Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 1007

From poster mom to pariah

I was never what you would call conventional. I worked as a stripper in New York to fund my writing career, did the whole "drinking too much, experimenting with every drug imaginable" bullshit we all do in our late teens and twenties, became a screenwriter, moved to L.A. and fell in love with a fierce, brave, handsome outspoken tattooed ex-con weirdo who took pictures of strangers on the street. We got married, ran out of money, and lived together in his van, which was parked in the back of our polyamorous friends’ house in South L.A. We became the darlings of the internet a year later, as the poster couple for what was regarded here in the U.S. as the “home-birth movement.” More from DAME: "Can an Open Marriage Be a Good Marriage?" Even before our son’s birth, pregnancy had conveyed upon me a level of acceptance I’d never before experienced. Whereas before I’d been known for my habit of calling people “cunt” (affectionately and derogatorily) amd writing provocative op-eds in places like Al-Jazeera, the Guardian, and Counterpunch that had earned the ire of people like Sinead O’ Connor, who’d threatened to sue me, the hormones softened my tongue and made it nearly impossible for me to continue publishing the angry, sarcastic pieces that I’d been building my career on. My work had become more thoughtful, contemplative. The exhaustion and nesting instinct made living in a van anathema to me. People started smiling at me, asking about the baby as my belly grew, assuming I was a “nice” person by virtue of harboring another life inside me, never thinking to question my credentials for motherhood. I loved every second of being boring and predictable. I loved prenatal appointments with my midwife, sessions that would extend into hour-long gossip sessions where we’d all laugh and cry. I loved making new pregnant friends and comparing our bellies and ailments and bizarre new symptoms. I suppose I threw myself into it partly because my husband didn’t. He was scared shitless of being a father, and he seemed to be having a breakdown—he was barely sleeping, losing his temper, acting so strangely that I would lock myself in the bedroom night after night, terrified, barely recognizing him as the man I married. When I was seven months pregnant with our son, I learned why he was so off. I woke up at 6 one morning to find him locked in the bathroom. I banged on the door and he made a hasty, naked exit, leaving a wet towel on the floor. I picked it up, and found a piece of tinfoil with a startled, vivid smoky streak across it, a homemade pipe fashioned from the body of a ballpoint pen carelessly discarded nearby. I followed wet footprints that led from the bathroom, through the living room, down the stoop and outside to the front lawn where I discovered my husband—pin-pricked pupils, sweating despite the cool of an early October morning—outside, gardening urgently, wearing only boxer shorts. In shock, I texted my neighbor, the daughter of a former addict. She came outside and spoke briefly to him, and confirmed my suspicions. He was high on meth. I locked myself in the bedroom and called my midwife, desperate for advice. She didn’t have any, but she was eager to vent about an argument she’d had with my doula the day before. It was the first time I realized these magic women who were to deliver my baby were just flawed human beings—like my husband and me. I confronted my husband a few days later in therapy. He agreed to a home drug test which came out positive for meth and heroin. He told me later he only took the test because he thought it was out of his system, and the evidence could be disposed of. I think, somehow, he wanted me to know. He was falling apart as our baby grew bigger, and he knew he needed someone outside him to make him stop. I asked him to leave until he could guarantee he would come back sober and ready to address whatever inside him was compelling him to check out. I called his family, and cried. Though his mother appeared to sympathize, she sent a text to me later that day that was meant for her sister: “I think Ruth is as crazy as he is.” That, more than anything, made me realize I was alone in this shit. I wasn’t ready to be a single mother. My husband wasn’t ready to leave us, either, so he promised to get clean and seek help. The midwife, on the other hand, dealt with us with a new briskness once she’d calmed down about her squabble with the doula. She was a mandated reporter, and told my husband he had to get his act together, because she didn’t want to be the one to snitch him out. And he did—for the remainder of my pregnancy, and for the birth. We began to fall back in love and remember why we were having a baby together. I went into labor on Christmas Day, 2013, and sent the first tweet out to my family: “Labor started at 8 p.m.” Our son was born at home 12 hours—and many tweets and pictures—later. Then something bizarre happened. Newspapers across the world picked up on a Huffington Post piece about “the girl who live-tweeted her birth”—even gossip-blogger Perez Hilton wrote about us. Suddenly, mothers in Costa Rica, Taiwan, Japan, Germany, Argentina, England, Italy, Turkey were all reading about our son’s home birth. My live-tweeting catapulted us into the spotlight as the poster family for the home-birth movement. Our fleeting internet fame forgave all of our transgressions. My midwife told me even she had been recognized in a store by two guys who were talking at the checkout about “the girl who gave birth and tweeted all those pictures.” People bought me food and sent me gifts and told me I was fabulous and told our son, Nye, that he was adorable, and told my husband he was an amazing father. Even the assistant midwife who’d been at the birth kept dropping by with wine and gossip and meals, drawn in, perhaps, by the seeming glamor of the cute tattooed dad, the British mom, the Venice Beach home, our “alternative” past behind us, simply more color to a perfect picture. I was hounded to do TV shows. Pale and wan from the blood loss of a retained placenta, I did one—and hated it, quickly retreating back to my pajamas and bonding with my wide-eyed, aware little son who seemed so much more mature than a newborn. More from DAME: "Not Tonight, Honey. And Maybe Not Ever Again" My husband and I rode the wave of this popularity for as long as we could—I suppose, because we both knew it would be over soon. Because, of course we were not the perfect, adorable sweet couple who had birthed their son at home. We were a family with dark, worrying secrets that I was scared would bubble to the surface again, and destroy us all as they nearly had before our son was born. And they did. Even though he loved our son and was a natural father, my husband began to drink daily, and his temper grew exponentially. He’d spend hours brooding over a computer screen in the same pajamas he’d wear for days, ignoring our son gurgling on the playmat at his feet while I tried to take care of our household, our child, earn money, and love a man who didn’t seem to like the world or himself very much. I started to suspect he was taking drugs so I asked him to take a drug test after he turned up at 1:30 a.m. after having been missing for hours. He was furious, refused the test, and walked out. Within 24 hours he was demanding a legal separation and printing out a diary of my ineptitude as a mother. He began a blog he’d titled, “A Boy and His Dad,” a photographic diary detailing his struggles to maintain a relationship with his son due to his "bitch" wife. He wanted me to feel scared. I was. I loved him, but the speed at which he left, and the venom of his response made me think he’d wanted out for a while. I felt I had no choice but to file for divorce from this man who was living in a van, stinking of booze, bellowing at me every day, and insisting on disappearing with our 8-month-old for hours at a time, refusing to tell me where they were going, refusing to return him for nursing breaks. I hid the messy breakup and divorce and custody battle for awhile from everyone but my immediate family. But when the time came that I felt able to talk openly about it, I suppose I was naïve enough to think that it might elicit some sympathy, maybe even invite some help. But I instantly went from vaunted to reviled, and even mocked. I had become the Pariah. I discovered that the curious, enquiring mothers who offered to give me support and a shoulder to cry on when they didn’t know all the details, now wanted nothing to do with me. My neighbor in our Venice fourplex—irritated when she’d learned I playfully mocked diaper-free parenting philosophies she endorsed on Facebook—took my husband’s side. She encouraged my husband to ditch the therapy, and fed into his narrative of “abusive wife tries to steal baby from loving husband.” She wrote long letters to court detailing conversations she’d overheard, things I’d said and done which might somehow prove my moral and ethical failings as a parent (“I have also seen Ruth with her arms around him this Wednesday saying she loves him so much”).  Things took a sinister turn when she showed up with my ex-husband at our (intensely private) mediation session claiming that I was abusive to my son, tried to convince our landlord, on more than one occasion, to evict me, and then filed a restraining order against me claiming I’d poisoned her dog, and was threatening the life of her unborn child. It was thrown out, of course and revealed as simply malicious litigation by a very sick woman. Someone—to this day, I don’t know who—called the Department of Children and Family Services, and a skinny young woman with a Southern accent carrying a clipboard stumbled unannounced into my kitchen one afternoon, disappointed to find my husband had been banished by a restraining order, and my toddler son and I were engaged in little more than finger-painting, giggling and eating kale chips. I asked the new mom friends that I’d met in prenatal yoga class and mamas meetings if they would testify in court—not against my husband, but on my behalf, to tell the judge what kind of person I was. Most of them “didn’t want to get involved” and “couldn’t be the kind of friend that I needed.” So I drifted toward other mothers who had felt the deepest kind of pain and grief imaginable. Like Mary, who had woken up one morning to find her husband had passed away from Deep Vein Thrombosis after a long haul flight before they’d ever had a chance to start a family. Laura who had lost her little girl, Layla, just a month before she was due. Opal who had to listen, over and over, to her teenage son relate to an uncaring courtroom how his father had assaulted him, an act which led one mother to say loudly outside the school gates well within Opal’s earshot, “I wouldn’t let my kids anywhere near her house.” More from DAME: "How Will I Survive August Without My Shrink?" Dysfunction is infectious, or so it seems. There’s something about being “happily” married, “happily” pregnant, “happily” conventional that shuns not only the horrors that afflict some mothers, but those mothers themselves. We are complicit in our own tragedies, yes: How could we not be? Something about me chose to have a child with a man who would crumble and walk out on us at eight months postpartum. Laura’s daughter was not destined to ever set eyes on her loving parents. Opal married a man who would turn out to be abusive, not only to her, but to her children. Mary fell deeply in love with a man who would leave this world well before it was time, leaving her nothing but snapshots and memories and a well of unconscionable grief. I suppose part of our pain is waking up to that knowledge every day, facing that our intuitive and uncontrollable failures, that loving the wrong people, have hurt not only us, but those whom we love the most—our children, those we have, those we had, those we might have had. When others act as if proximity to us might prove catching, is it any wonder that in our darkest hours we half believe it ourselves? What has stunned me most about becoming a single parent is how pain makes a mother the pariah amid a sea of carefully edited social-networking nirvana. That the words and comfort we expected from those that can see how much we have lost—the families we had planned, the families they still have—never came. Perhaps it is because to survive the storm of parenting, we have to reserve the empathy gene for ourselves. Or perhaps it is simply that no words are ever sufficient to cover the deepest pain imaginable when families are destroyed.

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Sex trafficking “happens in everybody’s backyard”: A survivor busts the biggest myths and offers advice on how to keep kids safe

Savannah Sanders’s first encounter with sex trafficking at the age of 16 was as a victim. But during the years since, she has tackled this shockingly prevalent problem as an educator, a mentor, a social work student and most recently an author. Her debut book “Sex Trafficking Prevention: A Trauma-Informed Approach for Parents and Professionals,” to be published by Unhooked Books on September 8, weaves her plight together with research on the U.S. sex trade and advice for everyday people to minimize children’s vulnerability. Sanders speaks in a warm tone even when discussing grave matters, joking about how her expertise in concepts like body safety — the practice of consent in every activity from tickles to hugs — has informed her approach to mothering her four children. Though she harbors no resentment about her past, she believes it was avoidable and is dedicated to preventing it in her own family and arming others with the knowledge to do the same. I spoke to Sanders about the abuse she overcame, its psychological consequences, the patterns it illuminates about other survivors and how we can address the issue on a political, cultural and individual level. The interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity. Could you start by telling me your own story? How were you first coerced into the sex trade? I, like a lot of people, started experiencing sexual abuse at a pretty young age. I was raped and molested starting from six on. That left shame and guilt and all sorts of stuff in my life. I moved around a lot and dropped out of school in eighth grade and started cutting and running from home a lot. I was 16 when a friend of mine took me to a club at night, and when I got out of the club, there was a guy out there who introduced himself to me and told me to come over the next day. When we got there, he told me I would be working with him. I was forced to work in a massage parlor and have all of the money taken by this guy for nine months. How did you get out of that situation? The police started doing an investigation on the massage parlor. I was told to leave before the police found me. I think they wanted me to leave so that they wouldn’t get in trouble, but I’m sure back then I most definitely would have gotten arrested for something. I got into more abusive relationships and started using drugs even harder. When I was 18, my grandmother had passed away, and I tried to stay clean for a little bit. During that time, I met my now-husband. Has anyone ever blamed you for your victimization? I was blamed for a lot of what happened to me. “Why didn't you run?” “Why didn't you go back to your parents?” That kind of stuff. What did the people who said those things fail to understand? That you're abused and trauma puts somebody in survival mode, and so they do what they have to do to get through to the next day. Most trafficking survivors have been going through trauma from very young ages. What’s the relationship between childhood trauma and sex trafficking? Mainly, there’s a lot of shame when somebody experiences sexual abuse or physical abuse, and so they act out and become very vulnerable to being picked up by other abusers. In our society, we see people acting out by cutting or using drugs or engaging in risky behavior, and instead of seeing those behaviors as a result of their trauma, we see them as rebellions. And that’s exactly what traffickers and various abusers look for because they know that those are the most vulnerable in the population. How does your story compare to the stories of other sex trafficking victims in the U.S.? I don't think my story's unusual. I do think, though, that trafficking happens in many, many different ways, that sexual abuse is a huge precursor to most stories but not all of them, that trafficking happens to boys and girls and that individuals at the highest risk are young girls of color, LGBTQ youth, homeless youth and kids who have been ostracized or taken into the foster care system. But anybody who has a pimp, whether they’re under 18 or over 18, is considered a trafficking victim by law. So a lot of times, people consider prostitution to be two consenting adults, but legally, if there’s a pimp, they’re considered a trafficking victim. Where is the line between sex work and trafficking? The line is the moment that anybody else is manipulating the situation, forcing, coercing or taking advantage of somebody in a vulnerable spot. I also think that there are many people who want to get out of sex work but don't feel like they have any viable options because they feel like they don't have any other skills. What do you think of the recent Amnesty International proposal to legalize sex work, then? I don't really have a specific take on that. It's not as easy an answer as legalization. As far as curbing child sex trafficking, there is absolutely no way that legalization will do that. Just because adult porn is legal doesn't mean that child porn dissipates, so I don't feel that legalizing adult sex work would contribute to curbing child sex trafficking. Some people are even saying the policy could encourage sex trafficking. I don't know if it'll encourage trafficking. It already occurs at an extremely high rate. It's such a big topic that there's no easy “yes” or “no” answer. The issue is so much broader than that. If we want to make a real difference, we have to address poverty and we have to address gender inequality. What about the recently passed Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act of 2015 ? Could the increased government funding for victims make a difference in their lives? I think there will be some changes, and I'm thankful that trafficking issues are coming up at a federal level. I don’t know what the long-term unintended consequences or ramifications of that bill are, so I wouldn't say I'm for or against it. It’s easy to think that when we've passed a law, we’ve made a change, but we don't understand the long-term consequences of that law. We’ll just have to see as time goes on if it’s really helping or if things need to be tweaked in order to make sure that we’re doing the best for victims first. You mentioned we need to make changes broader than legislation. What are some society-wide transformations you’d like to see? We need an array of services. We can't just be pumping up shelters all over the country and think that’s going to solve the problem. We need services that are unique and individualized and meet the needs of each person instead of trying to force them through a funnel. They need to be in control of their own change and growth. Shelters are very much needed, but so are specialized foster care and outpatient services that meet victims where they're at. Somebody might not ever want to go into a shelter. We have this idea that if somebody doesn’t follow through with services, they must not want help. That’s rarely the case. Usually, the services just weren’t a good fit for that person. We can’t expect somebody who has been experiencing trauma their whole life to be healed by what we as a society deem successful. They need to be able to create their own success. What can we as individuals do to prevent sex trafficking? When we talk about prevention, a lot of time, we talk about it as recognition of trafficking and learning warning signs. That’s helpful, but it's not prevention. Prevention starts well before a child turns five. Prevention is about educating kids and addressing poverty and gender inequality and learning body safety and breaking generational cycles of abuse. My book is about how to become a safe adult and support kids so that they aren't as vulnerable to being trafficked. People in my life didn't understand the effects of trauma, so they just thought I was acting out or being a bad kid. I think if someone had asked the right questions, there could have been a different outcome. What are the most telltale signs of vulnerability to look out for? Early childhood sexual abuse is probably the number one precursor to trafficking, and I think it's the number one sign people miss. The list of signs that someone has been abused really does go on and on: sudden change in behavior, bed-wetting, extreme aggression, hyper-sexualization. A lot of times, when kids are acting sexualized when they're younger, it's for a very good reason. And sexual abuse isn't always somebody touching them. It can mean being exposed to pornography at a young age, which is very common these days. That’s interesting because I never thought of pornography as a source of trauma. Kids aren't ready to be exposed to sex at such a young age, and it's very similar to being sexually abused. It takes away their innocence at a very young age. I know young girls ten and eleven years old who have been highly addicted to pornography. Young girls get addicted to pornography just as young boys do. I don't think that people really understand the effects that it has on their brains. And it's not just the hyper-sexualization that it causes; it's the violence against women, unrealistic body expectations, and shame. What do you think is the most widely accepted myth surrounding sex trafficking? That it doesn’t happen here. People don’t understand how prevalent it is in America. 83 percent of victims of trafficking in America were born in America, and it's the same in other countries. So, if you go to Mexico, 79 percent of their victims are from Mexico and born in Mexico. We have this misconception that it's a border issue. But it happens in everybody's backyard.Savannah Sanders’s first encounter with sex trafficking at the age of 16 was as a victim. But during the years since, she has tackled this shockingly prevalent problem as an educator, a mentor, a social work student and most recently an author. Her debut book “Sex Trafficking Prevention: A Trauma-Informed Approach for Parents and Professionals,” to be published by Unhooked Books on September 8, weaves her plight together with research on the U.S. sex trade and advice for everyday people to minimize children’s vulnerability. Sanders speaks in a warm tone even when discussing grave matters, joking about how her expertise in concepts like body safety — the practice of consent in every activity from tickles to hugs — has informed her approach to mothering her four children. Though she harbors no resentment about her past, she believes it was avoidable and is dedicated to preventing it in her own family and arming others with the knowledge to do the same. I spoke to Sanders about the abuse she overcame, its psychological consequences, the patterns it illuminates about other survivors and how we can address the issue on a political, cultural and individual level. The interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity. Could you start by telling me your own story? How were you first coerced into the sex trade? I, like a lot of people, started experiencing sexual abuse at a pretty young age. I was raped and molested starting from six on. That left shame and guilt and all sorts of stuff in my life. I moved around a lot and dropped out of school in eighth grade and started cutting and running from home a lot. I was 16 when a friend of mine took me to a club at night, and when I got out of the club, there was a guy out there who introduced himself to me and told me to come over the next day. When we got there, he told me I would be working with him. I was forced to work in a massage parlor and have all of the money taken by this guy for nine months. How did you get out of that situation? The police started doing an investigation on the massage parlor. I was told to leave before the police found me. I think they wanted me to leave so that they wouldn’t get in trouble, but I’m sure back then I most definitely would have gotten arrested for something. I got into more abusive relationships and started using drugs even harder. When I was 18, my grandmother had passed away, and I tried to stay clean for a little bit. During that time, I met my now-husband. Has anyone ever blamed you for your victimization? I was blamed for a lot of what happened to me. “Why didn't you run?” “Why didn't you go back to your parents?” That kind of stuff. What did the people who said those things fail to understand? That you're abused and trauma puts somebody in survival mode, and so they do what they have to do to get through to the next day. Most trafficking survivors have been going through trauma from very young ages. What’s the relationship between childhood trauma and sex trafficking? Mainly, there’s a lot of shame when somebody experiences sexual abuse or physical abuse, and so they act out and become very vulnerable to being picked up by other abusers. In our society, we see people acting out by cutting or using drugs or engaging in risky behavior, and instead of seeing those behaviors as a result of their trauma, we see them as rebellions. And that’s exactly what traffickers and various abusers look for because they know that those are the most vulnerable in the population. How does your story compare to the stories of other sex trafficking victims in the U.S.? I don't think my story's unusual. I do think, though, that trafficking happens in many, many different ways, that sexual abuse is a huge precursor to most stories but not all of them, that trafficking happens to boys and girls and that individuals at the highest risk are young girls of color, LGBTQ youth, homeless youth and kids who have been ostracized or taken into the foster care system. But anybody who has a pimp, whether they’re under 18 or over 18, is considered a trafficking victim by law. So a lot of times, people consider prostitution to be two consenting adults, but legally, if there’s a pimp, they’re considered a trafficking victim. Where is the line between sex work and trafficking? The line is the moment that anybody else is manipulating the situation, forcing, coercing or taking advantage of somebody in a vulnerable spot. I also think that there are many people who want to get out of sex work but don't feel like they have any viable options because they feel like they don't have any other skills. What do you think of the recent Amnesty International proposal to legalize sex work, then? I don't really have a specific take on that. It's not as easy an answer as legalization. As far as curbing child sex trafficking, there is absolutely no way that legalization will do that. Just because adult porn is legal doesn't mean that child porn dissipates, so I don't feel that legalizing adult sex work would contribute to curbing child sex trafficking. Some people are even saying the policy could encourage sex trafficking. I don't know if it'll encourage trafficking. It already occurs at an extremely high rate. It's such a big topic that there's no easy “yes” or “no” answer. The issue is so much broader than that. If we want to make a real difference, we have to address poverty and we have to address gender inequality. What about the recently passed Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act of 2015 ? Could the increased government funding for victims make a difference in their lives? I think there will be some changes, and I'm thankful that trafficking issues are coming up at a federal level. I don’t know what the long-term unintended consequences or ramifications of that bill are, so I wouldn't say I'm for or against it. It’s easy to think that when we've passed a law, we’ve made a change, but we don't understand the long-term consequences of that law. We’ll just have to see as time goes on if it’s really helping or if things need to be tweaked in order to make sure that we’re doing the best for victims first. You mentioned we need to make changes broader than legislation. What are some society-wide transformations you’d like to see? We need an array of services. We can't just be pumping up shelters all over the country and think that’s going to solve the problem. We need services that are unique and individualized and meet the needs of each person instead of trying to force them through a funnel. They need to be in control of their own change and growth. Shelters are very much needed, but so are specialized foster care and outpatient services that meet victims where they're at. Somebody might not ever want to go into a shelter. We have this idea that if somebody doesn’t follow through with services, they must not want help. That’s rarely the case. Usually, the services just weren’t a good fit for that person. We can’t expect somebody who has been experiencing trauma their whole life to be healed by what we as a society deem successful. They need to be able to create their own success. What can we as individuals do to prevent sex trafficking? When we talk about prevention, a lot of time, we talk about it as recognition of trafficking and learning warning signs. That’s helpful, but it's not prevention. Prevention starts well before a child turns five. Prevention is about educating kids and addressing poverty and gender inequality and learning body safety and breaking generational cycles of abuse. My book is about how to become a safe adult and support kids so that they aren't as vulnerable to being trafficked. People in my life didn't understand the effects of trauma, so they just thought I was acting out or being a bad kid. I think if someone had asked the right questions, there could have been a different outcome. What are the most telltale signs of vulnerability to look out for? Early childhood sexual abuse is probably the number one precursor to trafficking, and I think it's the number one sign people miss. The list of signs that someone has been abused really does go on and on: sudden change in behavior, bed-wetting, extreme aggression, hyper-sexualization. A lot of times, when kids are acting sexualized when they're younger, it's for a very good reason. And sexual abuse isn't always somebody touching them. It can mean being exposed to pornography at a young age, which is very common these days. That’s interesting because I never thought of pornography as a source of trauma. Kids aren't ready to be exposed to sex at such a young age, and it's very similar to being sexually abused. It takes away their innocence at a very young age. I know young girls ten and eleven years old who have been highly addicted to pornography. Young girls get addicted to pornography just as young boys do. I don't think that people really understand the effects that it has on their brains. And it's not just the hyper-sexualization that it causes; it's the violence against women, unrealistic body expectations, and shame. What do you think is the most widely accepted myth surrounding sex trafficking? That it doesn’t happen here. People don’t understand how prevalent it is in America. 83 percent of victims of trafficking in America were born in America, and it's the same in other countries. So, if you go to Mexico, 79 percent of their victims are from Mexico and born in Mexico. We have this misconception that it's a border issue. But it happens in everybody's backyard.

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The sexy ’70s, re-imagined now: The empowering seduction of “The Diary of a Teenage Girl,” a coming-of-age fantasy that couldn’t be set today

"I refuse to be a sniveling crybaby. I'm a fucking woman and this is my life."  So goes the battle cry of Minnie Goetze, the irrepressible heroine of “The Diary of a Teenage Girl,” a film widely lauded as a game-changing coming-of-age narrative. And the film should be praised for its unapologetic treatment of female desire as something to contend with. Of the best coming-of-age films, almost all star male protagonists, and those who are female tend to come of age through a sequence of unavoidable, often traumatic, events that happen to them rather than as a result of their own volition (anyone who jumps to “Juno” as an exception should fully consider the trauma of carrying a child to term and then giving that child away). But in “Diary,” director Marielle Heller’s debut feature film, Minnie Goetze gets what she wants, when she wants it, a refreshingly frequent amount of time. For most of the film what she wants to get is sex — something the film approaches with a rare respect for the exigency of female desire, perhaps specifically the desire to be desired. Played by British actor Bel Powley, Minnie “gets to get” in a pool shed, hotel room, the belly of a sailboat, the back of a car. The perspective offered is patently female; Minnie is less objectified gamine than woman on the prowl for a good lay. Even the way she sees herself (as revealed in the film’s opening shot) is as a moving sexual agent: the lens looks up at her trousered booty as she strides surely forward. Given Minnie’s small stature, we know that this shot is how she imagines her body and sexuality as towering and powerful. I can think of few shots of a young woman’s caboose that carry such surprisingly positive connotations. “Surprise” seems to be the operative term that many critics take. HuffPost’s Leora Tanenbaum asserts that “[t]he surprise of this movie … is that it portrays Minnie as someone in control of her body and her life — even when her surrounding circumstances may lead us to conclude otherwise.” That a female sexual coming-of-age can happen sans victimization might indeed prove a surprise to any fan of the genre; typically a girl becomes a “fucking woman” not through, well, fucking from a standpoint of desire, but through enduring any number of bad things that assault her body — having her period, suffering cramps (or cliques) or submitting to a painful, violent, or at least awkward loss of virginity. So Minnie as lusty protagonist comes as a welcome “surprise,” though it’s sad to admit that’s the case 39 years after 1976, when the film is set, a time when the FDA has finally approved a version of “female Viagra” for women with flagging libidos. And it is in this gap of eras that the film really seduces. No matter how surprisingly willful its teenage heroine, “The Diary of a Teenage Girl” ultimately serves the seventies as sensual panacea to a 2015 consciousness. Set in a decade in which the economy sucked and crime was, in many cities, at an all-time high, the film presents a free-for-all of bohemian pleasures far from rampant urban decline — high schoolers get served at bars, entertainment comes through comic books or record playing and a single-mom librarian can afford a house in San Francisco. Even the porn projected in the background of parties (body hair! B cups! flesh jiggles!) seems innocent. Free of smartphones and selfies, these late-night festivities unfurl in a blur of soft focus and roving-camera reverie. Flash forward and today seems prudish, even downright hostile to sexually adventurous young women. As pointed out last week by Amanda Hess in Slate, “the underlying sexual and technological panic” streaming from recent anti-Tinder-heads “looks remarkably similar to the Victorian version” over a hundred years ago. But staged against the enviably libertine seventies, the central controversy of “Diary” — Minnie’s affair with Monroe, her mother’s boyfriend, 25 years her senior — somehow seems a lot less reprehensible, less like statutory rape and more like just another break from taboo. “My life has gotten really crazy of late,” she gleefully boasts into her audio-diary early in the film after their first encounter. It becomes easier to accept, and even enjoy, the ensuing sexcapades between Minnie and Monroe amidst an Instagrammish scenescape of bellbottoms and tighty whities. It’s as though one has to displace her mind to a time she hasn’t lived through to entertain the illusion that the sex depicted is consensual, that the teenage girl is really the one calling the shots. In the process, the potentially treacherous side of sex with men (rape, objectification, unplanned pregnancy) is almost entirely faded over in a haze of ringer tees and striped tube socks. Now that we've learned of how even the most wholesome of paternal icons carried out his sexually-predatorial behavior — many of the 50 women accusing Bill Cosby of drugging and sexually assaulting them first met him in the '70s — it's all the more tempting to revert to a version of the past in which women somehow weren’t as subjected to such perils. In a particularly cogent animated sequence in the film, Minnie imagines herself a kind of ravenous giantess, picking up tiny young men on the street and having her way with them — a clear reversal of the typical predator-prey relationship and gratifying to witness. At the same time, nothing really permanently "bad" ever happens to Minnie, no matter how many close brushes with rock-bottom debauchery she has by the end; she and her best friend are depicted as powerful seductresses with Teflon hearts, and her failed affair with Monroe ultimately leads to a stronger relationship with her mother. It is fantasy by any stretch of the imagination — a fantasy all too seductive for those who can’t remember the ‘70s themselves, the viewers who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s. “Childhood itself has changed greatly during the past generation,” write Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt in their recent article “The Coddling of the American Mind” for The Atlantic. “[K]ids were expected to occupy themselves, getting into minor scrapes and learning from their experiences. But ‘free range’ childhood became less common in the 1980s … many parents pulled in the reins and worked harder to keep their children safe.” In “Diary,” Minnie’s freedom from such control would strike many audience members as downright foreign. Her parents barely monitor their daughter's life and her sexual (mis)adventures follow suit. But the parents aren't depicted as "bad parents" demanding our scrutiny; Kristen Wiig’s rendering of Charlotte, Minnie’s mother, is ultimately a warm one, if fettered by her denial of and response to her daughter’s affair with Charlotte’s boyfriend. Pascal, Minnie’s academic stepdad, is distant but clearly engaged; he buys his daughters espressos and questions their lives, pays for private schooling about which Minnie couldn’t care less. Speaking to Terry Gross on Fresh Air on August 13, Phoebe Gloeckner, the author of the autobiographical book upon which the film was based, inserted a dose of reality to the aftermath of such freedom. Of Minnie, she says, “People used to tell me, God, you know, your family is so cool. You can do whatever you want. You can smoke pot at home, you can do this. And I would say, you know, I wish I lived in your house. I would've welcomed the chance to not have been allowed to do anything … I wanted to be just held tightly and controlled because it was — everything was so anarchical.” To younger Gen-Xers and Millennials, this anarchy holds its own onscreen appeal. In April, Marcie Bianco wrote “8 Feminist Reasons We Know 2015 Is Just 1972 All Over Again,” and "Diary" feels of a piece with this persuasion. But 2015 isn’t 1972 all over again. If it was, films like “Diary” wouldn’t feel so openly, so sumptuously, escapist. Director Marielle Heller was born in 1979. I was born in 1979. I understand the compulsion to romanticize the period right before one was born; my students often do this with the early ‘90s. But as much as “Diary” celebrates the complexity of female desire, its perspective of the ‘70s can be too simple and sentimental. “This is for all the girls when they have grown,” concludes the voiceover at the end of the film, followed by a wistful shoreline scene that rolls with the credits. For all teenage girls who have grown, leaving the cineplex might prove a rude awakening.

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A Tig Notaro primer: 8 iconic works you need to know beyond “Hello, I have cancer”

While Tig Notaro exploded onto the scene with her instantly iconic “cancer set” at Los Angeles’ Largo theater in 2012 — which she famously began by saying “Hello, I have cancer,” before speaking openly about her illness and her mother’s recent death — there’s a lot more to the comedian than one (admittedly legendary) performance. A longtime comics' comic with an adoring cult following, Notaro was a rising star on the indie comedy scene for years before an unlikely set of tragic circumstances — and her singular response to them — catapulted her into the spotlight. As we prepare for her HBO comedy special “Tig Notaro: Boyish Girl Interrupted" to air tonight at 10 p.m., here are some other highlights from her impressive career: The Tig Series Tig’s interview series, ‘The Tig Series," gives Zach Galifianakis’ ‘Between Two Ferns’ a run for its money when it comes to bizarre talk show formats — like in this 2009 interview with (who else?) Zach Galifianakis, which she conducts with her face a foot away from his. "Good One" Notaro released her first live stand-up album in 2011, featuring many bits that have become classics among her fans: For example, the eminently quotable "no moleste” routine about a “do not disturb” sign in her Mexican hotel room. "Professor Blastoff" Notaro’s podcast, hosted alongside David Huntsberger and Kyle Dunnigan, ran for 217 episodes from 2011 to 2015, during which the hosts picked a guest expert's brain on all manner of scientific, creative and philosophical topics. Here’s Tig talking about her cancer diagnosis in 2012: And here’s one of their most-talked-about episodes, a famously awkward interview with pickup artist Rick Jeffries: Her stand-up sets on "Conan" Late night appearences were many people's first introduction to Notaro's absurdist brand of comedy, like her much-discussed 2011 Conan appearance, during which she dragged a stool around the stage for almost five minutes. That same year, she also busted out another of her classic stand-up bits — a clever meta gag centered around an impression of a person doing impressions. "This American Life" Notaro is a frequent "This American Life" contributor, but easily her most popular story was one she performed live in 2012, when she talked about her encounters with ‘80s pop singer Taylor Dayne. (The story also makes frequent appearances in Tig’s standup sets and was featured on "Good One") The "cancer set" Even those unfamiliar with Notaro’s other work will likely know her for her 2012 set at Largo, where she walked onstage and announced "Thank you, thanks, I have cancer. Thank you, I have cancer. Really, thank you." What followed was a raw, hilarious and intimate excavation of the recent hardships in Tig’s life, including her stage 2 cancer diagnosis, her mother’s recent death and her recovery from a rare bacterial infection. The day after the set, Louis CK tweeted: "In 27 years doing this, I’ve seen a handful of truly great, masterful standup sets. One was Tig Notaro last night at Largo.” The "topless set" In yet another legendary set at the New York Comedy Festival in 2014, Notaro revealed she had recently had a successful double mastectomy — and then tore off her shirt to reveal her scars, performing her jokes shirtless before an awestruck crowd (she had previously performed a similar topless set at Largo a month before) Here’s Tig discussing the set on "Conan": "Knock Knock, it’s Tig Notaro" This charming 2015 Showtime documentary followed Notaro as she travels across the country and performs intimate stand-up performances for her fans inside their homes — as well as their basements, barns, backyards and anywhere else they would have her. "Tig" This deeply personal 2015 Netflix documentary explores Notaro's battle with cancer and gives an intimate look at how she got through the toughest year of her life, as well as how she rebounded from her misfortune with a new perspective and a nascent romance with her "In a World" co-star Stephanie Allynne. As BuzzFeed's Ira Madison III writes in his rave review of the film: "the beauty of 'Tig' is that it’s not just a story about a comedian — it’s a story about a woman and how she learns to love again, finding inner strength against insurmountable odds." While Tig Notaro exploded onto the scene with her instantly iconic “cancer set” at Los Angeles’ Largo theater in 2012 — which she famously began by saying “Hello, I have cancer,” before speaking openly about her illness and her mother’s recent death — there’s a lot more to the comedian than one (admittedly legendary) performance. A longtime comics' comic with an adoring cult following, Notaro was a rising star on the indie comedy scene for years before an unlikely set of tragic circumstances — and her singular response to them — catapulted her into the spotlight. As we prepare for her HBO comedy special “Tig Notaro: Boyish Girl Interrupted" to air tonight at 10 p.m., here are some other highlights from her impressive career: The Tig Series Tig’s interview series, ‘The Tig Series," gives Zach Galifianakis’ ‘Between Two Ferns’ a run for its money when it comes to bizarre talk show formats — like in this 2009 interview with (who else?) Zach Galifianakis, which she conducts with her face a foot away from his. "Good One" Notaro released her first live stand-up album in 2011, featuring many bits that have become classics among her fans: For example, the eminently quotable "no moleste” routine about a “do not disturb” sign in her Mexican hotel room. "Professor Blastoff" Notaro’s podcast, hosted alongside David Huntsberger and Kyle Dunnigan, ran for 217 episodes from 2011 to 2015, during which the hosts picked a guest expert's brain on all manner of scientific, creative and philosophical topics. Here’s Tig talking about her cancer diagnosis in 2012: And here’s one of their most-talked-about episodes, a famously awkward interview with pickup artist Rick Jeffries: Her stand-up sets on "Conan" Late night appearences were many people's first introduction to Notaro's absurdist brand of comedy, like her much-discussed 2011 Conan appearance, during which she dragged a stool around the stage for almost five minutes. That same year, she also busted out another of her classic stand-up bits — a clever meta gag centered around an impression of a person doing impressions. "This American Life" Notaro is a frequent "This American Life" contributor, but easily her most popular story was one she performed live in 2012, when she talked about her encounters with ‘80s pop singer Taylor Dayne. (The story also makes frequent appearances in Tig’s standup sets and was featured on "Good One") The "cancer set" Even those unfamiliar with Notaro’s other work will likely know her for her 2012 set at Largo, where she walked onstage and announced "Thank you, thanks, I have cancer. Thank you, I have cancer. Really, thank you." What followed was a raw, hilarious and intimate excavation of the recent hardships in Tig’s life, including her stage 2 cancer diagnosis, her mother’s recent death and her recovery from a rare bacterial infection. The day after the set, Louis CK tweeted: "In 27 years doing this, I’ve seen a handful of truly great, masterful standup sets. One was Tig Notaro last night at Largo.” The "topless set" In yet another legendary set at the New York Comedy Festival in 2014, Notaro revealed she had recently had a successful double mastectomy — and then tore off her shirt to reveal her scars, performing her jokes shirtless before an awestruck crowd (she had previously performed a similar topless set at Largo a month before) Here’s Tig discussing the set on "Conan": "Knock Knock, it’s Tig Notaro" This charming 2015 Showtime documentary followed Notaro as she travels across the country and performs intimate stand-up performances for her fans inside their homes — as well as their basements, barns, backyards and anywhere else they would have her. "Tig" This deeply personal 2015 Netflix documentary explores Notaro's battle with cancer and gives an intimate look at how she got through the toughest year of her life, as well as how she rebounded from her misfortune with a new perspective and a nascent romance with her "In a World" co-star Stephanie Allynne. As BuzzFeed's Ira Madison III writes in his rave review of the film: "the beauty of 'Tig' is that it’s not just a story about a comedian — it’s a story about a woman and how she learns to love again, finding inner strength against insurmountable odds." While Tig Notaro exploded onto the scene with her instantly iconic “cancer set” at Los Angeles’ Largo theater in 2012 — which she famously began by saying “Hello, I have cancer,” before speaking openly about her illness and her mother’s recent death — there’s a lot more to the comedian than one (admittedly legendary) performance. A longtime comics' comic with an adoring cult following, Notaro was a rising star on the indie comedy scene for years before an unlikely set of tragic circumstances — and her singular response to them — catapulted her into the spotlight. As we prepare for her HBO comedy special “Tig Notaro: Boyish Girl Interrupted" to air tonight at 10 p.m., here are some other highlights from her impressive career: The Tig Series Tig’s interview series, ‘The Tig Series," gives Zach Galifianakis’ ‘Between Two Ferns’ a run for its money when it comes to bizarre talk show formats — like in this 2009 interview with (who else?) Zach Galifianakis, which she conducts with her face a foot away from his. "Good One" Notaro released her first live stand-up album in 2011, featuring many bits that have become classics among her fans: For example, the eminently quotable "no moleste” routine about a “do not disturb” sign in her Mexican hotel room. "Professor Blastoff" Notaro’s podcast, hosted alongside David Huntsberger and Kyle Dunnigan, ran for 217 episodes from 2011 to 2015, during which the hosts picked a guest expert's brain on all manner of scientific, creative and philosophical topics. Here’s Tig talking about her cancer diagnosis in 2012: And here’s one of their most-talked-about episodes, a famously awkward interview with pickup artist Rick Jeffries: Her stand-up sets on "Conan" Late night appearences were many people's first introduction to Notaro's absurdist brand of comedy, like her much-discussed 2011 Conan appearance, during which she dragged a stool around the stage for almost five minutes. That same year, she also busted out another of her classic stand-up bits — a clever meta gag centered around an impression of a person doing impressions. "This American Life" Notaro is a frequent "This American Life" contributor, but easily her most popular story was one she performed live in 2012, when she talked about her encounters with ‘80s pop singer Taylor Dayne. (The story also makes frequent appearances in Tig’s standup sets and was featured on "Good One") The "cancer set" Even those unfamiliar with Notaro’s other work will likely know her for her 2012 set at Largo, where she walked onstage and announced "Thank you, thanks, I have cancer. Thank you, I have cancer. Really, thank you." What followed was a raw, hilarious and intimate excavation of the recent hardships in Tig’s life, including her stage 2 cancer diagnosis, her mother’s recent death and her recovery from a rare bacterial infection. The day after the set, Louis CK tweeted: "In 27 years doing this, I’ve seen a handful of truly great, masterful standup sets. One was Tig Notaro last night at Largo.” The "topless set" In yet another legendary set at the New York Comedy Festival in 2014, Notaro revealed she had recently had a successful double mastectomy — and then tore off her shirt to reveal her scars, performing her jokes shirtless before an awestruck crowd (she had previously performed a similar topless set at Largo a month before) Here’s Tig discussing the set on "Conan": "Knock Knock, it’s Tig Notaro" This charming 2015 Showtime documentary followed Notaro as she travels across the country and performs intimate stand-up performances for her fans inside their homes — as well as their basements, barns, backyards and anywhere else they would have her. "Tig" This deeply personal 2015 Netflix documentary explores Notaro's battle with cancer and gives an intimate look at how she got through the toughest year of her life, as well as how she rebounded from her misfortune with a new perspective and a nascent romance with her "In a World" co-star Stephanie Allynne. As BuzzFeed's Ira Madison III writes in his rave review of the film: "the beauty of 'Tig' is that it’s not just a story about a comedian — it’s a story about a woman and how she learns to love again, finding inner strength against insurmountable odds."

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Jay Smooth: “Someone needs to defend Bernie Sanders from his own supporters”

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Hillary and Bernie at the prison gates: Mass incarceration is finally a hot political issue — if we want to save America we must seize the moment

Mass incarceration is an issue whose time has finally come. There are many signs that the wind is shifting on the question of America’s vast, wasteful and immensely destructive prison state, both among the public and the political class -- and that shift is not limited to the left. Criminal justice reform was supposed to be the issue that separated Rand Paul from the other Republican presidential candidates, at least until he got Trumped. It has become a central focus, believe it or not, of the Charles Koch Institute, the billionaire GOP donor’s libertarian nonprofit. This shift has created an important opening for political change, but it’s also a shift in the moral and cultural landscape, in ways that may be less evident but are just as important. Barack Obama has evidently decided to use the bully pulpit of his final two years in the White House to shift the national debate on mass incarceration and the enormous racial disparities it both reveals and exacerbates. This could be seen as six years late and billions of dollars short, given the extent to which the president has avoided or soft-pedaled those issues throughout his time in office. As in so many other areas, Obama is more reactive than proactive, more a follower than a leader. He’s responding to the same conditions that have compelled Hillary Clinton to take up the cause despite what can only be described as an abysmal record on these issues, the same conditions that have unexpectedly made prisons, policing and criminal justice central themes of the 2016 campaign. In fairness, Bernie Sanders has been a critic of America’s mass incarceration policies for years, although he has foregrounded the issue much more vigorously since being confronted by Black Lives Matter protesters. As is generally the case with any such shift, these politicians have been forced into new stances by ground-level activism, by the sheer weight of statistical evidence and intellectual argument, and by the altered mood of the public. In that regard, I think this summer’s tabloid-friendly story of Richard Matt and David Sweat, the two convicted murderers who dug their way out of a maximum-security prison in upstate New York, was a more significant event than it appeared to be on the surface. If their improbable saga seemed more like a Hollywood screenplay than reality – a pair of white killers, amid a demographic that is predominantly black and Latino, a Miss Lonelyhearts romance, an elaborate escape route through the steam tunnels – the ambiguous mixture of fear, longing and “Shawshank Redemption” sympathy they provoked reflected a widespread underlying unease with the nature of imprisonment in America. Reality reasserted itself, you might say, after Matt was killed and Sweat was recaptured, with the allegations that other inmates at the Clinton Correctional Facility – a prison deliberately sited in the Adirondack North Woods, far from any population center -- had been viciously choked, beaten and suffocated by guards seeking information about the escape. That story has been less vigorously pursued, to be sure, by the TV reporters who breathlessly relayed every half-baked rumor about Matt and Sweat’s whereabouts. But it now appears that the Clinton escape inadvertently revealed the tip of an extremely ugly iceberg. Only the most naïve or most hypocritical observer would try to claim that the widening scandal around official abuse and corruption within New York’s prison system (including the alleged murder of at least one inmate, and its subsequent coverup) is unlikely to be replicated in other places. The political opportunity presented by this moment of rapidly shifting perceptions – the opportunity to change laws, to change hearts and minds, and if possible to re-examine our entire approach to criminal justice -- must not be squandered if we want to build a more just society. But real change will not come easily: As Adam Gopnik wrote three years ago in the New Yorker, mass incarceration on a scale never before seen in human history, a policy that has disproportionately affected communities of color that were already marginalized, impoverished and disenfranchised, could be called “the fundamental fact” in American society. Some studies suggest that rates of incarceration have dipped slightly as a result of recent reforms, but by any standard you like America remains the unchallenged superpower when it comes to locking up its own citizens. We have a prison population of roughly 700 inmates per 100,000 people, with Russia – Russia! – a distant second among major nations at about 455. We even lead the world in terms of absolute prison population, with at least 2.2 million people behind bars at any given time, while China, with four times our population, has around 1.6 million prisoners. You can slice and dice these numbers in all kinds of amazing ways: The United States has just 4 percent of the world’s population but nearly one-quarter of its prisoners; 37 American states have higher incarceration rates than any nation in the world, large or small. That fundamental fact of our society is insulated by thick walls of ideology and money. Law-and-order think tanks are standing by to argue that all the zillions we have poured into the prison state, and all the harsh sentences handed down for minor offenses, are the primary cause of the decline in crime over the last several decades. That’s a can of worms to drill open some other time, but here are a couple of salient points: Correlation does not equal causation, as the ancient social science maxim holds, and there is much more evidence to suggest that long-term incarceration breeds career criminals than that it deters them. Secondly, this is the only context where you ever hear prison-industry lobbyists, or the Republican legislators they bankroll, admit that crime has trended consistently downward for 50 years. Their entire con game relies on the media-fueled perception that “urban violence” is out of control and mobs of armed black men are roaming the streets in search of white victims. Cutting through these lies and misperceptions and undoing the social devastation of mass incarceration is likely to require forging difficult alliances across ideological boundaries, not to mention working with many of the same people who created this disaster in the first place. There are innumerable reasons to indict our bipartisan political system for its mendacity and cowardice, but I can think of none worse than this: For at least 35 years, the only perceptible division between mainstream Democrats and Republicans on the prison issue was over whether we should simply build more and more prisons and stuff more and more people into them (the "moderate" view) or whether we should do that and hand the whole enterprise over to private, for-profit corporations. Understanding that shared political culpability is one important aspect of the point that Black Lives Matter activists have tried to make in their recent confrontations with Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Whatever we make of those tactics – bearing in mind that BLM is a decentralized movement whose members don’t necessarily reflect a unified strategy – I think it’s crucial for white leftists to face the fact that the Democratic Party has blood on its hands on this issue (among others), and that liberal sanctimony simply will not do. I hesitate to give Hillary Clinton credit for much of anything beyond her well-known gift for shrewd political calculation – which led to fateful arrogance in 2008, and may yet do so again in this campaign. But her rhetorical turnabout on the issue of mass incarceration, including the fact that she now routinely utters those words aloud, is an important signal of the changing tide. Clinton vigorously supported her husband’s massive anti-crime bill of 1994, which provided almost $10 billion in prison funding, stripped state and federal prison inmates of the right to higher education, made gang membership a crime in itself (almost certainly a violation of the First Amendment), and implemented the infamous “Three Strikes, You’re Out” policy mandating life sentences for repeat offenders, even for certain nonviolent crimes. (I learned something new about that law while doing some background reading: It required the Justice Department to issue annual reports on “the use of excessive force by law enforcement officers.” No such reports have ever appeared.) Clinton has looked a bit defensive during the early stages of her Democratic campaign, although she is unquestionably playing the long game and it’s way too early to announce that she’s in trouble. Her videotaped conversation last week with BLM activists has been endlessly picked apart by Clinton-bashers on the left, and I’d love to play along. But in terms of sheer political calculus and her middle-class, liberal base, she probably did herself no damage. She adroitly steered the discussion away from the Bill Clinton administration’s thoroughly noxious record on criminal justice and toward her long history of support for mainstream civil-rights issues and her political alliances with the African-American community. There were good reasons for that. The aforementioned Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (whose principal legislative sponsor, by the way, was Sen. Joe Biden) almost certainly did more to drive the boom in prison-building and mass incarceration than the policies of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush put together. Furthermore, it epitomized the cynical Clintonite strategy of “triangulation,” which in this case specifically meant co-opting a core Republican issue while marginalizing or repudiating poor black people, the most vulnerable element of the most loyal Democratic constituency. Given that history, I don’t think African-American activists – or anyone else – can be blamed for feeling less than convinced by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 change of heart. Both Clintons have expressed regret over certain consequences of the 1994 law that were perhaps unintended or unforeseen – and, fine, let’s take them at their word. But social scientists, activists and investigative journalists have told us all along that the vast prison-industrial complex created by bipartisan consensus was brutal, corrupt and inefficient -- to state the case in its narrowest possible terms. Many went on to observe that its principal product, and arguably its intended purpose, was a “new Jim Crow,” to borrow the title of Michelle Alexander’s groundbreaking study. In practice, mass incarceration amounted to the selective and systematic oppression of poor people in general and African-Americans in particular. It hardened patterns of enduring racial injustice and widening economic inequality. Nobody in mainstream political or media circles particularly wanted to hear any of that. Such ideas were viewed as tedious and unrealistic left-wing spinach, until they abruptly became unavoidable. The mythical suburban swing voters understood to be decisive in national elections wanted tough talk on crime, and they got it. No candidate in American political history has ever lost an election by promising to be tougher on crime than his or her opponent, to build prisons that resemble the Château d’If from “The Count of Monte Cristo” as closely as possible and then fill them up with drug lords, sexual abusers, juvenile “superpredators” and other fearsome monstrosities. Those poisonous fantasies have not entirely lost their grip, to be sure, but they are starting to come unglued. What happened in reality was quite different: It was the evil default setting of the American criminal justice system, cranked up to 11 and fed with crystal meth. We bankrupted ourselves and ripped our society apart with a “war on drugs” that everyone with a brain knew would not work but was supported by every major politician in both parties. We locked up black and brown men by the millions (along with significant numbers of poor rural whites), mostly for the kinds of nonviolent drug offenses that are widely tolerated or overlooked among the more affluent classes. When we look at the current political landscape and see the bizarre coalition that has concluded that all this was a dreadful mistake, from the Clintons to Rand Paul and his dad to the Koch brothers, we may well respond with a mixture of hilarity, nausea and disbelief. But this is no time for ideological purity; addressing this national emergency will require all those odd alliances and many more. If the question is who Hillary Clinton thinks she is fooling and whether she can be trusted, the only possible answers are “nobody, I hope” and “hell, no.” I'm not saying I wouldn't rather have Bernie Sanders, or that Clinton is inevitable (especially given how this crazy campaign has gone so far). But we may be stuck with her anyway, and then the question becomes whether we have the will, and the political power, to compel her to do the right thing.

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Robert Reich: Corporate welfare is ravaging American taxpayers

Corporate welfare is often camouflaged in taxes that seem neutral on their face but give windfalls to big entrenched corporations at the expense of average people and small businesses. Take a look at commercial property taxes in California, for example. In 1978 California voters passed Proposition 13 – which began to assess property for tax purposes at its price when it was bought, rather than its current market price. This has protected homeowners and renters. But it’s also given a quiet windfall to entrenched corporate owners of commercial property. Corporations don’t need this protection. They’re in the real economy. They’re supposed to compete on a level playing field with new companies whose property taxes are based on current market prices. This corporate windfall has caused three big problems. First, it’s shifted more of the property tax on to California homeowners. Back in 1978, corporations paid 44 percent of all property taxes and homeowners paid 56 percent. Now, after exploiting this loophole for years, corporations pay only 28 percent of property taxes, while homeowners pick up 72 percent of the tab. Second, it’s robbed California of billions of dollars to support schools and local services. If all corporations were paying the property taxes they should be paying, schools and local services would have $9 billion dollars more in revenues this year. Third, it penalizes new and expanding businesses that don’t get this windfall because their commercial property is assessed at the current market price – but they compete for customers with companies whose property is assessed at the price they purchased it years ago. That’s unfair and it’s bad for the economy because California needs new and expanding businesses. Today, almost half of all commercial properties in California pay their fair share of property taxes, but they’re hobbled by those that don’t. This loophole must be closed. All corporations should be paying commercial property taxes based on current market prices. The giant corporations that are currently exploiting the loophole for their own profits obviously don’t want it closed, so they’re trying to scare people by saying closing it will cause businesses to leave California. That’s baloney. Leveling the playing field for all businesses will make the California economy more efficient, and help new and expanding businesses. Besides, California’s property taxes are already much lower than the national average. So even if corporations pay their full share, they’re still getting a great deal. Right now, a grassroots movement is growing of Californians determined to reform this broken commercial property tax system, and who know California needs more stable funding for its schools, libraries, roads, and communities. Corporate welfare is often camouflaged in taxes that seem neutral on their face but give windfalls to big entrenched corporations at the expense of average people and small businesses. Take a look at commercial property taxes in California, for example. In 1978 California voters passed Proposition 13 – which began to assess property for tax purposes at its price when it was bought, rather than its current market price. This has protected homeowners and renters. But it’s also given a quiet windfall to entrenched corporate owners of commercial property. Corporations don’t need this protection. They’re in the real economy. They’re supposed to compete on a level playing field with new companies whose property taxes are based on current market prices. This corporate windfall has caused three big problems. First, it’s shifted more of the property tax on to California homeowners. Back in 1978, corporations paid 44 percent of all property taxes and homeowners paid 56 percent. Now, after exploiting this loophole for years, corporations pay only 28 percent of property taxes, while homeowners pick up 72 percent of the tab. Second, it’s robbed California of billions of dollars to support schools and local services. If all corporations were paying the property taxes they should be paying, schools and local services would have $9 billion dollars more in revenues this year. Third, it penalizes new and expanding businesses that don’t get this windfall because their commercial property is assessed at the current market price – but they compete for customers with companies whose property is assessed at the price they purchased it years ago. That’s unfair and it’s bad for the economy because California needs new and expanding businesses. Today, almost half of all commercial properties in California pay their fair share of property taxes, but they’re hobbled by those that don’t. This loophole must be closed. All corporations should be paying commercial property taxes based on current market prices. The giant corporations that are currently exploiting the loophole for their own profits obviously don’t want it closed, so they’re trying to scare people by saying closing it will cause businesses to leave California. That’s baloney. Leveling the playing field for all businesses will make the California economy more efficient, and help new and expanding businesses. Besides, California’s property taxes are already much lower than the national average. So even if corporations pay their full share, they’re still getting a great deal. Right now, a grassroots movement is growing of Californians determined to reform this broken commercial property tax system, and who know California needs more stable funding for its schools, libraries, roads, and communities. Corporate welfare is often camouflaged in taxes that seem neutral on their face but give windfalls to big entrenched corporations at the expense of average people and small businesses. Take a look at commercial property taxes in California, for example. In 1978 California voters passed Proposition 13 – which began to assess property for tax purposes at its price when it was bought, rather than its current market price. This has protected homeowners and renters. But it’s also given a quiet windfall to entrenched corporate owners of commercial property. Corporations don’t need this protection. They’re in the real economy. They’re supposed to compete on a level playing field with new companies whose property taxes are based on current market prices. This corporate windfall has caused three big problems. First, it’s shifted more of the property tax on to California homeowners. Back in 1978, corporations paid 44 percent of all property taxes and homeowners paid 56 percent. Now, after exploiting this loophole for years, corporations pay only 28 percent of property taxes, while homeowners pick up 72 percent of the tab. Second, it’s robbed California of billions of dollars to support schools and local services. If all corporations were paying the property taxes they should be paying, schools and local services would have $9 billion dollars more in revenues this year. Third, it penalizes new and expanding businesses that don’t get this windfall because their commercial property is assessed at the current market price – but they compete for customers with companies whose property is assessed at the price they purchased it years ago. That’s unfair and it’s bad for the economy because California needs new and expanding businesses. Today, almost half of all commercial properties in California pay their fair share of property taxes, but they’re hobbled by those that don’t. This loophole must be closed. All corporations should be paying commercial property taxes based on current market prices. The giant corporations that are currently exploiting the loophole for their own profits obviously don’t want it closed, so they’re trying to scare people by saying closing it will cause businesses to leave California. That’s baloney. Leveling the playing field for all businesses will make the California economy more efficient, and help new and expanding businesses. Besides, California’s property taxes are already much lower than the national average. So even if corporations pay their full share, they’re still getting a great deal. Right now, a grassroots movement is growing of Californians determined to reform this broken commercial property tax system, and who know California needs more stable funding for its schools, libraries, roads, and communities. Corporate welfare is often camouflaged in taxes that seem neutral on their face but give windfalls to big entrenched corporations at the expense of average people and small businesses. Take a look at commercial property taxes in California, for example. In 1978 California voters passed Proposition 13 – which began to assess property for tax purposes at its price when it was bought, rather than its current market price. This has protected homeowners and renters. But it’s also given a quiet windfall to entrenched corporate owners of commercial property. Corporations don’t need this protection. They’re in the real economy. They’re supposed to compete on a level playing field with new companies whose property taxes are based on current market prices. This corporate windfall has caused three big problems. First, it’s shifted more of the property tax on to California homeowners. Back in 1978, corporations paid 44 percent of all property taxes and homeowners paid 56 percent. Now, after exploiting this loophole for years, corporations pay only 28 percent of property taxes, while homeowners pick up 72 percent of the tab. Second, it’s robbed California of billions of dollars to support schools and local services. If all corporations were paying the property taxes they should be paying, schools and local services would have $9 billion dollars more in revenues this year. Third, it penalizes new and expanding businesses that don’t get this windfall because their commercial property is assessed at the current market price – but they compete for customers with companies whose property is assessed at the price they purchased it years ago. That’s unfair and it’s bad for the economy because California needs new and expanding businesses. Today, almost half of all commercial properties in California pay their fair share of property taxes, but they’re hobbled by those that don’t. This loophole must be closed. All corporations should be paying commercial property taxes based on current market prices. The giant corporations that are currently exploiting the loophole for their own profits obviously don’t want it closed, so they’re trying to scare people by saying closing it will cause businesses to leave California. That’s baloney. Leveling the playing field for all businesses will make the California economy more efficient, and help new and expanding businesses. Besides, California’s property taxes are already much lower than the national average. So even if corporations pay their full share, they’re still getting a great deal. Right now, a grassroots movement is growing of Californians determined to reform this broken commercial property tax system, and who know California needs more stable funding for its schools, libraries, roads, and communities.

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Why the world’s remaining hunter-gatherer societies are some of its biggest pot smokers

What if it were marijuana’s medicinal qualities that originally inspired humans to light up, instead of the urge to get high? That’s the theory of some Washington State bioanthropologists just back from studying one of the world’s last hunter-gatherer societies—nomadic Africans in the Congo Basin who also happen to be among the world’s biggest pot smokers. What’s clear is that the Aka people are managing to keep at bay an otherwise deadly infestation of intestinal worms entirely through diligent application of cannabis. They are not doing it on purpose, however. The Aka, also known as Pygmies, enjoy weed because of what it does to their heads, not their intestines. A 1977 study of the group described its use as motivational: They “smoke to increase their courage on a hunt, dance better, increase their vital force, or to increase their work capacity when working for Europeans or village people,” researcher Barry Hewlett wrote at the time. This next generation of Congo researchers, led by Washington State University researcher Ed Hagen, found the same. And then they deduced that the health benefits of enjoying a leaf-wrapped spliff in a Central African rainforest are evolutionary. The Aka may be unconsciously self-medicating. This goes way beyond pot and Pygmies. Hagen thinks human use of all plant-based drugs followed the same path. “We might have evolved a ‘taste’ for drugs for some utilitarian reason, such as defense against parasites,” Hagen said by email, “but then we elaborate this behavior in rituals, etc., exactly as we do for eating food and every other utilitarian behavior. “Countless rituals have developed around food that do not relate to nutrition. The same goes for sex, clothing, shelter and other utilitarian behaviors. All these behaviors are (and were) essential to survival and reproduction, but we humans have a tendency to elaborate everything. We think the same might be true of recreational drugs.” * * * That would mean that in the Aka’s ongoing battle with worms, pot is “instrumental.” The term was coined in 2011 by psychiatrist Christian P. Mueller to describe the way that people learn to take drugs for purposes other than to get stoned. “Humans are able to learn that mental states can be changed on purpose by drugs, in order to facilitate other, non-drug-related behaviors,” Mueller wrote in the journal  Behavioral Brain Science. The drugs-as-instruments idea is a shift from the usual way of seeing drug use as a mark of human failure, whether as a step toward addiction or a purely Bacchanalian compulsion. Mueller argues that drug use should also be viewed as “a stable and widespread behavior in its own right,” at least among people who don’t get addicted—and Mueller frequently points out that most drug takers don’t. You already know about instrumentalization: People take psychoactive drugs all the time with a specific goal in mind other than sheer fun, whether it’s to stay awake for a long drive, achieve special insights during a religious ritual or even just relax after work. Skeptics abound. “Do drugs really allow us to cope with ‘modern’ (read: shitty/stressful) environments? Or is drug (ab)use the consequence of these environments?” asks one poster on a Bluelight web forum page about Mueller. But the idea hits home for lots of people, even those who know from drugs’ bad side. Another participant in the same Bluelight forum wrote this: “i have been dependent on substances at times, but even having been thru that, i'd still choose to use the ‘instruments’ to expand my reservoir of experiences.” Some harm reduction websites link to Mueller’s work. If drugs do have a rightful place in human society, as the argument goes, then the criminal justice and abstinence approaches to addiction need amending. * * * Mueller is not ignoring drug abuse. On the contrary, he says, “Understanding the everyday utility and the learning mechanisms of non-addictive psychotropic drug use may help to prevent abuse and the transition to drug addiction in the future.” He thinks it’s the way we form memories that holds the key to drug use of all kinds. Some of these are good memories and others bad: Psychoactive plants are technically a kind of toxin, which is why people generally experience drugs as bitter or otherwise unappealing at first. In a 2013 journal article, Mueller quoted a friend to show how the memory process works: “I smoked my first cigarette when I was 12 years old – behind the house, together with a few friends and some older guys who had provided it for trying. It was incredibly cool, not allowed of course, and it tasted awful. Despite persistent peer pressure, the memory of this one event still accompanies me until present day. It forms part of my personality and prevents me from trying cigarettes again. My first experience with alcohol a little later at the retirement party of my much beloved granddad was quite bad as well. I felt sick and abstained from any countable consumption of alcohol for a few years. However, when I was a student I felt forced to social drinking which I tentatively did. At one occasion, however, I learned from rather unexpected feedback that my constitutively restricted social skills were tremendously enhanced after a few glasses of wine. This one episode, again vividly remembered to the present day, has shaped my drug consumption behavior into another direction. After establishing a working dose window, I can now ‘instrumentalize’ a controlled consumption for just this one purpose: ‘socializing on demand.’" * * * The Aka make good subjects for researching instrumental drug use (at least the unconscious intestinal health kind) because they don’t have access to sophisticated health care. And that’s the way things were for humans during 99% of our time on the planet. We have been evolving our drug needs and tastes for hundreds of thousands of years. It’s also possible that plants have been doing the same. Indeed, Ed Hagen believes that humans and the plants we smoke, snort or shoot up may have “coevolved.” He thinks this is why drugs are able to mimic human brain chemicals like serotonin and dopamine and why humans are able to exploit these plants for our own assorted purposes. It’s a slippery slope from the idea of human-drug co-evolution to the wacky views of people like Terence McKenna, who theorized that the mind-expanding power of magic mushrooms helped advance our ancestors beyond apes. Or consider Ronald K. Siegel’s idea that drugs are a biological need. He says pursuit of drugs is a basic human drive, the “fourth drive” along with food, water and sex. But who’s to say, in the era of designer drugs and cheddar cheese Weed-Itz pot snacks, where our long and lively relationship with plant toxins will take us next? What if it were marijuana’s medicinal qualities that originally inspired humans to light up, instead of the urge to get high? That’s the theory of some Washington State bioanthropologists just back from studying one of the world’s last hunter-gatherer societies—nomadic Africans in the Congo Basin who also happen to be among the world’s biggest pot smokers. What’s clear is that the Aka people are managing to keep at bay an otherwise deadly infestation of intestinal worms entirely through diligent application of cannabis. They are not doing it on purpose, however. The Aka, also known as Pygmies, enjoy weed because of what it does to their heads, not their intestines. A 1977 study of the group described its use as motivational: They “smoke to increase their courage on a hunt, dance better, increase their vital force, or to increase their work capacity when working for Europeans or village people,” researcher Barry Hewlett wrote at the time. This next generation of Congo researchers, led by Washington State University researcher Ed Hagen, found the same. And then they deduced that the health benefits of enjoying a leaf-wrapped spliff in a Central African rainforest are evolutionary. The Aka may be unconsciously self-medicating. This goes way beyond pot and Pygmies. Hagen thinks human use of all plant-based drugs followed the same path. “We might have evolved a ‘taste’ for drugs for some utilitarian reason, such as defense against parasites,” Hagen said by email, “but then we elaborate this behavior in rituals, etc., exactly as we do for eating food and every other utilitarian behavior. “Countless rituals have developed around food that do not relate to nutrition. The same goes for sex, clothing, shelter and other utilitarian behaviors. All these behaviors are (and were) essential to survival and reproduction, but we humans have a tendency to elaborate everything. We think the same might be true of recreational drugs.” * * * That would mean that in the Aka’s ongoing battle with worms, pot is “instrumental.” The term was coined in 2011 by psychiatrist Christian P. Mueller to describe the way that people learn to take drugs for purposes other than to get stoned. “Humans are able to learn that mental states can be changed on purpose by drugs, in order to facilitate other, non-drug-related behaviors,” Mueller wrote in the journal  Behavioral Brain Science. The drugs-as-instruments idea is a shift from the usual way of seeing drug use as a mark of human failure, whether as a step toward addiction or a purely Bacchanalian compulsion. Mueller argues that drug use should also be viewed as “a stable and widespread behavior in its own right,” at least among people who don’t get addicted—and Mueller frequently points out that most drug takers don’t. You already know about instrumentalization: People take psychoactive drugs all the time with a specific goal in mind other than sheer fun, whether it’s to stay awake for a long drive, achieve special insights during a religious ritual or even just relax after work. Skeptics abound. “Do drugs really allow us to cope with ‘modern’ (read: shitty/stressful) environments? Or is drug (ab)use the consequence of these environments?” asks one poster on a Bluelight web forum page about Mueller. But the idea hits home for lots of people, even those who know from drugs’ bad side. Another participant in the same Bluelight forum wrote this: “i have been dependent on substances at times, but even having been thru that, i'd still choose to use the ‘instruments’ to expand my reservoir of experiences.” Some harm reduction websites link to Mueller’s work. If drugs do have a rightful place in human society, as the argument goes, then the criminal justice and abstinence approaches to addiction need amending. * * * Mueller is not ignoring drug abuse. On the contrary, he says, “Understanding the everyday utility and the learning mechanisms of non-addictive psychotropic drug use may help to prevent abuse and the transition to drug addiction in the future.” He thinks it’s the way we form memories that holds the key to drug use of all kinds. Some of these are good memories and others bad: Psychoactive plants are technically a kind of toxin, which is why people generally experience drugs as bitter or otherwise unappealing at first. In a 2013 journal article, Mueller quoted a friend to show how the memory process works: “I smoked my first cigarette when I was 12 years old – behind the house, together with a few friends and some older guys who had provided it for trying. It was incredibly cool, not allowed of course, and it tasted awful. Despite persistent peer pressure, the memory of this one event still accompanies me until present day. It forms part of my personality and prevents me from trying cigarettes again. My first experience with alcohol a little later at the retirement party of my much beloved granddad was quite bad as well. I felt sick and abstained from any countable consumption of alcohol for a few years. However, when I was a student I felt forced to social drinking which I tentatively did. At one occasion, however, I learned from rather unexpected feedback that my constitutively restricted social skills were tremendously enhanced after a few glasses of wine. This one episode, again vividly remembered to the present day, has shaped my drug consumption behavior into another direction. After establishing a working dose window, I can now ‘instrumentalize’ a controlled consumption for just this one purpose: ‘socializing on demand.’" * * * The Aka make good subjects for researching instrumental drug use (at least the unconscious intestinal health kind) because they don’t have access to sophisticated health care. And that’s the way things were for humans during 99% of our time on the planet. We have been evolving our drug needs and tastes for hundreds of thousands of years. It’s also possible that plants have been doing the same. Indeed, Ed Hagen believes that humans and the plants we smoke, snort or shoot up may have “coevolved.” He thinks this is why drugs are able to mimic human brain chemicals like serotonin and dopamine and why humans are able to exploit these plants for our own assorted purposes. It’s a slippery slope from the idea of human-drug co-evolution to the wacky views of people like Terence McKenna, who theorized that the mind-expanding power of magic mushrooms helped advance our ancestors beyond apes. Or consider Ronald K. Siegel’s idea that drugs are a biological need. He says pursuit of drugs is a basic human drive, the “fourth drive” along with food, water and sex. But who’s to say, in the era of designer drugs and cheddar cheese Weed-Itz pot snacks, where our long and lively relationship with plant toxins will take us next? What if it were marijuana’s medicinal qualities that originally inspired humans to light up, instead of the urge to get high? That’s the theory of some Washington State bioanthropologists just back from studying one of the world’s last hunter-gatherer societies—nomadic Africans in the Congo Basin who also happen to be among the world’s biggest pot smokers. What’s clear is that the Aka people are managing to keep at bay an otherwise deadly infestation of intestinal worms entirely through diligent application of cannabis. They are not doing it on purpose, however. The Aka, also known as Pygmies, enjoy weed because of what it does to their heads, not their intestines. A 1977 study of the group described its use as motivational: They “smoke to increase their courage on a hunt, dance better, increase their vital force, or to increase their work capacity when working for Europeans or village people,” researcher Barry Hewlett wrote at the time. This next generation of Congo researchers, led by Washington State University researcher Ed Hagen, found the same. And then they deduced that the health benefits of enjoying a leaf-wrapped spliff in a Central African rainforest are evolutionary. The Aka may be unconsciously self-medicating. This goes way beyond pot and Pygmies. Hagen thinks human use of all plant-based drugs followed the same path. “We might have evolved a ‘taste’ for drugs for some utilitarian reason, such as defense against parasites,” Hagen said by email, “but then we elaborate this behavior in rituals, etc., exactly as we do for eating food and every other utilitarian behavior. “Countless rituals have developed around food that do not relate to nutrition. The same goes for sex, clothing, shelter and other utilitarian behaviors. All these behaviors are (and were) essential to survival and reproduction, but we humans have a tendency to elaborate everything. We think the same might be true of recreational drugs.” * * * That would mean that in the Aka’s ongoing battle with worms, pot is “instrumental.” The term was coined in 2011 by psychiatrist Christian P. Mueller to describe the way that people learn to take drugs for purposes other than to get stoned. “Humans are able to learn that mental states can be changed on purpose by drugs, in order to facilitate other, non-drug-related behaviors,” Mueller wrote in the journal  Behavioral Brain Science. The drugs-as-instruments idea is a shift from the usual way of seeing drug use as a mark of human failure, whether as a step toward addiction or a purely Bacchanalian compulsion. Mueller argues that drug use should also be viewed as “a stable and widespread behavior in its own right,” at least among people who don’t get addicted—and Mueller frequently points out that most drug takers don’t. You already know about instrumentalization: People take psychoactive drugs all the time with a specific goal in mind other than sheer fun, whether it’s to stay awake for a long drive, achieve special insights during a religious ritual or even just relax after work. Skeptics abound. “Do drugs really allow us to cope with ‘modern’ (read: shitty/stressful) environments? Or is drug (ab)use the consequence of these environments?” asks one poster on a Bluelight web forum page about Mueller. But the idea hits home for lots of people, even those who know from drugs’ bad side. Another participant in the same Bluelight forum wrote this: “i have been dependent on substances at times, but even having been thru that, i'd still choose to use the ‘instruments’ to expand my reservoir of experiences.” Some harm reduction websites link to Mueller’s work. If drugs do have a rightful place in human society, as the argument goes, then the criminal justice and abstinence approaches to addiction need amending. * * * Mueller is not ignoring drug abuse. On the contrary, he says, “Understanding the everyday utility and the learning mechanisms of non-addictive psychotropic drug use may help to prevent abuse and the transition to drug addiction in the future.” He thinks it’s the way we form memories that holds the key to drug use of all kinds. Some of these are good memories and others bad: Psychoactive plants are technically a kind of toxin, which is why people generally experience drugs as bitter or otherwise unappealing at first. In a 2013 journal article, Mueller quoted a friend to show how the memory process works: “I smoked my first cigarette when I was 12 years old – behind the house, together with a few friends and some older guys who had provided it for trying. It was incredibly cool, not allowed of course, and it tasted awful. Despite persistent peer pressure, the memory of this one event still accompanies me until present day. It forms part of my personality and prevents me from trying cigarettes again. My first experience with alcohol a little later at the retirement party of my much beloved granddad was quite bad as well. I felt sick and abstained from any countable consumption of alcohol for a few years. However, when I was a student I felt forced to social drinking which I tentatively did. At one occasion, however, I learned from rather unexpected feedback that my constitutively restricted social skills were tremendously enhanced after a few glasses of wine. This one episode, again vividly remembered to the present day, has shaped my drug consumption behavior into another direction. After establishing a working dose window, I can now ‘instrumentalize’ a controlled consumption for just this one purpose: ‘socializing on demand.’" * * * The Aka make good subjects for researching instrumental drug use (at least the unconscious intestinal health kind) because they don’t have access to sophisticated health care. And that’s the way things were for humans during 99% of our time on the planet. We have been evolving our drug needs and tastes for hundreds of thousands of years. It’s also possible that plants have been doing the same. Indeed, Ed Hagen believes that humans and the plants we smoke, snort or shoot up may have “coevolved.” He thinks this is why drugs are able to mimic human brain chemicals like serotonin and dopamine and why humans are able to exploit these plants for our own assorted purposes. It’s a slippery slope from the idea of human-drug co-evolution to the wacky views of people like Terence McKenna, who theorized that the mind-expanding power of magic mushrooms helped advance our ancestors beyond apes. Or consider Ronald K. Siegel’s idea that drugs are a biological need. He says pursuit of drugs is a basic human drive, the “fourth drive” along with food, water and sex. But who’s to say, in the era of designer drugs and cheddar cheese Weed-Itz pot snacks, where our long and lively relationship with plant toxins will take us next?

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The GOP has become the party of infantile rage

The Democratic Party is quite often infuriating. The activist left even more so. It'd be disingenuous to suggest that your side isn't flawed -- that it doesn't get caught in lies or is completely gaffe-free. It does, and it is not. Likewise, sure, it's entirely possible that Hillary Clinton is fibbing about her private email account. She's certainly been dodging questions about the issue. But it's also just more of the same. It's another press-driven story that's resonating very little with anyone outside the beltway or beyond the reach of cranky Fox News viewers. It might turn into something awful, or it might just go away. Elsewhere, the Obama administration has frustratingly stumbled over itself, mainly in the messaging and communications department. The plan to allow Shell to drill off the Alaskan shore in the Arctic ocean is a huge step in a potentially harrowing direction, given the potential for another BP-style catastrophe. Meanwhile, no, the Democrats haven't been entirely on-message in reaction to #BlackLivesMatter activists, sometimes even responding with the tone-deaf "All Lives Matter" slogan. Yes, Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, the Iran deal and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) are all Democratic creations, and it's absolutely fair to debate and bicker about the merits of each. It's all fair game, and it all fits perfectly within the wheelhouse of normal political argle-bargle. On the other hand, the Republican Party and the modern conservative movement are so utterly at the mercy of their most extreme elements -- on everything from Benghazi, to racism people, to reproductive health, and now even the contents of key sections of the U.S. Constitution. Indeed, while the left can suffer its own unhinged moments, there's simply no comparison when it comes to what's happening on the far-right. Especially now. While Clinton and Sanders are talking about the middle class, the minimum wage, foreign policy and voting rights, here's a sampling of what the Republican presidential candidates are discussing: • The Republicans are talking about eliminating the birthright citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment in order to deport the children of undocumented immigrations. (Children should only be protected before they're born, after all.) Incidentally, almost all of the top GOP candidates have joined Donald Trump in supporting this ludicrous and completely unattainable idea. • Likewise, all of the GOP candidates are weighing in on the virtue of the phrase "anchor babies," which is, in fact, a racist term for the children of immigrants -- and, specifically, American citizens of Latino descent. It boggles the mind, not to mention common sense and enlightened self interest. Does the GOP ever want to win a presidential election again? (Incidentally take a quick glance at what Donald Trump said on Friday on the subject: "Oh, you want me to say that instead, OK? No, I'll use the word 'anchor baby.' Excuse me — I’ll use the word 'anchor baby.'" Far be it from me to nitpick the presumptive GOP nominee, but "anchor baby" is two words, not one.) • Meanwhile, two not insignificant conservatives have stepped forward in the last week in support of enslaving deported workers. Fox News Channel's Jesse Watters floated the idea on "The Five," and suggested that illegal immigrants be forced to build the border wall. Meanwhile, talk-radio host Jan Mickelson proposed making illegal immigrants property of the state and forcing them into compulsory labor. Mickelson went on to ask, "What's wrong with slavery?" • Ted Cruz, the son of immigrants, actually appeared on Mickelson's show on Friday in spite of the host's anti-immigrant screed just days earlier. The cause of greatest concern to the senator and presidential candidate? "The Atheist Taliban." Okay! • Mike Huckabee recently came out in support of a law in Paraguay that forced an 11-year-old rape victim to birth her rapist's child. Elsewhere, Scott Walker said that he's opposed to abortion even when the life of the mother is threatened by the pregnancy. He said this during a nationally-televised debate. • And the entire Republican field has wrapped their arms around a series of fraudulent sting videos alleging to show malfeasance on the part of Planned Parenthood, even though numerous fact-checks showed the videos were deceptively edited. Since the videos have been released, a handful of states have exonerated Planned Parenthood of any wrongdoing. But Bobby Jindal, for his part, opted to block Medicaid funds from going to the health clinics even though exactly none of the Planned Parenthood facilities in Louisiana offer abortion services. So, the far-right is mainstreaming slavery; it's pushing for women and even young girls to die from complicated pregnancies or to birth the children of rapists; it's planning to strip the citizenship clause from an amendment that was ratified 150 years ago; it's embracing racist colloquialisms; and it's acting upon videos that are proven hoaxes. The Republican race for the presidency is all about who's better at blurting ridiculous non-sequiturs -- all of it following the lead of their reality-show frontrunner. The Democrats, in spite of their faults, are the only grown-ups in the room. Yet shows like "Morning Joe" and "Meet the Press" continue to treat each side as if they're exhibiting similar behavior. There's simply no Democratic equivalent to the insanity that's being hurled around on the Republican side of the aisle these days. None. While the Democrats are focused on actual issues, and caught in a relatively innocuous scandal, the GOP is off on a series fringe crusades that bear little resemblance to the issues that most affect voters -- that is unless voters are desperate to bring back slavery. Indeed, the Democrats have an opportunity here to show maturity and moderation in the face of an increasingly clownish, incoherent GOP. Honestly, it won't take much effort to do so.The Democratic Party is quite often infuriating. The activist left even more so. It'd be disingenuous to suggest that your side isn't flawed -- that it doesn't get caught in lies or is completely gaffe-free. It does, and it is not. Likewise, sure, it's entirely possible that Hillary Clinton is fibbing about her private email account. She's certainly been dodging questions about the issue. But it's also just more of the same. It's another press-driven story that's resonating very little with anyone outside the beltway or beyond the reach of cranky Fox News viewers. It might turn into something awful, or it might just go away. Elsewhere, the Obama administration has frustratingly stumbled over itself, mainly in the messaging and communications department. The plan to allow Shell to drill off the Alaskan shore in the Arctic ocean is a huge step in a potentially harrowing direction, given the potential for another BP-style catastrophe. Meanwhile, no, the Democrats haven't been entirely on-message in reaction to #BlackLivesMatter activists, sometimes even responding with the tone-deaf "All Lives Matter" slogan. Yes, Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, the Iran deal and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) are all Democratic creations, and it's absolutely fair to debate and bicker about the merits of each. It's all fair game, and it all fits perfectly within the wheelhouse of normal political argle-bargle. On the other hand, the Republican Party and the modern conservative movement are so utterly at the mercy of their most extreme elements -- on everything from Benghazi, to racism people, to reproductive health, and now even the contents of key sections of the U.S. Constitution. Indeed, while the left can suffer its own unhinged moments, there's simply no comparison when it comes to what's happening on the far-right. Especially now. While Clinton and Sanders are talking about the middle class, the minimum wage, foreign policy and voting rights, here's a sampling of what the Republican presidential candidates are discussing: • The Republicans are talking about eliminating the birthright citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment in order to deport the children of undocumented immigrations. (Children should only be protected before they're born, after all.) Incidentally, almost all of the top GOP candidates have joined Donald Trump in supporting this ludicrous and completely unattainable idea. • Likewise, all of the GOP candidates are weighing in on the virtue of the phrase "anchor babies," which is, in fact, a racist term for the children of immigrants -- and, specifically, American citizens of Latino descent. It boggles the mind, not to mention common sense and enlightened self interest. Does the GOP ever want to win a presidential election again? (Incidentally take a quick glance at what Donald Trump said on Friday on the subject: "Oh, you want me to say that instead, OK? No, I'll use the word 'anchor baby.' Excuse me — I’ll use the word 'anchor baby.'" Far be it from me to nitpick the presumptive GOP nominee, but "anchor baby" is two words, not one.) • Meanwhile, two not insignificant conservatives have stepped forward in the last week in support of enslaving deported workers. Fox News Channel's Jesse Watters floated the idea on "The Five," and suggested that illegal immigrants be forced to build the border wall. Meanwhile, talk-radio host Jan Mickelson proposed making illegal immigrants property of the state and forcing them into compulsory labor. Mickelson went on to ask, "What's wrong with slavery?" • Ted Cruz, the son of immigrants, actually appeared on Mickelson's show on Friday in spite of the host's anti-immigrant screed just days earlier. The cause of greatest concern to the senator and presidential candidate? "The Atheist Taliban." Okay! • Mike Huckabee recently came out in support of a law in Paraguay that forced an 11-year-old rape victim to birth her rapist's child. Elsewhere, Scott Walker said that he's opposed to abortion even when the life of the mother is threatened by the pregnancy. He said this during a nationally-televised debate. • And the entire Republican field has wrapped their arms around a series of fraudulent sting videos alleging to show malfeasance on the part of Planned Parenthood, even though numerous fact-checks showed the videos were deceptively edited. Since the videos have been released, a handful of states have exonerated Planned Parenthood of any wrongdoing. But Bobby Jindal, for his part, opted to block Medicaid funds from going to the health clinics even though exactly none of the Planned Parenthood facilities in Louisiana offer abortion services. So, the far-right is mainstreaming slavery; it's pushing for women and even young girls to die from complicated pregnancies or to birth the children of rapists; it's planning to strip the citizenship clause from an amendment that was ratified 150 years ago; it's embracing racist colloquialisms; and it's acting upon videos that are proven hoaxes. The Republican race for the presidency is all about who's better at blurting ridiculous non-sequiturs -- all of it following the lead of their reality-show frontrunner. The Democrats, in spite of their faults, are the only grown-ups in the room. Yet shows like "Morning Joe" and "Meet the Press" continue to treat each side as if they're exhibiting similar behavior. There's simply no Democratic equivalent to the insanity that's being hurled around on the Republican side of the aisle these days. None. While the Democrats are focused on actual issues, and caught in a relatively innocuous scandal, the GOP is off on a series fringe crusades that bear little resemblance to the issues that most affect voters -- that is unless voters are desperate to bring back slavery. Indeed, the Democrats have an opportunity here to show maturity and moderation in the face of an increasingly clownish, incoherent GOP. Honestly, it won't take much effort to do so.

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Ben Folds: “I’m the rock musician dressed in classical clothing”

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