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Farming fish in fresh water is more affordable and sustainable than in the ocean - 0 views

  • A tidal wave of interest is building in farming the seas. It’s part of a global rush to exploit oceanic resources that’s been dubbed the “blue acceleration.” Optimistic projections say that smart mariculture – fish farming at sea – could increase ocean fish and shellfish production
  • We see far fewer technical, economic and resource constraints for freshwater aquaculture than for ocean farming, and far greater potential for land-based fish farms to contribute to global food security.
  • The most important species groups – carp, tilapia and catfish – are herbivorous or omnivorous, so they don’t need to eat animal protein to thrive.
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  • Raising marine fish is a different proposition. The harsh ocean environment makes production risky, and the biology of these species makes many of them difficult and costly to breed and grow.
  • Improvements in technology have reduced, though not eliminated, the amount of fish used in feeds, especially for farmed salmon. It now takes half as much fresh fish to raise salmon as it did 20 years ago.
  • Marine fish farming is currently done in sheltered bays and sea lochs. But there is growing interest in a new high-tech method that raises fish in huge submersible cages anchored far from land in the open ocean. It’s risky business, with high operating costs. Expensive infrastructure is vulnerable to intense storms.
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How humans became the best throwers on the planet - 0 views

  • From 2008 to 2020, the average speeds of all major league baseball pitches combined rose by between 1.5 mph and 2 mph.
  • But MLB pitchers aren’t the only expert throwers; most healthy people can throw faster than our much stronger chimpanzee relatives, who max out at around 30 mph. A study of boys from the ages of 8 to 14 who were only moderately trained in throwing could still throw two times faster than chimps.
  • Humans are the only species that can throw well enough to kill rivals and prey. Because throwing requires the highly coordinated and extraordinarily rapid movements of multiple body parts, there was likely a long history of selection favoring the evolution of expert throwing in our ancestors.
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  • The Australopithecines, the relatively small-brained, bipedal ancestors of our genus that lived in Africa somewhere between 1 million and 4 million years ago, probably threw projectiles as well, since their hand bones hint at their ability to grip objects and throw them.
  • Once the ability to throw quickly and accurately became critical to success in combat and hunting, our male ancestors would have been more likely than females to develop, through natural selection, these skills, since anthropologists have shown that males tended to fight and hunt big game.
  • Sex differences in throwing do not exist just because males are, on average, larger and stronger. The relative size, shape and orientation of the shoulders of men increase the range of motion of the arm during the cocking phase, which facilitates better throwing.
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Opinion | I Survived 18 Years in Solitary Confinement - The New York Times - 0 views

  • I Survived 18 Years in Solitary Confinement
  • Mr. Manuel is an author, activist and poet. When he was 14 years old, he was sentenced to life in prison with no parole and spent 18 years in solitary confinement.
  • Imagine living alone in a room the size of a freight elevator for almost two decades.
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  • As a 15-year-old, I was condemned to long-term solitary confinement in the Florida prison system, which ultimately lasted for 18 consecutive years
  • From age 15 to 33.
  • For 18 years I didn’t have a window in my room to distract myself from the intensity of my confinement
  • I wasn’t permitted to talk to my fellow prisoners or even to myself. I didn’t have healthy, nutritious food; I was given just enough to not die
  • These circumstances made me think about how I ended up in solitary confinement.
  • United Nations standards on the treatment of prisoners prohibits solitary confinement for more than 15 days, declaring it “cruel, inhuman or degrading.”
  • For this I was arrested and charged as an adult with armed robbery and attempted murder.
  • My court-appointed lawyer advised me to plead guilty, telling me that the maximum sentence would be 15 years. So I did. But my sentence wasn’t 15 years — it was life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
  • But a year and a half later, at age 15, I was put back into solitary confinement after being written up for a few minor infractions.
  • Florida has different levels of solitary confinement; I spent the majority of that time in one of the most restrictive
  • I was finally released from prison in 2016 thanks to my lawyer, Bryan Stevenson
  • Researchers have long concluded that solitary confinement causes post-traumatic stress disorder and impairs prisoners’ ability to adjust to society long after they leave their cell.
  • In the summer of 1990, shortly after finishing seventh grade, I was directed by a few older kids to commit a robbery. During the botched attempt, I shot a woman. She suffered serious injuries to her jaw and mouth but survived. It was reckless and foolish on my part, the act of a 13-year-old in crisis, and I’m simply grateful no one died.
  • More aggressive change is needed in state prison systems
  • In 2016, the Obama administration banned juvenile solitary confinement in federal prisons, and a handful of states have advanced similar reforms for both children and adults.
  • Yet the practice, even for minors, is still common in the United States, and efforts to end it have been spotty
  • Because solitary confinement is hidden from public view and the broader prison population, egregious abuses are left unchecked
  • I watched a corrections officer spray a blind prisoner in the face with chemicals simply because he was standing by the door of his cell as a female nurse walked by. The prisoner later told me that to justify the spraying, the officer claimed the prisoner masturbated in front of the nurse.
  • I also witnessed the human consequences of the harshness of solitary firsthand: Some people would resort to cutting their stomachs open with a razor and sticking a plastic spork inside their intestines just so they could spend a week in the comfort of a hospital room with a television
  • On occasion, I purposely overdosed on Tylenol so that I could spend a night in the hospital. For even one night, it was worth the pain.
  • Another time, I was told I’d be switching dorms, and I politely asked to remain where I was because a guard in the new area had been overly aggressive with me. In response, four or five officers handcuffed me, picked me up by my feet and shoulders, and marched with me to my new dorm — using my head to ram the four steel doors on the way there.
  • The punishments were wholly disproportionate to the infractions. Before I knew it, months in solitary bled into years, years into almost two decades.
  • As a child, I survived these conditions by conjuring up stories of what I’d do when I was finally released. My mind was the only place I found freedom from my reality
  • the only place I could play basketball with my brother or video games with my friends, and eat my mother’s warm cherry pie on the porch.
  • No child should have to use their imagination this way — to survive.
  • It is difficult to know the exact number of children in solitary confinement today. The Liman Center at Yale Law School estimated that 61,000 Americans (adults and children) were in solitary confinement in the fall of 2017
  • No matter the count, I witnessed too many people lose their minds while isolated. They’d involuntarily cross a line and simply never return to sanity. Perhaps they didn’t want to. Staying in their mind was the better, safer, more humane option.
  • Solitary confinement is cruel and unusual punishment, something prohibited by the Eighth Amendment, yet prisons continue to practice it.
  • When it comes to children, elimination is the only moral option. And if ending solitary confinement for adults isn’t politically viable, public officials should at least limit the length of confinement to 15 days or fewer, in compliance with the U.N. standards
  • As I try to reintegrate into society, small things often awaken painful memories from solitary. Sometimes relationships feel constraining. It’s difficult to maintain the attention span required for a rigid 9-to-5 job. At first, crossing the street and seeing cars and bikes racing toward me felt terrifying.
  • I will face PTSD and challenges big and small for the rest of my life because of what I was subjected to.
  • And some things I never will — most of all, that this country can treat human beings, especially children, as cruelly as I was treated.
  • Sadly, solitary confinement for juveniles is still permissible in many states. But we have the power to change that — to ensure that the harrowing injustice I suffered as a young boy never happens to another child in America.
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    A very eye-opening article and story told by a victim about young children facing solitary confinement.
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Service dogs can help veterans with PTSD - growing evidence shows they may reduce anxie... - 0 views

  • As many as 1 in 5 of the roughly 2.7 million Americans deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001 are experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder.
  • Our lab is studying whether service dogs can help these military veterans, who may also have depression and anxiety – and run an elevated risk of death by suicide – in addition to having PTSD.
  • Unlike emotional support dogs or therapy dogs, service dogs must be trained to do specific tasks – in this case, helping alleviate PTSD symptoms. In keeping with the Americans with Disabilities Act, service dogs are allowed in public places where other dogs are not.
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  • Once veterans got service dogs, they described themselves in surveys as more satisfied with their lives, said they felt a greater sense of well-being and deemed themselves as having better relationships with friends and loved ones.
  • There can also be a new sense of stigma that goes along with making a disability that might otherwise be hidden readily apparent. Someone who has PTSD might not stick out until they get a service dog that is always present.
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Many QAnon followers report having mental health diagnoses - 0 views

  • QAnon is often viewed as a group associated with conspiracy, terrorism and radical action, such as the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection. But radical extremism and terror may not be the real concern from this group.
  • I noticed that QAnon followers are different from the radicals I usually study in one key way: They are far more likely to have serious mental illnesses.
  • I found that many QAnon followers revealed – in their own words on social media or in interviews – a wide range of mental health diagnoses, including bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety and addiction.
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  • 68% reported they had received mental health diagnoses. The conditions they revealed included post-traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder, paranoid schizophrenia and Munchausen syndrome by proxy
  • Research has long revealed connections between psychological problems and beliefs in conspiracy theories. For example, anxiety increases conspiratorial thinking, as do social isolation and loneliness.
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Female presidents don't always help women while in office, study in Latin America finds - 0 views

  • Between 2006 and 2018, four women served as presidents in the region.
  • For gender researchers like ourselves, this is a rare chance to assess how the president’s gender influences policy in Latin American countries. Global research has confirmed that having women in the highest echelons of power leads to greater political engagement among women and girls. We wanted to know what Latin America’s four “presidentas” had done to promote gender equality while in power.
  • Latin Americans who have a woman for president are also much less likely than other respondents to say they think men make better political leaders than women.
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  • Take abortion, for example, which is largely outlawed in heavily Catholic Latin America.
  • populists
    • cvanderloo
       
      populist: a person, especially a politician, who strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups
  • Fernández didn’t just uphold Argentina’s harsh abortion restrictions – she actually cut off funding for the country’s universal contraception program, too. Rather than focus on women’s issues, her Justicialist Party expanded social welfare programs, including a hallmark cash-transfer program that subsidizes families with young children.
  • We found they did somewhat better on childcare, which enables women to return to the labor market after becoming mothers.
  • Improvements began in the early 1990s. Back then, nearly every Latin American country adopted some form of gender quota, which requires political parties to nominate a certain percentage of women for legislative office.
  • In every country where women pushed stronger gender quotas through Congress, those initiatives became law.
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The Economics of Well-Being - 0 views

  • Money isn’t everything. But for measuring national success, it has long been pretty much the only thing
  • And the era of GNP and GDP has been characterized by a huge global rise in living standards and in wealth.
  • At the moment, though, GDP is embattled. Economists and national leaders are increasingly talking about measuring a country’s status with other metrics and even with a squishy-seeming concept like “happiness.”
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  • As everyone in business knows, you manage what you measure. So although the replacing-GDP discussion may seem a little airy, its growing credibility in important circles could give it a real impact on economic policy
  • The story usually begins with Jeremy Bentham, an Englishman who in 1781 outlined a philosophy of utility that assessed the merits of an action according to how much happiness it produced. This was during the Enlightenment, when thinkers sought to replace religion-based rules with rational, scientific guides to decision making and life.
  • Economists, the most enthusiastic adopters of the concept, came to focus instead on the tangible expression of people’s needs and desires: what they were willing to spend money on.
  • For its original purpose—measuring short-term economic fluctuations—GDP is not likely to be supplanted anytime soon. It may even be gaining ground: A major discussion is under way concerning whether the U.S. Federal Reserve and other central banks should in times of crisis focus not on inflation but on GDP growth.
  • Compiling GDP involves making a lot of choices, and even reasonable choices can lead to skewed results. Statisticians understandably favor goods and services that are bought and sold—and thus easily valued by market price—over economic activities whose value must be estimated
  • Developing nations with lots of foreign direct investment saw GDP grow much faster than GNP would have—but didn’t necessarily reap the benefits, because the investments’ profits went mostly to multinational corporations.
  • It’s true that the challenges of tracking energy use or pollution aren’t huge. But the politics are extremely tricky. In its early days the Clinton administration pushed the Bureau of Economic Analysis—the agency that measures U.S. GDP—to develop a green GDP
  • Many things of value in life cannot be fully captured by GDP, but they can be measured by metrics of health, education, political freedom, and the like
  • The idea that economic and other data can be better presented with a dashboard of indicators than as a single number or ranked list is very much in the air among experts and policy makers.
  • In Sarkozy’s 2009 report on alternatives to GDP, the word “dashboard” appears 78 times. But the notion of dashboards hasn’t captured the public’s imagination. What has is a word that shows up just 29 times in the Sarkozy report (mostly in the bibliography): “happiness.”
  • In the 1950s and 1960s psychologists and sociologists reopened the question of whether it could be quantified. Opinion polls, then entering their heyday as measurers (and in some cases determiners) of the public mood, were an obvious vehicle for the attempt.
  • The economist Richard Easterlin imported the happiness discussion to his discipline with a 1974 paper pointing out that the results of national happiness polls did not correlate all that well with per capita income.
  • The interest in happiness surveys has also led to critical scrutiny of the Easterlin paradox. After reevaluating decades’ worth of polling data, the economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers made headlines in 2008 by refuting the paradox—at least the part that said people in wealthy nations weren’t happier than those in poor nations
  • They were unable to conclusively debunk the argument that rises in income over time fail to deliver increased happiness, but the evidence they marshaled certainly muddied the waters
  • Money can’t buy happiness. But it could perhaps buy the ability to measure it.
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Glimpses of Sudan's Forgotten Pyramids - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Situated on the east bank of the Nile, some 150 miles by car northeast of Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, the Meroe pyramids — around 200 in total, many of them in ruins — seemed to be in perfect harmony with the surrounding landscape, as if the wind had smoothed their edges to accommodate them among the dunes.
  • was the hope that the country’s archaeological sites might receive broader attention and protections, not simply from researchers and international visitors but also from Sudanese citizens themselves.
  • A wave of demonstrations filled the streets of several towns, far beyond the capital Khartoum. These were Sudanese of all ethnicities, classes and generations — but above all students and young professionals.
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  • Perhaps the most infamous act of destruction at Meroe, however, is attributed to the Italian treasure hunter Giuseppe Ferlini, who in the 1830s destroyed several of the pyramids in a ruthless search for ancient artifacts.
  • “The Sudanese people have the right to reclaim their country,” she said, adding that she and her friends long for a democratic society that can be open and accessible to everyone.
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Some Covid-19 Patients Say They're Left With Ringing Ears - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Scientists are examining a possible link to tinnitus. A businessman’s suicide has lent urgency to the research.
  • Mr. Taylor suffered from a variety of symptoms following his illness, including severe tinnitus, his family said in a statement, adding that his suffering had become “unbearable.”
  • A study published on Monday in the Journal of International Audiology that looked at nearly 60 case reports and studies found that 15 percent of adults with Covid-19 reported symptoms of tinnitus.
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  • ‘I was so happy to read about this, because my doctor thought I was crazy when I mentioned tinnitus and now I know I’m not the only one.’”
  • A study published late last year in the journal Frontiers in Public Health surveyed 3,100 people with tinnitus and found that 40 percent of the 237 respondents who had contracted Covid-19 reported that their symptoms were “significantly exacerbated” following the infection.
  • A very small group of people in Dr. Beukes’s study — seven — reported that Covid-19 brought on tinnitus for the first time. Just over half of people with tinnitus said the illness had left their symptoms unchanged.
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Opinion | Why Were Strangers Allowed to Hide Part of Me From Myself? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • For 50 years, my state denied me the story of my birth. All adoptees deserve better.
  • In 1968, a woman appeared for an interview at the Children’s Bureau, an adoption agency in Indianapolis
  • “a very attractive, sweet looking girl,” who seemed “to come from a good background” and was “intelligent.”
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  • Her reason for coming was obvious. She was around 40 weeks pregnant
  • She was an office worker in Ohio when she became pregnant by a man who wasn’t going to marry her. The most remarkable part of her story was this: When she knew she was about to give birth, she drove westward out of Ohio, stopping at Indianapolis only because it was the first big city she encountered
  • She arranged to place the baby for adoption and gave birth the next day.
  • The baby was me. If she’d driven farther, I’d be a native of Chicago or St. Louis, but Indianapolis it was
  • Life is a journey, and I was born on a road trip.
  • Secrecy was considered best for all concerned. In recent decades, open adoption has been replacing this practice, but rules governing past adoptions change slowly, and I was barred from seeing my birth records.
  • Everything I just told you about my biological parents was unknown to me growing up; they were such a blank that I could not even imagine what they might be like.
  • I accepted this until I became an adoptive parent in 2012 and a social worker suggested that my adopted daughter might want to know my story someday
  • She’s from China, and like many international adoptees, she also had no story of her biological family.
  • I requested my records from the State of Indiana and was denied.
  • Next I called the Children’s Bureau, where a kind woman on the phone had my records in her hands, but was not allowed to share them.
  • Typed notes from the Children’s Bureau recorded a visit with my biological mother in the hospital. Asked how she felt, she cried
  • It’s been nearly two years since I first read those documents, and I’m still not over it. Knowing that story has altered how I think about myself, and the seemingly simple question of where I’m from
  • It’s brought on a feeling of revelation, and also of anger. I’m not upset with my biological mother; it was moving to learn how she managed her predicament alone.
  • Her decisions left me with the family that I needed — that I love. Nor am I unhappy with the Children’s Bureau, which did its duty by preserving my records.
  • I am angry that for 50 years, my state denied me the story of how I came to live on this earth. Strangers hid part of me from myself.
  • While I now have the privilege of knowing my information, many people’s stories are still hidden.
  • About 2 percent of U.S. residents — roughly six million people — are adoptees
  • A majority were adopted domestically, with records frequently sealed, especially for older adoptees
  • I was never able to tell a doctor my family medical history when asked. It’s one of those little things that never bother you until it does.
  • The people who blocked me from learning my past must have thought their motives were pure.
  • Closed adoption began as “confidential” adoption in the early 20th century, enabling parents and children to avoid the stigma of illegitimacy.
  • Records were sealed to all but people directly involved
  • But nobody asked if I wanted my identity hidden from me.
  • Should adoptees and biological families contact each other, after the law forbade it for so long?
  • Not without mutual consent:
  • information alone is powerful.
  • As records are opened, people’s privacy should be respected; that’s why I’m withholding my biological mother’s name and any details that might identify her. But my story is mine, and other adoptees have a right to recover theirs.
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Some Tourists Find Luck in the Caribbean with Covid-19 Vaccine - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Roughly 3 percent of vaccines in the U.S. Virgin Islands have gone to tourists, the governor said this week. “Nowhere else in the U.S. can you actually just walk in and get the vaccine,” he said.
  • “We were in and out within a matter of a few minutes,” Ms. Todman said. “It was amazing.”
  • “Have we become aware of the fact that people are seeking us out? Yes. And you know, we accommodate everyone,” said Angela East, the coordinator and director of the Covid-19 vaccine program at Plessen Healthcare, which has administered 44 percent of all Covid-19 vaccines in the territory. “We are going to give you the shot in the spirit of putting as many shots in arms as possible.”
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  • ‘Listen, I have all this vaccine. And people are afraid to get it here,’” Ms. Platten recalled. “‘If you have any friends, or there’s anyone you know who wants a vaccine, please have them call me.’”
  • “The result has been a mini boom of visitors on an island whose tourism economy, like most others, has been brutalized by the pandemic.”
  • “Nowhere else in the U.S. can you actually just walk in and get the vaccine, anybody over 16,” Mr. Bryan said on Monday. On March 1, the islands also opened two federally supported community vaccination centers on St. Thomas and St. Croix.
  • “On the public health side, it’s a plus,” she said. “On the equity side, I don’t see it as significant issue.”
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Some Elephants in Africa Are Just a Step From Extinction - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The threat of extinction has diminished the odds of spotting one of these wood-dwelling elephants in recent decades,
  • The shy forest elephants have lost nearly nine-tenths of their number in a generation and are now critically endangered — just one step from extinction in the wild.
  • The population of savanna elephants has fallen at least 60 percent, the team found. Forest elephants have declined by more than 86 percent.
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  • More than two decades ago, a study of 295 skulls in museums found “enormous differences” between the two types of elephants, he said. In life, forest elephants have smaller bodies, rounder ears and straighter tusks than savanna elephants.
  • Elephants being killed for their ivory tusks isn’t a new problem, and neither is the habitat loss they face.
  • Savanna elephants are “thriving,”
  • “At the moment we are getting to the minds of the people,” Dr. Okita said. “But we need to get to the hearts.”
  • The average savanna elephant mother gives birth at 25 years; forest elephant moms are 31 on average. Because the earliest surveys researchers could find were from the 1960s and 1970s, they could peer back only two generations for savanna elephants, and a single generation for forest elephants.
  • “The forest elephants, in most cases, have been largely ignored,” he said. Grouping the two elephants together probably masked just how bad things were for the forest elephant, he said.
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Culture matters a lot in successfully managing a pandemic - and many countries that did... - 0 views

  • Culture matters more than a leader’s gender in how a nation survives a global pandemic, according to a study I conducted on gender and COVID-19 management, which was published in December in the journal PLOS ONE.
  • We identified no statistically significant differences in deaths based on the gender of the country’s leader.
  • Instead, we found that pandemic outcomes hinged primarily on how egalitarian a country is.
    • cvanderloo
       
      egalitarian: relating to or believing in the principle that all people are equal and deserve equal rights and opportunities
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  • We identified two cultural variables with a statistically significant effect on death rate: individualism and “power distance”
  • Leaders do have important power during a crisis. They can institute emergency policies – from mask requirements to stay-at-home orders – to halt the virus’s spread. But it takes everyone’s cooperation to make these measures work.
  • Egalitarian countries also tend to reject traditional gender roles, so are more likely to elect women leaders. All 16 women-led countries in our study rated as “egalitarian.”
  • Women leaders enjoyed rare latitude during COVID-19 that allowed them to do everything in their power to manage it.
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Protecting Lions Helps the Whole Food Chain? Actually, We Don't Know. - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The assumption has long been that adding lions to the top of the food chain would lead to healthier populations of these other carnivore species, and that any efforts to protect large predators, such as lions, automatically benefit smaller ones, too. However, scientists lack evidence about whether these predictions play out in the real world, especially in small reserves of the sort found in South Africa.
  • “Apex predators are very interactive in an ecosystem, and we need to take better into account their ecological effect.”
  • Mr. Curveira-Santos says it is clear that the lions, when they are present, are influencing the distributions of these smaller carnivores.
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  • It could be that there are fewer individual small carnivores, because lions are killing or otherwise repressing them, he said, or that lions are causing small carnivores to avoid certain areas out of fear — or both.
  • “However, we need to take heed of the findings of this paper and direct research to ensure we have sufficient information to adapt management to a more holistic approach for the benefit of the whole ecosystem” she said.
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If You Look at Your Phone While Walking, You're an Agent of Chaos - The New York Times - 0 views

  • An experiment by Japanese researchers revealed how just a few distracted walkers really can throw off the movements of a whole crowd.
  • And so it might not come as too much of a surprise to learn that a person staring down at a phone, lost in a private world while walking, really messes with the vibe, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.
  • When those students were placed at the back of their group, the distraction did not affect how the groups moved past each other. But when the distracted walkers were at the front of the pack, there was a dramatic slowdown in the whole group’s walking pace. It also took longer for clear lanes to form.
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  • Distracted people also did not move smoothly. They took big steps sideways or dodged others in a way that the researchers rarely saw when there were no distractions. The inattentive pedestrians in the experiment induced that behavior in others as well; the people who weren’t looking at their phones moved in a more choppy fashion than they did when there were no phone-gazers.
  • Looking at one’s phone might have that effect because it deprives others of the information contained in our gazes, the researchers suggest.
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Opinion | How to Fix the Debate Over Guns - The New York Times - 0 views

  • We can find real solutions to gun violence if we recognize the trauma it causes.
  • In the span of a week, two acts of public violence have stolen the lives of 18 people and provided a stark reminder of the mass gun violence that characterized the pre-Covid United States
  • Gun violence did not go away during 2020. Gun homicides jumped 25 percent from the year before, apparently fueled in part by a rise in intimate partner violence
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  • In the U.S., people often reach for more guns as a response to mass shootings and in anticipation of needing a method of home protection, but also — as we saw in 2020 and into 2021 — in response to presidential elections, political unrest and mass-scale infectious disease.
  • Gun violence entails immediate physical trauma, but it also elicits forms of trauma that can ricochet far beyond its initial target
  • If we understand trauma as social, psychological and physical responses to experiences that cannot be assimilated into an individual’s existing understandings of themselves and the world around them, then gun trauma goes far beyond
  • Having someone taken through gun violence, surviving gun violence oneself, even hearing gunshots tears at our basic sense of safety, of security and of self
  • Research has found that surviving or being exposed to gun violence survival is associated with an increased risk of symptoms linked with PTSD (including anxiety and depression) in both urban and rural contexts, short-term decreases in reading ability, vocabulary, and impulse control, unemployment and substance use and even shifts in friendship formation
  • While gun trauma most certainly shapes the aftermath of shootings, it also shapes our day-to-day decisions and sensibilities far beyond specific acts of gun violence
  • Policies that purport to end the trauma of gun violence by increasing the punitive surveillance of individuals with mental illness, increasing police presence and surveillance of students at schools, or bringing more people into contact with the criminal justice system may ultimately create more, if different, trauma.
  • This trauma-violence cycle cannot break itself — but certainly has the power to break us.
  • Gun trauma is implicated in how guns harm us, why we turn to guns, and — to the extent that we depend on punitive criminal justice approaches to address it — how we attempt to solve the problem of gun violence.
  • We must dismantle this trauma-violence cycle, and the first step is centering gun trauma within the gun debate and addressing gun violence
  • what this might look like: the Community Justice Action Fund and Revolve Impact’s By Design campaign, which aims to “change the conversation” on gun violence by elevating leaders of color to “interrupt systems of violence and ultimately build power for communities most impacted by gun violence”
  • Approaching guns from the perspective of trauma will require some imagination — and some courage
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How We've Failed MLK Jr's Dream of Economic Justice | Time - 0 views

  • Economic justice was not new to his agenda
  • The March on Washington sought equality before the law, but also an economic bill of rights for poor white, black and brown workers. He had constantly linked civil rights and labor and poor people’s movements; as far back as 1957, he condemned “the tragic inequalities of an economic system which takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.”
  • Trump Administration tax cuts have allowed the wealthiest Americans to pay a lower tax rate than the poorest, and multibillion-dollar companies like Amazon are often able to effectively avoid paying federal taxes.
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  • Worker and union rights established in the New Deal era are fading, and Census Bureau figures released last fall show that income inequality in the U.S. is at its highest level on record.
  • Today, nearly 40 million Americans remain poor, and a majority of students in many schools do not have enough to eat
  • One-third of African Americans there lived in poverty in 2018, the year for which the most recent data is available. Most of the city’s public-school students need subsidized lunches, and black child-poverty rates are above 50%
  • Tax and budget cuts in the 1980s and again after the 2007–2008 financial meltdown destroyed budgets and crippled education. And though the police department is now “integrated,” police-community relations remain tense and often explosive.
  • This all sounds too familiar to a country that spends twice as much on health care as any other advanced nation, where “right to work” laws subvert unions, where gun violence is at epidemic levels, where greed overpowers concern for the earth, where the top 1% of earners own more wealth than 90% of the rest of us combined.
  • To address interrelated evils, King called for a revolution of values
  • To his dying day, King saw a new dispensation of economic justice as attainable. On April 3, 1968, he told a mass meeting of sanitation strikers and their supporters to remember that “either we go up together or we go down together.”
  • More than a half-century later, that promised land of economic justice remains out of reach.
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