Lily Salter's Blog, page 975

Torture, Iran, and Secrecy: Trove of CIA Director John Brennan’s emails released by WikiLeaks

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Ahmed’s clock in Los Alamos: “Manhattan” shows America’s long history of alienating its most brilliant minds

In last night’s episode of “Manhattan,” “Fatherland,” nuclear scientist Frank Winter (John Benjamin Hickey) wakes up in an internment camp. Though he does not know it, he is in Crystal City, Texas, home of one of the most notorious detention camps in American history—at least, pre-Guantanamo Bay. He’s been imprisoned on suspicion of being a spy; there’s a security leak in Los Alamos, home of the Manhattan Project. It is 1944, and a select group of people in the world know that the American military is creating a world-ending weapon. Winter is one of them—and moreover, as the first season revealed, he is one that is more successful than most in creating that weapon. But he’s haunted by visions of apocalypse and increasingly distrustful of his government; at the end of the first season, he flees Los Alamos, only to be caught and imprisoned. He isn’t the spy, of course—the audience knows exactly who is—but even when he proves it, by the end of “Fatherland,” he can’t get out of prison. Winter might be the most valuable mind in the military research facility of Los Alamos, but the government, in paranoia and suspicion, refuses to have him there any longer. He’s not a spy, but he still knows too much. Winter is just one nuclear physicist of many in “Manhattan,” and like most of our lead characters, he is a fictional construct. But the world of Los Alamos isn’t, and neither are legendary physicists like Robert Oppenheimer and Niels Bohr, who are both secondary characters in the first season. At its simplest, “Manhattan” is a period drama about this circumscribed group of people and an era of extreme anxiety; war with Germany and Japan is all-consuming, and the Americans might not be winning. The mostly male scientists are forced to keep secrets from those closest to them, and it eats them alive. The mostly unemployed wives sit at home and fret over limited rations, bad weather, and the vast stretches of the unknown. Soldiers stationed at Los Alamos get drunk at dance parties that host both members of the indigenous tribe and Spanish-speaking Mexicans. It’s an era and an atmosphere, conveyed through scene-setting. At its slightly more complex, “Manhattan” is a show that looks at history with a modern understanding of the complexities of identity. Chinese-American scientist Sidney Liao (Eddie Shin) is discriminated against for being Asian, distrusted by the military, and then is executed for treason. Housewife Abby (Rachel Brosnahan) finds solace in a relationship with another army wife, Elodie (Carole Weyers). Helen Prins (Katja Herbers) is the only female scientist in a team of men, and struggles to be seen as something more than a strident anomaly. As I discussed with executive producer Thomas Schlamme—who previously worked on “The West Wing”—“Manhattan” is deeply concerned with restoring context to history. The result is “The West Wing” without all the circular Aaron Sorkin dialogue, mixed with “Masters Of Sex,” but with far more compelling stakes (the creator of the show, Sam Shaw, used to be a writer on the Showtime show). And all this alone would make it well with your time, especially if you’re fond of World War II history. But last night’s episode—in which Frank Winter grapples with internment, in the form of a very suspicious fellow inmate (Justin Kirk)—offers a window into what is another of “Manhattan”’s subtle strengths: that of a show that engages with total war as not just mass destruction but also a narrative. While war makes for the simplest story, that of “us” versus “them,” none of the characters of “Manhattan” neatly fit into either category, despite working for one team or another. As is revealed in “Fatherland,” Frank Winter’s mother is German—and grew to despise her American husband and son. Frank is American, and works for the Americans, but is also imprisoned by the Americans. Once you start drawing lines trying to determine who is really “us” and who is really “them,” it becomes increasingly difficult to make any sense of the landscape—as the paranoid gatekeepers of “Manhattan” rapidly discover. It’s 1944, and America had yet to really experience the us/them paranoia of the Cold War; this is just the tip of what will be a massive, world-shaking iceberg. It’s apparently too optimistic to hope that we might have learned something since then. While I was watching “Fatherland,” something was nagging me about the familiar shape of the story, and I realized that Frank Winter’s bomb was reminding me of the homemade clock of a 14-year-old boy—a clock that inspired so much paranoia, it got him arrested. Though of course, the whole point is that the clock wasn’t a bomb, in the case of Ahmed Mohamed, there is one thing both stories have in common—that of losing incredible talent, due to arbitrary reckonings of “us” and “them.” Mohamed’s family announced yesterday that they were all moving to Doha, Qatar, where the government had offered Ahmed fully funded education through college. In raising the specter of “us”/”them”—in treating a 14-year-old boy like a terrorist because of his name and skin color—an American town has actually reinforced the “us”/”them,” because Mohamed is now leaving our country entirely to live and pay taxes in the vilified Middle East. We lost an American, in our attempt to be more American. “Fatherland” is a psychological, almost dream-like exploration of self and allegiance, one that unfolds like a dramatic one-man play with Hickey in the lead. As if to underscore the shifting lines of identity, he introduces himself with a fake name, at first—the name of a colleague. His fellow inmate, over the course of several hours, plays at least three different identities—Nazi, American agent, communist—trying to get Frank to respond to any of them. In the midst of starvation and mind games, Frank tries to maintain some shred of his own “real” self. And in the end, he discovers his allegiance doesn’t even matter to his captors—“Fatherland” reveals that the American military is using the specter of Nazi invasion and German superweapons to keep the team at Los Alamos working faster and faster. Because it’s never just “us” and ”them”—it’s “us,” “them,” and those that profit on the difference between the two.

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Texas has gotten this bad: Norwegians now use the state’s name as slang for “crazy”

Texas is many things to many people—a state the size of a medium-sized country; home to several idiot governors, one who became president, and a current one who thinks it’s a good idea for college students to openly carry firearms. To Donald Trump, Texas is the place where a "big, beautiful wall" should be built. To people in Norway, “texas” with a small “t” is a synonym for crazy, bonkers, out of control and wild. As in,that’s totally texas. Or in Norwegian: det var helt texas Texas Monthly discovered this hilarious (or humbling, depending on your perspective) piece of slang on a Tumblr page. The magazine accumulated several pieces of evidence that this is really a thing in Norway, and gave these examples:

Here is an article from Aviso Nordland from March 2014 about reckless international truck drivers traveling through the northern part of the country. Norwegian police chief Knut Danielsen, when describing the situation, tells the paper that “it is absolutely texas.” Here’s one from a 2012 edition of Verdens Gang, a Norwegian tabloid, in which Blackburn Rovers soccer manager Henning Berg—a Norwegian former star who played for the British team—describes the atmosphere at a match between the Rovers and the rival Burnley Clarets as “totally texas.” And here’s a fisherman telling the local news about the rare swordfish he caught in Northern Norway: “I heard a loud noise from the bay, but I did not know where it came from right away. Thirty seconds to a minute later it jumped out in the fjord. I got to see some of it before I took up the camera,” he says and continues: “It was totally texas!”-

A Norwegian explained what "texas" meant to him in a Reddit discussion earlier this year, writing: “When I think of the word I picture a cowboy crashing a party and shooting two revolvers into the air. ‘It’s completely texas!" So entrenched is this idiom in Norway that a restaurant called Dolly Dimple's uses "helt texas" to characterize its pizza deals. Note, for those planning on using “texas” as a substitute for “crazy” while in Norway (or elsewhere, perhaps) it is an adjective that applies to situations, not people. So, you can’t call Gov. Greg Abbott “texas,” even if you really believe he is crazy.

This is why I’m still single?: Men think smart women are sexy — but only from a distance

One of my most vivid memories is the night before my first day of kindergarten. My dad sat me down and said it’s more important for me to be smart and nice to people than it is to be pretty or popular. He reiterated this statement the night before my first day of high school, and it’s a piece of advice I’ve carried with me since. So far, it’s worked out pretty well. I love the career I’m building and have a group of friends I trust and admire. Dinner and text conversations range from recent features in the New Yorker, to the political landscape to the etymology of favorite words like the Portuguese “saudade.” Overwhelmingly, though, my female friends and I are for the most part single. There’s been eviscerating break ups, whirlwind romances and casual dates in between. But for some reason few men have stuck. The romantic ones of the bunch attribute it to not yet finding a perfect match, while the more cynical ones say it’s the guys we’re choosing, like we have bad taste in men. I’m more inclined to think it’s not so much bad taste in men, but a taste for the bad boys. When I talk to my dad about it, he rolls his eyes and says to stop over-analyzing and that we’re too smart for our own good. According to science, my old man is right. A new study published in the November issue of "Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin" suggests that while men like the idea of partnering with intelligent women, being presented with one in real life is a turn off. Let’s just jump off this pedestal right now, shall we? Research teams from the University of Buffalo, California Lutheran University and the University of Texas at Austin studied intellectual preferences in men by presenting them with two scenarios. The first scenario told male participants a woman outperformed them in either an English or math course, and then asked them to imagine the woman as a romantic partner. Then the men were asked a series of questions based on a ranking scale. The research team found “men formed favorable impressions and showed greater interest in women who displayed more (versus less) intelligence than themselves.” This sounds great -- promising, even! -- as things in theory are wont to do. For the second part of the study, researchers administered an intelligence test to the men, and then told the participants they were about to meet a woman who had outperformed them on the same test. According to the study, the men “distanced themselves more from her, tended to rate her as less attractive, and showed less desire to exchange contact information or plan a date with her.” When presented with the real life possibility of an intelligent woman as a romantic partner, men seem to find it as inconvenient as a glass filled to its brim. No one wants to dance while balancing a full martini in one hand. The researchers who led this study believe “feelings of diminished masculinity accounted for men’s decreased attraction toward women outperformed them.” So basically women have to worry about stepping on shards of shattered masculinity when breaking glass ceilings. It’s an interesting cultural moment to be a woman. Women are purchasing more music than men, emerging as leaders in STEM fields, and now hold more advanced degrees than men do. Michelle Obama spoke a few weeks ago on the importance of girls paying attention in school and getting good grades. “There is no boy at this age that is cute enough or interesting enough to stop you from getting your education,” said the First Lady at The Power of the Educated Girl panel hosted by Glamour at the end of September. Actress Charlize Theron reaffirmed the sentiment at the panel, saying “there is nothing sexier than a smart woman.” Intelligence is something most agree to be universally sexy. But when it comes to dating, men seem to admire more intelligent women, and end up with women whom they have intellectual superiority to. Intellectual distance, the paper argues, makes the heart grow fonder. It makes you understand Amazing Amy’s rage in “Gone Girl” once she learns she’s being replaced by the not-so-outstanding Andy. Men today have a much larger selection pool to choose from. In “DATE-ONMICS: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game,” author Jon Birger argues that shifting dating and hookup culture paradigms among the post-collegiate crowd is due to shifting demographics regarding who is more educated. In 2012, 34 percent of women were more educated than men, and it’s expected that this number will soar to 43 percent within the next decade. It’s an empowering statistic in terms of the progress women have made within the last century, but discouraging when it comes to romantic partnership. Nearly a century ago F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” Given cultural and scientific evidence, maybe those words apply to modern women who can outperform men intellectually, but still seek long term romantic partnership. We’re encouraged to cultivate our intellects, but it runs the risk of making us less romantically appealing. Maybe intelligence will put us on idealized pedestals, rendering intelligent women alone but adored. The alternative would be to exist as a pretty fool, a la Daisy Buchanan’s wish for her daughter. But I wouldn’t want to be a woman who’s ignorant to the wonders a scholarly life has to offer — nor would I want a man dumb enough to love me for it.One of my most vivid memories is the night before my first day of kindergarten. My dad sat me down and said it’s more important for me to be smart and nice to people than it is to be pretty or popular. He reiterated this statement the night before my first day of high school, and it’s a piece of advice I’ve carried with me since. So far, it’s worked out pretty well. I love the career I’m building and have a group of friends I trust and admire. Dinner and text conversations range from recent features in the New Yorker, to the political landscape to the etymology of favorite words like the Portuguese “saudade.” Overwhelmingly, though, my female friends and I are for the most part single. There’s been eviscerating break ups, whirlwind romances and casual dates in between. But for some reason few men have stuck. The romantic ones of the bunch attribute it to not yet finding a perfect match, while the more cynical ones say it’s the guys we’re choosing, like we have bad taste in men. I’m more inclined to think it’s not so much bad taste in men, but a taste for the bad boys. When I talk to my dad about it, he rolls his eyes and says to stop over-analyzing and that we’re too smart for our own good. According to science, my old man is right. A new study published in the November issue of "Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin" suggests that while men like the idea of partnering with intelligent women, being presented with one in real life is a turn off. Let’s just jump off this pedestal right now, shall we? Research teams from the University of Buffalo, California Lutheran University and the University of Texas at Austin studied intellectual preferences in men by presenting them with two scenarios. The first scenario told male participants a woman outperformed them in either an English or math course, and then asked them to imagine the woman as a romantic partner. Then the men were asked a series of questions based on a ranking scale. The research team found “men formed favorable impressions and showed greater interest in women who displayed more (versus less) intelligence than themselves.” This sounds great -- promising, even! -- as things in theory are wont to do. For the second part of the study, researchers administered an intelligence test to the men, and then told the participants they were about to meet a woman who had outperformed them on the same test. According to the study, the men “distanced themselves more from her, tended to rate her as less attractive, and showed less desire to exchange contact information or plan a date with her.” When presented with the real life possibility of an intelligent woman as a romantic partner, men seem to find it as inconvenient as a glass filled to its brim. No one wants to dance while balancing a full martini in one hand. The researchers who led this study believe “feelings of diminished masculinity accounted for men’s decreased attraction toward women outperformed them.” So basically women have to worry about stepping on shards of shattered masculinity when breaking glass ceilings. It’s an interesting cultural moment to be a woman. Women are purchasing more music than men, emerging as leaders in STEM fields, and now hold more advanced degrees than men do. Michelle Obama spoke a few weeks ago on the importance of girls paying attention in school and getting good grades. “There is no boy at this age that is cute enough or interesting enough to stop you from getting your education,” said the First Lady at The Power of the Educated Girl panel hosted by Glamour at the end of September. Actress Charlize Theron reaffirmed the sentiment at the panel, saying “there is nothing sexier than a smart woman.” Intelligence is something most agree to be universally sexy. But when it comes to dating, men seem to admire more intelligent women, and end up with women whom they have intellectual superiority to. Intellectual distance, the paper argues, makes the heart grow fonder. It makes you understand Amazing Amy’s rage in “Gone Girl” once she learns she’s being replaced by the not-so-outstanding Andy. Men today have a much larger selection pool to choose from. In “DATE-ONMICS: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game,” author Jon Birger argues that shifting dating and hookup culture paradigms among the post-collegiate crowd is due to shifting demographics regarding who is more educated. In 2012, 34 percent of women were more educated than men, and it’s expected that this number will soar to 43 percent within the next decade. It’s an empowering statistic in terms of the progress women have made within the last century, but discouraging when it comes to romantic partnership. Nearly a century ago F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” Given cultural and scientific evidence, maybe those words apply to modern women who can outperform men intellectually, but still seek long term romantic partnership. We’re encouraged to cultivate our intellects, but it runs the risk of making us less romantically appealing. Maybe intelligence will put us on idealized pedestals, rendering intelligent women alone but adored. The alternative would be to exist as a pretty fool, a la Daisy Buchanan’s wish for her daughter. But I wouldn’t want to be a woman who’s ignorant to the wonders a scholarly life has to offer — nor would I want a man dumb enough to love me for it.One of my most vivid memories is the night before my first day of kindergarten. My dad sat me down and said it’s more important for me to be smart and nice to people than it is to be pretty or popular. He reiterated this statement the night before my first day of high school, and it’s a piece of advice I’ve carried with me since. So far, it’s worked out pretty well. I love the career I’m building and have a group of friends I trust and admire. Dinner and text conversations range from recent features in the New Yorker, to the political landscape to the etymology of favorite words like the Portuguese “saudade.” Overwhelmingly, though, my female friends and I are for the most part single. There’s been eviscerating break ups, whirlwind romances and casual dates in between. But for some reason few men have stuck. The romantic ones of the bunch attribute it to not yet finding a perfect match, while the more cynical ones say it’s the guys we’re choosing, like we have bad taste in men. I’m more inclined to think it’s not so much bad taste in men, but a taste for the bad boys. When I talk to my dad about it, he rolls his eyes and says to stop over-analyzing and that we’re too smart for our own good. According to science, my old man is right. A new study published in the November issue of "Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin" suggests that while men like the idea of partnering with intelligent women, being presented with one in real life is a turn off. Let’s just jump off this pedestal right now, shall we? Research teams from the University of Buffalo, California Lutheran University and the University of Texas at Austin studied intellectual preferences in men by presenting them with two scenarios. The first scenario told male participants a woman outperformed them in either an English or math course, and then asked them to imagine the woman as a romantic partner. Then the men were asked a series of questions based on a ranking scale. The research team found “men formed favorable impressions and showed greater interest in women who displayed more (versus less) intelligence than themselves.” This sounds great -- promising, even! -- as things in theory are wont to do. For the second part of the study, researchers administered an intelligence test to the men, and then told the participants they were about to meet a woman who had outperformed them on the same test. According to the study, the men “distanced themselves more from her, tended to rate her as less attractive, and showed less desire to exchange contact information or plan a date with her.” When presented with the real life possibility of an intelligent woman as a romantic partner, men seem to find it as inconvenient as a glass filled to its brim. No one wants to dance while balancing a full martini in one hand. The researchers who led this study believe “feelings of diminished masculinity accounted for men’s decreased attraction toward women outperformed them.” So basically women have to worry about stepping on shards of shattered masculinity when breaking glass ceilings. It’s an interesting cultural moment to be a woman. Women are purchasing more music than men, emerging as leaders in STEM fields, and now hold more advanced degrees than men do. Michelle Obama spoke a few weeks ago on the importance of girls paying attention in school and getting good grades. “There is no boy at this age that is cute enough or interesting enough to stop you from getting your education,” said the First Lady at The Power of the Educated Girl panel hosted by Glamour at the end of September. Actress Charlize Theron reaffirmed the sentiment at the panel, saying “there is nothing sexier than a smart woman.” Intelligence is something most agree to be universally sexy. But when it comes to dating, men seem to admire more intelligent women, and end up with women whom they have intellectual superiority to. Intellectual distance, the paper argues, makes the heart grow fonder. It makes you understand Amazing Amy’s rage in “Gone Girl” once she learns she’s being replaced by the not-so-outstanding Andy. Men today have a much larger selection pool to choose from. In “DATE-ONMICS: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game,” author Jon Birger argues that shifting dating and hookup culture paradigms among the post-collegiate crowd is due to shifting demographics regarding who is more educated. In 2012, 34 percent of women were more educated than men, and it’s expected that this number will soar to 43 percent within the next decade. It’s an empowering statistic in terms of the progress women have made within the last century, but discouraging when it comes to romantic partnership. Nearly a century ago F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” Given cultural and scientific evidence, maybe those words apply to modern women who can outperform men intellectually, but still seek long term romantic partnership. We’re encouraged to cultivate our intellects, but it runs the risk of making us less romantically appealing. Maybe intelligence will put us on idealized pedestals, rendering intelligent women alone but adored. The alternative would be to exist as a pretty fool, a la Daisy Buchanan’s wish for her daughter. But I wouldn’t want to be a woman who’s ignorant to the wonders a scholarly life has to offer — nor would I want a man dumb enough to love me for it.

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“It’s not your bra”: Gwyneth Paltrow’s under fire for pushing debunked breast cancer myth

Actress Gwyneth Paltrow is under fire for a post on her website GOOP by Dr. Habib Sadeghi with the inflammatory title “Could There Possibly Be a Link Between Underwire Bras and Breast Cancer??” The research discussed in the article has been widely discredited, including by the American Cancer Society. In fact, in a 2014 study in which 1,044 women ages 55 to 74 were interviewed about their bra wearing, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (also known as Fred Hutch) found absolutely no link between bras and breast cancer. Specifically, Lu Chen, a researcher in the Public Health Sciences Division at Fred Hutch, said in an article on the center’s website (one that’s cited in a footnote of the GOOP article), “Our study found no evidence that wearing a bra increases a woman’s risk for breast cancer. The risk was similar no matter how many hours per day women wore a bra, whether they wore a bra with underwire, or at what age they began wearing a bra.” Diane Mapes, who was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2011 and underwent chemotherapy, radiation and a double mastectomy (what she calls “the full monty”), is a public health writer for FredHutch.org and also blogs about her breast cancer experience at DoubleWhammied.com. She told Salon, “If you get your advice from Gwyneth Paltrow, you’re probably not serving yourself particularly well. If people want public health advice, there’s a lot of other sites where they can go to get it.” In addition to Fred Hutch, Mapes recommended the websites of The American Cancer Society, Susan G. Komen for the Cure and Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation. She also recommends the weekly Breast Cancer Social Media Twitter chat (using the hashtag #BCSM), which takes place every Monday night at 9 pm EST as a way to connect with breast cancer patients, survivors and researchers as well as doctors working in the field, including radiologists, oncologists, and breast surgeons. Mapes is frustrated by the resurgence of the false bra/breast cancer link. “It comes up all the time and it’s ridiculous,” she said. She calls the GOOP piece “clickbait,” adding that “it’s not driving the conversation forward, it’s driving it backwards.” As for why it continues to propagate? According to Mapes, “People are confused and upset and they want some way to try to protect themselves so they come up with these notions, but it’s not a scientifically proven notion. There’s other things that people should worry about [regarding] cancer. You want to make sure you’re at a good weight; you want to make sure you don’t drink a lot and exercise regularly. You also want to make sure you get mammograms and know your breast cancer risks, know if it’s in your family, know if you have dense breasts. These are things that might be connected to breast cancer, but it’s not your bra.” Adrienne Santos-Longhurst, a freelance writer and the daughter of a “stage IV breast cancer fighter,” had strong words for Paltrow and GOOP. She told Salon, “When my mom was first diagnosed early stage and given the ‘all clear,’ I’d have laughed this off, but my mother is now stage IV and I am angry. I am angry that after 11 years of being ‘cancer-free,’ her cancer metastasized and is now considered incurable. And I am especially angry about all of the misinformation that’s out there, like the GOOP piece. After much research on the possible causes of cancer, both for writing projects and my own personal interest—seeing as how I feel my breasts are two ticking time bombs dangling from my body—I know that underwire bras have never been proven to increase breast cancer risk.” Santos-Longhurst was also quick to point out that an underwire bra couldn’t possibly have caused her mother’s breast cancer. “Research aside, my mother has to this day never worn an underwire bra, instead favoring the seamed ‘torpedo-tits’ styling of bras from her heyday that she always buys a little loose so they ‘can breathe.’” Stef Woods, a breast cancer survivor who, like Mapes, underwent a chemotherapy, radiation and a double mastectomy, called out the GOOP article for fear-mongering. “It wasn't burying the lede, it was burying the facts. I think it was done in a way to instill fear and to get hits and to create a controversy, and it’s done that. But if the message is education, that's not what's happening here,” she said. Woods, who is an American University instructor of American Studies, specializing in social media, sexuality, nonprofits, and activism, told Salon it’s vital to analyze any information presented about breast cancer critically. That means not simply accepting something as factual because the author has the title “Dr” before their name. Woods advises looking at authors of articles by asking “What’s their background? Are they affiliated with an integrated health center like the author of GOOP’s article or are they an MD affiliated with a breast care center or a cancer center or involved with cancer research?” Woods, who’s blogged about topics such as breast cancer gene testing and offered her advice for newly diagnosed breast cancer patients, said, “I'd heard, previously to being diagnosed, about the link between breast cancer and bras, but once I did more research, then you learn, that's a myth. Once you talk to doctors in the field, then you learn that's actually not true.” Woods wants women like Paltrow and others with major platforms to write about breast cancer not just in October, during Breast Cancer Awareness Month, but throughout the year. She said the media needs “to recognize that people are being diagnosed and people are concerned about cancer every day of the year. There was a time when I think the pink ribbon and awareness over this issue were needed. It's not anymore. We know that breast cancer exists. Thankfully women are not shamed and shunned the way they once were. What can be done 12 months of the year to educate from reliable medical resources?” She suggested sites like GOOP talk to people who are working in the field or focus on individual female patients or survivor perspectives. Specifically taking GOOP to task, Woods noted, “That was a long article. In my social media classes, we talk about how you have three to five seconds to keep someone on the first paragraph. I highly doubt the majority of [GOOP] readers were getting to the bottom of that article to read about the National Cancer Institute.” Santos-Longhurst also expressed her dismay at the damage an article like GOOP’s can do. “A breast cancer diagnosis inevitably leads to women wondering what they did wrong and what they could have done to prevent it,” she said. “This is reality for all women diagnosed and their loved ones. Articles like this only fuel that and lead women to blame themselves for something that they had no control over. The amount of regret and stress that this adds on top of all the stress that comes with cancer and treatment takes a toll physically and emotionally on all involved. As for women like me who are worried about their breast cancer risk, articles like this don’t educate; they simply create more fear and offer no value.” [image error]Actress Gwyneth Paltrow is under fire for a post on her website GOOP by Dr. Habib Sadeghi with the inflammatory title “Could There Possibly Be a Link Between Underwire Bras and Breast Cancer??” The research discussed in the article has been widely discredited, including by the American Cancer Society. In fact, in a 2014 study in which 1,044 women ages 55 to 74 were interviewed about their bra wearing, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (also known as Fred Hutch) found absolutely no link between bras and breast cancer. Specifically, Lu Chen, a researcher in the Public Health Sciences Division at Fred Hutch, said in an article on the center’s website (one that’s cited in a footnote of the GOOP article), “Our study found no evidence that wearing a bra increases a woman’s risk for breast cancer. The risk was similar no matter how many hours per day women wore a bra, whether they wore a bra with underwire, or at what age they began wearing a bra.” Diane Mapes, who was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2011 and underwent chemotherapy, radiation and a double mastectomy (what she calls “the full monty”), is a public health writer for FredHutch.org and also blogs about her breast cancer experience at DoubleWhammied.com. She told Salon, “If you get your advice from Gwyneth Paltrow, you’re probably not serving yourself particularly well. If people want public health advice, there’s a lot of other sites where they can go to get it.” In addition to Fred Hutch, Mapes recommended the websites of The American Cancer Society, Susan G. Komen for the Cure and Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation. She also recommends the weekly Breast Cancer Social Media Twitter chat (using the hashtag #BCSM), which takes place every Monday night at 9 pm EST as a way to connect with breast cancer patients, survivors and researchers as well as doctors working in the field, including radiologists, oncologists, and breast surgeons. Mapes is frustrated by the resurgence of the false bra/breast cancer link. “It comes up all the time and it’s ridiculous,” she said. She calls the GOOP piece “clickbait,” adding that “it’s not driving the conversation forward, it’s driving it backwards.” As for why it continues to propagate? According to Mapes, “People are confused and upset and they want some way to try to protect themselves so they come up with these notions, but it’s not a scientifically proven notion. There’s other things that people should worry about [regarding] cancer. You want to make sure you’re at a good weight; you want to make sure you don’t drink a lot and exercise regularly. You also want to make sure you get mammograms and know your breast cancer risks, know if it’s in your family, know if you have dense breasts. These are things that might be connected to breast cancer, but it’s not your bra.” Adrienne Santos-Longhurst, a freelance writer and the daughter of a “stage IV breast cancer fighter,” had strong words for Paltrow and GOOP. She told Salon, “When my mom was first diagnosed early stage and given the ‘all clear,’ I’d have laughed this off, but my mother is now stage IV and I am angry. I am angry that after 11 years of being ‘cancer-free,’ her cancer metastasized and is now considered incurable. And I am especially angry about all of the misinformation that’s out there, like the GOOP piece. After much research on the possible causes of cancer, both for writing projects and my own personal interest—seeing as how I feel my breasts are two ticking time bombs dangling from my body—I know that underwire bras have never been proven to increase breast cancer risk.” Santos-Longhurst was also quick to point out that an underwire bra couldn’t possibly have caused her mother’s breast cancer. “Research aside, my mother has to this day never worn an underwire bra, instead favoring the seamed ‘torpedo-tits’ styling of bras from her heyday that she always buys a little loose so they ‘can breathe.’” Stef Woods, a breast cancer survivor who, like Mapes, underwent a chemotherapy, radiation and a double mastectomy, called out the GOOP article for fear-mongering. “It wasn't burying the lede, it was burying the facts. I think it was done in a way to instill fear and to get hits and to create a controversy, and it’s done that. But if the message is education, that's not what's happening here,” she said. Woods, who is an American University instructor of American Studies, specializing in social media, sexuality, nonprofits, and activism, told Salon it’s vital to analyze any information presented about breast cancer critically. That means not simply accepting something as factual because the author has the title “Dr” before their name. Woods advises looking at authors of articles by asking “What’s their background? Are they affiliated with an integrated health center like the author of GOOP’s article or are they an MD affiliated with a breast care center or a cancer center or involved with cancer research?” Woods, who’s blogged about topics such as breast cancer gene testing and offered her advice for newly diagnosed breast cancer patients, said, “I'd heard, previously to being diagnosed, about the link between breast cancer and bras, but once I did more research, then you learn, that's a myth. Once you talk to doctors in the field, then you learn that's actually not true.” Woods wants women like Paltrow and others with major platforms to write about breast cancer not just in October, during Breast Cancer Awareness Month, but throughout the year. She said the media needs “to recognize that people are being diagnosed and people are concerned about cancer every day of the year. There was a time when I think the pink ribbon and awareness over this issue were needed. It's not anymore. We know that breast cancer exists. Thankfully women are not shamed and shunned the way they once were. What can be done 12 months of the year to educate from reliable medical resources?” She suggested sites like GOOP talk to people who are working in the field or focus on individual female patients or survivor perspectives. Specifically taking GOOP to task, Woods noted, “That was a long article. In my social media classes, we talk about how you have three to five seconds to keep someone on the first paragraph. I highly doubt the majority of [GOOP] readers were getting to the bottom of that article to read about the National Cancer Institute.” Santos-Longhurst also expressed her dismay at the damage an article like GOOP’s can do. “A breast cancer diagnosis inevitably leads to women wondering what they did wrong and what they could have done to prevent it,” she said. “This is reality for all women diagnosed and their loved ones. Articles like this only fuel that and lead women to blame themselves for something that they had no control over. The amount of regret and stress that this adds on top of all the stress that comes with cancer and treatment takes a toll physically and emotionally on all involved. As for women like me who are worried about their breast cancer risk, articles like this don’t educate; they simply create more fear and offer no value.” [image error]

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Netanyahu’s dangerous Holocaust lie: Yet another disgrace shows he’s one of the world’s most repellant leaders

In a sense, Benjamin Netanyahu's recent incendiary comments about the Holocaust are a relative triviality when compared to the never-ending host of other issues plaguing the most protracted conflict in the world.

Yet Netanyahu's attempt yesterday to pin the intellectual foundation of the genocide of six million Jews on Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Palestinian religious leader whose ties to Adolf Hitler have rendered him a figure of historical infamy, is so eye-popping that it deserves further consideration.

Here's what Netanyahu said:

Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews. And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, "If you expel them, they'll all come here." "So what should I do with them?" he asked. He said, "Burn them."

This is, of course, ahistorical nonsense—if there is a consensus around any fact in the world, there is a consensus that Hitler was quite capable of coming up with the Holocaust on his own, and there is no evidence that the above dialogue ever took place. After making the statement, Netanyahu was quickly denounced from all sides and forced to backtrack. End of story, it would seem.

But let's pause for a second and think about what Netanyahu did, and in what context he did it. There is currently a renewed wave of violence in Israel and Palestine. At least 50 Palestinians and 9 Israelis are dead. In that climate, Netanyahu chose to rewrite the history of the Holocaust so thoroughly that he was accused of echoing the conspiracy theories of Holocaust deniers. He did this for the purpose of recasting both the current conflict and, really, any conflict with Palestinians, as something ground in a permanent Palestinian tendency towards anti-Jewish hatred. Never mind the ongoing occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, or the inexorably expanding settlements, or the fact that more Palestinians were killed by Israel last year than at any time since 1967, or the discrimination and despair that Palestinians in Jerusalem face: It is anti-Semitism, and anti-Semitism alone, that is responsible. In this retelling, Palestinians are reduced to the status of wild-eyed brutes, driven to murder by unfathomable evil.

It is one thing to have an opinion about which side is most to blame for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or which set of historical facts is most pertinent in understanding the situation. People will likely be doing that until the end of time. It is another to say that history does not matter at all, that it is something in the very nature of the people on one side of the conflict that is influencing events. That Netanyahu wanted to drive home this point so much that Germany itself felt compelled remind him it was responsible for the Holocaust is quite something. This is racism of the crudest kind, and it does nothing but add another match to the flame. If a Palestinian leader made up a similar story as a way to blame Jews for an atrocity like that, Netanyahu would have been apoplectic.

Still, we should not be too stunned by what has happened. Netanyahu attracted similar opprobrium for his openly bigoted—and extremely, electorally successful—campaign tactics back in March, when he warned that Arabs would be in the driver's seat if he wasn't re-elected, and promised never to grant Palestinians their statehood. He also presides over a Knesset that Haaretz called the most racist in the history of Israel. It is no huge shocker that he would launch yet another abhorrent broadside at Palestinians. But it is depressing and infuriating nevertheless, and it cements Netanyahu's position as one of the more repellant world leaders of our time.

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Obamacare saved my a**: Really, it literally saved my a**

When I was a kid, I broke my nose eight times over the course of ten years. As a toddler, a four-year-old girl named Jessica pushed me down the stairs while I was on a Hobby Horse. Then I fell off a slide. Ice-skating, tobogganing, a particularly inglorious game of Red Rover: these are all things that took an unfavorable toll on my face. Perhaps most embarrassingly, I once accidentally smashed myself in the snout with a wizard staff while role-playing a game of Elfquest with the girls who lived across the street. 

My nose’s misfortune was one of the many reasons I was lucky to have been born and raised in Canada. All the rides to the infirmary; the X-rays; all the bandages and painkillers; these are things that ended up costing nothing (read: zero dollars), thanks to Canada’s government-funded health care system. The only burden on my poor mother were the phone calls that dragged her out of work and the icy stares from the doctors, who after a while must have assumed that she had been beating me with a tire iron. My point is this: my mother took care of me as best she could; but when she couldn’t, my country stepped in. We were protected. 

Everything changed years later when my parents announced we were going to move away from Toronto, to Orlando, Florida, right before my senior year of high school. The reasons for this were various: my mother had been pining for life in a warmer climate, and my stepfather simply did whatever my mother wanted. As for me, well, apparently my mom overheard me say that I might want to study marine biology once I got to college. The very next day, I came home to find my bedroom walls laden with scientific posters of whales and dolphins, as my stepfather busied himself setting up a freshwater tank next to my desk. We would make the trek come summer, I was told, to a place with all the fish I could ever want to study.

This was difficult for me to swallow. First off, the allure of fish-- no matter how many-- was not as sumptuous as one might imagine. For my parents, this move was merely an opportunity to wear Bermuda shorts in wintertime. For me, it meant leaving friends and family behind, certainly; but also my country—which, in a lot of ways— was worse. Canada is cold, yes. Very, very cold. But it is also clean, and polite, and safe. To my knowledge at the time, the U.S. was a hotbed of cocaine, guns, and speedboat-related gang shootouts (to be fair, I’d gleaned much of my info from old episodes of Miami Vice). Plus, as was explained to me, people actually had to pay for health care. I would have to be very, very careful with my nose.

My folks were undeterred; they eagerly sacrificed their existence in the Great White North, ostensibly to facilitate my quest for higher knowledge. Oblivious to the state of education in Florida, we rented an RV that June, filled it with everything we owned, and drove straight down into a dank, spider-infested nightmare.

During my tenure in the Sunshine State, I would learn three things: a warmer climate does not necessarily mean a more pleasant climate, windows cannot be left open in a state made of swampland, and cockroaches can fly.

I would also be faced with a series of what my step-dad referred to as “cultural differences.” When kids at my new high school found out I was Canadian, for instance, they would uniformly respond with “I’m sorry”.  Whenever I would say “I’m sorry” (which, given that I’m Canadian, was a lot), kids would uniformly mock my accent, peppering in a few ‘eh’s’ in case I didn’t get the gist. On my first day of class, my marine biology teacher, Mrs. Jarrell, asked if my last name was “a Jew name,” then went on to announce that, “for some dumb reason, your people willingly ignore the scriptures.” (I lost interest in the study of aquatic life shortly thereafter.) However, the most significant difference between Canada and America, at least from my purview, was the American attitude toward health care.

In this new world, this U.S. of A., not only was health care not free, it was so insanely expensive, people actually had to purchase protection from one of a number of private corporations in order to avoid financial ruin. Further, if people couldn’t afford this protection, they were considered lazy, which I would come to learn, in the U.S., is synonymous with “poor.” As fascinating as this new ritual was, the idea of paying for medical insurance didn’t thrill me. And that is why-- once I inevitably assumed the even more daunting expense of college tuition—I opted not to bother.

And so, at 18 years of age, I joined the myriad shruggers and gamblers and budget prioritizers who tiptoe through the United States hoping they don’t contract West Nile or get hit by a bus.

For the first time in my life, I was uninsured.

To be fair, for a long time it didn’t really seem to matter. I whizzed through my 20’s with the confidence of an immortal-- albeit an immortal with chronic sinus infections (guess why). In my early 30’s, I got a decent job. Through the job, I got fancy-pants insurance. With the insurance, I got the peace of mind I’d once had in Canada. For the first time in a long time, I got regular check-ups. I got free contact lenses. I got cocky.

But then, around my 38th birthday, I got my first bout of hemorrhoids. This is one of those rites of passage no one warns you about when you’re young. No mother ever sat her child down to recall the first time the veins around her own anus swelled up like a snakebite. It just doesn’t have that “there will come a special day…” feel to it. A hemorrhoid, after all, is not like an erection, or a period, or a mysterious wet spot in your pajamas. It’s not a life-affirming body change. A hemorrhoid is the fuse on a ticking time bomb, the beginning of the end. It is a tiny, thrombosed step toward oblivion.

So, yes, I went to the doctor, who assured me that this type of thing is perfectly common for a person my age, and whose days consist of sitting in mid-back office chairs while eating a cavalcade of low-fiber foods. He prescribed an over-the-counter cream, and then glanced at my chart, which up to that point had mostly chronicled half a decade’s worth of sinus infections. It was my family history that concerned him this time-- specifically, my mother’s battle with both colon and anal cancer. I was “at-risk”, he told me, a “perfect candidate” for the early development of a host of horrendous colorectal maladies. Inasmuch as my anal canal was already causing me problems, he recommended a preventive colonoscopy.

Pro tip for Canadian-Americans: with insurance, preventive procedures like this one are typically one hundred percent free. As it happened, I had the fancy-pants insurance, so I figured it couldn’t hurt. I took the doctor’s referral, and a few days later, went in for a consultation. There, the gastroenterologist gave me a very delicate explanation of what was about to happen. For those who haven’t had the pleasure, here’s the gist:

1.     You drink a gallon of foul-tasting syrup.

2.     You shit for 24 hours straight.

3.     The next day, you’re drugged and anally probed with an HD camera attached to a plumbing snake.

Despite all that, I made an appointment for the following week.

However, two days before the actual procedure, I got a call from my insurance company. My first adventure with hemorrhoids had apparently raised one of their billion red flags, and-- according to the relentlessly cheery agent on the other line-- qualified as a pre-existing condition. The upshot was that my colonoscopy would no longer be free. In fact, I was now on the hook for 70 percent of the cost of the procedure, a sum totaling over $3500. Those hemorrhoids had literally and figuratively come back to bite me in the ass. The Canadian in me seethed at being denied something so crucial, but given that my salary left no wiggle room for the frivolity of preventative medicine, I canceled the procedure.

A year later, the job ended, and with it went the fancy-pants insurance. Instead of going through COBRA (which was $450 a month!) I opted to sign up for a very basic plan, one that would cover only the worst case scenarios-- the type insurance companies refer to as “catastrophic.” I didn’t need much of a safety net: I was a non-smoker, I didn’t eat raw oysters, and I was, overall, still young-ish and spritely-ish. I figured I was in an optimal position to pot-hunt for the bare minimum.

Except I wasn’t. I was refused. By every carrier to which I applied.

Turns out those year-old, long-gone hemorrhoids were still itching and blazing in the annals of my medical records. I was told very matter-of-factly that I would not be eligible for coverage until I had an elective colonoscopy, to prove that my expired butt piles weren’t the symptom of something more insidious. Naturally, I would have to pay for this myself, 100% out-of-pocket. I would have to plop down five grand just for the privilege of plopping down another fifteen hundred a year for insurance that probably wouldn’t cover anything anyway. Because if hemorrhoids are a means of exclusion, then so is everything else: dry skin, premature balding, unsavory foot smell. all those yearly sinus infections. Life, as it happens, is one big pre-existing condition.

Once again, I was uninsured: a word that held a wholly different connotation now that I was in my 40’s. It echoed in my mind like ‘slutty’ or ‘artsy’ or ‘socialist,’ or all those other labels that carry a mild civil stigma, even in a universe of imperfections. Uninsured people still live with their parents, whisper the cool kids. They might be okay for a good time, if that’s what you’re after, but you definitely shouldn’t marry one. The American in me felt irresponsible and ashamed. The Canadian in me longed for the protective embrace of my mother country. To be uninsured in this place, with its lax gun laws and over half a billion germy, unwashed hands seemed a little bit like doom.

But then came the Affordable Care Act.

ObamaCare, with its insurance exchanges and extended coverage. ObamaCare, with its subsidies, patient protections, and its elimination of the pre-existing condition. ObamaCare, with its terrible fucking website that made it infuriatingly difficult-- but not impossible-- to sign up. For less than the price of the ‘catastrophic’ insurance I was denied, I was able to get coverage comprehensive enough to cover a 90-year-old with one lung.

Best of all, I was able get that colonoscopy.

I drank the syrup. I spent a day on the toilet. I got violated by a doctor whose career choices I find baffling. But it was all worth it.

Because the doctor found and removed two sessile polyps from my colon, both of which were precancerous.

So you can rant to me all you want about the deficient, unconstitutional, big-government, communist health care forced upon us by a leftist dictator; believe me, it will fall on deaf ears. It’s the only thing remotely Canadian about this country, and that is nothing to be “sorry” about. The Affordable Care Act saved me thousands of dollars this year, and will have saved me hundreds of thousands down the road. Also worth mentioning: it potentially saved my life. At the very least, it saved my ass.

When I was a kid, I broke my nose eight times over the course of ten years. As a toddler, a four-year-old girl named Jessica pushed me down the stairs while I was on a Hobby Horse. Then I fell off a slide. Ice-skating, tobogganing, a particularly inglorious game of Red Rover: these are all things that took an unfavorable toll on my face. Perhaps most embarrassingly, I once accidentally smashed myself in the snout with a wizard staff while role-playing a game of Elfquest with the girls who lived across the street. 

My nose’s misfortune was one of the many reasons I was lucky to have been born and raised in Canada. All the rides to the infirmary; the X-rays; all the bandages and painkillers; these are things that ended up costing nothing (read: zero dollars), thanks to Canada’s government-funded health care system. The only burden on my poor mother were the phone calls that dragged her out of work and the icy stares from the doctors, who after a while must have assumed that she had been beating me with a tire iron. My point is this: my mother took care of me as best she could; but when she couldn’t, my country stepped in. We were protected. 

Everything changed years later when my parents announced we were going to move away from Toronto, to Orlando, Florida, right before my senior year of high school. The reasons for this were various: my mother had been pining for life in a warmer climate, and my stepfather simply did whatever my mother wanted. As for me, well, apparently my mom overheard me say that I might want to study marine biology once I got to college. The very next day, I came home to find my bedroom walls laden with scientific posters of whales and dolphins, as my stepfather busied himself setting up a freshwater tank next to my desk. We would make the trek come summer, I was told, to a place with all the fish I could ever want to study.

This was difficult for me to swallow. First off, the allure of fish-- no matter how many-- was not as sumptuous as one might imagine. For my parents, this move was merely an opportunity to wear Bermuda shorts in wintertime. For me, it meant leaving friends and family behind, certainly; but also my country—which, in a lot of ways— was worse. Canada is cold, yes. Very, very cold. But it is also clean, and polite, and safe. To my knowledge at the time, the U.S. was a hotbed of cocaine, guns, and speedboat-related gang shootouts (to be fair, I’d gleaned much of my info from old episodes of Miami Vice). Plus, as was explained to me, people actually had to pay for health care. I would have to be very, very careful with my nose.

My folks were undeterred; they eagerly sacrificed their existence in the Great White North, ostensibly to facilitate my quest for higher knowledge. Oblivious to the state of education in Florida, we rented an RV that June, filled it with everything we owned, and drove straight down into a dank, spider-infested nightmare.

During my tenure in the Sunshine State, I would learn three things: a warmer climate does not necessarily mean a more pleasant climate, windows cannot be left open in a state made of swampland, and cockroaches can fly.

I would also be faced with a series of what my step-dad referred to as “cultural differences.” When kids at my new high school found out I was Canadian, for instance, they would uniformly respond with “I’m sorry”.  Whenever I would say “I’m sorry” (which, given that I’m Canadian, was a lot), kids would uniformly mock my accent, peppering in a few ‘eh’s’ in case I didn’t get the gist. On my first day of class, my marine biology teacher, Mrs. Jarrell, asked if my last name was “a Jew name,” then went on to announce that, “for some dumb reason, your people willingly ignore the scriptures.” (I lost interest in the study of aquatic life shortly thereafter.) However, the most significant difference between Canada and America, at least from my purview, was the American attitude toward health care.

In this new world, this U.S. of A., not only was health care not free, it was so insanely expensive, people actually had to purchase protection from one of a number of private corporations in order to avoid financial ruin. Further, if people couldn’t afford this protection, they were considered lazy, which I would come to learn, in the U.S., is synonymous with “poor.” As fascinating as this new ritual was, the idea of paying for medical insurance didn’t thrill me. And that is why-- once I inevitably assumed the even more daunting expense of college tuition—I opted not to bother.

And so, at 18 years of age, I joined the myriad shruggers and gamblers and budget prioritizers who tiptoe through the United States hoping they don’t contract West Nile or get hit by a bus.

For the first time in my life, I was uninsured.

To be fair, for a long time it didn’t really seem to matter. I whizzed through my 20’s with the confidence of an immortal-- albeit an immortal with chronic sinus infections (guess why). In my early 30’s, I got a decent job. Through the job, I got fancy-pants insurance. With the insurance, I got the peace of mind I’d once had in Canada. For the first time in a long time, I got regular check-ups. I got free contact lenses. I got cocky.

But then, around my 38th birthday, I got my first bout of hemorrhoids. This is one of those rites of passage no one warns you about when you’re young. No mother ever sat her child down to recall the first time the veins around her own anus swelled up like a snakebite. It just doesn’t have that “there will come a special day…” feel to it. A hemorrhoid, after all, is not like an erection, or a period, or a mysterious wet spot in your pajamas. It’s not a life-affirming body change. A hemorrhoid is the fuse on a ticking time bomb, the beginning of the end. It is a tiny, thrombosed step toward oblivion.

So, yes, I went to the doctor, who assured me that this type of thing is perfectly common for a person my age, and whose days consist of sitting in mid-back office chairs while eating a cavalcade of low-fiber foods. He prescribed an over-the-counter cream, and then glanced at my chart, which up to that point had mostly chronicled half a decade’s worth of sinus infections. It was my family history that concerned him this time-- specifically, my mother’s battle with both colon and anal cancer. I was “at-risk”, he told me, a “perfect candidate” for the early development of a host of horrendous colorectal maladies. Inasmuch as my anal canal was already causing me problems, he recommended a preventive colonoscopy.

Pro tip for Canadian-Americans: with insurance, preventive procedures like this one are typically one hundred percent free. As it happened, I had the fancy-pants insurance, so I figured it couldn’t hurt. I took the doctor’s referral, and a few days later, went in for a consultation. There, the gastroenterologist gave me a very delicate explanation of what was about to happen. For those who haven’t had the pleasure, here’s the gist:

1.     You drink a gallon of foul-tasting syrup.

2.     You shit for 24 hours straight.

3.     The next day, you’re drugged and anally probed with an HD camera attached to a plumbing snake.

Despite all that, I made an appointment for the following week.

However, two days before the actual procedure, I got a call from my insurance company. My first adventure with hemorrhoids had apparently raised one of their billion red flags, and-- according to the relentlessly cheery agent on the other line-- qualified as a pre-existing condition. The upshot was that my colonoscopy would no longer be free. In fact, I was now on the hook for 70 percent of the cost of the procedure, a sum totaling over $3500. Those hemorrhoids had literally and figuratively come back to bite me in the ass. The Canadian in me seethed at being denied something so crucial, but given that my salary left no wiggle room for the frivolity of preventative medicine, I canceled the procedure.

A year later, the job ended, and with it went the fancy-pants insurance. Instead of going through COBRA (which was $450 a month!) I opted to sign up for a very basic plan, one that would cover only the worst case scenarios-- the type insurance companies refer to as “catastrophic.” I didn’t need much of a safety net: I was a non-smoker, I didn’t eat raw oysters, and I was, overall, still young-ish and spritely-ish. I figured I was in an optimal position to pot-hunt for the bare minimum.

Except I wasn’t. I was refused. By every carrier to which I applied.

Turns out those year-old, long-gone hemorrhoids were still itching and blazing in the annals of my medical records. I was told very matter-of-factly that I would not be eligible for coverage until I had an elective colonoscopy, to prove that my expired butt piles weren’t the symptom of something more insidious. Naturally, I would have to pay for this myself, 100% out-of-pocket. I would have to plop down five grand just for the privilege of plopping down another fifteen hundred a year for insurance that probably wouldn’t cover anything anyway. Because if hemorrhoids are a means of exclusion, then so is everything else: dry skin, premature balding, unsavory foot smell. all those yearly sinus infections. Life, as it happens, is one big pre-existing condition.

Once again, I was uninsured: a word that held a wholly different connotation now that I was in my 40’s. It echoed in my mind like ‘slutty’ or ‘artsy’ or ‘socialist,’ or all those other labels that carry a mild civil stigma, even in a universe of imperfections. Uninsured people still live with their parents, whisper the cool kids. They might be okay for a good time, if that’s what you’re after, but you definitely shouldn’t marry one. The American in me felt irresponsible and ashamed. The Canadian in me longed for the protective embrace of my mother country. To be uninsured in this place, with its lax gun laws and over half a billion germy, unwashed hands seemed a little bit like doom.

But then came the Affordable Care Act.

ObamaCare, with its insurance exchanges and extended coverage. ObamaCare, with its subsidies, patient protections, and its elimination of the pre-existing condition. ObamaCare, with its terrible fucking website that made it infuriatingly difficult-- but not impossible-- to sign up. For less than the price of the ‘catastrophic’ insurance I was denied, I was able to get coverage comprehensive enough to cover a 90-year-old with one lung.

Best of all, I was able get that colonoscopy.

I drank the syrup. I spent a day on the toilet. I got violated by a doctor whose career choices I find baffling. But it was all worth it.

Because the doctor found and removed two sessile polyps from my colon, both of which were precancerous.

So you can rant to me all you want about the deficient, unconstitutional, big-government, communist health care forced upon us by a leftist dictator; believe me, it will fall on deaf ears. It’s the only thing remotely Canadian about this country, and that is nothing to be “sorry” about. The Affordable Care Act saved me thousands of dollars this year, and will have saved me hundreds of thousands down the road. Also worth mentioning: it potentially saved my life. At the very least, it saved my ass.

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Fox News’ bogus CIA terror analyst fed off a nation hooked on lies: Wayne Simmons is a symptom of a much deeper disease

So a Fox News “terrorism expert” who claimed to be a former CIA operative has turned out to be neither of those things, but rather a con man with an apparent criminal record who bamboozled the network, the United States government and millions of viewers for many years. Here’s my question: Why is anyone surprised? Our entire media discussion of terrorism and Islam and national security and war and foreign policy in general is driven (to paraphrase Mark Twain) by lies, damned lies, made-up or distorted statistics and rampant paranoia. Virtually everything the American people think they know about the world is the product of a sophisticated but nearly invisible propaganda-recirculation machine that would make Joseph Goebbels bow his head in awe and humility. Wayne Simmons is just the guy who took it a little too far and got caught. No doubt the sheer brazenness of Simmons’ scam is newsworthy, and so is its alleged scope: According to the murky news stories we have seen so far, Simmons leveraged his entirely fictional CIA career into some kind of shadowy contract work for the Pentagon, and was perhaps stationed overseas “as an intelligence adviser to senior military officers,” in the words of a Reuters story. Simmons evidently applied for a high-level national security clearance, which is one of the reasons he was arrested on fraud charges last week. Some reports have suggested that he actually received such a clearance, but the facts have yet to come into focus. Fox host Neil Cavuto deserves credit for offering viewers a straight-up apology for relying on this sinister huckster, especially since no one else on the network has yet done so. But in attempting to spread the blame, Cavuto added that Simmons “might have fooled many others, including no less than former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.” That would be funny if it weren’t horrible, and I guess it’s both. See, Neil, it’s like this: When you try to defend yourself against an egregious lapse in judgment by saying, well, maybe I behaved like a gullible and credulous ass who just wanted to believe all kinds of crap that wasn’t true -- but at least I’m no worse than Mr. Stuff Happens, Mr. Known Unknowns, Mr. Evidence of Absence? At least I’m right there alongside the Jedi Master of Pseudo-Profound Bullshit who presided over the ultimate Bad Idea Gone Wrong, the worst foreign-policy disaster of the 21st century to date and the most grievous self-inflicted injury since Vietnam? Other people in town – the really crazy ones -- said that old lady was a witch too! It’s just not that good of a defense. Is it startling and depressing that some bozo can allegedly get a Defense Department contract for God only knows how many taxpayer dollars, just by putting up a website claiming that he spent 27 years in the CIA as part of an “Outside Paramilitary Special Operations Group” who “spearheaded Deep Cover Intel Ops against some of the world’s most dangerous Drug Cartels”? And that Don Rumsfeld and his underlings in the Pentagon were so turned on by Simmons’ tough talk and virile mustache that they never bothered to check whether he was making up the whole story about having worked for a closely allied branch of the United States government, or felt alarmed by his sustained assault of Proper Nouns? Well, sure it is. But I ask again: What else is new? In former New York Times reporter James Risen’s 2014 book “Pay Any Price,” an important investigative work that brought great discomfort to both Risen’s former employer and the U.S. government, you get the strong sense that cases like Wayne Simmons are less uncommon than we’d like to believe. We don’t know the whole Simmons story yet, but it doesn’t sound like he scammed the government anywhere near as spectacularly as Dennis Montgomery did. As Risen explains, Montgomery was a compulsive gambler and con man who had previously tried to sell casino operators in Reno, Nevada, a software package that could supposedly catch cheaters. They didn’t want it, because it didn’t work. So Montgomery moved on from the canny sophisticates of Reno to the hopeless rubes of the Rumsfeld-era Pentagon, who paid him millions of dollars for a sexed-up version of the same software, on the premise that it could detect coded al-Qaida messages concealed within Al Jazeera TV broadcasts. There were no such messages, of course, but Montgomery’s hoax could have led to tragedy and disaster: At one point his phony software sent up an alarm that led the Bush White House to consider shooting down a passenger plane over the Atlantic Ocean. To circle back to my original point, these are only the guys who have been exposed and cast into disrepute. Montgomery’s embarrassing saga was thoroughly hushed up until Risen got hold of it, and Wayne Simmons is about to become the scapegoat for the entire industry of bogus terrorism expertise. I’m not saying he doesn’t deserve it, but exclaiming self-righteously over Simmons' misdeeds and sending him to prison amounts to whitewashing such self-appointed experts as Steven Emerson, David Horowitz, Pamela Geller and Frank Gaffney, who represent exactly the same ideology of paranoia and Islamophobia and spread precisely the same falsehoods, but without falsifying their credentials quite so egregiously. The only good thing you can say about Emerson, who has been a cable-news staple since the 1990s and runs a shady nonprofit called the Investigative Project on Terrorism that attracts millions in right-wing foundation funding, is that he has no academic or governmental credentials beyond his media celebrity, and does not claim any. (IPT channels most of the money it raises to a for-profit “research” business whose sole employee is, you guessed it, Steven Emerson.) Yet this guy keeps on showing up on TV, year after year, saying stuff that is flat-out untrue: In 1995 he told us that the Oklahoma City bombing was the work of Islamic militants. In 2013 he told us that the Boston Marathon bombing had been carried out by a “Saudi national” who was then spirited out of the country. In between those episodes, Emerson has led crusades against Arab or Muslim intellectuals who are critical of Israel, has demonized virtually every American Muslim activist or civil-rights organization as supporters of terrorism, and has suggested that there is a “quasi-alliance” between radical Islamists and radical leftists. (It’s true, both groups share a sinister agenda: They think Emerson is an ass, and they find his orange, ferret-like, sub-Trumpian hairdo increasingly disturbing.) He has claimed that President Obama is shielding former ISIS fighters in the United States from FBI surveillance, and has repeatedly said that his own truth-telling has made him an assassination target for Islamic fundamentalists. (When asked by a reporter some years ago whether there was any truth to that, an unwary FBI agent responded: “No, none at all.”) Emerson was the guy who infamously informed Fox viewers last January that the city of Birmingham, in the English Midlands, was “a Muslim-only city” where infidels dared not venture. This led British Prime Minister David Cameron, a Tory aristocrat and in no sense a lefty Islam-coddler, to describe Emerson as “a complete idiot.” Emerson was forced to apologize, saying he had “relied on sources he had used in the past” who had proven faulty. Those sources being what, and where – deep in his butt? In about 14 seconds on Wikipedia, I determined that the population of Birmingham is currently estimated at 58 percent white, about 46 percent Christian and less than 22 percent Muslim. But those would be facts, and the entire basis of the right-wing media propaganda recirculation machine established since 9/11 is that facts don’t matter. Only fear matters. In terms of their fact-free claims and inflammatory paranoid rhetoric, there is almost no difference between the now-discredited Simmons, the utterly uncredentialed and ubiquitously incorrect Emerson and the others I have mentioned (which is not by any means a complete list). How many Americans now believe that Paris and many other European cities have “no-go zones” ruled by Sharia law, or that there are “at least 19 paramilitary Muslim training facilities” in the U.S. (as Simmons once told Cavuto), false and outrageous claims that were put forward with no evidence and have now been repeated numerous times by more or less mainstream media outlets and more or less legitimate politicians? On a larger scale, most of our media and political cycle consists of mainlining fear into the collective American mind, stripped of any context or logic or evidence. Most of it is delivered more subtly than what we get from Emerson and Simmons and Geller and Horowitz, who are extremely useful to the Republican Party and the national-security establishment but need to be kept at arm’s length (unless you’re openly going for crazy or stupid, e.g., Donald Trump or Bobby Jindal). Hell, how many Americans believe that Obama has raised taxes to record highs, or that illegal immigrants are flooding across the border in record numbers? How many people believe that wasteful social programs are to blame for our national debt, that free-market capitalism is guaranteed to bring prosperity to all and that Americans lead longer, healthier and happier lives than Europeans (ruled as they are by Sharia and socialism and other forms of unfreedom)? Those things are not remotely true or approximately true or halfway true. They’re just lies, brilliantly woven into a suffocating ideological fabric that smothers democracy and snuffs out the possibility of social change. We are a nation hooked on lies, and Wayne Simmons’ only mistake was that his lies weren’t good enough.

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TV’s most conservative show isn’t on Fox News: This new cop show glorifies everything Bill O’Reilly holds dear

Because in the modern era of reboot, spin-off, and franchise television, nothing is ever truly gone, Fox this fall debuted a crime procedural that is an adaptation of the 2002 Steven Spielberg film “Minority Report.” That film, which is itself based on a Philip K. Dick short story, introduces the viewer to a Washington, D.C. free of crime—free, because three people with psychic powers predict crime before it happens. Tom Cruise and Colin Farrell play two law enforcement officers who are tasked with rounding up and disposing of the criminal element, before they have a chance to commit their crimes. The film is partially a vision of the future and partially a hell-for-leather thriller, one that follows a narrow path of twists and turns to uncover the mystery of why the main precog, Agatha (Samantha Morton), sees Cruise’s character John Anderton committing a murder, even though he has no intention whatsoever of doing so. And though it is built on a supernatural premise—and presents as futuristic technology that we’ve rapidly eclipsed—“Minority Report” holds up with terrifying relevance in 2015. Last week I wrote about how Edward Snowden’s data leak had shaped fantasies of surveillance on television; “Minority Report,” the film, may well have shaped the fantasies of surveillance hold sway in our real lives. Either way, the film forces the viewer to ponder what criminal profiling and pre-emptive sentencing does to the social fabric. The film questions the very existence of the PreCrime division, and by the end, concludes it must be dismantled, judging the cost of such a program to not be worth the benefit. Then Fox’s “Minority Report,” the TV series, rolls up and says, hey, why don’t we bring the band back together? The premise of the television show is that several years after the original program was dismantled, one of the male precogs—lacking both the odd water bath and the loopy speech patterns of his past—contacts the police, hoping to help solve crimes. Dash, the precog (Stark Sands) befriends Vega, the cop (Meagan Good). And along with a cast of motley characters—some drawn from the film, some not—they sally forth to stop crimes that no one has asked them to stop, through erratic, imperfect visions that have been proven faulty time and time again. In short, then, the show is a repudiation of any questioning or observation that the film made in 2002. And though it is certainly flawed in its own right—Good and Sands have minimal chemistry, and both have difficulty connecting to their roles—its biggest problem is that it is unable to engage with the themes of the story it is doggedly aping. And by ignoring it to focus on the shiny appeal of slick gadgetry and visions of crimes not yet committed, “Minority Report” ends up making astonishing statements about the criminal justice system. Though these problems have been apparent since the first episode, last night's episode, "The Present," really showcases them. It's an hour of incredible arrogance on the part of law enforcement, represented almost entirely here by Good’s character Vega. Precog Dash sees a vision that he believes indicates Vega is going to be murdered, and as the two investigate, they begin to realize that the vision is tied to Vega's continued torment about her father's murder. Like Vega, he was also a cop; unlike Vega, he did not have precogs to warn him of impending doom. This storyline hews very closely to the driving narrative of the film; Anderton is in precog Agatha's vision of an imminent murder, and as the story goes on, we learn that Anderton is driven to the act because of a personal loss that has become defining for him. In the film, Anderton has to learn to put aside his personal revenge narrative in order to examine the bigger picture. In the show, Vega... hijacks the resources of the precogs and goes completely off-book to try to solve her father's murder, only to realize, when she's pointing a gun at a child, that she probably should not do that. It's an incredibly hacky take on what was rather nuanced source material, exacerbated by the brutal dismissiveness of the cop Vega. She is supposed to learn, by the end of the episode, that crime isn't a simple question of good-and-evil. She barely manifests that transformation. Presumably, Vega's view of the world is rigid so that it can evolve over the course of the season. But Vega, the self-martyring cop, fits into the show's larger themes of widespread overpolicing. Midway through "The Present," Vega and Dash take a trip to a correctional facility, looking for an inmate who may intend to harm Vega. She imprisoned him two years back, and he has sent her death threats ever since. When they walk in, each prisoner is sitting in digitized booth, staring at their own personal screen. Each is talking to a person on the other end—FaceTime, but really big. Everyone on the other end is extremely annoyed about trivial things—missing work, undelivered Chinese food, malfunctioning equipment. The guide explains that the inmates are working tech support:

Sixty years ago, companies outsourced all this stuff abroad and killed the working class, causing incarceration rates to skyrocket. Now we give the working class their jobs back, only this time, behind bars—for two cents on the dollar.

Aside from the main problem with this—which is that the working class traditionally didn't do white-collar customer service; it's the middle class that got killed—prison labor for profit is a real, radical, and terrifying issue. Here is how it boils down in the episode. Dash—a precog who is still reintegrating to society—hesitantly says, "doesn't seem right." Vega responds: "I'll save my crocodile tears for the victims and their families." Immediately thereafter, they confront the inmate that has threatened Vega. The prison they are in stresses rehabilitation. Vega is openly dismissive of any efforts to change, expressing real anger that the inmates are allowed excursions as part of their incarceration. When she meets the inmate, he appears somewhat rehabbed. So she insults his independence and compares him to a housebroken poodle—which goads him to attack her. She quickly overpowers him, and asks if he wants to go best of seven. And that's it; that's the scene. One might expect some fallout from this event, that would push Vega to less radical territory. One might expect some pushback from other characters. There is none. At the end of the episode, Vega finds the woman who killed her father—by storming into her house, without a warrant or probable cause, and holding a gun to her. The woman pleads that she has changed. She, at gunpoint, is the only character to advance the notion that criminals may not all bad. It's not that "Minority Report" doesn't know what it's doing. Little asides in the show indicate that every cop wears a body-cam, and "force authorized" shows up when a cop can go to town on a criminal. A Defense Intelligence Agency higher-up complains about how unconstitutionality interfered with the maintenance of law and order. Terrorists bombed the National Mall and destroyed the Washington Monument just a few months after the PreCrime program ended; that symbolic castration is felt by law enforcement, too. And in the first few episodes of the season, nearly every bad guy the heroes catch is a formerly “haloed” criminal—one who was imprisoned by the PreCrime program, and after it was dismantled, moved to a rehabilitation facility. The proliferation of wrongdoing ex-haloes indicates to Vega and Dash that the PreCrime program had the right idea—and not, as Willa Paskin observed at Slate, “that some of these insane bad guys were once innocents, radicalized by a flawed system.” “Minority Report” the show is a kind of fever dream of centralized police power. It's underscored by how the show has trouble extending compassion to any of its characters except Vega—in "The Present," even the terrible experience of the precogs is backgrounded so that Vega can solve her cop-dad's murder. [The precogs, when they see their visions of crimes, experience the pain and horror of them. In the episode, Dash shudders and gasps as the "bullets" hit him.] Its premise is founded on the notion that PreCrime, that supernatural stand-in for surveillance and control, is not such a bad thing; its execution emphasizes the duality between police and criminals, as if one is good, and one is bad. The show is unable to extend any compassion towards its purported bad guys whatsoever—and instead runs amok in the sandbox of police power excused by precognition. Vega is supposed to be our heroine, and yet time and time again she is quite cruel. It's worth observing that “Minority Report” is very careful to not use race as a signifier of guilt, as is too obvious in our current practice of law and order—Good, among many other actors in the ensemble, are people of color. But it's almost an odd misdirect in what is otherwise a rather conservative narrative. “Minority Report” fits intimately into a worldview of mass incarceration and police overreach, at a time where consciousness on these topics has reached new heights. And though it's politically disturbing, the real problem is one of adaptation—this is what happens when the adapters aren't paying attention to whatever it is they're desperately trying to reboot.

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7 bizarre aphrodisiacs that helped our ancestors get in the mood

Last week, we wrote about what our ancestors used as lube. This week, the conversation turns to ancient aphrodisiacs. Amy Reiley, author of Romancing the Stove: The Unabridged Guide to Aphrodisiac Foods , says the simplest description of aphrodisiac could read, “any food that improves romance and/or sex life.” There’s also the scientific approach. Neurologist Paola Sandroni told ABC News that the term refers to "anything that uses serotonin increases arousal at the brain level to promote sexual activity.” Listed below are some of the strangest aphrodisiacs used in the past. 1. Lizard flesh. The skink is a small leaf-eating lizard found in most parts of the world. Roman author and naturalist Pliny the Elder first made mention of the skink and its amorous properties in his text Natural History. Its feet, skin and urine were thought to serve as potent aphrodisiacs for men. 2. Marijuana. In ancient India, practitioners of Ayurvedic medicine recommended cannabis as a decongestant, an astringent and a means of stimulating appetite. It was also considered an effective aphrodisiac. The plant is also recognized in the ancient Hindu tantric traditions as a powerful sexual stimulant. Bhang is the name given to a special concoction that became popular during the seventh century. People mixed the plant with milk, water and other spices to enhance sexual pleasure. 3. Ants. Colombia’s leafcutter ants have been used as an aphrodisiac for over 500 years. The ants, which are loaded with protein, are thought to heighten sexual arousal when eaten. 4. Carrots. Given its phallic appearance, it’s not hard to see how the carrot got involved in sex and arousal. The vegetable was distributed among Middle Eastern royalty during ancient times to help aid in the art of seduction. The ancient Greeks referred to it as a Philtron , meaning love charm. According to them, the carrot helped make both men and women more affectionate. 5. Whale guts. Ambrein is a substance that comes from the guts of sperm whales. Sure, it may not seem like the most accessible aphrodisiac out there, but thought to be well worth it once obtained. Practitioners of Arab folk medicine used the substance to treat headaches and improve sexual function. Scientist recently put this one to the test by measuring the effect ambrein has on male rats when administered in small doses. The test rats were assessed by erectile response and “homosexual mountings in the absence of female” (gay rat sex). Base on their findings, the researchers concluded that the drug could indeed function as a sexual stimulant, writing, “The present results… support the folk use of this drug as an aphrodisiac.” 6. Arugula. This one may not be as strange as the others on this list, but the story behind it is. In ancient Rome and Greece, arugula was considered such apowerful aphrodisiac it had to be served alongside other ingredients that could combat its effects. Lettuce became a staple of salads to prevent “excessive libido at the table.” So next time you’re preparing a salad, remember, it’s not just about a balanced diet. The leafy green was seen as a neutralizer to the sexy side-effects arugula was known to bring on. 7. Frog juice. Ancient Andean cultures used to access a revered aphrodisiac by liquefying a specific species of frog. In addition to its purported aphrodisiacal properties, the scrotum water frog (yes, really) was said to cure bronchitis, tuberculosis, asthma and arthritis. Today, the frog is listed as a critically endangered species, although “Peruvian Viagra” continues to be illegally bought and sold throughout South American markets today. Last week, we wrote about what our ancestors used as lube. This week, the conversation turns to ancient aphrodisiacs. Amy Reiley, author of Romancing the Stove: The Unabridged Guide to Aphrodisiac Foods , says the simplest description of aphrodisiac could read, “any food that improves romance and/or sex life.” There’s also the scientific approach. Neurologist Paola Sandroni told ABC News that the term refers to "anything that uses serotonin increases arousal at the brain level to promote sexual activity.” Listed below are some of the strangest aphrodisiacs used in the past. 1. Lizard flesh. The skink is a small leaf-eating lizard found in most parts of the world. Roman author and naturalist Pliny the Elder first made mention of the skink and its amorous properties in his text Natural History. Its feet, skin and urine were thought to serve as potent aphrodisiacs for men. 2. Marijuana. In ancient India, practitioners of Ayurvedic medicine recommended cannabis as a decongestant, an astringent and a means of stimulating appetite. It was also considered an effective aphrodisiac. The plant is also recognized in the ancient Hindu tantric traditions as a powerful sexual stimulant. Bhang is the name given to a special concoction that became popular during the seventh century. People mixed the plant with milk, water and other spices to enhance sexual pleasure. 3. Ants. Colombia’s leafcutter ants have been used as an aphrodisiac for over 500 years. The ants, which are loaded with protein, are thought to heighten sexual arousal when eaten. 4. Carrots. Given its phallic appearance, it’s not hard to see how the carrot got involved in sex and arousal. The vegetable was distributed among Middle Eastern royalty during ancient times to help aid in the art of seduction. The ancient Greeks referred to it as a Philtron , meaning love charm. According to them, the carrot helped make both men and women more affectionate. 5. Whale guts. Ambrein is a substance that comes from the guts of sperm whales. Sure, it may not seem like the most accessible aphrodisiac out there, but thought to be well worth it once obtained. Practitioners of Arab folk medicine used the substance to treat headaches and improve sexual function. Scientist recently put this one to the test by measuring the effect ambrein has on male rats when administered in small doses. The test rats were assessed by erectile response and “homosexual mountings in the absence of female” (gay rat sex). Base on their findings, the researchers concluded that the drug could indeed function as a sexual stimulant, writing, “The present results… support the folk use of this drug as an aphrodisiac.” 6. Arugula. This one may not be as strange as the others on this list, but the story behind it is. In ancient Rome and Greece, arugula was considered such apowerful aphrodisiac it had to be served alongside other ingredients that could combat its effects. Lettuce became a staple of salads to prevent “excessive libido at the table.” So next time you’re preparing a salad, remember, it’s not just about a balanced diet. The leafy green was seen as a neutralizer to the sexy side-effects arugula was known to bring on. 7. Frog juice. Ancient Andean cultures used to access a revered aphrodisiac by liquefying a specific species of frog. In addition to its purported aphrodisiacal properties, the scrotum water frog (yes, really) was said to cure bronchitis, tuberculosis, asthma and arthritis. Today, the frog is listed as a critically endangered species, although “Peruvian Viagra” continues to be illegally bought and sold throughout South American markets today. Last week, we wrote about what our ancestors used as lube. This week, the conversation turns to ancient aphrodisiacs. Amy Reiley, author of Romancing the Stove: The Unabridged Guide to Aphrodisiac Foods , says the simplest description of aphrodisiac could read, “any food that improves romance and/or sex life.” There’s also the scientific approach. Neurologist Paola Sandroni told ABC News that the term refers to "anything that uses serotonin increases arousal at the brain level to promote sexual activity.” Listed below are some of the strangest aphrodisiacs used in the past. 1. Lizard flesh. The skink is a small leaf-eating lizard found in most parts of the world. Roman author and naturalist Pliny the Elder first made mention of the skink and its amorous properties in his text Natural History. Its feet, skin and urine were thought to serve as potent aphrodisiacs for men. 2. Marijuana. In ancient India, practitioners of Ayurvedic medicine recommended cannabis as a decongestant, an astringent and a means of stimulating appetite. It was also considered an effective aphrodisiac. The plant is also recognized in the ancient Hindu tantric traditions as a powerful sexual stimulant. Bhang is the name given to a special concoction that became popular during the seventh century. People mixed the plant with milk, water and other spices to enhance sexual pleasure. 3. Ants. Colombia’s leafcutter ants have been used as an aphrodisiac for over 500 years. The ants, which are loaded with protein, are thought to heighten sexual arousal when eaten. 4. Carrots. Given its phallic appearance, it’s not hard to see how the carrot got involved in sex and arousal. The vegetable was distributed among Middle Eastern royalty during ancient times to help aid in the art of seduction. The ancient Greeks referred to it as a Philtron , meaning love charm. According to them, the carrot helped make both men and women more affectionate. 5. Whale guts. Ambrein is a substance that comes from the guts of sperm whales. Sure, it may not seem like the most accessible aphrodisiac out there, but thought to be well worth it once obtained. Practitioners of Arab folk medicine used the substance to treat headaches and improve sexual function. Scientist recently put this one to the test by measuring the effect ambrein has on male rats when administered in small doses. The test rats were assessed by erectile response and “homosexual mountings in the absence of female” (gay rat sex). Base on their findings, the researchers concluded that the drug could indeed function as a sexual stimulant, writing, “The present results… support the folk use of this drug as an aphrodisiac.” 6. Arugula. This one may not be as strange as the others on this list, but the story behind it is. In ancient Rome and Greece, arugula was considered such apowerful aphrodisiac it had to be served alongside other ingredients that could combat its effects. Lettuce became a staple of salads to prevent “excessive libido at the table.” So next time you’re preparing a salad, remember, it’s not just about a balanced diet. The leafy green was seen as a neutralizer to the sexy side-effects arugula was known to bring on. 7. Frog juice. Ancient Andean cultures used to access a revered aphrodisiac by liquefying a specific species of frog. In addition to its purported aphrodisiacal properties, the scrotum water frog (yes, really) was said to cure bronchitis, tuberculosis, asthma and arthritis. Today, the frog is listed as a critically endangered species, although “Peruvian Viagra” continues to be illegally bought and sold throughout South American markets today.

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