in sentences such as “She be trippin’ ” or “He be late.” Again, these sentences carry a specific meaning that is often lost on those who are not native speakers of the dialect.

“He be late,” for instance, does not indicate that someone is currently running late; it means that someone is often late. Linguists call this feature of AAE the “habitual be.”

“A lot of white kids will just put ‘be’ everywhere," says Cecelia Cutler, an associate professor of linguistics with the City University of New York. “They think that’s how black people talk. They don’t understand the nuances.”

Eberhardt and Freeman find that Azalea, on the other hand, correctly uses the habitual “be” in her lyrics. For instance, in “1 800 Bone,” she deploys it to describe a situation that happens regularly:

--- Warning: video contains explicit lyrics --- 

That [person’s] in my chat room, my chat room be popping,
Turn that chat room to a freak show and that [person] be topless.

Empirical proof that Iggy sounds like she’s trying too hard

In another section of their paper, Eberhardt and Freeman looked at “copula absence.” Unlike the previous examples, copula absence is not an obscure feature of AAE. It's widely known and imitated.

Here's how it works: Often in situations involving the present tense, speakers of AAE skip over the words “is” or “are.” For example:

Standard English: “She is not here.” AAE: “She not here.”

Standard English: “You are crazy.” AAE: “You crazy.”

Copula absence does not happen all the time in AAE. Speakers turn it up or turn it down depending on the situation, on the audience and the image that they want to project.

Those who use it more are the ones trying to project a "street-conscious" sound, the researchers write. And Azalea uses it a lot.

After coming through all the lyrics from her album and mixtapes, the researchers found that Azalea uses this speech pattern three-quarters of the time in her music. That is far more than the black rapper Eve, but about as often as black rappers Juvenile and Trina.

White rapper Eminem, in contrast, rarely ever skips linking verbs in his music, even though he grew up in a racially mixed Detroit neighborhood surrounded by AAE.

That Azalea exceeds Eminem, and even a black rapper such as Eve, who came from Philadelphia, suggests that the Australian Azalea is overcompensating — and may be engaging in "hyper-performance," as the linguists say. It shows how she relies on her accent to make herself sound authentic. “While other white hip-hoppers may be more prudent in their use of AAE, Iggy appears to use AAE overzealously as a central way of positioning herself within hip-hop,” they write.

Cutler, who has studied young white hip-hoppers extensively, says this is a pattern she has also noticed in her research. Often, it is the people the most distant from the black community who use — or overuse — the patterns of AAE. “Sometimes they take this one feature and they beat it to death — as a way to signal that they’ve arrived, that they know what they’re doing, that they’re part of this culture,” she says.

As Cutler documents in her book, “White Hip-Hoppers, Language, and Identity in Post-Modern American,” this strategy often backfires. Imitating AAE too closely invites ridicule because it offends one of hip-hop’s core values — authenticity. There is a sense, Cutler writes, that “respecting ethnolinguistic boundaries is an essential part of ‘keepin’ it real’ because it is an acknowledgement that one is not trying to be black.”

Azalea’s music attracts controversy because it doesn’t respect any of these boundaries. In radio interviews, she speaks in her native Australian twang — but in performance, she switches into a full-strength AAE accent. And she has been particularly unapologetic about adopting features of African American speech and black culture to further her career.

When Complex asked her about her accent a few years ago, Azalea responded infamously: “If you’re mad about it, and you’re a black person, then start a rap career and give it a go, too. I’m not taking anyone’s spot, so make yourself a mixtape.”

“Or maybe if you’re black,” she continued, “start singing like a country singer and be a white person. I don’t know. Why is it such a big deal?”

Iggy as an example of the wrong way to be ‘real’

One outstanding question from the linguists’ research is where Azalea learned to rap like that — and whether she even writes her own lyrics. "She's showing such versatile, wide-ranging uses of African American English features," says Sonya Fix, an assistant professor at the Columbus College of Art and Design. "These are not features that we see a lot of whites using. But Iggy's using them all over the place.”

Many in the past have accused the rapper of using ghostwriters. Fix says this evidence is more reason to suspect that Azalea gets substantial help with her songs. “It's like, how does she even pick up on this? How does she have access to some of these relatively obscure features?" Fix says. “This, to me, raises red flags about authorship.”

Azalea was born Amethyst Kelly in Sydney and lived in Australia until she was 16, when she dropped out of high school and moved to Miami to pursue a music career. She traveled around the region, spending time in Atlanta and Houston.

Now 25, she has said that her rapping voice resulted from her closeness to hip-hop music and culture. “I lived in the South for five years; you pick up things from your surroundings and teachers,” she told online magazine the Pop Manifesto in 2012. “The people who taught me to rap are all from the South and so was the music I had listened to as a teen.”

It is not surprising, of course, that a motivated person can learn a dialect. Hollywood actors often hire coaches to help them nail, say, a Welsh or a New York accent. The process takes time and effort, but it can be done. Eberhardt and Freeman's research is evidence of Azalea's zeal. The data suggest that Azalea has painstakingly practiced the way she speaks in her performances. Other white rappers have largely avoided this kind of dialect work — not because they are incapable of it, perhaps, but because it's a sensitive matter.

Last year, Roots frontman Questlove defended Azalea’s music, telling Time magazine: “You know, we as black people have to come to grips that hip-hop is a contagious culture. If you love something, you gotta set it free.” But even Questlove said he found something about her accent unsettling.

“Part of me hopes she grows out of that and says it with her regular dialect — I think that would be cooler,” he said.

Eberhardt says that Azalea’s accurate use of AAE does not excuse her from being criticized for appropriation. “Maybe you could say she’s being respectful of the dialect, but she’s doing this without any kind of critical reflection,” she says. “The way that she’s taken this language and this culture wholesale and used it to fuel her fame and fortune is disrespectful.”

And critics say that is the broader problem with Azalea. Although she apparently has a diligent grasp of AAE, her understanding of race and hip-hop culture is much spottier. They point to racially insensitive lyrics, such as when Azalea called herself a “runaway slave … master.” Fellow rapper Banks scolded her for staying silent in the wake of the Ferguson protests.

Todd Boyd, a professor of critical studies at the University of Southern California, contrasts Azalea and Eminem, who he says has adroitly navigated hip-hop culture as a white man. “There was recognition of who he was and where he fit,” he says. “He’s someone who has done a good job of being reverent of the music and its history.”

Moreover, Boyd says, Eminem used hip-hop as inspiration, not as a template to copy off. “When you listen to Eminem rap, he's rapping about his own personal struggles. It’s not the typical narrative. These are themes specific to who he is,” Boyd says.

Azalea doesn't seem to have much of a point of view. She raps about hip-hop tropes such as being the "realest" and the "murda bizness." Her 2014 album "The New Classic," received a mixed 56 out of a 100 on Metacritic, with some calling it a "schtick" and "heavily manufactured."

While Azalea sat atop the music charts last year, the United States' own problems with race were coming into sharper focus. Against the backdrop of police shootings and reinvigorated black activism, critics unearthed old tweets in which Azalea used the n-word, or made jokes about black people and fried chicken: "Just saw 5 black men get arrested out the front of popeyes. #damn #stereotypes."

Insiders tried to explain the situation to her. “[H]iphop is fun it's vile it's dance it's traditional it's light hearted but 1 thing it can never detach itself from is being a SOCIO-Political movement,” rapper and producer Q-Tip said to her last year in a series of tweets about the history of hip-hop. Azalea responded with a subtweet calling the episode “patronizing.”

That exchange marked the beginning of the fall of Azalea’s career. Her mentor, T.I., has revealed that he privately cut ties with her after those remarks to Q-Tip. This summer, she was forced to cancel her tour for lack of ticket sales.

“Hip-hop culture has always done a great job of policing itself,” Boyd says. “After a while, if you’re wack, you’re going to be held accountable. She was wack. And that’s what happened.”

Azalea has spoken about the hard work she put into her craft. The process of learning to rap similar to her black mentors "took a long, long time," she told Gawker in 2012. But no matter how realistic her rapping voice became, it would never belong to her. Instead of earning her credibility, Azalea’s use of the “blaccent” only highlighted how foreign she was.

"It would be dope to hear her with her swag," the rapper Eve said on Sway in January, echoing Questlove's comments. "What are you, who are you, what is that?"

The lesson from Azalea's career is that accuracy and authenticity don't always mean the same thing. Boyd, for one, said it was utterly unremarkable to him that Azalea could learn AAE fluently. The surprise is that she would strain herself to adopt this artificial voice, instead of finding her own.

"You can't try to be authentic," Boyd says. "Either you are or you aren't."

“You can listen to someone's records. You can learn the way they speak. You can imitate that until you're very good at it," he says. "But at no point does that change who you are. You are still an imitator.”

The 9/11 Commission, created to investigate the worst terrorist attack ever on American soil, conducted its work over 604 days -- less than the Benghazi panel.

This year will go down in the record books as one of the safest for police officers in recorded history, according to data released this week from the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund. There were 42 fatal shootings of police officers in 2015, down 14 percent from 2014, according to the organization.

Overall, 124 officers were killed in the line of duty this year. More than one third of those deaths were due to traffic accidents, the largest single cause of officer fatalities. Thirty other officers died of a variety of other causes, including job-related illnesses.

The memorial fund's numbers square with figures put together earlier this week by Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute, who found that "this year (2015) is on track to be the second-safest year for U.S. police officers in history (0.1112 gun-related police deaths per 1 million population), second only to a slightly safer year in 2013 (0.097 deaths per 1 million)."

But they contrast sharply with a narrative we've been hearing about a "war on cops" in the wake of demonstrations in Ferguson, Mo., and elsewhere in protest of fatal shootings by police. The narrative has been especially popular among Republican presidential contenders: In September, Chris Christie blamed the Obama administration for "police officers that are being hunted." In October, Mike Huckabee claimed that a "war on cops" was responsible for a "surge in crime" across the country. In November, Ted Cruz held a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing he called "The War on Police" and blamed the Obama administration for creating "a culture where the men and women of law enforcement feel under siege."

Even though it's squarely at odds with the facts, this rhetoric has an effect: A Rasmussen poll in September found that 58 percent of Americans said that there's a war on police in the United States today.

The 2015 data show that traffic accidents are a greater danger to police officers' safety than shootings are. "Move over and slow down when you see an emergency vehicle on the side of the roadway," the memorial fund's chairman told NPR this week. "Eleven officers this year were struck and killed by motorists who did not slow down, who did not move over."

All 50 states already have laws in place requiring motorists to move over for emergency vehicles.

More from Wonkblog:

Law enforcement took more stuff from people than burglars did last year

Why white people see black boys like Tamir Rice as older, bigger and guiltier than they really are

Florida police face backlash after publishing photos of unconscious women

 

Details? We aint got no details. But what we do have is that image above, freshly posted to Instagram and Facebook by Timo Tjahjanto, one half of Indonesian directing duo The Mo Brothers. And for those unfamiliar with the face, that'd be the lead villain in the pair's ultra bloody horror film Macabre - released in Indonesia as Rumah Dara. Though little seen outside of Indonesia - and cut for bloody content to pass censorship within Indonesia - the original Macabre is one hella good time and this is very, very good news. Check out the trailer for the original below....

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]

Earlier this year, Maryland's new Republican governor, Larry Hogan, canceled a long-planned new transit line across Baltimore, angering city officials and residents in the mostly-black urban neighborhoods that stood to gain from the new Red Line. What's more: Hogan announced that he would spend the state money instead on roads, highways and bridges outside Maryland's largest city.

That decision, civil rights groups said Monday in a complaint filed with the federal Department of Transportation, violated the Civil Rights Act. By nixing the transit project — particularly in favor of rural and suburban highway funding — the state will disproportionately harm African Americans, they allege. And, they add, the move follows a long history in which transportation decisions in Baltimore in particular have destroyed black neighborhoods, robbed their residents of job access, and helped cement inequality there.

[NAACP to challenge cancellation of Baltimore Red Line rail project]

"Given these facts," the complaint alleges, "the cancellation of the Red Line Project, rather than being a cost-saving measure, was simply a naked transfer of resources from the project corridor’s primarily African-American population to other rural and suburban parts of the state, several of which have predominantly Caucasian populations."

The complaint, led by the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, applies the fierce language of fights over housing and education to a realm where civil rights is much less often discussed.

"My hope is that with the filing of this complaint, people will understand that transportation is also a civil rights issue," says Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the LDF.

Transportation determines whether the unemployed can reach jobs. It affects how long workers must commute — and the time they lose with their families. It affects air quality and housing options and where children go to school.

[What people who live near metro stops increasingly have in common]

Transportation, Ifill argues, is a key piece of the systemic disinvestment in Baltimore behind unrest there this spring after the death in police custody of Freddie Gray.

"As much attention as we give to the trial of the officers who were charged in the killing of Freddie Gray," she says, "we should give to a decision that implicates 10,000 construction jobs and billions of infrastructure investment in Baltimore that were eliminated in a single day, by a single decision, made by a single person."

The governor's announcement came just two months after the riots in Baltimore touched off a national debate about conditions in poor urban communities. But the connection between the two, Ifill laments, went largely unnoticed.

The particular transit line at issue would have crossed the city from east to west for 14 miles, connecting neighborhoods with high unemployment and low car ownership to jobs centers downtown and on the city's edge. Today, the city has just one existing light rail line running from north to south (along with one heavy-rail line), an anemic network relative to cities like Washington and Philadelphia.

[The long, painful and repetitive history of how Baltimore became Baltimore]

For decades, Baltimore officials have drawn up and scuttled and redrawn maps for an expanded network. But those plans have repeatedly fallen apart, sometimes from opposition by white suburbs to infrastructure that residents feared would bring poverty and crime to their neighborhoods.

The Baltimore communities that never saw real transit investment, the complaint points out, were often harmed by other kinds of infrastructure, too. When the region sought to build new highways extending into the city starting in 1950s and 60s, it was primarily black neighborhoods that were chosen for demolition. In effect, black residents were displaced by highways to neighborhoods where they were later denied transit.

Their lack of mobility, Ifill says, now "holds" people in place, in communities with few options and paths out of poverty. The result, she adds, is that nurses who work at Johns Hopkins must wait on the street before dark for buses that inch them across town at 9 miles an hour, along commutes that prevent them from accompanying their children to school.

[How railroads, highways and other man-made lines racially divide America’s cities]

"This case is about the Red Line, but it’s also about so much more than just the cancelation of the Red Line," says Ajmel Quereshi, an assistant counsel at the LDF and the lead counsel on the complaint. "It’s about the history of discrimination in the state of Maryland against the residents of Baltimore when it comes to transportation and housing."

That larger story isn't particularly unique to Baltimore. Black communities have been razed by highways and denied transit in Atlanta and Buffalo. The same urban-rural politics that prioritize roads over railways play out in Detroit and Los Angeles. The same suburban fears about subway-riding robbers crop up beyond Baltimore (although the old urban legend about Georgetown is actually not true).

Because these fault lines are so common, transportation is a civil rights issue nearly anywhere. But it takes some care to draw the line between what happens in distressed communities, and how we enable people to move out of them.

The idea that being vegetarian is better for the environment has, over the last forty years, become a piece of conventional wisdom.

Its popular rise began in 1971 with the publication of the surprise best-seller Diet for a Small Planet and then spread far and wide: earlier this year it made its way into a key government report for recommendations for the American diet.

As that report from the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee put it: “Consistent evidence indicates that, in general, a dietary pattern that is higher in plant-based foods, such as vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds, and lower in animal-based foods ...is associated with lesser environmental impact than is the current average U.S. diet.”

This notion isn’t, however, something that scientists have agreed on, and some new research undermines the longstanding idea.

A paper from Carnegie Mellon University researchers published this week finds that the diets recommended by the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which include more fruits and vegetables and less meat, exacts a greater environmental toll than the typical American diet. Shifting to the diets recommended by Dietary Guidelines for American  would increase energy use by 38 percent, water use by ten percent and greenhouse gas emissions by six percent, according to the paper.

“We were very surprised by our results,” said Paul Fischbeck, professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University. “It’s not what we set out to do - in fact, we expected the exact opposite.”

The findings on the government-recommended diet, which the researchers described as “perhaps counterintuitive,”  stem from the fact that the “healthy” diet includes larger amounts of fruits, vegetables, dairy products and fish, which have relatively large environmental impacts when compared to some foods in our current diet such as foods with added sugars.

“You can’t just assume that a vegetarian diet will reduce your carbon footprint, which is what people think,”  Fischbeck said.

[Here's what Congress is doing about concerns regarding the accuracy of the Dietary Guidelines]

The Carnegie Mellon paper was funded by the Colcom Foundation and the Steinbrenner Institute for Environmental Education and Research at Carnegie Mellon University.

While the research builds on previous work that likewise undermines the conventional wisdom, the debate over the environmental virtues of vegetarianism are unlikely to subside any time soon.

For one thing, the vegetarians have a point: scientists on both sides have concurred that eating beef - though not other meats - has daunting environmental impacts.

Because of the amount of grain and land used to produce a pound of beef, as well as the volume of methane the animals produce, the nation’s intake of beef has significant environmental ramifications, particularly in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. Indeed, the environmental impacts from beef production dwarf those of other animal foods such as dairy products, pork and poultry.

“The key conclusion - that beef production demands about one order of magnitude more resources than alternative livestock categories - is robust,” according to a paper last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Perhaps not surprisingly then, six other studies, all cited by the federal committee providing expert advice to Dietary Guidelines for Americans, indicated that diets including less meat are better for the environment. To take but one example, Cornell University researchers reported in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 2003 that “meat-based food system requires more energy, land, and water resources than the lactoovovegetarian diet.”

On the other hand, other papers echo the findings from Carnegie Mellon, suggesting that diets with less meat are no guarantee of environmental benefits. For example, a 2013 paper published by French researchers in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that some diets “containing large amounts of plant-based foods” had the highest levels of greenhouse gas emissions.

“Our results therefore seem to contradict the widely accepted view that diets that are good for health are also good for the planet,” they reported.

So how do the scientists reach such different conclusions?

The reasons, it turns out, are illuminating.

To oversimplify somewhat, research of this type consists of adding up the amounts of greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental costs estimated to come from the production, transportation and marketing of individual foods included in a diet. For example, in the Carnegie Mellon research, the scientists collected estimates of the water use, energy use, and the greenhouse gas emissions for scores of individual foods, and then added up the environmental impacts incurred by various diets.

One of the reasons that the studies vary is that the scientists made different assumptions about the foods involved in each diet studied - and this turns out to be critical. The environmental impacts of individual foods vary tremendously (see chart below), and consequently, the results of these papers shift dramatically depending on the particular vegetarian or meat-eating menu.

Some of the environmental impacts of individual foods are quite strikingly opposite what you might guess: On a per calorie basis, producing lettuce creates nearly as much greenhouse gas emissions as does beef, according to the CMU research; in fact, lettuce generates roughly three times what pork does. Fresh fish, too, is associated with surprisingly high levels of greenhouse gas emissions.

As a result of the varying impacts among foods, small changes in the diet to be analyzed can have large impacts on the results: for example, cutting out pork and eating more lettuce, for example, might be good for you but it will take a higher toll from the environment.

Another important reason for the conflicting findings is that some of the research only considers the environmental costs of what people actually eat. But a significant percentage of any given food is wasted, and in order to get a complete tally, the environmental costs of producing the wasted food also ought to be included. Including food waste tends to raise the environmental costs of fruits and vegetables because more of them tend to be wasted: According to Fischbeck and colleague Michelle Tom,  while about 40 percent or more of fruit goes to waste, only about 33 percent of meat does.

The data on the environmental effects of the food supply, moreover, can be extremely complicated to measure, vary from place to place, and are a subject of significant scientific uncertainty. But for all the debate over the issue, and the complexity of data, a couple of nuggets seem clear.

First, while it might be nice to think that what’s good for you is also good for the planet, it’s not necessarily the case. To take just one example that may please some people: Ingredients associated with junk foods, such as added sugars and saturated fats, have lower environmental impacts, according to the CMU estimates.

Second, the choices you make for dinner do have environmental consequences. They’re just not as simple as you might think.

As the end of the year approaches, experts and pundits start rolling out their predictions for next year, and the year to come. But seeing into the future is a bit more challenging than these predictions make it seem — as the fascinating images below demonstrate.

These fantastic visions of what fashion would look like in the future were published by W. Cade Gall in The Strand Magazine in 1893. The ideas, which were recently featured in The Public Domain Review, are based on the principle that fashion had moved in "waves" over the 19th Century, and would do so in the 20th.

As it turns out, fashion did move in waves over the 20th Century, but not quite in the way Gall imagined. Here is what people were wearing at the time the article was published, in 1893:

As the decades progress, however, these fashions become more and more frilly and comical, seemingly channeling medieval court jesters and the Wizard of Oz.

Here's what Gall envisioned for the 1900s and 1910s:

And the 1920s:

The 1930s:

The 1950s:

The 1960s:

The 1980s:

And, finally, 1993:

You might also like:

-What people in 1900 thought the year 2000 would look like

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The man reportedly said on Facebook that he would follow the hotel-mogul-turned-candidate "to the end of the world."

The post Trump Supporter Arrested In Alleged Plot To Bomb Muslims appeared first on ThinkProgress.

The lifetime ban on blood donation by any man who has ever had sex with another man will now be replaced with a one-year ban.

The post FDA Lifts Ban On Gay Men Giving Blood, But There’s A Catch appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Last year, the Guardian shed light on an uncomfortable — and unfortunate — truth about much of the shrimp sold in North America, Europe, Japan and elsewhere around the world. A six-month-long investigation revealed that torture, wage-theft, beatings and various other illegal practices were a reality in the production chain of the world's largest supplier.

"If you buy prawns or shrimp from Thailand, you will be buying the produce of slave labor," Aidan McQuade, director of Anti-Slavery International, told the Guardian at the time. And many countries do, including the United States, which imports about half of the shrimp Thailand harvests.

The investigation followed a 2013 report by the Environmental Justice Foundation, a nongovernmental organization, which chronicled the abuse in the Thai shrimp industry. It also spurred a flurry of corporate responses: Walmart said it was "actively engaged" in the issue; Costco said it was telling its suppliers "to take corrective action;" and Tesco, the largest supermarket chain in Britain, called it "completely unacceptable."

But almost two years later, the problem persists.

A new report published on Monday by the Associated Press holds that such abuses are still rampant in the Thai shrimp industry. What's more, major markets around the world aren't doing a good job of keeping shrimp peeled by modern-day slaves out of their food system. The AP investigation, which has led to the freeing of thousands of indentured fishermen, dozens of arrests and millions of dollars in seizures, found that the United States has been particularly poor in this regard. This, per the report:

U.S. customs records show the shrimp made its way into the supply chains of major U.S. food stores and retailers such as Wal-Mart, Kroger, Whole Foods, Dollar General and Petco, along with restaurants such as Red Lobster and Olive Garden.

It also entered the supply chains of some of America's best-known seafood brands and pet foods, including Chicken of the Sea and Fancy Feast, which are sold in grocery stores from Safeway and Schnucks to Piggly Wiggly and Albertsons. AP reporters went to supermarkets in all 50 states and found shrimp products from supply chains tainted with forced labor.

In part, the problem stems from the growing appetite for ready-to-cook shellfish, which is peeled before it's packaged and frozen. The result is a stir-fry-friendly food that is easy to make and has proved wildly popular (shrimp is now far and away the most popular seafood in the United States). But the labor required to provide that luxury is so large that exporters have turned to unregistered peeling sheds, where workers are overworked, underpaid and often unable to leave.

The burden has largely fallen on migrants, who, desperate for work, are likeliest to oblige. And the government has done little to curb the conditions. This is how Gwynn Guilford, who has written extensively about slave labor in the seafood trade, described the role of migrant workers in a 2013 piece:

Unsurprisingly, Thais long since stopped taking those jobs. Migrants, mostly from Myanmar, can earn more there than they would at home, and thus send money to support their families. Though Thailand’s estimated 3 million migrants make up 10% of its workforce, in seafood processing, they compose 90%.

But protecting workers and punishing abuses is expensive. It also risks making Thailand’s exports pricier. Maybe that’s why the government does neither.

The conditions aren't helped by countries, such as the United States, which allow slave-peeled shrimp to enter the domestic supply chain. A near-century-old exemption contained in the U.S. tariff code stipulates that companies can bring goods into the country that don't meet domestic labor laws (i.e. that were produced with forced labor) if there is a supposed shortage of that good, but in the United States precise demand is a tough thing to pinpoint. The result is a loophole that allows food sourced from deplorable means to slip through the cracks. A bill that would close the loophole was introduced earlier this year and has since passed the Senate and House of Representative, which are still working to resolve differences.

The truth is that even for companies hoping to escape such seafood, it's not very easy. The issue is further complicated by the ease with which slave-peeled shrimp dissolves into the system. The AP tracked shrimp from one unregulated peeling shed to a number of major exporters, all of which claimed to abhor the very practices that were helping to boost their supply. Several American companies told the AP that their supplier had assured them their shrimp wasn't being served at the expense of abusive labor practices, but that supplier later admitted that it couldn't account for the source of all of its shrimp.

The AP published a list of grocers that it visited randomly and found such shrimp (the list runs dozens of companies long), but the problem is likely far more extensive. On Monday, Martha Mendoza, who was part of the team that conducted the investigation, participated in a Reddit "Ask me Anything," where experts, celebrities and other people of public interest open themselves up to questions. She said they found that just about every grocery store in the United States had supply chains that could be linked to modern-day slavery. She also lamented that "there is more oversight in seafood to protect dolphins than there is to protect humans."

Thailand is hardly the only offender — the U.S. State Department has tied some 55 countries to such practices — but it is among the worst offenders. The Global Slavery Index estimates that the country is home to nearly half a million enslaved workers, and specifically cites the shrimp industry as a leading contributor. The 2014 Guardian report, meanwhile, holds that the Thai government condemns the same abuses that its officials help to perpetuate.

The European Union, which has already slapped Thai seafood imports with a hefty tariff, is weighing the possibility of an outright ban. It's hard to see how this latest investigation won't increase the likelihood of a ban.

So far, reaction to the report has been mixed. Some have called for a boycott of seafood linked to Thailand. Others have dismissed the idea as counterproductive, arguing that continuing to source from the country but demanding better oversight is a more practical and ultimately effective approach. Companies, meanwhile, have denied that shrimp made from slave labor is entering their supply chains, despite the fact that the AP investigation found otherwise.

Most movie theaters today look the same wherever you are in America; the same mass produced interiors, annoying pre-movie commercials, and paper-thin walls that do little to dampen the noise from the action movie next door.

It's a big change since the early 20th Century, the heyday of the movie theater in the U.S., when movie studios and entertainment companies commissioned famous architects to design grand theater buildings. These theaters were a center of community life -- and, for a long time, one of the few places with air conditioning.

By the 1960s, audiences at these downtown theaters started to dwindle, as families began to buy TVs and relocate to the suburbs, and entertainment companies built movie multiplexes that could show many films at the same time. Some of these theaters went on to live second lives as gyms, churches, retail spaces, and bingo halls, while other sat waiting for demolition or restoration.

Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, two Paris-born photographers, began capturing these surviving theaters in 2005. They've also photographed the changing urban landscape around Paris, as well as Detroit's post-industrial monuments, which they collected in a 2010 book called "The Ruins of Detroit."

Here is the Paramount Theater in Brooklyn, which was opened in 1928 and hosted artists such as Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis, Liberace and Frank Sinatra. It closed in 1962 and has since been used by Long Island University as a gym (you can click on the photo to enlarge it):

The Paramount Theater in Long Branch, N.J., which was built in 1912, closed in 1959, and subsequently used as storage for a paint company:

The State Theater in West Orange, N.J., later used as an office and garage by the Valley Transportation Bus Company:

The Alhambra Theater in San Francisco, Ca., which opened in 1926 and is now occupied by Crunch Fitness:

The Eagle Theater in New York, which opened in 1927, closed in the early 1980s, and was later used as a meat market and discount store:

The Rivoli Theater in Berkeley, Ca., was built in 1925, closed in the 1950s, and later used as a supermarket:

The Loew's Palace Theater in Bridgeport, which was once the largest theater in Connecticut with more than 3,500 seats. The theater opened in 1922, switched to adult films in the early 1970s, closed in 1975 and is now waiting for restoration:

The projector at RKO Keith's Richmond Hill Theater in Queens, N.Y., which opened in 1929 and ultimately was used as a bingo hall and flea market:

Letters for the marquee at the Fox Theater in Inglewood, Ca.:

The Fabian Theater in Paterson, N.J., which was opened in 1925, divided into five screens in the '70s, then ultimately gutted to make way for condos and retail space:

The RKO Flushing Theater in Queens, opened in 1928 and closed in 1986:

A shot of the exit sign from the Casino theater in Bronx, N.Y.:

You can see more photographs from Marchard and Meffre on their website. An exhibition of these photos appears at the Cultuurcentrum Caermersklooster in Gent, Belgium, until January 3, 2016.

See also: 

-These are the craziest and most beautiful flight attendant uniforms of all time

-Stunning photos show what America looked like during the Great Depression

-What really drives you crazy about waiting in line (it actually isn’t the wait at all)

Last month, Chipotle closed 43 restaurants in Washington and Oregon after health authorities linked an E. coli outbreak to six restaurants in the area. The announcement came as a shock to adoring fans of the fast-food company — especially those living in the Pacific Northwest — but it was actually meant to help quell worries about food safety. After all, the company was going overboard, voluntarily shuttering dozens of restaurants when only a few had been implicated. The move, Chipotle insisted, came "out of an abundance of caution." Everything was going to be all right.

Except that it wasn't.

In the 31 days since, illnesses linked to the chain have been reported in seven more states, including Illinois, Pennsylvania and Maryland, suggesting the problem was neither isolated nor a fluke. What's more, the avalanche of unfortunate news has yet to subside: On Monday, 30 students at Boston College fell ill after eating at a local Chipotle, leading the company to close yet another restaurant; On Tuesday, the number grew to at least 80 students. Although Boston health officials believe the food-borne illness is norovirus—not E. Coli — and is isolated to a single location, they won't know for sure until test results are available in a few days. In the meantime, Chipotle is left to cross its fingers in hopes that yet another state isn't at risk.

To say that the outbreak is a problem for America's fast food darling would be a gross understatement. The food scare jeopardizes Chipotle's reputation as a purveyor of high-quality food, which has, at least until now, helped propel the brand into a model for the rest of the industry. It's also emblematic of problems that could surface down the road, as the chain continues to expand.

Chipotle's response has been swift. The company, which has now closed dozens of restaurants around the country, is working to clean and sanitize its operations. It has also hired food safety consultants to improve its standards and assured its customers that it is doing everything it can to contain the outbreak. Just last week, it announced that it has revamped its food safety procedures by updating its supply chain and introducing DNA testing of its produce.

But the damage has been done.

Although it's unclear how many of Chipotle's nearly 2,000 locations have been directly affected, it's not unreasonable to think that all of them have suffered in some way. The company, which has posted strong revenue growth since it went public in 2006, has already said that it expects significant declines at its flagship stores, where sales could fall by as much as 11 percent in the fourth quarter as a result of the scare. Its shares, meanwhile, have fallen by nearly 30 percent since mid-October, when the outbreak was first detected. A good deal of that is likely due to residual effects — customers, worrying that a choice to eat lunch at Chipotle comes with an unnecessary risk, are choosing something else; investors, fearing the same, are looking elsewhere, too.

If previous examples are any indication, Chipotle's woes could continue for some time. Taco Bell, the last major fast food company to face an E. coli outbreak, suffered mightily in the aftermath of its 2006 scare. The chain quickly pinpointed and resolved the issue — shredded lettuce served at its northeastern U.S. locations — but the pain persisted, leading to five straight quarters of negative sales growth. Yum! Brands, Taco Bell's parent company, told investors in 2007 that its "Taco Bell business has been negatively impacted by adverse publicity related to a produce-sourcing issue."

More troubling than the immediate impact of Chipotle's run-in with food safety is the reality that the outbreak could cast a shadow that lingers long after the chain has cleaned up the mess. No food company wants to be associated with foodborne illnesses, but the association could be especially crippling for Chipotle, whose brand centers on a promise of clean food.

Nowhere is that promise louder than on the company's website, where its core mission, selling "food with integrity," emphasizes a respect for all participants in the supply chain, including animals, farmers, customers and the environment. Ever since the company first opened more than 20 years ago, it has worked to make good on that promise by seeking out ways to cut its carbon footprint, carefully choose its farmers, source its ingredients locally where it can, and work with meat farmers such as Niman Ranch Pork Company, which has long been a leader in humane animal practices.

This has been a major key to the chain's success. Although fast-food giants, such as McDonald's, have struggled after years of prioritizing cheapness in its supply chain, Chipotle has thrived by putting quality first. The unparalleled success of the chain is glaring proof that people are willing to pay a bit more for that assurance.

More recently, however, that success has also been a lesson in how hard it is to scale the entirety of a business like Chipotle, with its promise to sell food people should feel good about eating.

In 2013, the company was forced to begin serving "conventionally raised beef," after it became clear that there was no longer enough antibiotic- and hormone-free beef to go around. In January of this year, it decided to pull pork from the menus at roughly a third of its restaurants (some 600 stores nationwide) after one of its suppliers violated its standards. Chipotle anticipated only a brief interruption in its ability to source pork it was proud of, but it took more than half a year, a foreign company, and two of Chipotle's most disappointing quarters on record to put carnitas back on the menu. Farms that raise pigs outside of gestation crates simply don't represent a large enough portion of the pork industry.

Chipotle's bout with foodborne illnesses appears to stem from the same laudable but increasingly tenuous desire: to build a business without changing it too much.

"They’re trying to be local and serve food with integrity, but as you grow it becomes incredibly complex and difficult and challenging," said Darren Tristano, executive vice president of industry research firm Technomic. "When you look at what’s going on, how they're expanding, the outbreak was almost bound to happen."

Chipotle understands this. The company admitted as much in its most recent annual report, where it warned that its use of "fresh produce and meats rather than frozen," and "reliance on employees cooking with traditional methods rather than automation," puts it at a higher risk for outbreaks of foodborne illnesses.

Tristano, who admits that it's hard to hear about a food safety issue and still feel comfortable eating at the chain in question, believes that the effects of the scare will be significant but not likely long-lasting.

"Consumers have a surprisingly short memory," he said. "I would be surprised if it's still affecting them by mid-next year."

Whether that proves true doesn't diminish the challenge ahead. On the one hand, Chipotle has an ongoing food scare to clean up and then, eventually, erase from the minds of its customers. On the other, it has to reconcile with the very real possibility that problems like these are only going to become more frequent — and formidable — if it is as determined to ascend in the American fast-food industry as it seems.

The open carry activists have hired actors who will enact a mass shooting with cardboard guns and the sounds of actual gunshots over a stereo.

The post Gun Rights Group Plans Mock Mass Shooting On College Campus appeared first on ThinkProgress.

In December of 1978, Tom Waits recorded an episode of Austin City Limits. The now-mainstay music program was in its relative infancy – only its fourth season – and had built a solid fanbase of Americana music enthusiasts. As the ACL website notes: “…the show came in through the back door, so to speak. Terry […]

Pinkshinyultrablast - Kiddy Pool Dreams

Everything in upon itself. 

It’s the greatest Q4 gift of all: the best song on Kylie’s Christmas album, remixed by the three wise men who shoved Charlene into the pop spotlight back in 1988.

For younger readers, there was a point in music history when Stock, Aitken and Waterman basically did all the best pop music for about five years — they were responsible for 70 Top 10 hits, which is even more than Rihanna, and sold over 40m records, which is even more than Adele’s ’25’ (correct at time of writing).

This is SAW’s first single release in a quarter of a century and Pete Waterman has described working again with Mike and Matt as “a hoot”.

The result? Well, in the very best way possible, it sounds exactly like you’d expect, and in these turbulent times sometimes that’s just what you need.

The post Kylie Minogue – ‘Every Day’s Like Christmas’ (Stock Aitken Waterman mix) appeared first on Popjustice.

If you fly America's major airlines today, you probably think that flight attendant uniforms are kind of boring — navy blue, unremarkable, resembling a sort of dowdy suit. But they weren't always this way.

In decades past, when flying was still seen as a glamorous activity and airlines restricted their hiring to young, attractive women (a practice that's now illegal in the U.S.), the uniforms issued by America's biggest airlines were fantastical, fashionable, sexy or downright weird.

And in some places around the world, they still are.

All this is on display in Cliff Muskiet's collection. Muskiet, a purser who flies around the world for the Dutch airline KLM, has amassed what is perhaps the world's largest collection of flight attendant uniforms, many of which he features on his Web site. This sci-fi creation from Muskiet's collection was the uniform of Braniff International Airways, a U.S. carrier that closed in the 1980s, in 1965 and 1966, for example:

This Kuwait Airlines uniform from the 1990s featured a detailed print and jaunty hat:

Iberia Airline used this psychedelic-meets-military uniform in the 1970s:

This comfy-looking uniform was used by RAM, a Moroccan airline, in the 1990s:

Muskiet has been fascinated with airplanes ever since he flew from New York to Amsterdam as a 5-year-old. He started collecting uniforms at the age of 15, when a flight attendant friend of his mother's gave him her old uniform. "I thought it was really interesting because a uniform is really special and it was hard to get."

Now his collection contains more than 1,300 uniforms from roughly 500 airlines. The uniforms are a fascinating reflection of fashion through the decades, national styles of dress around the world, and our changing attitudes toward flying itself.

In the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s, for example, flight attendant outfits were quite conservative and often echoed military uniforms. Most had long skirts, tailored jackets, white or cream-colored blouses, and a hat.

But beginning in the 1960s, flight attendant fashion gets a lot more adventurous, and a lot more fun. Uniforms suddenly featured psychedelic prints, bright colors, short skirts and hot pants, Muskiet says — echoing the huge shift in fashion with the arrival of 1960s and 1970s counter-culture.

One of Muskiet's favorites is the United Airlines uniform from 1968, which came in four different colors and was designed by Jean Louis, a prominent fashion designer. Louis purportedly said about the uniform, which was much more feminine than previous iterations, "There’s no reason in the world why stewardesses have to look like tank commanders."

But just having a uniform created by a big-name designer isn't necessarily a recipe for success, says Muskiet. He criticizes the 1980s Qantas uniform designed by Yves St. Laurent, with its suiting and big cuffs, as making the flight attendants look "like bellboys working in a hotel."

That ultra-feminine phase didn't last. In the 1970s, flight attendants began to wear pants, as in the Allegheny Airlines uniform below, and by the 1990s, flight attendant uniforms came to resemble business attire.

 

Other uniforms reflect a national tradition of dress. For example, Emirates, an airline based in Dubai, has a Western-style uniform, but the hat features a veil. Many Indian airlines issue saris for their female flight attendants, while female flight attendants for Thai Airlines wear a uniform of Thai silk on the plane, with an orchid on their lapel, Muskiet says. The uniforms for airlines in Singapore and Malaysia incorporate sarong kebayas, a traditional blouse-dress combo, like below:

Female flight attendants for Air France also wear flower-printed dresses on flights to Tahiti:

Muskiet says that his sentimental favorite is probably from KLM, an airline that he used to fly as a kid. "It reminds me of my childhood. The hat that is part of the uniform, it’s like a mushroom. I was always fascinated by this hat," he says.

He also likes the current uniform for XiamenAir in China, Aeroflot, Etihad from Abu Dhabi and Air Portugal, pictured below. He says he dislikes the uniforms of Austrian Airlines and Iberia Airline.

When Muskiet looks back at these decades of glamorous uniforms, he sees cause for nostalgia.

For one thing, these uniforms reflect an era in which people were more likely to dress up in public, unlike the casual — or sloppy — styles of today. "When you look at the '40s and '50s, it was a very normal thing for women to wear gloves and hats. If you went out to a cinema or theater, everyone was dressed up. … But fashion has changed over the years, and also the uniform has changed," Muskiet says.

Here is the uber-casual uniform that Southwest Airlines used in the late 1990s and early 2000s, for example:

But Muskiet also sees a darker side to the fashionable look of the late 1960s — the stringent and demeaning requirements placed on female employees, who typically had to be young, attractive, and a size 2 or 4.

"Back in the 'good old days,' you had to have a certain look, you had to have a certain size. Sometimes you had to have a similar hairstyle, because the airline wanted you all to look the same. Now everyone can be just like they want to be. … You don't have to be Miss Universe to become a flight attendant," Muskiet says.

When Muskiet first joined KLM, flight attendants had to be between the ages of 21 and 28. The airline later raised the maximum age to 32, then 34, and then abolished it altogether, he says. Like many airlines, KLM still has height requirements for flight attendants and requires them to wear mascara and lip gloss, he says, but the rest is up to the individual.

Muskiet can't say exactly why he's so drawn to the uniforms. "It’s hard to explain ... why do you like bananas, and why don’t you like oranges?" he asks. But part of it is undoubtedly his love for airplanes — both the beauty of their design and the amazing experience of traveling from one side of the world to the other in a few hours. "Even though a lot of people don’t think flying is glamorous today, for me it has something glamorous," he says.

"Every time I go to work and we take off, I’m always thrilled. The sound of the engine, the fact that the airplane takes off, the speed, flying over mountains and oceans. ... The whole thing — it’s really wow."

"Maybe he should have been roughed up," he said.

The post Donald Trump: My Fans Were Right To Beat Up Black Protester appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Yes, the mayor of Roanoke, Virginia went there. In a letter to local agencies on Wednesday, Mayor David Bowers asked them to stop helping Syrian refugees. He justified his request by invoking one of the nation’s most painful memories from World War II.

“I’m reminded that President Franklin D. Roosevelt felt compelled to sequester Japanese foreign nationals after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and it appears that the threat of harm to America from Isis now is just as real and serious as that from our enemies then,” he said in a statement, according to The Roanoke Times.

The saga of Japanese internment, when some 110,000 people of Japanese descent were forced into camps following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, does offer a valuable lesson from history.

The lesson is that paranoia and ethnic bias can lead the country to commit actions it will later regret. The internment of the Japanese-Americans — two-thirds of whom were U.S.-born — was a "great injustice," in the words of one former president. The events illustrate the mistake of stigmatizing an entire population over suspicions of people who share their ethnicity.

In the months after the Pearl Harbor attacks of Dec. 7, 1941, national opinion started to turn against people of Japanese descent. The anxiety spread quickly. By mid-1942, the military had begun rounding up people of Japanese heritage, uprooting them from their communities and forcing them into hasty tent cities.

It’s well-known now, of course, that the Japanese-Americans posed little security threat. But what might surprise casual readers of history is that even back then, the government knew this was a low-risk population.

Declassified military documents show that the nation’s leaders embarked on this vast incarceration project mostly to quell the fears of the the public. Here’s an excerpt from an internal report for the War Relocation Authority, the federal agency that oversaw the forced relocation efforts:

The time-worn and fallacious credo that "all Japanese are sly and treacherous" was fortified and strengthened in the minds of many by the very nature of the Pearl Harbor attack. The presence of Chinese and Filipinos in large number near the Pacific Coast added to the general confusion and the fear of violence between racial and national groups.

By the latter part of February, it had become abundantly clear that the American Japanese people — quite apart from their individual intentions — were complicating the problems of western defense in numberless ways simply by living in vital areas.

As long as they continued to reside in those areas, the military authorities could never be wholly free to concentrate on the primary job of defending our western frontier.

Mass removal of the American Japanese was admittedly a drastic step, but it was deemed the only effective way to clear up a situation that was becoming more critical and chaotic with every passing week of the war.

In these documents, the government admits that a top reason for forcing Japanese-Americans had little to do with concerns about spying or sabotage. Rather, the situation on the West Coast was becoming toxic, and internment was one way to improve — in the War Relocation Authority's words — “public morale.”

The same report cites other justifications for incarcerating Japanese-Americans, and to modern ears, these statements come across as paranoid.

Although the majority of American Japanese on the Coast were recognized by competent authorities as loyal, their behavior in the event of a bombing raid or an invasion attempt by Japanese forces was unpredictable.

Under such circumstances, would an American Japanese cooperate loyally in the defense? Or would some of them respond to years of Caucasian discrimination suffered in this country and aid the attacking forces?

This episode in American history is now remembered as a stain on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s record. Japanese-American families lost homes and businesses as they were uprooted from their communities. And though they tried, maintaining a sense of normalcy was hard to do in settlements that were ringed with barbed wire.

In an interview last year with Democracy Now, actor George Takei recalled the injustice of being delivered to one of these camps at the age of 5.

“I could see the barb wire fence and the sentry towers right outside my schoolhouse window as I recited the words ‘with liberty and justice for all,’ an innocent child unaware of the irony,” Takei said.

We were and are—my parents have passed now, but we were citizens of this country. We had nothing to do with the war. We simply happened to look like the people that bombed Pearl Harbor.

But without charges, without trial, without due process—the fundamental pillar of our justice system—we were summarily rounded up, all Japanese Americans on the West Coast, where we were primarily resident, and sent off to 10 barb wire internment camps—prison camps, really, with sentry towers, machine guns pointed at us—in some of the most desolate places in this country: the wastelands of Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, Colorado, the blistering hot desert of Arizona, of all places, in black tarpaper barracks.

After the war, the people in the camps were simply sent off. “We lost everything,” Takei said. “We were given a one-way ticket to wherever in the United States we wanted to go to, plus $20.”

In recent decades, some reparations have been paid, and many apologies have been issued. “The internment of Americans of Japanese ancestry was a great injustice, and it will never be repeated,” President George H.W. Bush said on the 50th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The Supreme Court decision that declared the camps constitutional, Korematsu v. United States, ranks high on lists of the Court's biggest mistakes according to constitutional scholars. Renowned law professor Erwin Chemerinsky called it "one of the worst decisions in history."

"It is almost beyond comprehension that our government could imprison 110,000 people solely because of their race," he wrote in an analysis from 2011.

One of the most important things to learn from Korematsu, Chemerinsky continued, "is always to remember the role of race in decisions by government in American history."

He goes on to cite historian William Manchester's book on the era, quoting from a passage that has resonance today. Back then, governors were up in arms because they did not want Japanese internment camps in their own states. Public officials openly referred to Japanese-Americans in offensive terms.

The Nevada Bar Association resolved, “We feel that if Japs are dangerous in Berkeley, California, they are likewise dangerous in the State of Nevada,” and Governor Chase Clark of Idaho told the press that “Japs live like rats, breathe like rats, and act like rats.” Governor Homer M. Adkins from Arkansas followed by announcing, “Our people are not familiar with the customs or peculiarities of the Japanese, and I doubt the wisdom of placing any in Arkansas.”

In Topaz, a camp of 8,000 pitched on Utah scrubland, some residents sought to approximate their former lives by putting together a literary magazine. Their first issue, published a year after the Pearl Harbor bombings, contained a report from journalist Taro Katayama, on the condition of the community, and the early months of its existence. He wrote:

“Asked what the infant city was like, those first residents might have, with some justice, summed it up with one word — dust.”

Today, state and local officials are racing to turn away Syrian refugees, fearing that some could perpetrate terrorism. In mentioning the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, the mayor of Roanoke was offering an example of what the United States had previously done in the name of public security. He may not have realized what a dark chapter this was for this nation.

Poop is being put to use around the world.

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