Hasta La Gadget!

There’s a virus infecting our politics and right now it’s flourishing with a scarlet heat. It feeds on fear, paranoia and bigotry. All that was required for it to spread was a timely opportunity — and an opportunist with no scruples.

There have been stretches of history when this virus lay dormant. Sometimes it would flare up here and there, then fade away after a brief but fierce burst of fever. At other moments, it has spread with the speed of a firestorm, a pandemic consuming everything in its path, sucking away the oxygen of democracy and freedom.

Today its carrier is Donald Trump, but others came before him: narcissistic demagogues who lie and distort in pursuit of power and self-promotion. Bullies all, swaggering across the landscape with fistfuls of false promises, smears, innuendo and hatred for others, spite and spittle for anyone of a different race, faith, gender or nationality.

In America, the virus has taken many forms: “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, the South Carolina governor and senator who led vigilante terror attacks with a gang called the Red Shirts and praised the efficiency of lynch mobs; radio’s charismatic Father Charles Coughlin, the anti-Semitic, pro-Fascist Catholic priest who reached an audience of up to 30 million with his attacks on Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal; Mississippi’s Theodore Bilbo, a member of the Ku Klux Klan who vilified ethnic minorities and deplored the “mongrelization” of the white race; Louisiana’s corrupt and dictatorial Huey Long, who promised to make “Every Man a King.” And of course, George Wallace, the governor of Alabama and four-time presidential candidate who vowed, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

Note that many of these men leavened their gospel of hate and their lust for power with populism — giving the people hospitals, schools and highways. Father Coughlin spoke up for organized labor. Both he and Huey Long campaigned for the redistribution of wealth. Tillman even sponsored the first national campaign-finance reform law, the Tillman Act, in 1907, banning corporate contributions to federal candidates.

But their populism was tinged with poison — a pernicious nativism that called for building walls to keep out people and ideas they didn’t like.

Which brings us back to Trump and the hotheaded, ego-swollen provocateur he most resembles: Joseph McCarthy, US senator from Wisconsin — until now perhaps our most destructive demagogue. In the 1950s, this madman terrorized and divided the nation with false or grossly exaggerated tales of treason and subversion — stirring the witches’ brew of anti-Communist hysteria with lies and manufactured accusations that ruined innocent people and their families. “I have here in my hand a list,” he would claim — a list of supposed Reds in the State Department or the military. No one knew whose names were there, nor would he say, but it was enough to shatter lives and careers.

In the end, McCarthy was brought down. A brave journalist called him out on the same television airwaves that helped the senator become a powerful, national sensation. It was Edward R. Murrow, and at the end of an episode exposing McCarthy on his CBS series See It Now, Murrow said:

“It is necessary to investigate before legislating, but the line between investigating and persecuting is a very fine one, and the junior senator from Wisconsin has stepped over it repeatedly. His primary achievement has been in confusing the public mind, as between the internal and the external threats of Communism. We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men — not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.”

There also was the brave and moral lawyer Joseph Welch, acting as chief counsel to the US Army after it was targeted for one of McCarthy’s inquisitions. When McCarthy smeared one of his young associates, Welch responded in full view of the TV and newsreel cameras during hearings in the Senate. “You’ve done enough,” Welch said. “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?… If there is a God in heaven, it will do neither you nor your cause any good. I will not discuss it further.”

It was a devastating moment. Finally, McCarthy’s fellow senators — including a handful of brave Republicans — turned on him, putting an end to the reign of terror. It was 1954. A motion to censure McCarthy passed 67-22, and the junior senator from Wisconsin was finished. He soon disappeared from the front pages, and three years later was dead.

Here’s something McCarthy said that could have come straight out of the Trump playbook: “McCarthyism is Americanism with its sleeves rolled.” Sounds just like The Donald, right? Interestingly, you can draw a direct line from McCarthy to Trump — two degrees of separation. In a Venn diagram of this pair, the place where the two circles overlap, the person they share in common, is a fellow named Roy Cohn.

Cohn was chief counsel to McCarthy’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, the same one Welch went up against. Cohn was McCarthy’s henchman, a master of dark deeds and dirty tricks. When McCarthy fell, Cohn bounced back to his hometown of New York and became a prominent Manhattan wheeler-dealer, a fixer representing real estate moguls and mob bosses — anyone with the bankroll to afford him. He worked for Trump’s father, Fred, beating back federal prosecution of the property developer, and several years later would do the same for Donald. “If you need someone to get vicious toward an opponent,” Trump told a magazine reporter in 1979, “you get Roy.” To another writer he said, “Roy was brutal but he was a very loyal guy.”

Cohn introduced Trump to his McCarthy-like methods of strong-arm manipulation and to the political sleazemeister Roger Stone, another dirty trickster and unofficial adviser to Trump who just this week suggested that Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin was a disloyal American who may be a spy for Saudi Arabia, a “terrorist agent.”

Cohn also introduced Trump to the man who is now his campaign chair, Paul Manafort, the political consultant and lobbyist who without a moral qualm in the world has made a fortune representing dictators — even when their interests flew in the face of human rights or official US policy.

So the ghost of Joseph McCarthy lives on in Donald Trump as he accuses President Obama of treason, slanders women, mocks people with disabilities, and impugns every politician or journalist who dares call him out for the liar and bamboozler he is. The ghosts of all the past American demagogues live on in him as well, although none of them have ever been so dangerous — none have come as close to the grand prize of the White House.

Because even a pathological liar occasionally speaks the truth, Trump has given voice to many who feel they’ve gotten a raw deal from establishment politics, who see both parties as corporate pawns, who believe they have been cheated by a system that produces enormous profits from the labor of working men and women that are gobbled up by the 1 percent at the top. But again, Trump’s brand of populism comes with venomous race-baiting that spews forth the red-hot lies of a forked and wicked tongue.

We can hope for journalists with the courage and integrity of an Edward R. Murrow to challenge this would-be tyrant, to put the truth to every lie and publicly shame the devil for his outrages. We can hope for the likes of Joseph Welch, who demanded to know whether McCarthy had any sense of decency. Think of Gonzalo Curiel, the jurist Trump accused of persecuting him because of the judge’s Mexican heritage. Curiel has revealed the soulless little man behind the curtain of Trump’s alleged empire, the avaricious money-grubber who conned hard-working Americans out of their hard-won cash to attend his so-called “university.”

And we can hope there still remain in the Republican Party at least a few brave politicians who will stand up to Trump, as some did McCarthy. This might be a little harder. For every Mitt Romney and Lindsey Graham who have announced their opposition to Trump, there is a weaselly Paul Ryan, a cynical Mitch McConnell and a passel of fellow travelers up and down the ballot who claim not to like Trump and who may not wholeheartedly endorse him but will vote for him in the name of party unity.

As this headline in The Huffington Postaptly put it, “Republicans Are Twisting Themselves Into Pretzels To Defend Donald Trump.” Ten GOP senators were interviewed about Trump and his attack on Judge Curiel’s Mexican heritage. Most hemmed and hawed about their presumptive nominee. As Trump “gets to reality on things he’ll change his point of view and be, you know, more responsible.” That was Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah. Trump’s comments were “racially toxic” but “don’t give me any pause.” That was Tim Scott of South Carolina, the only Republican African-American in the Senate. And Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas? He said Trump’s words were “unfortunate.” Asked if he was offended, Jennifer Bendery writes, the senator “put his fingers to his lips, gestured that he was buttoning them shut, and shuffled away.”

No profiles in courage there. But why should we expect otherwise? Their acquiescence, their years of kowtowing to extremism in the appeasement of their base, have allowed Trump and his nightmarish sideshow to steal into the tent and take over the circus. Alexander Pope once said that party spirit is at best the madness of the many for the gain of a few. A kind of infection, if you will — a virus that spreads through the body politic, contaminating all. Trump and his ilk would sweep the promise of America into the dustbin of history unless they are exposed now to the disinfectant of sunlight, the cleansing torch of truth. Nothing else can save us from the dark age of unreason that would arrive with the triumph of Donald Trump.

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Age: 162

Aliases: Grand Old Party, GOP, Party of “No,” Party of Lincoln [archaic]

b. February 28, 1854, Ripon Wisconsin

d. July 2016, Cleveland, Ohio

Causes of death:

Ingestion of large quantities of a slow-acting flesh-eating bacterium, Racism americanesis, beginning in the 1960s, weakened the party, sapped it of its principles, caused its heart to deteriorate, raised its blood pressure to extremely dangerous levels, and left it with only white blood cells–a condition that initially seemed to strengthen it, but ultimately left it with no resistance to a virulent disease that struck it in the summer of 2015 and precipitated its death a year later.

The new and fatal disease that afflicted the weakened party is known scientifically as Trumpine spongiform encephalopathy, but most people call it by its common name, Mad Don Disease. It is an affliction that attacks its host’s brain, leading the organism to engage in increasingly bizarre behavior, including but not limited to wild, uncontrollable outbursts of anger directed at anything and anyone, susceptibility to the most outlandish sorts of conspiracy theories, the fabrication of more and more ludicrous lies, denying what the afflicted party has said a short time before, misogyny, xenophobia, megalomania, and so on. Patients afflicted with Mad Don Disease usually have to be taken in straitjackets to psychiatric hospitals in the final stages of the disease, just before they expire. The demise of the Republican Party was a bit different in this regard. While there were many symptoms clearly indicating the need for professional mental care and sedation in a proper institutional setting, the Party was allowed to spend its last hours in an arena in Cleveland. This enabled millions of people to witness its last, machine-assisted breaths via television.

Summary of Life:

The Republican Party was born in a schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin, in 1854. Its parents were people who conceived the child when they were brought together by a shared opposition to the expansion of slavery, and the youngster turned out to be remarkably strong (though in its early years it proved unable to adapt to the climate of the American South). The youthful Republican Party was also stunningly precocious, winning the presidency of the United States at the age of six. At the age of seven, the very advanced youngster led a war that ultimately succeeded. It ended slavery in the nation and, for a time, sought to bring about genuine racial equality.

Idealistic in its youth and adolescence, the Party in its twenties agreed to marriage with a Robber Baron, who led it away from its youthful idealism and towards a religion that worships a God called The Market. In its forties, the Republican Party became expansionist, went to war with Spain and then fought a war in the Philippines to bring “the little brown brother” under its tutelage.

During that same fifth decade of its life, though, the Republican Party also began to move in a progressive direction, adopting several bright children, including Robert La Follette and Theodore Roosevelt.

As many people do, though, the Republican Party grew more conservative as it aged. In its seventies, the Party wed itself completely to those who worship the Free Market God and pushed policies that helped to cause the economy to collapse in 1929. This marriage caused it to fall into a weakened condition for a few decades. In the years just before its one hundredth birthday, the Party was seduced by people with such names as Nixon and McCarthy, who led it to adopt wild accusations of Communist infiltration almost everywhere.

There were, however, during the early years of the party’s second century, some more moderate voices coming out of its mouth. A majority of Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Substantial minorities of Republicans even voted for Medicare and Medicaid. The Party contracted a serious disease named Goldwaterism in 1964. The malady almost killed it, though it found that the Southern climate now seemed better suited it and it moved there for a period of convalescence.

At the end of the 1960s, the Republican Party began consuming and then regurgitating large doses of Racism americanesis. The initial results, especially the marked increase in white blood cells, produced a reinvigoration of the previously weakened body, accompanied by a noticeable paling of its skin.

A new affliction struck the Republican Party around the age of 140. Newt Gingrichitis caused the party become surly and uncooperative and to display an increasingly unmistakable tendency toward hypocrisy.

By 2008, the ill effects of the flesh-eating bacterium were becoming evident, particularly as the Party found itself residing in an environment in which the positive results of the infection were increasingly outweighed by the negative consequences.

In its last years, as its afflictions spread more completely through its body, the Party became more crotchety and angry.

Thus the Republican Party was in a very weakened condition when, in June of 2015, it had its first serious exposure to Mad Don Disease. Although a large number of physicians were called in to try to combat the new affliction, it spread rapidly through the Party, leaving it by June 2016, a year after the infection first invaded the body, on life support without a functioning brain or heart. It was left for the decision to be made to pull the plug in Cleveland a month later.

Survivors:

The Republican Party was preceded in death by its maternal grandparents, Abolitionism and Reconstruction; its paternal grandparents, Greed and Tariffs; its parents, Isolationism and McCarthyism; and a brother named Watergate. The Party is survived by several wealthy uncles, including Charles Koch of Wichita, David Koch of New York, and Sheldon Adelson of Las Vegas; an adopted brother, the National Rifle Association, of Fairfax, Virginia; an inconsolable stepson, The National Review, and a child born to it out of wedlock, the Libertarian Party, current whereabouts unknown. Other survivors include two daughters, Deregulation and No New Taxes; two sons, Concentration Of Wealth and War In Iraq, Jr. It is widely believed that W.I. Iraq, Jr., sired a bastard granddaughter of the Republican Party. Her name is Isis.

In lieu of flowers, mourners are asked to send as much money as possible to their favorite billionaire.

{Robert S. McElvaine teaches history at Millsaps College, is the author of ten nonfiction books, and has just completed a draft of his first novel, “What It Feels Like…”}

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There’s just one criteria that cookies have to meet: they must be delicious. But it definitely doesn’t hurt if they’re absolutely stunning, too. That’s exactly the kind of cookie you get when you let a graphic designer into the kitchen.

Holly Fox, an LA-based designer, picked up baking five years ago for a chance to play with royal icing and she hasn’t put down a piping bag since. Her creations are lovely, and so too are her utensils. Just look at the colorful lineup of her piping bags on any given day.

It’s no secret that she loves her Pantone shades. Check out what she creates with those lovely hues.

She sells her custom cookies on Etsy for roughly $2-4 a cookie. Or you can just experience them vicariously through Holly Fox’s aspirational Instagram account.

H/T design you trust

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What comes to mind when you think of the brain? You probably imagine a crinkly, walnut-like structure, with a multitude of hills and valleys (gyri and sulci, respectively). But did you know that under this rippled, walnut-shaped outer surface of the cerebrum (referred to as the cortex) lie other structures that are smaller, but equally complex? In fact, there’s an entire world of hidden structures with seemingly absurd, tongue twisting names like the basal ganglia (which actually isn’t that absurd, since basal means bottom and ganglia refer to a number of nerve cell bodies). You may have heard the basal ganglia being mentioned in mainstream media recently associated with movement disorders like Parkinson’s Disease, which burdened the late Muhammed Ali. And rightly so – the role of the basal ganglia is mostly understood as related to the formation, execution, and remembrance of a sequence of movements towards a goal like throwing a punch for Ali or walking for us. For example, the basal ganglia will string together the sequence of movements required to put one foot in front of the other without us having to consciously decide to do so. However, it turns out that in addition to affecting Ali’s and your abilities to move, these tiny, but mighty and complex structures also contribute to our motivation and higher-level thinking.

The basal ganglia (or BG for short) encompass 5 nuclei. The proper functionality of these nuclei depend on the balance of chemical messengers (referred to as neurotransmitters) that are involved in transmitting neuronal signals in the brain. Imbalances in these neurotransmitters lead to a variety of movement disorders. For example, dopamine is the neurotransmitter that plays a vital role in Parkinson’s Disease. Due to the degeneration of the brain cells that produce dopamine, there is a lack of dopamine in the BG, leading to tremors and shaking in patients like Ali.

Subcortical nuclei including the basal ganglia. A. Side view of the brain. B. A rotated view to show the structures more towards the front and midline of the brain. Image source: Blumenfeld (2002).

But, there’s more to the BG than just movement. The 5 nuclei of the BG each have independent functional roles and are also interconnected with different areas of the cortex. For example, recent evidence based on functional connectivity (specifically resting state that we learned about in a previous post) and structural connectivity show that different connections among BG nuclei and cortex align with different motor, cognitive, or affective (a fancy word for emotions) systems. So, together with the cortex, the BG are involved in modifying our movements, planning our actions, switching between tasks, and acting towards a goal – emotional or otherwise.

And yet, the many functions of the BG do not stop there! Recent evidence also indicates that the BG have complex roles encompassing learning and motivation, sentence processing and switching between languages in bilingual individuals, as well as processing things that might be rewarding to you or me, such as winning the lottery or getting praise from peers. So how does the BG accomplish so much and have so many seemingly different functional roles? Well, think of the BG as a hub with different parts. Each part is one of the 5 nuclei that has a distinct role differentiating it from the others. Each part also has a set of connections to other cortical systems. So, the BG utilizes its design as a hub, along with connections to other brain regions, to achieve its many functions in a flexible and efficient manner.

Ultimately, this general description of the BG stresses the importance of exploring the complex, walnut-like structure that we call the brain as an interconnected network of regions, rather than focusing on individual regions per se. It also emphasizes the inclusion of structures like the BG that are nestled under the cortex within these networks. In future posts, we will learn more about the BG and other hubs in the brain that scientists are beginning to understand in more detail and that we have only begun to explore together.

Ekaterina Dobryakova is a member of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping and writes for the Communications/Media Team. The OHBM Media Team brings cutting edge information and research on the human brain to your laptops, desktops and mobile devices in a way that is neurobiologically pleasing. For more like this, follow www.humanbrainmapping.org/blog or @OHBMSci_News

Further reading:
Blumenfeld, H., 2002. Neuroanatomy Through Clinical Cases 2nd ed., Sunderland, MA: Sinauer.

Haber and Knutson, 2010. Neuropsychopharmacology, 35(1).

Crinion, J. et al., 2006. Science, 312(5779).

Draganski, B. et al., 2008. The Journal of neuroscience, 28(28).

Di Martino, a et al., 2008. Cerebral cortex, 18(12).

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This driver must be feeling pretty deflated.

On Tuesday, dozens of balloons tied to a car began to fly away as the vehicle’s driver picked up speed on a freeway in Johannesburg.

Motorist Matthew Rorke was following the vehicle and captured the colorful — and potentially dangerous — sight on his own car’s dashcam.

Rorke’s video, which is now going viral, shows most of the helium-filled balloons soaring up into the sky.

A few balloons hit nearby cars, but the incident reportedly didn’t cause any crashes and no one was injured, according to UPI.

When Rorke later passes the vehicle, only about 10 balloons are still tied to it.

H/T Mashable

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