Aural Sex, Ctd

Joe Kloc explores the enduring appeal of painter Bob Ross and finds that he is especially loved by those who believe in “autonomous sensory meridian response”:

For those who experience it, ASMR is most frequently described as “the tingles” in the head and back that one gets when hearing certain sounds, particularly in the context of some mundane task like being fitted for a suit or learning to paint trees. (But, as just about anyone in the ASMR community will tell you, it is almost impossible to describe to someone who, through bad luck or cosmic misalignment, does not experience the sensation.)

ASMR stands for “autonomous sensory meridian response.” It was coined by Jenn Allen, the founder of asmr-research.org, who hoped that legitimizing the phenomenon with a scientific-sounding name would spur research into the subject. But it is, for lack of a better description, completely unscientific: Allen once commented to Vice that she chose meridian because it was a more “polite” synonym for orgasm.

So far, there is no science to support ASMR. But the phenomenon, which boomed on YouTube beginning in 2010, has gotten large enough to warrant coverage by The New York Times, The Atlantic, Dr. Oz and Oprah Winfrey. A Kickstarter fund-raising campaign for a documentary on ASMR has received more than $15,000 in pledges. If ASMR isn’t real, its online community, which numbers in the millions, certainly is.

And among the dozen or so creators and consumers of ASMR that Newsweek spoke to, one thing about it is almost universally agreed upon: The lasting, unlikely, appeal of Bob Ross is, at bottom, due to his uncanny ability to induce the ASMR response with every breath and stroke of his brush. As Ilse Blansert, the creator of the calculator video, put it, “If you have one thing in common, 9 out of 10 times it’s Bob Ross.” Ross, she adds, is often referred to as the “king of ASMR.” As a commenter wrote beneath a video of Ross painting a mountain, “Bob Ross [was] the creator of ASMR…without even trying…dayum.” The video has more than 6 million views.

Seen above. Previous Dish on ASMR here.

Manmade Man Parts

Lab-grown vaginas? Already a thing. Lab-grown penises? Science is working on it:

In their trials, researchers make “scaffolds” of rabbit penises by washing donor organs in detergent to kill all the living cells. This process leaves a collagen frame that can be seeded with penile cells from the recipient rabbit. The lab-grown penis is specifically rich with cultivated muscle and endothelial cells, which are essential for erectile function. The cell cultivation and scaffold creation takes weeks, but in the end, the rabbits who had new penises grafted onto their bodies gained sexual and reproductive ability. Indeed, when 12 of the newly-phallused males were put into cages with females, they mated within a minute, resulting in four pregnancies.

“The rabbit studies were very encouraging,” said [Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine] director Anthony Atala in an interview with the Guardian. Atala is an emerging icon of biomedical futurism, especially after his 2011 Ted Talk about 3D printing kidneys. He’s optimistic that lab-grown penises will be available to men in five years, but acknowledges that there are a lot of hurdles to clear before then.

If ever there was a fortune to be made … but no word yet on whether the researchers will “grow a pair” as well.

How Scared Should We Be?

Ebola Virus

David Willman relays concerns from some Ebola experts about our knowledge of how the disease spreads, some of whom “question the official assertion that Ebola cannot be transmitted through the air”:

In late 1989, virus researcher Charles L. Bailey supervised the government’s response to an outbreak of Ebola among several dozen rhesus monkeys housed for research in Reston, Va., a suburb of Washington. What Bailey learned from the episode informs his suspicion that the current strain of Ebola afflicting humans might be spread through tiny liquid droplets propelled into the air by coughing or sneezing. “We know for a fact that the virus occurs in sputum and no one has ever done a study [disproving that] coughing or sneezing is a viable means of transmitting,” he said. Unqualified assurances that Ebola is not spread through the air, Bailey said, are “misleading.”

[Dr. C.J.] Peters, whose CDC team studied cases from 27 households that emerged during a 1995 Ebola outbreak in Democratic Republic of Congo, said that while most could be attributed to contact with infected late-stage patients or their bodily fluids, “some” infections may have occurred via “aerosol transmission.”

Jonathan Ball dismisses fears of airborne Ebola:

While respiratory transmission has been shown in the laboratory, this was using a highly artificial animal model system, and most scientists concur that the virus is not spread through the respiratory route.

Similarly, in the only study of its kind, a report in the Journal of Infectious Diseases showed that the risk of contracting Ebola virus from fomites – particles loitering in the environment – was also very small. So all of the evidence suggests that if you avoid transferring virus from an infected individual or contaminated cadaver then the risk of infection is very low indeed.

But Allahpundit sees reason to worry about Ebola mutating into a more contagious virus:

The virus simply hasn’t had much of a chance to evolve while passing from person to person. It does now, with an outcome that’s yet to be determined. Just today, the World Health Organization walked back the conventional wisdom that the virus incubates in an infected person for no more than 21 days. Turns out that a man who’s gotten the disease and survived it can still pass it through his semen for up to 70 days afterward and possibly more than 90 days. Ebola could thus continue to thrive in Africa a la HIV as a killer STD.

Neo-Neocon notes something interesting too, per the bit in the excerpt about what it means to be “symptomatic”: Both Thomas Duncan, the Dallas Ebola patient, and the nurse in Spain had “slight fevers” when they first presented themselves to doctors. Fevers associated with Ebola typically run 101.5 or more. Could it be that victims with “slight fevers” are sufficiently symptomatic to pass the disease on?

Responding to those fears, Peter Barlow makes the point that just because a virus has an opportunity to mutate doesn’t mean it will:

While this certainly seems to be a real possibility, it is worth looking at what has happened with H5N1 avian influenza (“bird flu”). This highly contagious virus is relatively common in birds in Asia. But despite numerous human infections over the past 15-20 years, it has never mutated to spread through the air.

Alex Park has more on the WHO’s statement:

The sample sizes for these studies are extremely small, and it’s unclear just how great a risk the semen of surviving men poses in the weeks following their illness. Still, officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have recommended that they use condoms. And Doctors Without Borders—which has been on the front lines of the current outbreak since its early stages—is distributing condoms to survivors, according to a spokesperson for the group. …

Semen may not be the only bodily fluid through which a patient recovering from Ebola could pass on the disease. In 2000, researchers tested the fluids of a female Ebola survivor whose blood was already clear of the virus. Fifteen days after first falling ill, Ebola was still found in the woman’s breast milk. Her child eventually died of Ebola, though the researchers could not be certain the child got sick from feeding.

Meanwhile, Scott McConnell can’t believe we haven’t issued a travel ban yet:

In defense of the current, not very rigorous, regime, President Obama argues that “in recent months we’ve had thousands of travelers arriving from West Africa and so far only one case of Ebola.” But this was in the early stages of the epidemic, before the breakout of Ebola in West Africa’s cities. Does Obama really want thousands more West Africans flying here once Ebola cases number more than a million?

The answer appears to be yes. Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies has pointed out that 13,000 visas for travel to America have been handed out in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea—which means that so long as such travelers don’t have a fever observed by the West African screeners when boarding and can get a ticket, they’re coming to the U.S.

Some issues are complicated, but this one seems simple. So long as the epidemic is raging, why should even a single traveler come here from the Ebola-infected countries?

Karen Weintraub outlines the case against such a policy:

Many public health experts who oppose the travel ban argue that it’s simply not practical. That includes Columbia University’s [Stephen] Morse, who describes himself as a “fence-sitter” on the issue but doesn’t support a travel ban right now because people with financial means can travel to an intermediate country before entering the United States. West Africa’s many porous borders make such travel even easier, he said.

It wouldn’t make sense to ban people who fly out of Senegal—where, like the United States, there has been only one case of Ebola, Morse said. But if one person with Ebola made it there, others could, too. A ban could also encourage people to lie about where they have been, Morse said: “One of the real concerns is that if you outlaw [travel], it will discourage people from coming forth with the truth.”

Mary Katherine Ham is characteristically skeptical of the government’s actions thus far:

It’s true that the administration has some kind of process in place to deal with the possibility of infected people getting to the U.S., albeit so bare and reactive a response that even senators don’t know anything about it. It’s also true the administration constantly uses incompetence as an excuse for its own failures, which it routinely does not find out about until they are reported in the media. It’s true that the CDC has done good and competent things in the past for public health. It’s also true that government health organizations have grossly mishandled anthrax, bird flu, and smallpox in the last year.

(Photo: In this handout from the Center for Disease Control, a colorized transmission electron micrograph of an Ebola virus virion is seen. By CDC via Getty Images)

Rand Paul Stands Up For Emergency Contraception

Olivia Nuzzi has details:

While on a college tour in South Carolina [last] week, a red-headed woman in a baseball cap asked Paul if drugs that prevent conception, like Plan B, should be legal. Paul, leaning gracelessly on the side of the podium, stated matter-of-factly: “I’m not opposed to birth control.” He paused and shrugged. “That’s basically what Plan B is. Plan B is taking two birth control pills in the morning and two in the evening. I’m not opposed to that, or don’t think there should be any laws opposing that.”

As reported by The Daily Beast, Paul’s statement resulted in the prominent social conservative Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, attacking him on Twitter — which left Team Paul “fuming.”

Suderman puts Paul’s remarks in context:

The GOP probably won’t come out as the party of gay rights and the pill in time for the 2016 election, but those issues won’t be front and center. If anything, judging by the Summit, most Republican politicians are likely to try to avoid talking about gay marriage whenever possible. And when it comes to contraception, many will emphasize support for greater access by making it available over-the-counter.

The causes behind the Republican party’s shift are complex—changing social norms, the shifting demographics of the electorate, and the decline of religiosity in American life are all factors. But rather than trace the reasons for the transformation, I think it’s worth dwelling briefly on how rapid and drastic the shift on these issues, especially gay marriage, has been, and what that shift suggests about the stability of internal power dynamics in political parties.

But Ryan Lizza has a hard time squaring Paul’s comments with his support of the Life at Conception Act:

In my recent Profile of Senator Rand Paul, Dr. John Downing, the Senator’s friend and former medical partner, expressed his worries about Paul’s sponsorship of the Life at Conception Act, also known as the personhood law. The bill would ban abortion and grant the unborn all the legal protections of the Fourteenth Amendment, beginning at “the moment of fertilization.” To Downing, who is an ardent Paul supporter, this seemed like political madness. Downing said that he believed Paul’s personhood law would make some common forms of birth control illegal, and thus doom Paul’s Presidential hopes. “He’s going to lose half or more of women immediately once they find out what that would do to birth control,” Downing told me. …

As with so many other issues—the Middle East, civil rights—Paul has placed himself in a political vise on the question of when life begins. His views on personhood will be savaged by Democrats if he runs for President; and his casual endorsement of Plan B has antagonized leading social conservatives who were already highly skeptical of his pro-life bona fides.

The Politics Of Fear And Hysteria

Republicans are rolling out a new line of attack for the midterms, conflating the issues of immigration and national security to make Democrats look like surrender monkeys on both. Zeke Miller flags the above ad from the National Republican Congressional Committee, which claims that ISIS militants are coming to America “through Arizona’s backyard” – with help from Dem Congresswoman Ann Kirkpatrick, of course:

[T]he ad relies on a Sept. 10 writeup of a congressional hearing by the conservative Washington Free Beacon in which a Department of Homeland Security official was understood as telling lawmakers that ISIS “supporters are known to be plotting ways to infiltrate the United States through the border.” But a review of the testimony by DHS Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis Francis Taylor tells another story. Instead, he said, “there have been Twitter, social media exchanges among [ISIS] adherents across the globe speaking about that as a possibility.” But that is a far cry from a direct threat, and light years away from a direct plot against the homeland.

Greg Sargent looks at a similar claim from Arkansas Senate candidate Tom Cotton:

Congressman Cotton’s version seems to go a step further, envisioning an active, ongoing collaborative effort between the Islamic State, and Mexican drug cartels who are looking to diversify by branching out into terrorism, whose end goal is to kill Americans on U.S. soil.

New York Times columnist Charles Blow has performed an anatomy of this developing story on the right. Blow concluded that it originated on a conservative website, which suggested that ISIS may be “working to infiltrate the U.S. with the aid of transnational drug cartels.” A Republican Congressman from Texas similarly said ISIS and Mexican drug cartels have been “talking to each other.” And from there, it was onward to Fox News. Some of the sources Blow found overlap with the Cotton campaign’s back-up materials from conservative media.

GOP politicians aren’t the only people wilding exaggerating the ISIS threat. As Zack Beauchamp notes, the jihadists themselves are only too happy to do the same. Zack offers up “a by-no-means complete list of some of the crazier threats”:

• Take over the White House. Abu Mosa, an ISIS spokesman, told Vice that “we will raise the flag of Allah in the White House.”

• Conquer most of Syria, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon, Kuwait, and Iraq. An ISIS map shows the group controlling an implausibly large chunk of the Middle East.

• Ally with Russia to get Iranian nuclear secrets. A plan allegedly written by Abdullah Ahmed al-Meshedani, an ISIS leader with responsibility for foreign fighters, involves ISIS giving Russia access to Syrian natural gas to persuade Moscow to turn against Iran and Syria, as well as to help ISIS get nuclear weapons.

• Conquer Rome and then the world. In an address, ISIS chief Omar al-Baghdadi told his followers that “you will conquer Rome and own the world.” Rome.

• Destroy Iran using cheap Afghan carpets to undercut the Persian market. Also from the Meshedani document, this plan involves waging economic war on Iran by lowering prices in the rug market. The document also lays out designs on the Iranian caviar industry.

Quote For The Day

“[W]hat we need is honest talk about the link between belief and behavior. And no one is suffering the consequences of what Muslim “extremists” believe more than other Muslims are. The civil war between Sunni and Shia, the murder of apostates, the oppression of women—these evils have nothing to do with U.S. bombs or Israeli settlements. Yes, the war in Iraq was a catastrophe—just as Affleck and Kristof suggest. But take a moment to appreciate how bleak it is to admit that the world would be better off if we had left Saddam Hussein in power. Here was one of the most evil men who ever lived, holding an entire country hostage. And yet his tyranny was also preventing a religious war between Shia and Sunni, the massacre of Christians, and other sectarian horrors. To say that we should have left Saddam Hussein alone says some very depressing things about the Muslim world,” – Sam Harris.

My thoughts on Sam’s recent Real Time appearance here.

The Power Of Francis’ Glasnost

Synod On the Themes of Family Is Held At Vatican

Both John Paul II and Benedict XVI understood the power of open dialogue, which is why they did all they could to shut it down within the Catholic church. The sensus fidelium, the insight that ordinary Catholics may have into the Christian life, was all but banished in favor of top-down control and increasingly fastidious theological certitudes. And perhaps the most striking thing so far about the Synod now going on in Rome is simply that: a venting of reality in that airless context, that, while not in opposition to church teaching, is nonetheless frank about its challenges in the modern world.

And language matters. Ed Morrissey notes:

The most intriguing part of that discussion, at least as noted in the briefing, was a call to change the language associated with those teachings [on marriage and sexuality] and find more inclusive and welcoming language instead. The specific terms that some bishops wish to stop using are “living in sin,” “intrinsically disordered,” and “contraceptive mentality.”

Each of these terms is designed to define human beings in ways that can only wound and alienate. A couple co-habiting before marriage cannot be reduced to “sin” without obliterating everything else that may be wonderful about their relationship – and that may well lead to a successful marriage that is perfectly orthodox. Suggesting that all couples who use contraception can be reduced to endorsing a “culture of death” is equally likely to push flawed human beings away from Jesus rather than toward him. And, as for “intrinsically disordered”, Ratzinger’s prissy prose was impossible for a gay Catholic to read without feeling punched in the gut. The key to a renewal of Christianity in our age will be a shift in language, a reintroduction of the core truths of the faith with words that are not designed to wound, hurt or alienate, and that can convey truth in a positive manner for a new generation.

Then there is the remarkable testimony of an Australian married couple – about the central role that sex plays in supporting their marriage vows:

The couple explained that “gradually we came to see that the only feature that distinguishes our sacramental relationship from that of any other good Christ-centred relationship is sexual intimacy and that marriage is a sexual sacrament with its fullest expression in sexual intercourse.” “We believe,” they added, “that until married couples come to reverence sexual union as an essential part of their spirituality it is extremely hard to appreciate the beauty of teachings such as those of Humanae Vitae. We need new ways and relatable language to touch peoples’ hearts.”

Well: good for them. And wouldn’t Catholic marriages be better if more were able to tell their sexual story in ways currently repressed? There is, after all, an obvious and almost painful limitation on the clerisy’s ability to understand sexual intimacy, because they have all taken vows of celibacy. (Another gigantic obstacle, of course, is that of the nearly 200 voting participants in the Synod, only one is a woman. Of the 253 total participants, only 25 are women.) But the Australians had another point to make on the question of homosexuality:

“The domestic church” represented by the family, “has much to offer the wider Church in its evangelizing role,” the couple continued. “For example, the Church constantly faces the tension of upholding the truth while expressing compassion and mercy. Families face this tension all the time.” The couple went on to illustrate this with an example relating to homosexuality. “Friends of ours were planning their Christmas family gathering when their gay son said he wanted to bring his partner home too. They fully believed in the Church’s teachings and they knew their grandchildren would see them welcome the son and his partner into the family. Their response could be summed up in three words, ‘He is our son’.”

This, Ron and Marvis explained, “is a model of evangelization for parishes as they respond  to similar situations in their neighbourhood!” “The Church’s teaching role and its main mission is to let the world know of God’s love.”

This is what so many Catholics are already doing – because Christianity is about, among many things, a defense of human dignity and a love of the family. The hierarchy – which again has no such direct experience of actually navigating the challenges of parenting, and which seems incapable of seeing gay people as “first-class citizens” – has lost sight of this. They are still bound by fear – fear of actual gay people, of our happiness and self-worth, of our living example of the complexity of human love and sexuality. They cling to arid doctrine with little appreciation of how anyone can actually live it and not, in the heterosexual world, be cruel or dismissive or discriminatory or callous, or in the homosexual world, be uniquely alone, isolated, and without the sexual intimacy that the Australian couple celebrated as integral to their relationship.

What were seeing, I think, is how the mere fact of open discussion can shift the very direction of such discussion. We saw this in Vatican II, when new currents in the world and church transformed the meeting in ways no one quite expected. And Francis’ leadership in this contrasts so powerfully with his predecessor’s. He is not telling the church what it should do or how it should change. He has simply made it impossible for the lived reality of most Catholics to be ignored or dismissed any longer.

Some things cannot be unsaid. Some testimony from actual, broken but struggling Christians can never be forgotten. Dialogue shifts minds and hearts from the bottom up, not the top down.

“There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”

(Photo: Pope Francis leaves the Synod Hall at the end of a session of the Synod on the themes of family on October 7, 2014 in Vatican City, Vatican. By Franco Origlia/Getty Images)

The Right To Grow A Beard

Yesterday, SCOTUS heard oral arguments for Holt v. Hobbs, which involves a prisoner who wants to grow a beard for religious reasons. Dahlia Lithwick unpacks the case:

Gregory Holt, also known as Abdul Maalik Muhammad, is an inmate serving a life sentence in a maximum security prison in Arkansas after being convicted of cutting his girlfriend’s throat and stabbing her in the chest. He is a devout Muslim who, under the dictates of his religion as he understands them, is required to grow a beard. Arkansas’ prison policy states that prisoners may not have beards unless a doctor has diagnosed a dermatological problem, in which case the beard can only be one-quarter of an inch long. …

The truth is, as Justice Stephen Breyer points out, [Arkansas Deputy Attorney General David] Curran is having a hard time providing any examples of dangerous things dropping out of half-inch beards. He just wants us to know that they might be there. Dangerously. Hidden among the stubble.

Alito had the question of the day:

Why can’t the prison just give the inmate a comb, and say comb your beard, and if there’s a SIM card in there or a tiny revolver, it’ll fall out?

Damon Root sees no problem with a prisoner having a beard:

In this case, the law is squarely on Holt’s side. As his lawyers at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty observe in their main brief, “forty-four other state and federal prisons with the same security interests allow the beards that Arkansas forbids.” In other words, while prison security is undoubtedly a “compelling government interest,” the no-beard policy is far from the “least restrictive means” of achieving it.

For its part, Arkansas maintains that its correctional officers are entitled to broad deference from the courts. But that argument not only fails to satisfy the strict requirements of the [the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA)], it also runs counter to an important 19th century precedent set by Justice Stephen Field, one of the Supreme Court’s first great conservative jurists. In the 1879 Circuit Court case of Ah Kow v. Nunan, Justice Field confronted a San Francisco ordinance which required all male prisoners in the county jail to have their hair “cut or clipped to an uniform length of one inch from the scalp.” City officials claimed it was a public health regulation, but in fact the law’s real purpose was to humiliate male Chinese immigrants, who commonly wore their hair in long braided ponytails known as a queues. This “queue ordinance” (as it was known throughout the city) was just one of the many racist and xenophobic regulations passed by California officials in response to the arrival of Chinese immigrants.

Noah Feldman ponders the beard-friendliness of the various justices:

Unlike his older colleague Justice Antonin Scalia, Justice Samuel Alito has never worn a beard on the bench. But to Alito, the court’s emerging leader on religious liberty exemptions, beards are ground zero.

Feldman also provides context for Alito’s likely support for the hirsute:

[T]he fact that the Department of Corrections makes an exception for men who can’t shave must be evidence that it hasn’t adopted the least restrictive means of maintaining safety by banning beards. If a few people can have short beards, why can’t all?

Justice Alito actually dreamed up this logic in a 1999 case, Fraternal Order of Police v. City of Newark. The city banned not inmates but police officers from wearing beards — it made an exception, however, for officers suffering from folliculitis. Supreme Court precedent ordinarily denies constitutional exemptions when there is a neutral, generally applicable law in place. (Justice Scalia set that precedent, Employment Division v. Smith.) In a subversively brilliant reinterpretation of the Smith precedent, then-Judge Alito said that the exemption must be granted because the city had created a system of individual exemptions. Because it allowed medical beards, the city had to allow religious ones.

Previous Dish on the beard case here.