Ta-Nehisi Coates writes:

I think one of the reasons I write as I do about race is because I never really saw myself as a direct “victim” of racism. I thought there were many things that would impede my life–but white people never really ranked among them. I understood–and understand–that racism is a powerful systemic force. I understand red-lining, block-busting, slavery, Jim Crow etc. I don’t demean them as forces in American history. But there’s a difference between understanding how society views your group and being daily taunted as a faggot or a nigger.

The thing you should know about me is this–I have never, in my life, been called a nigger by a white person.

From the University of Exeter:

New research provides the first evidence that depression can be treated by only targeting an individual’s style of thinking through repeated mental exercises in an approach called cognitive bias modification.

The study suggests an innovative psychological treatment called ‘concreteness training’ can reduce depression in just two months and could work as a self-help therapy for depression in primary care.

Led by the University of Exeter and funded by the Medical Research Council, the research shows how this new treatment could help some of the 3.5 million people in the UK living with depression.

People suffering from depression have a tendency towards unhelpful abstract thinking and over-general negative thoughts, such as viewing a single mistake as evidence that they are useless at everything. Concreteness training (CNT) is a novel and unique treatment approach that attempts to directly target this tendency. Repeated practice of CNT exercises can help people to shift their thinking style.

CNT teaches people how to be more specific when reflecting on problems. This can help them to keep difficulties in perspective, improve problem-solving and reduce worry, brooding, and depressed mood. This study provided the first formal test of this treatment for depression in the NHS.

I’m a little uncertain about this. I need to read the study before I make any decisions. The study seems to no longer be available online. Hmmmm…

Cool science…

Mitch Green writes An Open Letter to the Winter Patriot:

As the Occupy movement continues to grow in defiance of the heavy-handed police action determined to squelch it, a natural question emerges: What point will the military be summoned to contain the cascade of popular dissent? And if our nation’s finest are brought into this struggle to stand between the vested authority of the state and the ranks of those who petition them for a redress of grievance, what may we expect the outcome to be?

If history is our guide then we know that story all too well. Behind a thin veil of red, white and blue stands a nation that has used its military might to respond forcefully to any public contempt for the very institutions which bind us in exclusion from the liberty those colors evoke. Just as a training collar keeps a dog in check, a highly militarized police force responds mercilessly, sharply, and without hesitation with an array of chemical warfare and thuggish brutality. And where they fail, divisions of soldiers stand ready to deliver a serious and painful lesson to all who demonstrate their unwillingness to wait for democracy.

This has been the history of democracy in America. The ink on the pages that chronicle the use of state violence towards an unruly citizenry is dry. We cannot rewrite them. We read them in lament. But for each new day history waits; at the dawn of each morning we are presented with the gift of creation. The prevailing thought woven into the fabric of our society today, threaded through both patterns of conservative and liberal ideology, remains the recognition that something is very wrong with the world. Naturally, we form the question: Can we do things differently? Once we animate that thought and present it to society as a question demanding an answer, we begin to sketch out our draft of the world in the pages of history.

Following my tour of duty in the U.S. Navy (1974-1980), I served in the Ohio Army National Guard (1980-1986) and I remember well our annual riot training with flak jackets and batons. I also remember the discussions by several of the sergeants about how they would walk away if ordered to act against or fire on certain classes of their fellow citizens. At the time a large number of my fellow non-commissioned officers were union workers and their fellow union members were among this protected class.

Union membership is way down from what it was in the ’80s, but I believe the number of thinking soldiers is just as great. Would troops mutiny in the face of peaceful protesters they can relate to? Perhaps.

Must we go there before any hope for change becomes possible? I wish it were not so but I do believe we must.

1002: The creeping paramilitarization of the police

Conservative Republican David Frum writes:

When contemplating the ruthless brilliance of this system, it’s tempting to fall back on the theory that the GOP is masterminded by a cadre of sinister billionaires, deftly manipulating the political process for their own benefit. The billionaires do exist, and some do indeed attempt to influence the political process. The bizarre fiasco of campaign-finance reform has perversely empowered them to give unlimited funds anonymously to special entities that can spend limitlessly. (Thanks, Senator ­McCain! Nice job, Senator Feingold!) Yet, for the most part, these Republican billionaires are not acting cynically. They watch Fox News too, and they’re gripped by the same apocalyptic fears as the Republican base. In funding the tea-party movement, they are ­actually acting against their own longer-term interests, for it is the richest who have the most interest in political stability, which depends upon broad societal agreement that the existing distribution of rewards is fair and reasonable. If the social order comes to seem unjust to large numbers of people, what happens next will make Occupy Wall Street look like a street fair.

So. Who is in charge? Perhaps it’s time for someone to come up with a deck of cards similar to the one our military developed for use in Iraq that helps Americans identify who these people are?

From The Guardian:

Britain’s jobless young people are being sent to work for supermarkets and budget stores for up to two months for no pay and no guarantee of a job, the Guardian can reveal.

Under the government’s work experience programme young jobseekers are exempted from national minimum wage laws for up to eight weeks and are being offered placements in Tesco, Poundland, Argos, Sainsbury’s and a multitude of other big-name businesses.

The Department for Work and Pensions says that if jobseekers “express an interest” in an offer of work experience they must continue to work without pay, after a one-week cooling-off period or face having their [£53-a-week ($84.28)jobseekers allowance] benefits docked.

My initial reaction was outrage and I contemplated writing a post suggesting that Walmart would be pushing for such a scheme (I love how scheme is not a pejorative in England), but by the time I got to the end of the piece I didn’t think it was all that bad. Why?

First, the limits placed on the people involved: they have to volunteer for the work and by doing so they at least make some contribution to the economy in exchange for their paltry £53-a-week.

Second, we already have programs here in the United States that are quite similar, unpaid internships.

My real issue is the question of how did we, the 99 percent, allow our economies to get to this place? At what point, the ’70s? the ’80s? the ’90s, did we internalize that getting a college education — even a degree in geology — only qualifies you for a minimum wage job in a retail store, not because the job you thought you were preparing for now has higher requirements, but because the job just doesn’t exist anymore?

I wonder what the high school classes of 2012 are thinking right now. Do they understand that the odds on their finding meaningful employment in their chosen fields after college are increasingly against them? Do they realize that the system whose rules they followed just doesn’t give a shit?

My prediction for the next six months is this: The #Occupy movement is going to limp along through the winter, it may even go dormant, but when spring gets here, when soon-to-be graduates raise their eyes from academia, all hell is going to break loose

Andrew Brietbart writes:

The more I started to listen to people like Dennis Prager and rational people who were religious—not fly-by-nights like Tammy Faye Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart and Benny Hinn. When you get past the hucksters and get to people like David Mamet, who now speaks of Judeo-Christianity, and Dennis Prager, it makes a hell of a lot more sense than the nihilism I embraced. I now find myself fighting alongside many Christians and Jews who believe Judeo-Christianity is the backbone of American culture. Until somebody gives me a better replacement than Judeo-­Christianity, I’m not going to be part of the team that’s trying to tear down that pillar and replace it with nihilism and cultural and moral relativism.

I love it when people pick false dichotomies…

I never quite got coulrophobia, but now I do…

Via The Second Alarm…

Angus Johnston writes:

A University of California police officer drew his gun and pointed it at students protesting meeting of the UC regents this morning, and the UC San Francisco police chief’s explanation as to why doesn’t seem to hold water.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, UCSF police chief Pamela Roskowski told a press conference today that the officer drew his weapon after a protester took his baton and hit him on the head with it, but that claim appears to be contradicted by a video recording of the incident.

The police have always been in the employ of the 1 percent, but as some move from peace officers in blue to paramilitary forces in battle dress uniforms, they are increasingly becoming the explicit domestic arm of the Miliary Industrial Complex. Have you heard of PERF?

Bye, bye, Herman, it’s been fun

Between 8th grade and my freshman year at Warren High School I attended my first band camp. What a nightmare that was.

One of the people I remember there was an über band geek from Ohio University who was there to assist the high school band director. His name was Marshall Kimball. It seems he’s made a pretty good life from music.

From this morning’s Marietta Times:

Already retired once, Marshall Kimball said his sons often try to talk him into taking some time off to enjoy life.

But that’s what Kimball, who was the Marietta City Schools director of bands for 26 years, is doing now in his job as Marietta College’s director of bands and instrumental activities.

“Whenever you have a passion for something and you get to practice that passion every day and share it with someone, how can it not be a fulfillment of a life?” he said.

Kimball, 61, retired from the Marietta school district at the end of the 2000-01 school year, “not because I didn’t want to teach anymore but because I was tired of fundraising,” he said.

Mr. Holland, afterall, was fiction.

The soundtrack is annoying, I recommend watching with your sound off.

Tim Russo writes:

I’m so in the tank for Barack Obama. This is well documented. It is in this spirit of total in-the-tankness that I beg Barack Obama to address the Occupy movement, in person, at length, from the presidential podium, soon.

At a bare minimum, Occupy has now suffered over 4,500 arrests in two months, with not a single peep from the White House. If this many peaceful protestors were arrested in ANY other country on earth this quickly, the entire world would be demanding comment from the American president, if not urgent action.

Even more alarming, I’ve tried to compare the rapidity and number of Occupy arrests in the 2 months since September 17, to any other movement in American history, and I cannot find anything that even comes close. Someone correct me if I’m wrong. Please.

Yes, yes, I know it ought to be whom do you serve, whom do you protect, but I’m quoting here…