Saturday, August 6th, 2016
Dana Dovey, - The Raw Story/Medical Daily
Stephan: Increasingly it is becoming clear that much of what we think of as political thinking is really psychophysiology. Here is the latest.
Source: Brandy MJ, Crawford JT. Answering Unresolved Questions About the Relationship Between Cognitive Ability and Prejudice. Social Psychology & Personality Science. 2016
Jeffrey Tindle defends his noose and Confederate flag
Humans may be prejudiced by nature, but a new study has found that who we choose to hate may depend on our overall intelligence. The finding reconfirms the idea that it may be human nature to dislike those who are different from us — including those who look and think differently.
According to the study, people of lower intelligence, as measured by cognitive ability, tend to be prejudiced against non-conventional or liberal groups, as well as groups that have little choice in their status, such as people defined by their race, gender, or sexual orientation. On the other hand, individuals of higher intelligence were likely to be prejudiced against groups considered conventional and groups perceived to have “high choice” in their associations, such as conservatives.
“People dislike people who are different from them,” study authors Mark Brandt and Jarret Crawford told Broadly. “Derogating people with different worldviews can help people maintain the validity of their own world view.”
The duo’s findings are based on […]
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Saturday, August 6th, 2016
Bryan Nelson, - mother nature network
Stephan: Here is a story to make you feel better about the world.
Humpback whale
Humans might not be the only creatures that care about the welfare of other animals. Scientists are beginning to recognize a pattern in humpback whale behavior around the world, a seemingly intentional effort to rescue animals that are being hunted by killer whales.
Marine ecologist Robert Pitman observed a particularly dramatic example of this behavior back in 2009, while observing a pod of killer whales hunting a Weddell seal trapped on an ice floe off Antarctica. The orcas were able to successfully knock the seal off the ice, and just as they were closing in for the kill, a magnificent humpback whale suddenly rose up out of the water beneath the seal.
This was no mere accident. In order to better protect the seal, the whale placed it safely on its upturned belly to keep it out of the water. As the seal slipped down the whale’s side, the humpback appeared to use its flippers to carefully help the seal back aboard. Finally, when the coast was clear, the seal was able to safely […]
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Kali Holloway, - Alternet
Stephan: This story was sent to me by a senior police official from a Southeastern city who reads SR. He told me that police in open carry states now feel substantially more at risk, particularly when they answer domestic violence calls. Given the number of people shot and killed each day in the U.S. by deranged individuals I can easily understand his concerns.
Credit: Shutterstock
There’s been a lot of talk on the right lately about law and order, an unsubtle phrase meant to express unwavering support for law enforcement against those protesting police abuse. The line is a mantra for people who shout over Black Lives Matter activists about blue lives mattering (as if the two are necessarily oppositional) and who oppose sensible firearms legislation, supposedly on behalf of “good guys with guns.” Police in multiple states have voiced criticism of open carry laws, which many say make their jobs more difficult, stressful and dangerous. Instead of listening to these police criticisms, those who continue to demand unfettered gun rights—nearly the whole of the GOP and its base—imperil the same police lives they claim to want to protect. “You can’t be the party of law and order and not listen to your police chiefs,” Art Acevedo, police chief of Austin, Texas, admonished his state’s Republican lawmakers recently.
Forty-five states permit open carry of guns. Among them are Texas and Louisiana, where recent cop shooting deaths […]
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Olivia Campbell, - takepart
Stephan: Racism is very very expensive. Nobody talks about that, but but it is true. This is a very disturbing report because it is telling us that systemic discrimination and repression has social effects that go on for generations after the supposed source has ended. Yet another proof that social policies that make wellbeing their first priority do better in the first instance, and in the years which follow.
Credit: www.videoblocks.com
In the U.S., health disparities are blunt realities: Black infants die at more than double the rate of white babies, middle-aged black men run double the risk of heart attack of white peers, and, overall, blacks experience higher rates of diabetes, certain cancers, and asthma. Socioeconomics has long been blamed as one of the core causes of these wide, persistent health disparities, but the truth may lie elsewhere.
Researchers are finding that racism and a legacy of American slavery may play an even bigger role in health disparities, a revelation that is being unearthed by diving deep into numbers that compare the health of America’s black population with that of blacks in a country where the African slave trade wasn’t significant: Canada. (emphasis added)
Chantel Ramraj, a researcher at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health, set out to compare the differences between the health of blacks and whites in Canada and the U.S. The study, published in the journal Social Science and Medicine, found that black Canadians fare better than black Americans, even after controlling for socioeconomic factors and […]
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MOISES VELASQUEZ-MANOFF, - The New York Times
Stephan: When I was a boy in the summer you got up in the morning, dressed, ate breakfast and ran outdoors to meet your friends and spend the day playing in the woods and street, going to somebody's house for lunch, then back outdoors until the street lights came on.
The standard question when you came home was: "Where did you go?" To which the standard answer was "Out." Followed by, "What did you do?" The answer, "Nothing." My mother called me, "The little gray man" because at the end of the day I was usually covered in dirt, with grass stains on my knees, not infrequently with bandaids on my arms and legs.
Today things are rather different. The average American boy or girl spends less than 30 minutes a day, even in summer, in unstructured outdoor play, and more than seven hours each day indoors in front of an electronic screen. So their exposure to germs is quite slight. And this is reinforced by the germ obsession promulgated by Big Pharma and Big Chemical. All of this is very profitable for the industries.
Yet today we are experiencing a frightening increase in asthma and allergies in children. Why? Research shows, this arises in large measure because American children spend almost no time outdoors and live in environments that are "semi-sterile." The result, the immune systems of many children do not develop properly. Here is the counter-story.
Amish girls
In recent decades, the prevalence of asthma and allergies has increased between two- and threefold in the United States. These days, one in 12 kids has asthma. More are allergic.
The uptick is often said to have started in the late 20th century. But the first hint of a population-wide affliction — the sneezing masses — came earlier, in the late 19th century, among the American and British upper classes. Hay fever so closely hewed to class lines, in fact, it was seen as a mark of civilization and refinement. Observers noted that farmers — the people who most often came in contact with pollens and animal dander — were the ones least likely to sneeze and wheeze.
This phenomenon was rediscovered in the 1990s in Switzerland. Children who grew up on small farms […]
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