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Dr. Webster was the first to report, in 2000, that Toxoplasma infection piqued rats’ interest in cat urine. She found that infected rats acted normally otherwise, and only their survival instincts seemed to suffer. She called their response “fatal feline attraction.” |
The Stanford researchers tested the brain activity of 36 infected and uninfected rats exposed to either the smell of a cat or that of an estrous female rat. They focused on two neuronal circuits — one for fear and one for sexual attraction. The two neuronal pathways run essentially side by side through a region deep in the brain called the amygdala, involved in emotions and many behaviors. To detect the level of neural activity, they measured the activity of a protein that is expressed only when neurons |
fire. |
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Toxoplasma infection may not directly cause the neuronal sabotage, said Patrick House, a graduate student in Dr. Sapolsky’s lab who carried out the bulk of the research. “The parasite could trigger an inflammation or some other response that in turn affects the brain,” he said. |
Toxoplasma infection in humans almost certainly would not affect human behavior as it does the rat’s, Mr. House says. |
At least two billion people worldwide are infected by the protozoan, many from eating infected meat. Initial symptoms are mild flu, after which the parasite forms cysts that lodge in the brain. There they remain for decades and are thought to have little or no effect in adults, except in people with compromised immune systems. |
Infection does, however, pose serious dangers for a fetus, so pregnant women are advised to take special care to avoid infection. |
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Band members and friends Nick DiSalvo, Jack Donovan, and Matt Couto already dismissed any last remains of stoner metal stereotypes on Lore (2015). Their current album, which was written following the long and acclaimed Lore tour in moments of intense creativity, is a journey into prog rock and psychedelic worlds. Six monumental songs, huge in sound, each of them their own cosmic expedition. |
What begins as driving mid-tempo rock filled with heavy guitar riffs repeatedly erupts into melodic tangents and clever variations. The high demands that DiSalvo places on his own songwriting seem to become more unfettered from minute to minute - as does the pleasure of listening to him. Guest musicians Michael Samos and Mike Risberg have added additional guitars, pedal steel and keyboards to the trio, making Elder's sound more voluminous than ever, and the influences found here range from 70's prog |
dinosaurs such as Yes, King Crimson or Pink Floyd to their kindred spirits in the European psychedelic and space rock scenes. And it is of course a cliché, but Elder bring their own organism to life from all these influences. |
Elder already strike out on their chosen path on the album opener "Sanctuary." What begins as a trademark stoner song turns on it's own axis several times at minute four, morphing into lyrical polyphonic pickings and using a Mellotron to sweet-talk it's way to an unfathomable and brutal finale. "The Falling Veil" moves between Thin Lizzy with palpitations and undulating progressive riffs. Those who think of Kyuss during "Staving Off Truth" won't be able to hold that though the entire 11 minutes of the song. |
And as hymn-like as the riffs can be, the band never settles down to one part for longer than two minutes. But at the same time, the songs never lose their coherence, because all the parts are logically woven into one another. And it could be that "Sonntag," a detour into the Krautrock motorik functions of Neu!, most clearly shows the limitless cosmic ambitions of Elder. |
Elder will be taking "Reflections Of A Floating World" live to European fans in July and August 2017, followed by a USA tour in the fall. The East Coast trio will be a quartet for the first time ever on these tours with the addition of Mike Risberg on second guitar and keyboards. Anybody who has already seen Elder live know that they shouldn't miss the opportunity to see them on this tour! |
Track Listing: |
1. Sanctuary |
2. The Falling Veil |
3. Staving Off Truth |
4. Blind |
5. Sonntag |
6. Thousand Hands |
(Yo, this piece originally appeared on Tumblr . I am tired and don't want to write any more.) |
The first time I saw “So-Called Angels,” the much-maligned Christmas episode of My So-Called Life, I was but 14, and I thought it was the best episode of television I had ever seen. Indeed, I was so moved by it that I woke my mother up from a dead sleep to tell her all about it. I remember how my voice cracked just a bit when I got to the bit where Patty Chase asked Juliana Hatfield’s homeless, guitar-strumming angel, “When did you die?” (I remember this took me completely by surprise at the time, even |
though it’s so obvious Hatfield is meant to be an angel). I remember how the final image of the Chase family—plus Ricky and Brian—leaving the church, watched over by Hatfield, who exits the screen with one glimpse of a feathery, luminous wing, struck me as absolutely perfect. I remember being dumbstruck by the episode’s sensitive depiction of teenage homelessness, right alongside angels, something I still so desperately wanted to believe in. |
In a way, “So-Called Angels” hit me directly in my sweet spot. Homelessness was a problem I fretted over often as a relatively affluent teenager growing up in the middle of nowhere. I would frequently force myself to cry over the song “That Could Have Been Me” by Christian recording group A Cappella, not because I was genuinely moved by it but because I forced myself to imagine a television episode version of it I constructed in my head, wherein I met a poor homeless kid my own age, learned some valuable |
lessons from him, then realized that that could have been me, as A Cappella took us home. I cried because I felt like I should, so I placed things in a context where they were all about me. “So-Called Angels” more or less isthat episode of television I imagined, only much better executed than what was in my head (which was more or less a very special episode of Family Matters) and with an angel chaser. |
Angels were everywhere in the mid-90s. There were all of these surveys about how this or that many Americans believed in angels, and what did it all mean? They were on the cover of newsmagazines and at the center of one of the most popular TV dramas of the era (yes,Touched By An Angel was legitimately huge there for a while). Buffed up, action movie versions of them were at the center of the seminal Christian fiction books This Present Darkness and Piercing The Darkness, and the popular culture of the |
era—even the Christian-specific pop culture—was never quite sure how to thread the needle between ultra-masculine he-men and friendly helper buddies who were always there to look out for you, all the while ignoring that the actual angels in the Bible were really fucking weird. (If Angela Chase had encountered a ring of eyes in the sky, then plaintively intoned about how that could have beenher in this episode, it would be the greatest TV episode of all time.) |
To be perfectly honest, the angel is the only reason “So-Called Angels” has the reputation it does. Yes, it’s a bit more sappy than your standard My So-Called Life episode, but Christmas episodes earn a certain degree of sap, and executive producers Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick come by their attachment to Christmas sap honestly, having named their production company after It’s A Wonderful Life’s Bedford Falls. The episode, co-written by series creator Winnie Holzman and story editor Jason Katims (on |
his first big TV assignment), has that smart structure one expects from an episode of this show, where something gets shuffled all the way to the back of the deck before coming out again at episode’s end. |
When Graham, learning where Angela has been taken by the police after being rounded up in the raid on the abandoned warehouse that’s accommodating runaway teens, says, “We’re going to church,” it’s a rather thrilling moment, because you suddenly remember all of the discussion about religion among the Chases earlier in the episode, before Ricky’s plight took precedence over everything else. The show was so good at mixing up a bunch of everyday, “that’s life” sorts of occurrences and then bringing them all |
together via a lovely grace note at the end, and this is just another example of that. Bringing the characters together to listen to a hymn about going home at a church is a little obvious, to be sure, but it’s obvious in a way that works when you see the look on Bess Armstrong’s face when she sees Rickie and, later, her daughter. |
The episode also absolutely nails the Rickie subplot. The series was in largely uncharted territory for an American teen drama, as Rickie was the first regular gay character on such a show, one who couldn’t go away after one or two episodes or after teaching the series star a lesson about something. In the hands of Holzman and actor Wilson Cruz, Rickie became someone slowly trying out new sides of a sexuality he didn’t have a lot of role models for. (That Rickie would become one of TV’s most important early |
gay role models was one of the show’s foremost triumphs.) “So-Called Angels” turns his struggle to find acceptance into the center of a Christmas story. We’re all seeking acceptance and lighting candles in remembrance. Rickie’s just caught in a very real, very terrifying situation that lots of kids his age had been and would be trapped in before and after the show’s run. And in Patty and Graham—who ultimately take the boy in, as you know they must—the series subtly expands the circle of TV human rights. |
Rickie doesn’t deserve to be punished for who he is, and Graham and Patty realize that. Being uncomfortable with him doesn’t trump the fact that they have a responsibility to him as a fellow human being and a friend of their daughter’s—a big message for the ‘90s. |
But then there’s that angel, and the problems of her portrayal extend beyond merely Hatfield’s weird, breathy whisper line delivery, which makes everything she says unintentionally hilarious. Check out the scene where Armstrong is just doing her damnedest to make this bit where Patty has encountered an angel out in the snow work, only she has to deal with Hatfield repeating her line from earlier about feeling like the fight is having you. It’s a nifty turn of phrase—though not one that I totally buy either |
of these characters (even the supernatural one) would say—but it’s shot down by the fact that it can only really work with Armstrong’s ability to shoot Patty’s brittleness through with warmth. Hatfield just doesn’t have that, and she ends up sounding like a really pretentious 14-year-old poet (and I know from really pretentious 14-year-old poets). |
No, the problem with the angel is that it takes a real, serious problem—homeless runaway teenagers, chased out of bad situations in their own homes—and turns it into a Christmas miracle to be “solved.” Patty and Graham taking in Rickie is genuinely heartwarming; it doesn’t really need the angel floating around the edges of the story to work. The shows of Herskovitz and Zwick were ones steeped in yuppie-life realism, in the problems and concerns of the people they knew around them. One of the accidental |
reasons for MSCL’s success is that Claire Danes’ young age (14 for the bulk of the series’ filming) necessitated the show becoming an ensemble drama instead of simply a story always from Angela’s perspective. That meant that Patty and Graham became a sort of pseudo-sequel to the pair’s earlierthirtysomething (which Holzman had been a staff writer on), but that also meant that the show would indulge in magical realism from time to time, just like the one that had indirectly given birth to it. Magical realism |
could work in a world like thirtysomething’s, where the characters frequently daydreamed in ways meant to express their inner monologues through pop culture spoofs and other cutaways. It had more trouble working in the more straightforward MSCL. |
But “So-Called Angels” also errs on the side of making the angel’s appearance too miraculous. In the fantastic thirtysomething episode “The Mike Van Dyke Show,” the main character—a man struggling with how to raise his children when he himself is Jewish (though he rarely attends synagogue) and his wife is Christian—meets an old rabbi who’s reappropriated into Santa Claus in his imaginations of a sitcom-style Christmas (hence the title). But when the episode ends and he goes to the synagogue to talk to the |
rabbi again, it seems as if the man doesn’t exist—perhaps never existed. This works because the episode suggests a myriad of possibilities in addition to “magical rabbi.” “So-Called Angels” pretty much only lets us believe the angel is an angel, and it kind of breaks the show. This isn’t a show where these things normally happen. How is Patty going to come back from the fact that she met a literal angel? How can the Chases go back to the Christmas-and-Easter Christians they were before the episode began, |
now that they know supernatural forces aren’t just at work throughout the world but, indeed, serenade their daughter with the first song off the soundtrack of their show? (That said, it’s a very pretty song.) |
It’s so easy to snark at “So-Called Angels” because the episode is so ham-fisted in a lot of ways. It has a perfectly good, perfectly moving story for a Christmas episode, one that wants to teach a lesson or be a “very special episode,” so to speak, but gains power from the time of year it’s set at and what it’s about. And then it piles on top of that this unnecessary metaphysical bullshit that obscures the real issue with the cosmology of this fictional universe. There were probably ways to fix this. Maybe |
the angel’s living identity could have become something more than just a symbol for a problem, or maybe Angela could have been the one to have the realization (a teenager meeting an angel feels much more emotionally appropriate than a grown woman). But either of these would have necessarily taken away from the Rickie storyline, which is so good at so many things. (I haven’t even mentioned that scene he shares with Jordan, which is also great—even with the ending reveal that Jordan is lighting a candle, aw.) |
So try something far more difficult. Try to approach this episode as I did at 14, when it blew me away and blew my mind. My So-Called Life is, on some level, a series about how the world is filled with mystery when you’re a teenager, how even your mother and father start to become these enigmas you can’t really perceive. What Angela wants—what I wanted at 14—is clarity for something that won’t be solved so easily, and “So-Called Angels” offers that clarity. As an adult, that feels like a cheap way out, like |
an attempt to assuage the wounds of people who have lost so much and will never understand why. For a teenager, though, it’s enough, enough to pull a girl questioning everything back toward her family and friends and enough to bring a teenage boy who loved the show a touch closer to a God he was already drifting from, a God who let terrible, random things happen but also provided a bit of light in the midst of winter’s chill. (Never mind that it was we, ourselves, providing that light in the first place.) |
In the New Testament—and especially in the Christmas story—angels are messengers, emissaries from the highest to an Earth that sometimes dare not believe in a better world coming with enough planetary revolutions. “So-Called Angels” may be a mess, but I ultimately can’t hate it because it reinstates the idea of the angel as someone who doesn’t fight back against demons or save wayward souls from straying off a path set for them from on high. All this angel is is someone who listens, someone who speaks peace |
and understanding. She is not heard on high; indeed, she’s barely heard at all. Somewhere in there is the Christmas I’ve come to know. |
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Germany: The Lübeck arson attack and the Zwickau neo-Nazi terrorist cell |
By Dietmar Henning |
16 January 2012 |
The Zwickau neo-Nazis—since 2000, responsible for at least nine cold-blooded killings of Greek and Turkish-born small business owners, several bombings, bank robberies and the murder of a policewoman from Thuringia—committed their crimes under the noses of police and intelligence agencies. |
The precise links that existed between the neo-Nazi killers Uwe Mundlos, Uwe Böhnhardt and Beate Zschäpe and the state authorities remain unclear. Der Spiegel has reported evidence that one or more members of the trio might have been working for the secret service. The intelligence agency denies any collaboration with the killers. |
What is certain is that before they went underground, the three were being watched by the security authorities and that they maintained contact with undercover agents in the neo-Nazi scene who were highly paid for their services. |
It is not the first time that right-wing killers have enjoyed the protection of the state. A particularly well-documented case is the arson attack on a refugee hostel in Lübeck in January 1996. |
There were several attacks on foreigners’ hostels in Germany in the early 1990s. On November 23, 1992 in Mölln, two girls (aged 14 and 10) and their 51-year-old grandmother were killed and nine people seriously injured. On May 29, 1993 in Solingen, five people died in an attack and 17 suffered injuries, some life-threatening. In both cases, the right-wing perpetrators were identified and convicted. The Solingen arsonists had regularly visited a martial arts club run by a secret service informant. |
On the night of June 5, 1993, the house of a Turkish family in Hattingen burned down. An arson attack was immediately suspected. A demonstration and donations to the family testified to the spontaneous solidarity with the victims. But a little later, police and prosecutors alleged that the family had set their own house on fire. On the basis of completely outrageous claims, the mother was charged with arson and giving false information about a criminal act. In 1996, she was acquitted by a court in Bochum. |
During this period there were a number of vicious attacks by neo-Nazis on immigrants, homeless and disabled persons, and social dissidents, often with fatal consequences. Over 150 people have been killed by the extreme right since German reunification in 1990. |
The Lübeck arson attack on a refugee shelter on the night of January 18, 1996 was a high point of these atrocities. Throughout the country, outrage over attacks by right-wing extremists had been growing. In 1995, initiatives were taken to post night guards in front of refugee homes to protect them against arson attacks. On the morning of the 18th, the whole country was discussing the attack in Lübeck, in which ten people died and 38 were injured, some seriously. |
It soon became known that three young men from neighbouring Grevesmühlen—one of whom had a right-wing background—were stopped by a nearby police patrol at about the time of the crime. Hair samples of the men showed scorching of the eyelashes and eyebrows. A forensic medical report said the traces of fire were “fresh,” meaning “no more than 24 hours old.” The men from Grevesmühlen were unable to provide a credible explanation for the scorching. |
A roommate of one of the three suspects told police that his roommate had informed him two weeks before “that he wants to set fire to something in Lübeck.” A girlfriend said the same person had told her the next morning that “there was someone who was still burning down on the ground by the fire there.” The student, Sylvio Amoussou, a refugee from Togo, burned to death on the porch of the hostel. |
The three men from Grevesmühlen were remanded in custody, along with Dirk Techentin, who, according to the testimony of the three, was with them on the night of the crime and who also had burn marks on his face. It seemed only a matter of time before the crime would be completely solved. |
In the event, the case turned into a farce. As with the three Zwickau killers, the Lübeck case was characterised by errors and incompetence, if not outright sabotage, by the security authorities. |
On the morning of January 19, something happened that no one had expected. The four men from Grevesmühlen were set free. The public was told they had an alibi. On the night of the fire, they had been seen by the police shortly before the crime, far away from the crime scene. This police alibi later turned out to be false. |
Just two days later, the prosecution, under the chairmanship of the senior public prosecutor, Klaus-Dieter Schultz, who is still in office, brought forward a new prime suspect. A paramedic named Jens Leonard had emerged as a witness and reported that Safwan Eid, a resident in the refugee hostel, had told him that night on the way to the hospital that he had started the fire. The witness said he had heard the phrase: “It was us.” |
Eid, who vehemently denied the charge, was brought in for questioning on the evening of January 19. He then languished in jail for over half a year. The allegations against him could not be substantiated. |
Following the arrest of Eid, clues pointing in the direction of extreme right circles were ignored by the judiciary and police. The existence of the singed hair samples from the Grevesmühlen men was concealed from the public for months, and the samples disappeared mysteriously. An expert witness, who had testified under oath that she had forwarded the samples to the police, was charged with perjury. |
There are many indications that the State Criminal Investigation Office (LKA) played a crucial role in keeping the right-wing suspects from becoming the focus of the investigation of the Lübeck attack. In the case of Eid, clues, facts and witness statements that exonerated the accused or substantiated suspicions about the men from Grevesmühlen were consistently ignored or dismissed as “irrelevant.” |
Even during the investigation, the press reported that the main witness against Eid, Jens Leonard, had ties to right-wing circles and possibly to at least one of Grevesmühlen men. |
It also seemed that one of the suspects, Dirk Techentin, might have been an informant. The police files on him noted “personal details known,” although this had not previously been reported. |
Safwan Eid was finally acquitted in July 1997 due to the lack of evidence. In an appeal before the Kiel district court he was also found not guilty because there were “no indications” of “participation of the accused in the crime.” |
Following this, Maik Wotenow, one of the Grevesmühlen men, admitted to the crime more than once. The first time was in early 1997, when a store employee accused him of shoplifting in Gustrow. When the employee demanded that Wotenow return the stolen goods and threatened to call the police, Wotenow boasted, “The police can’t touch me.” He said he had been present during the attack in Lübeck and had helped set fire to the refugee home. When the employee stood his ground, Wotenow and his cronies beat him up. |
The employee filed a complaint with the police and six weeks later identified Wotenow based on photos. |
The authorities nevertheless refused to mount any further investigation of the Lübeck fire. |
In February 1998, Wotenow went voluntarily to a department head in Neustrelitzer prison, where he was serving time for various offences, and confessed to the crime. The next day, he repeated his confession to detectives. |
The official investigation came increasingly under suspicion because of the reported confessions. In January 2000, Eid’s lawyer applied to the High Court for a prosecution case to be made against the men from Grevesmühlen. Shortly afterwards, the authorities silenced the detained Wotenow, sentencing him to a further six months in prison for making false accusations and deceiving the authorities through “false” confessions. |
The arson attack in Lübeck happened almost exactly 16 years ago. It is a particularly serious example of how the security agencies held a protective hand over extreme right-wing criminals while turning victims into suspects. Similarly, the relatives of the victims of the Zwickau neo-Nazi murderers have been pressed to admit the deceased had “criminal connections.” |
The protection of the Lübeck suspects from 1996 to 2000 by the secret service, police and judiciary encouraged the violent neo-Nazi scene. In February 1998, the Zwickau three—Mundlos, Böhnhardt and Zschäpe—went to ground under the eyes of the security agencies and began their racist killing spree. |
By Printus LeBlanc |
On Tuesday, a radical Islamist launched a terrorist attack against pedestrians and cyclists, blocks from the World Trade Center in New York. The terrorist adopted the tactics of other attackers in Europe by using a vehicle as a weapon, in this case, a rented Home Depot truck. Shortly after the suspect was subdued by police, his identity and how he came to be in the U.S. became known. The man that killed eight and injured more than a dozen was an invited guest. |
Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov entered the U.S. legally through what is known as the Diversity Visa Lottery Program in 2010. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 was amended in 1990 with the passage of the Immigration Act of 1990, S. 358. The 1990 bill increased the number of family-based immigration visas, created five occupational categories, and created the diversity visa lottery program. The program was designed to encourage legal immigration from countries that were “underrepresented” in the |
current immigration flows. |
The program makes 50,000 permanent resident visas available every year. The visas are divided among nations from which immigrant admissions were lower than a 50,000 over the preceding five years. To be eligible for the visa program, the alien must have a high school education or the equivalent, or two years’ experience in an occupation which requires at least two years of training or experience. |
Since the inception of the program, there have been numerous examples of fraud and misuse. A 2007 Government Accountability Office report about the program stated, “At 5 of the 11 posts we reviewed, consular officers reported that the majority of DV applicants, lacking access to a computer or internet savvy, use “visa agents” to enter the lottery. Some agents take advantage of DV applicants; visa agents in Bangladesh have intercepted applicants’ program documents and charged ransoms of up to $20,000 or |
coerced applicants into sham DV marriages. Consular officers at 6 posts reported that widespread use of fake documents, such as birth certificates, marriage certificates, and passports, presented challenges when verifying the identities of applicants and dependents.” |
A Congressional Research Service report about the program found evidence of human trafficking, reporting, “Some might reference the 2009 arrests of Lassissi Afolabi and Akouavi Kpade Afolabi, who coerced foreign nationals into human trafficking and forced labor rings by paying for the diversity visas if they listed the trafficked young women as their own family on the visa application.” |
The program has survived more than a few attempts to end it, with the closest coming in the mid-2000s. |
In the 109th Congress Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisc.) introduced the Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005, H.R. 4437. The legislation passed the House with bipartisan support in December of 2005. One provision of the bill eliminated the diversity visa program. Unfortunately, despite a Republican majority, the bill was stalled where all good legislation goes to die, the Senate. |
Following the attack, the President called for Congress to act and end the program. The good news for the President is there is already a bill that does that. |
Senators Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and David Purdue (R-Ga.) have introduced the Reforming American Immigration for the Strong Employment Act (RAISE Act), S. 1720. The bill focuses U.S. immigration policy on merit and need, instead of the familial based system currently in use. The legislation also terminates the lottery program. |
The President has endorsed the Cotton legislation and should make it the centerpiece of his immigration policy. |
Clearly, the program is highly flawed. It has been used in human trafficking, bribery, and now terrorism. It is time to end the program, and Congress can act. They can pass the RAISE Act and dare any House Member or Senator to vote against an immigration policy that puts the priorities of foreigners over the priorities of Americans. |
Printus LeBlanc is a contributing editor for Americans for Limited Government |