Monthly Archives: March 2020

Merion West is an online news source that dubs itself a journal where all perspectives are welcome. They tout the fact that they have been rated by Media Bias/Fact Check as a Least Biased source.

Generally, their articles seem to have deeper analysis than you will find in much of the mainstream media. For example, recent headlines include, The Fraught Relationship Between Religion and Epidemiology, The Critics of Social Justice, from Jonah Goldberg to Jordan Peterson, and Hannah Arendts Concept of Impotent Bigness. They regularly interview newsmakers, and authors often include professors in relevant fields and others well qualified to comment.

Articles are explicitly labeled by viewpoint: left, center, or right. This makes for interesting reading. To date, I havent seen much about evolution and intelligent design on the site, but there is a recent article entitled When We Oversimplify Darwin. I was curious to see what Merion West would say. The article is labeled as representing a View from the Center.

It is too concerned with trying to make peace between all sides. Interestingly, the author, artist Chris Augusta, acknowledges that there is scientific debate over evolutionary theory. Thats a plus. The article links to last years Hoover Institution-sponsored discussion Mathematical Challenges to Darwins Theory of Evolution among Stephen Meyer, David Gelernter, and David Berlinski, led by Peter Robinson, and to a Socrates in the City conversation between Dr. Meyer and Eric Metaxas.

Augusta argues that Darwin was confused about the nature of reality and didnt come to firm conclusions regarding the existence of a designer or a central role for chance. Augusta, whose website includes some weird and spooky Art of Evolution, advocates for paradoxical reality:

Charles Darwin, that greatest of empiricists, bears witness to the raw spectacle of paradoxical nature. He sees clearly manifestations ofdesign,and he sees clearly manifestations ofchance. Reading Darwins letters to Asa Gray reveals a man transfixed by the blinding spectacle of contrary forces. Darwin is a deer in the headlights: He cant move forward; he cant move backward.

I find this conclusion absurd. Darwin clearly derived from his theory a materialistic view of the world. He wrote in his Autobiography, There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows. Everything in nature is the result of fixed laws. For Darwin, this had sinister implications. In a poignant Evolution News article, science historian Michael Flannery noted, Writing to William Graham (1839-1911) on July 3, 1881, Darwin saw the march of human progress in blatantly racist terms. Civilization would advance even at the cost of inevitable racial extermination. Darwin wrote:

Lastly I could show fight on natural selection having done and doing more for the progress of civilisation than you seem inclined to admit. Remember what risks the nations of Europe ran, not so many centuries ago of being overwhelmed by the Turks, and how ridiculous such an idea now is. The more civilised so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilised races throughout the world.

We may dispute what Darwin felt or thought in the privacy of his study but the bulk of his writings fall clearly into advocating for one perspective: naturalism. Why else would atheist Daniel Dennett have written that Darwinism was a universal acid that eats through just about every traditional concept? Dennett was not wrong. That does not sound too paradoxical to me.

Augusta says poets too grapple with this paradoxical reality and then goes on to liken science to poetry. He offers comfort to those who, unlike Darwin and poets, are intimidated by paradox but gently points out that our insistence on resolving these paradoxes through Christianity or militant atheism la Percy Shelley is childlike. Pardon me, Augusta, I think I might vomit.

Needless to say, poetry is very different from science. It operates by entirely different rules. We dont let poets (or artists) make rules for us; I dont think they were consulted about how to respond to the coronavirus. Poets and artists dont have that kind of power, and its probably a good thing.

As part of his closing, Augusta notes that the universe is better described as creative than created. Really? Actually, lets take a look at that whole paragraph:

This materialistic Darwinism has dominated for more than a century-and-a-half, but its own explanatory power may be waning. Proponents of Intelligent Design insist that the very complexity of life cannot be explained by essentially random mechanistic processes. But Intelligent Design is perhaps a poor choice of words that tends to shift attention away from the thing (or event) observed to some pre-existing designer. You do not have to introduce the notion of an Intelligent Designer to acknowledge the existence of order and pattern in nature. The universe may be apprehended, as it was by Albert Einstein among many others, as embodyingintelligenceinsofar as the human mind can apprehend order and harmony. For Einstein, doing science was nothing less than an attempt to understand this intelligence. Sticking to what we actually experience, the universe is better described ascreativerather thancreated.

I am at a loss. In what way is the universe creative? To be sure, materialists have mounted strained defenses against the evidence of cosmic design. But the multiverse hypothesis is bankrupt truly a fantasy. String theory is a delusional apparition. Stephen Meyers forthcoming The Return of the God Hypothesis makes these things clear.

Augusta seeks to encourage tolerance and agreement. What he has written, though, is a mess. Im baffled to see that Merion West thinks this is centrist.

Photo credit: JJ YingviaUnsplash.

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An Artist Examines Evolution - Discovery Institute

In The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biographic of Cancer, the oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee, MD, intuits, Down to their innate molecular core, cancer cells are hyperactive, survival-endowed, scrappy, fecund, inventive copies of ourselves.1 Replace cancer cells with viruses and the quote holds equally true.

Darwinian perpetrators of genomic dysregulation, many viruseshave integrated foundationally into the human genome. Indeed, nearly 8% of ourgenome is believed to consist of inactive viral sequences, an ancient graveyardof disabled invaders that attacked our ancestors eons ago now lying asremnants of past infections.2

Overbillions of years of evolution, the complex genomic battle between virus andcellular host has varied from symbiosis, to detente, to revolution. In its mostrapid, extreme, and antagonistic form, infection results in exuberant viralreplication, uncontrolled inflammatory responses, communicable dissemination,and swift death of individuals or species by pandemic. In a slower butinvariably malignant process, viral mediated cellular transformation leads touncontrolled host cell proliferation and cancer death. For his discovery ofhepatitis B virus and connecting the concepts of viral genomic integration andcertain cancer risks along with the development of a vaccine and prevention ofliver cancer by this mechanism, Barry Blumberg, MD, of Fox Chase Cancer Centerin Philadelphia, won the Nobel Prize in Medicine some 40 years ago.

Viralinfections and cancers share more than just their desire for nucleic control.While the spectrum of these disease states are equally broad, ranging fromindolent to virulent, perhaps the greatest and most universal human emotionstoked by both invasive ailments is fear. This is partly because of theiruniversality, our personal histories, and their cryptic inevitability. It hasbeen said that what the mind does not understand, it fears.

Asthe world negotiates its first global pandemic in over a century, the lessonslearned from our human responses to COVID-19 can teach us a great deal aboutour visceral response to cancer. As Neil Shubin put it in a Wall StreetJournal article, both literally and figuratively, Each of us is part virus(and part cancer), in ways that affect who we are and what we do.2

Robert G. Uzzo, MD, MBA, FACS

G. Willing Wing Pepper Chair in Cancer Research

Professor and Chairman, Department of Surgery

Fox Chase Cancer Center, Temple University

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Cancers, Viruses, and the Evolution of Fear - Renal and Urology News

(Click for full view.) A new feathered dinosaur that lived in New Mexico 67 million years ago is one of the last known surviving raptor species, according to a new publication in the journal Scientific Reports. Dineobellator notohesperus adds to scientists understanding of the paleo-biodiversity of the American Southwest, offering a clearer picture of what life was like in this region near the end of the reign of the dinosaurs. Credit: Sergey Krasovskiy

The discovery of a new species of dromaeosaurid a family of generally small to medium-sized feathered carnivores that lived during the Cretaceous Period is reported in Scientific Reports. The fossil furthers our understanding of dinosaur evolution during the Late Cretaceous (70-68 million years ago).

Steven Jasinski and colleagues discovered 20 identifiable skeletal elements of the new dromaeosaurid in deposits of the Ojo Alamo Formation in the San Juan Basin, New Mexico, USA. The dinosaur has been named Dineobellator notohesperus from the Navajo word Din (Navajo people) and the Latin word bellator (warrior). The authors report a number of unique features, including vertebrae near the base of the tail that curved inwards, which could have increased Dineobellators agility and improved its predation success. A gouge mark on the fossils large sickle-shaped claw may have been inflicted during an altercation with another Dineobellator or other theropod such as Tyrannosaurus rex, they speculate.

Phylogenetic analyses of relationships between species suggest that Dineobellator may be part of the Velociraptorinae subfamily, which also includes velociraptors. Ancestors of Dineobellator are thought to have migrated from Asia to North America where multiple lineages may have evolved, potentially accounting for differences in morphology between Dineobellator and other dromaeosaurids.

The findings, which contribute to the sparse fossil record of dromaeosaurids, indicate that this family was still diversifying at the end of the Cretaceous period prior to the mass extinction that wiped out non-avian dinosaurs 65.5 million years ago.

Read New Dinosaur Discovered in New Mexico Is One of the Last Known Surviving Raptors for more detail on this discovery.

Reference: New Dromaeosaurid Dinosaur (Theropoda, Dromaeosauridae) from New Mexico and Biodiversity of Dromaeosaurids at the end of the Cretaceous by Steven E. Jasinski, Robert M. Sullivan and Peter Dodson, 26 March 2020, Scientific Reports.DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-61480-7

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New Species of Feathered Carnivorous Dinosaur Discovered in New Mexico Yields Evolutionary Insights - SciTechDaily

Boring and basic are two words that aren't part of Bad Bunny's vocabulary.

The Latin trap star, whose real names is Benito Antonio Martnez Ocasio, is not only known for his music around the world. He's also famous for hiselectrifying and daring fashion.

Take one look at El Conejo Malo onstage or on the red carpet, and you'll see he's pulling out all of the style stops with something just as loud and head-turning as his chart-topping tunes.

In fact, he's explained before how his love for fashion andsinging often go hand-in-hand.

"My style influences my music and everything around me," he told Billboard in a sit-down interview. "It can be said that the way you dress is like a type of artform. I think everyone should dress [in a] way that uses their creativity... and as a way to express themselves however they want to."

The 26-year-old star is alwaysshowing up and showing out... no matter the occasion.

From donning a prosthetic third eye at the 2018 American Music Awards to lighting up the 2020 Super Bowl Halftime Show with a silver coat that featured13,000 Swarovski stones, his lewks are simply unique and unforgettable.

To seeBad Bunny's gloriousfashion evolution, scroll through our gallery below!

ABC/Image Group LA

All eyes are on Bad Bunny at the 2018 American Music Awards... and he wants it that way! "The eye represents power and confidence," he shares with Billboard. From his black-and-white striped pants to his colorful skull-adorned blouse, this is oneiconiqueensemble.

Michael Tran/FilmMagic

The jewel-encrusted face mask is a whole ass lewk alone. But the in-your-face orange coat with butterfly accessories and white hoodie make even more fabulous.

Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic

The 26-year-old singer makes the crowd go wild at the 2020 Super Bowl Halftime Show. His custom silver bedazzled coat also drops jaws with its blinding 13,000 Swarovski stones that were hand-sewn and hand-selected.

Eric Jamison/Invision/AP/REX/Shutterstock

Green with envy! The Puerto Rican star makes the red carpet his runway at theBillboard Music Latin Awards with his lavender suit and lime green hair.

Alexander Tamargo/Getty Images

This lewk is a knock-out! Bad Bunnytakes the stage inMiami with a eccentric ensemble: the bright-yellow plaid pants, red sneakers andwrestling belt is chef's kiss.

David Becker/Getty Images for LARAS

The Latin trap singer pays homage to one of his heroes at the 2018 Latin Grammy Awards: Stone Cold Steve Austin.

YouTube

El Conejo Malo looks like an angel with his all-white suitthat he dons in his music video "Si Estuvisemos Juntos."

(Photo by Sam Wasson/FilmMagic)

The YHLQMDLG singer serves lewks at the 2018 Billboard Latin Music Awards with his violet-colored suit, which features floral embroidery, yellow diamond details and more.

Kevin Mazur/WireImage

Looking sleek and chic! The "Vete" star wears an all-black 'fit that blends high fashion with everyday-wear at the2019 MTV Video Music Awards.

Dia Dipasupil/VMN19/Getty Images for MTV

One word: unforgettable! The Oasis singer takes the stage with J Balvin at the 2019 MTV Video Music Awards in an electrifying custom-made costume.

Kevin Winter/Getty Images for Coachella

Bad Bunny makes a grand entrance during his 2019 Coachella set with a colorfulImran Moosvi design. His holographic sunglasses and black combat boots tie the flashy lewk together.

Steve Marcus/Getty Images

Fashion highlight... literally! Bad Bunny brings bright and bold style front-and-center at the 2019 Calibashevent in Las Vegas.

Victor Chavez/Getty Images for Spotify

El Conejo Malo goes for a goth-glam vibe at the 2020 Spotify Awards with his Matrix-esque ensemble.

Alexander Tamargo/Getty Images

Sometimes, less is more. The "Caro" singer dons a grey plaid outfit that's anything but basic.

Scott Dudelson/Getty Images

The 26-year-old star takes the stage in Inglewood, Calif. and pays homage to the Los Angeles Lakers with his purple and gold jersey.

Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic

Feeling Gucci! Bad Bunny brings luxury fashion to the basketball court with his GG-embossed coat at the 2020 State Farm All-Star Game.

Kevin Winter/Getty Images for Coachella

The Latin trap singer lights up the stage at 2019 Coachella with his neon hoodie and matching multi-colored suit.

Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP

Not one for boringor basique suits, El Conejo Malo pulls out all the fashion stops at the 2017 Latin American Music Awards. He even wears a diamond pendant that he had specially made.

Denise Truscello/Getty Images for LARAS

His voice may be soft as buttuh, but his fashion is soft as velvet! The 26-year-old star shows up and shows out in a larger-than-life blue velvet coat at the 2019 Latin Grammy Awards.

We can't wait to see what the Latin trap singer wears next.

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Relive Bad Bunny's Fashion Evolution On and Off the Red Carpet - E! NEWS

The media is replete with COVID-19 stories about people clearing supermarket shelves and the backlash against them. Have people gone mad? How can one individual be overfilling his own cart, while shaming others who are doing the same?

As a behavioral neuroscientist who has studied hoarding behavior for 25 years, I can tell you that this is all normal and expected. People are acting the way evolution has wired them.

The word hoarding might bring to mind relatives or neighbors whose houses are overfilled with junk. A small percentage of people do suffer from what psychologists call hoarding disorder, keeping excessive goods to the point of distress and impairment.

But hoarding is actually a totally normal and adaptive behavior that kicks in any time there is an uneven supply of resources. Everyone hoards, even during the best of times, without even thinking about it. People like to have beans in the pantry, money in savings and chocolates hidden from the children. These are all hoards.

Most Americans have had so much, for so long. People forget that, not so long ago, survival often depended on working tirelessly all year to fill root cellars so a family could last through a long, cold winter and still many died.

Similarly, squirrels work all fall to hide nuts to eat for the rest of the year. Kangaroo rats in the desert hide seeds the few times it rains and then remember where they put them to dig them back up later. A Clarks nutcracker can hoard over 10,000 pine seeds per fall and even remember where it put them.

Similarities between human behavior and these animals are not just analogies. They reflect a deeply ingrained capacity for brains to motivate us to acquire and save resources that may not always be there. Suffering from hoarding disorder, stockpiling in a pandemic or hiding nuts in the fall all of these behaviors are motivated less by logic and more by a deeply felt drive to feel safer.

My colleagues and I have found that stress seems to signal the brain to switch into get hoarding mode. For example, a kangaroo rat will act very lazy if fed regularly. But if its weight starts to drop, its brain signals to release stress hormones that incite the fastidious hiding of seeds all over the cage.

Kangaroo rats will also increase their hoarding if a neighboring animal steals from them. Once, I returned to the lab to find the victim of theft with all his remaining food stuffed into his cheek pouches the only safe place.

People do the same. If in our lab studies my colleagues and I make them feel anxious, our study subjects want to take more stuff home with them afterward.

Demonstrating this shared inheritance, the same brain areas are active when people decide to take home toilet paper, bottled water or granola bars, as when rats store lab chow under their bedding the orbitofrontal cortex and nucleus accumbens, regions that generally help organize goals and motivations to satisfy needs and desires.

Damage to this system can even induce abnormal hoarding. One man who suffered frontal lobe damage had a sudden urge to hoard bullets. Another could not stop borrowing others cars. Brains across species use these ancient neural systems to ensure access to needed items or ones that feel necessary.

So, when the news induces a panic that stores are running out of food, or that residents will be trapped in place for weeks, the brain is programmed to stock up. It makes you feel safer, less stressed, and actually protects you in an emergency.

At the same time theyre organizing their own stockpiles, people get upset about those who are taking too much. That is a legitimate concern; its a version of the tragedy of the commons, wherein a public resource might be sustainable, but peoples tendency to take a little extra for themselves degrades the resource to the point where it can no longer help anyone.

By shaming others on social media, for instance, people exert what little influence they have to ensure cooperation with the group. As a social species, human beings thrive when they work together, and have employed shaming even punishment for millennia to ensure that everyone acts in the best interest of the group.

And it works. Twitter users went after a guy reported to have hoarded 17,700 bottles of hand sanitizer in the hopes of turning a profit; he ended up donating all of it and is under investigation for price gouging. Who wouldnt pause before grabbing those last few rolls of TP when the mob is watching?

People will continue to hoard to the extent that they are worried. They will also continue to shame others who take more than what they consider a fair share. Both are normal and adaptive behaviors that evolved to balance one another out, in the long run.

But thats cold comfort for someone on the losing end of a temporary imbalance like a health care worker who did not have protective gear when they encountered a sick patient. The survival of the group hardly matters to the person who dies, or to their parent, child or friend.

One thing to remember is that the news selectively depicts stockpiling stories, presenting audiences with the most shocking cases. Most people are not charging $400 for a mask. Most are just trying to protect themselves and their families, the best way they know how, while also offering aid wherever they can. Thats how the human species evolved, to get through challenges like this together.

Stephanie Preston, Professor of Psychology, University of Michigan

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Hoarding groceries during the coronavirus pandemic is the result of evolution - PhillyVoice.com

When Kerrang! spoke to Paramore for their first ever cover story all the way back in 2006, the interviewer wrapped things up by asking Hayley Williams why she believed the band deserved pride of place on the front of that issue. After a thoughtful moment, the then 17-year-old star-in-the-making said, People might not think were real, but we are. We couldnt be more real. We make music that comes from the heart. And the reason we deserve this cover is so that people can read about us and see that for themselves. Were worth listening to. Theres no-one else like us.

Fast-forward to 2017 and Hayley had firmly established herself as the most important and iconic woman in alternative music, beloved by legions of fans. A GRAMMY winner [in the Best Rock Song category, for Paramores 2014 single Aint It Fun], she had now adorned countless magazine covers and picked up more awards than she could ever have fathomed back when the band started out. Global success was hers. She had also, however, never felt more alone, as she moved into an empty home carrying a plant and a box with the word fragile marked on it. Her divorce from New Found Glorys Chad Gilbert was confirmed, and the future of Paramore looked to be in the balance.

Long before she felt ready to fly solo, though, as she finally does this year, all Hayley Williams ever wanted was to be part of a family. Growing up, her home life was difficult. When she was a young child her parents split, and despite being hard-line Christians living in the Bible Belt of America they would both remarry. By the time she was 15, Paramore would get their record deal. Finally, she had her family a band of brothers (literally in the case of guitarist Josh and drummer Zac Farro), who would tour together, share vans and room space, taking every shiny opportunity that came their way. The catch was that Atlantic only wanted to sign Hayley, with the rest of the band signed via Fueled By Ramen, the emo and pop-punk subsidiary. This was a small distinction, but one that, despite Hayley and the bands best efforts to ignore it, would put a strain on them all.

READ THIS: Haley Williams talks grief, rage, depression and Petals ForArmor

I was an only child and I wanted to be a part of something really bad, the singer told The Fader many years later. When I got signed by myself, I felt veryalone.

From the off, Hayley was portrayed in the press as the boss at the head of the Paramore family. Driving the aesthetics, decision-making and ambitions, she was the one fussing after her bandmates and answering all the questions. Were in a band its not about me, she would tell K! of her frustrations about the way the press framed them. To ram the point home, she performed in a homemade PARAMORE IS A BAND T-shirt a simple act of defiance and rebellion that spoke of an underlying anxiety about her bandmates not getting their due recognition orappreciation.

Still, when young fans ran screaming to Hayley in the streets or felt closer to Paramore thanks to her candid LiveJournal blogs, it was undeniably because she was the beating heart and soul of the band. The minute you met Hayley, you knew she was going to be a star, Warped Tour founder Kevin Lyman told K! in 2015. People connected with her, and particularly the female audience Warped is so about.

The tension may not have undermined Paramores brilliance, but it was forever in the background. Hayley was the one who meant so much to fans and audiences, while also representing the marketable public face for record label executives. More than anything, though, she just wanted to keep her family aroundher.

Throughout their successes, good times and gut-wrenching, genre-defining music, Paramore had always been uncertain. Speaking to lOdet in 2019, Hayley pinpoints Paramores hard times as being between 2007 until right before 2017 album After Laughter almost the entirety of the bands journey to date,then.

In light of that, depression and interpersonal struggles dominated their best work. Around the lead-up to and release of 2009s Brand New Eyes, the band attended group therapy to stay together. Hayleys subsequent lyrics duly spoke to those issues: Were taking shortcuts and false solutions / Just to come out the hero (Turn It Off) and Next time you point a finger / I might have to bend it back (Playing God). Shortly after, in 2010, when the Farro brothers left the band, they did so with a blog post penned by Josh that claimed he and his bandmates were riding on the coattails of Hayleys dream. He also confirmed longstanding rumours that he and Hayley had dated and after their break-up, the band had gonedownhill.

When K! joined Paramore at SXSW in Texas during their self-titled album run in 2013, the band were down to just three (Hayley, bassist Jeremy Davis and guitarist Taylor York). Im so grateful for where we are, she said, adding of her lost-bandmates, I cant be mad at them for trying to find happiness in their own lives. Now Im sitting here in the band that I wanted to be in since I was 13 years old.

Being grateful and positive was always Hayleys modus operandi. At least in public. But the weight and responsibility of all this disruption within the band and also in her long-term relationship with Chad, all of which was happening throughout her teenhood and early twenties rested heavily on her shoulders.

READ THIS: The 10 best Paramorevideos

In the summer of 2015 she had privately left Paramore only to later, in the depths of her darkest depression, have Taylor coax her into the happy-sad contradiction of After Laughter. But the synth-pop opus almost didnt happen. Performing it at Riot Fest 2017, standing in front of a crowd of rock fans whod been through every twist and turn with her, she said the record was about darkness, or sadness, or depression, or whatever you wanna call it.

Sadly, during this album cycle journalists were ruthless. Enquiries fiercely pressed for drama and band dynamics her Achilles heel. One interview, in The Fader, detailed the aftermath of a panic attack she had, subsequently digging for answers in a way that Hayley would later admit made her uncomfortable. Through another interview with a male blogger, Hayleys regrets at having written 2007 single Misery Business were aggregated by music blogs, prompting an online scene-wide discourse around problematic lyrics. In the wake of all this pressure, its understandable that she would subsequently retreat from publiclife.

Ive had to be careful how I answer people who ask me questions for Paramore about these last songs, she said in a blog with lOdet. Is this the place? Or is this safe? I dont want to sound sexist, but when weve done interviews with male journalists its been really hard. Its sacred, you know? Its your story.

Her story or what shed believed to be her story was unravelling and in need of examination. In the same interview she revealed that Paramore was suffering, too. I cant keep this family together Im failing so badly. She wasnt happy in her marriage either. Perhaps, she realised, she hadnt wanted to get married, only that she thought she did.

I thought it would help, she reflected. And I couldnt keep that together either. So Ive had a lot of unravelling and deconstruction of my ideas of family, loyalty, commitment. There is a lot of grieving that comes with that too.

But without her chosen family, who is Hayley Williams? To find out, she needed the space to explore and process everything that had come before. Paramore didnt allow for that. In December 2019, Hayley announced on social media that her 31st year would be a special one. With the help of some of my closest friends, she stated, I made something Im going to call myown.

During a craniosacral massage, as Hayley lay on her back, she had a vision of flowers growing out of her, grotesque and painful. When she came to, she found the masseuse had laid petals on her. She knew that it meant she had growing to do, and it would hurt, but it would also be beautiful. Hayley told this story and more in an interview in February with Zane Lowe on Apple Music about her new solo project, Petals For Armor.

Depression, she told him, was often a mask for other feelings. After years of bottling emotions up and suppressing darkness and anger, it was time to release everything. She began intensive therapy alone, this time and started to explore her relationships with her family. It was evident that her early experiences had left their mark in adulthood. She spoke with her mother about why Hayleys dad and her had split up. With that knowledge, maybe she could understand more about why she desperately needed others in the way she did. Ive been trying to keep my family together ever since then, vicariously, through this band, she told lOdet of her parents split.

This is the Hayley who is learning to stand alone. In the furious DNA of the Petals To Armor music, there is also a glimpse of hope. Theres hope of eventual comfort without a romantic relationship, without tying herself to the raft of a family structure. Now that Im taking account of all these feelings, and Im feeling all of them, theres this beautiful rainbow versus just the deep end, she told ZaneLowe.

From the depths of those dark years, there is a version of Hayley now being reborn. On the Petals To Armor album artwork, the singer holds her hand near her mouth, so the black squares of ink that she had tattooed over her ex-husbands name on her fingers lead to a spiralling branch of squares painted on her face. They look like dark petals in the shape of a question mark, or a path to something else.

From the clay and the earth comes something feminine and beautiful, something real natures way of saying that theres still no-one else quite like HayleyWilliams.

READ THIS: The 51 greatest pop-punk albums of alltime

Posted on March 27th 2020, 3:00pm

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Ok Bloomer: The Rise, Resilience And Evolution Of Hayley Williams - Kerrang!

The House bill, called the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, was passed by a vote of 410-4 on February 26, after the Senate passed the bill unanimously last year. The legislation, if signed into law by President Trump, will end more than a century of effort to make lynching a federal crime.

As Erin Logan reported, this was something that Congress had failed to do for over 120 years. Lawmakers in the first half of the 20th Century tried nearly 200 times to address lynching on a federal level. Although seven presidents supported such efforts, none were successful.

The first efforts to address this lawlessness on the federal level came in 1870, when President Ulysses S. Grant approved legislation to subdue the actions of white-supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.Michael J. Pfeifer, history professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told The Washington Post in an email that legislative failure to federally penalize assailants was largely because of Southern lawmakers stonewalling.

Asserting a doctrine of states rights, Southern Democratic senators consistently thwarted federal anti-lynching legislation over the decades, Pfeifer said. So although federal anti-lynching legislation enjoyed majority support in the House in the 1920s and 30s, through the filibuster and other means, Southern Democrats were able to block federal anti-lynching legislation.

The topic of lynchings in America has been renewed recently by Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative and author of the book Just Mercy, which has been made into a movie. Stevenson began his career by defending people on death row, primarily in Alabama. Here is how he explains the connection between that work and his efforts to document the history of lynchings in this country. Stevenson says that slavery didnt end in 1865, it just evolved.

There is a line from slavery through racial terrorism, through segregation, that is evident in what we see in our criminal justice system today. I am persuaded that we really wont eliminate the problems of discrimination in the criminal justice system, in the education system, in the employment system until we change the narrative of racial difference that we have all accepted These acts of humiliation and degradation created this desensitizing to victimization. We are indifferent to evidence of bias or discrimination. We are indifferent to innocent people being wrongly condemned on death row for thirty years. I think there is a historical root to that silence.

One of the results of Stevensons work is a report titled Lynchings in America, which documents over 4,000 instances of the racial terror between 1877 and 1950 predominantly (but not exclusively) in the South.

Lynching in America makes the case that lynching of African Americans was terrorism, a widely supported phenomenon used to enforce racial subordination and segregation. Lynchings were violent and public events that traumatized black people throughout the country and were largely tolerated by state and federal officials.This was not frontier justice carried out by a few marginalized vigilantes or extremists. Instead, many African Americans who were never accused of any crime were tortured and murdered in front of picnicking spectators (including elected officials and prominent citizens) for bumping into a white person, or wearing their military uniforms after World War I, or not using the appropriate title when addressing a white person. People who participated in lynchings were celebrated and acted with impunity.

One way we can re-sensitize ourselves to this history is to listen to the stories of people like Shirah. Hergreat grandfather was lynched in Shreveport, Louisiana. As part of Caddo Parish, it represents the community with the second highest number of lynchings in the country. That begins to bring this all home to me because I grew up in the town of Longview, Texas, which is just 60 miles west of Shreveport. Because none of these stories were included in the history classes I attended, I was interested in learning more about what happened in the area around my hometown.

One of the things I learned is that there was a race riot in the town of Longview back in 1919. It was actually part of what has become known as the red summer, which included anti-black white supremacists attacks in more than three dozen cities. Here is how the Texas State Historical Association describes the incidents that led to the riot in Longview.

Racial tension was especially high immediately before the riot because two locally prominent black leaders, Samuel L. Jones and Dr. Calvin P. Davis, had urged black farmers to avoid local white cotton brokers and sell directly to buyers in Galveston. Then an article in the July 10 issue of the Chicago Defenderdescribed the death of a young black man, Lemuel Walters, in Longview. The article reported that Walters and an unnamed white woman from Kilgore, Texas, were in love and quoted her as saying they would have married if they had lived in the North. Walters, according to the article, was safely locked in the Gregg County Jail until the sheriff willingly handed him over to a white mob that murdered him on June 17.Jones, a teacher in the Longview school system and a local correspondent for the Chicago Defender, was held responsible for the article, and on Thursday, July 10, he was accosted and beaten, supposedly by two brothers of the Kilgore woman.

The congressman who currently represents the district that includes Longview is Republican Louie Gohmert. He is one of the four House members who voted against the anti-lynching bill on Wednesday. History is alive and well in northeast Texas.

I hope youll forgive me for writing so much about my hometown. But this is exactly what Stevenson is suggesting that we all need to do. In order to shed our indifference to the way that slavery has evolved, we need to unlock the silence about our own past by putting it into human terms.

I grew up in a community that was scarred by what happened to people like Lemuel Walters, Samuel Jones, and Shirahs great grandfather. Their deaths are examples of the kind of terrorism that was designed to instill fear as a way to entrench white supremacy. That legacy lives on today, most notably in our criminal justice system.

Go here to see the original:

The Evolution of Slavery and a 120 year effort to finally make lynching a federal crime - Milwaukee Independent

We all know Patty Mills as the spirited, towel flinging, three-point scoring, Spurs player that he is. And as I am sure most Pounders are aware, he is a dedicated humanitarian, using his celebrity to bring awareness to events where he can offer support. The water shortages and fires plaguing his native Australia are two recent events that have taken him back home.

But now, Mills has posted this message via Twitter:

Without notice and most likely unintentionally, Mills has evolved into an ambassador of goodwill on a global level. While speaking to his native Australians in this message regarding the postponement of the 2020 Summer Olympics, Mills exhibited the tone of a leader. The Indigenous baller has an unavoidable, charismatic clarity to his message. One that many political leaders never reach after lifetimes of service.

Stay positive and stay strong and lean on each other for support if needed. We are all in this together. If someone were to ask me if there were a call to action I would say this- whether you are an Olympic athlete, any athlete, or just someone that likes to participate in sports to stay fit and healthy, please stay at home and keep your distance. The better we can control this virus, the better we can look after each other.

This pandemic is bringing the best out of many, and Patty is one of those who always puts his best foot forward. We are watching his leadership continue to evolve on and off the court and may just be witness to the rising of a new voice in the worldview.

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Link:

The inevitable evolution of Patty Mills into a global ambassador of goodwill - Pounding The Rock