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After dropping hints earlier this month that it was reconsidering its longstanding ban on blood donations by gay men, the FDA adopted a new policy last week, easing the lifetime ban but still requiring men to abstain from sex with other men for an entire year before being eligible to donate. Mark Joseph Stern is unsatisfied:

This is, no doubt, a step forward. But it’s a very small one. The one-year deferral policy is still rooted in an outdated, insulting vision of gay men as diseased, promiscuous lechers. A gay man in a decades-long monogamous relationship with his husband will be forbidden from donating blood. So, too, will any gay or bisexual man who consistently practices safe sex. Meanwhile, straight people who routinely have sex with multiple opposite-sex partners—whether or not they use condoms—face no deferral at all. A straight man can donate blood the morning after participating in an unprotected, anonymous orgy. A married gay man cannot donate blood at all.

Adam Chandler adds:

“I predict blood donation drops because it’s way less embarrassing to lie about being gay than to lie about being celibate,” one observer remarked. It’s a great line, but also highlights the complexity and the absurdity of a policy that is already based on a wayward honor system of sorts.

As many have noted, the new policy conforms with that of a number of countries including the United Kingdom, Sweden, Australia, and Japan, all of which use the one-year ban.

Nevertheless, as Elaine Teng pointed out, the one-year deferral puts gay or bisexual men on the same donor pool as “heterosexuals who have had sex with someone who is HIV-positive, and heterosexuals who have had sex with a sex worker.” In other words, the standard for gay identity is equal to action for heterosexuals.

Scott Shackford weighs in:

Current HIV tests can detect the virus now with just an 11-day window for incubation. So a permanent ban preventing gay and bisexual men from donating blood is overkill. But even the one-year ban seems extreme, given the science. AIDS awareness group Gay Men’s Health Crisis calls the new policy useless and essentially a “lifetime ban” for most gay men. But this one-year ban matches the rules for other countries like the United Kingdom and Canada. According to one study, letting gay men who aren’t getting laid donate blood would add 317,000 pints to the blood supply in the United States annually.

So I’m working on my script treatment for a gay “indie” romantic comedy about two lonely men who meet while donating blood and have to get over whatever personality quirks have been keeping them from getting some action. Steal my idea and you’ll be the one needing blood donations.

Sam Eifling remarks that the NYPD “has behaved like it’s at war since officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu were murdered in their patrol car last week”:

A basic principle of good policing holds that officers in the field should seek to de-escalate, rather than intensify, tension and use of force. (Police escalation of force was instrumental in many if not all the recent deaths that have sparked nationwide protests.) Yet thousands of New York’s finest created a political spectacle at Ramos’ funeral Saturday by turning their backs on the mayor during his eulogy. And while it’s [police union head Patrick] Lynch’s job to antagonize the sitting mayor when his union is in protracted contract negotiations with the city, it’s also his job to represent police to the city. Cranking up the heat, especially at funerals, does police no favors. Even NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton has started pointing fingers, saying on the “Today” show that the “targeting of these two police officers was a direct spinoff of this issue of these demonstrations.”

Tomasky wants cops to “understand that some criticism of them is legitimate; that not everyone who levels criticisms is a cop-hater; and that in a democratic society, no institution is above criticism and accountability”:

We don’t criticize the armed services much in America these days—this isn’t the early 1970s, with anti-Vietnam protesters cruelly calling legless veterans pigs and so on—but by God, when something goes haywire (Abu Ghraib), at least there are some prosecutions and forced retirements. The CIA spends years getting away with the stuff it gets away with, but eventually, something happens like this month’s Senate report, and with any luck a couple of heads will roll.

These people put their lives on the line for the rest of us, too. It’s not only possible but also right to find the deaths of CIA officers in the field to be tragic while also demanding that they follow the law and international treaties the United States has signed. And it’s possible and right to be sickened both by the murder of those two NYPD cops and by incidents of police violence that seem to have a clear racial element to them. But somehow, it feels like the Army and the CIA, rigid as those institutions can be, are more responsive to democratic accountability than police departments. That’s the reality that needs to change. And in New York, at least, Bratton has to lead the way.

Ilya Somin argues along the same lines:

As A. J. Delgado points out in a recent National Review article, police departments exhibit many of the same pathologies that conservatives rightly decry in other government bureaucracies – including a tendency to avoid accountability like the plague. Just as pointing out the flaws of public schools does not make conservative and libertarian critics “anti-teacher,” so condemning the comparable failings of police departments does not make you “anti-cop.” Both cops and public school teachers are members of valuable professions. But both also often get away with poor performance because of perverse incentives.

But Thomas Knowles, who has “spent the last 39 years working as a Military Investigator, a police officer and then 23 years as an FBI Agent and supervisor,” thinks the focus on cop quality is a mistake:

Yes, bad cops do exist—and they must be held accountable. They deserve the full weight of our criminal justice system brought down upon them.

But I don’t think that’s what this fall’s protests are really about. We’re not talking about bad cops. We’re debating bad policies and broken systems. And too many people are trying to indict the system itself by pretending that the cops are the enemy.

In almost every instance, by the time a cop pulls his or her service weapon and fires, the system has failed. A police officer’s use of lethal force, in almost every instance, isn’t the disease. It’s a symptom of broader challenges and bigger problems. Deadly force, most often, is the end result of a failure—and often many cascading failures—elsewhere in our society leading up to that fatal encounter.

AirAsia flight QZ8501 is presumed to be “at the bottom of the sea”:

The jet vanished from radar screens on Sunday morning with 162 people on board, as it approached violent weather over the Java Sea about 40 minutes into a two-hour flight between the Indonesian city of Surabaya and Singapore. The plane, an Airbus A320-200 operated by an Indonesian subsidiary of the Malaysian budget airline AirAsia, reportedly requested to deviate from its flight path to avoid a cloud. Moments later, it lost contact with Jakarta air traffic controllers. It did not send a distress signal.

Chris Brummitt contrasts this missing jet with MH370, the Malaysian plane lost earlier this year. Why we have a better chance of finding this one:

Based on data “pings” from Flight 370, authorities believe the plane crashed into the southern Indian Ocean, a vast, deep, isolated stretch of water far from the last known position of the plane. The AirAsia flight was carrying enough fuel for about four hours of flying. Assuming it crashed soon after it dropped off the radar, finding it should be far easier. The Java Sea is a contained body of water, shallow, and crisscrossed by planes and ships. In normal circumstances, a plane leaves wreckage even if it enters the water largely intact. It can take several days for it to be spotted, however. On Jan. 1, 2007, an Indonesian jetliner carrying 102 people went missing on a domestic flight from Surabaya to Manado. A search effort across land and sea turned up nothing until 11 days later, when a fisherman found the plane’s right horizontal stabilizer.

Charlie Campbell passes along “speculation that flying through thunderstorms at high altitude could have caused ice to form on instruments, giving erroneous readings and effecting navigation”:

Similar problems are thought responsible for the ditching in the Atlantic of Air France Flight 447 in June 2009, that killed all 228 people aboard.

However, there are problems with this theory. Firstly, cockpit recordings indicate the Air France crew hadn’t been trained for such circumstances. But ever since, Airbus has put new training in place so that all pilots who fly their aircraft know how to deal with these occurrences. “It’s a new regime,” says [Captain Desmond Ross, an Australia-based aviation expert].

What’s more, the Air France flight was in the dead of night and so the crew only had instruments to rely on. “I don’t even think they had a horizon,” says Ross. It is unlikely such a tragedy would have occurred in daylight conditions such as QZ 8501 experienced.

Essentially, says Ross, “Weather doesn’t cause accidents. Accidents are caused by poor decision-making or other things like malfunctions.”

David Cenciotti also brings up Air France flight 447:

AF447 was an Airbus 330 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris that plummeted 38,000 feet in 3 minutes and 30 seconds and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean in 2009. In that case, pilots responded to a stall, induced by inconsistencies between the airspeed measurements likely due to pitot tubes being obstructed by ice, by pulling the nose up instead of pushing it down to attempt a recover.

Even though a low Ground Speed can be caused by strong head winds, the fact that nearby Emirates was cruising at 36,000 feet at a speed of 503 knots, seems to suggest that the missing Airbus 320 was probably too slow and closer to the stall speed than it should have been

William Wan likewise focuses on the speed of the plane:

The speed of the airplane will likely be at the forefront of any investigation, said John Cox, a former accident investigator. Radar suggests the plane was flying at a low speed, Cox said. Too slow at certain altitudes will cause an airplane to physically stall with insufficient lift to sustain flight, he said.

Geoffrey Thomas, editor of airlineratings.com, said he reviewed radar data of the flight obtained by other A320 pilots showing the plane at an altitude of 36,300 feet and climbing and traveling at 353 knots or roughly 406 miles per hour — a relatively low speed for that altitude.

Adam Minter can’t believe Malaysia’s bad luck:

[M]any Malaysians are now trying to reckon with the fact that Malaysian-owned carriers will have been involved in the three worst air tragedies of the past year, including Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, shot down over the Ukraine. That’s an unlikely status for any country, much less Malaysia, population 30 million, and hardly a global aviation power.

It’s tempting to look for a common thread to explain this inexplicable string of bad aviation luck. But prior to March 2014, Malaysia’s two major carriers had exemplary safety records, and there was absolutely nothing about them to lead an outside observer to believe that they’d lose three jets in nine months.

And Amanda Macias looks back at this year’s aircraft crashes:

If the Indonesian-registered aircraft is confirmed to have crashed, killing all on board, the accident would make 2014 the worst year for loss of life in civil aviation since 2005, when 1,014 people were killed in passenger accidents, according to the Netherlands-based Aviation Safety Network.

But the number of fatal accidents in 2014 would stand at only eight, if flight QZ8501 is included, compared with 24 in 2005. This would be the lowest in memory, reflecting the peculiar nature of this year’s disasters.

(Photo: An Indonesian military commander marks the map at the Crisis Center of AirAsia at Juanda Airport on December 29, 2014 in Surabaya, East Java, Indonesia. By Syaiful Arif/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Gregory F. Treverton argue that a super-centralized infrastructure is a marker of instability:

The first marker of a fragile state is a concentrated decision-making system. On its face, centralization seems to make governments more efficient and thus more stable. But that stability is an illusion. Apart from in the military—the only sector that needs to be unified into a single structure—centralization contributes to fragility. Although centralization reduces deviations from the norm, making things appear to run more smoothly, it magnifies the consequences of those deviations that do occur. It concentrates turmoil in fewer but more severe episodes, which are disproportionately more harmful than cumulative small variations. In other words, centralization decreases local risks, such as provincial barons pocketing public funds, at the price of increasing systemic risks, such as disastrous national-level reforms. Accordingly, highly centralized states, such as the Soviet Union, are more fragile than decentralized ones, such as Switzerland, which is effectively composed of village-states.

States that centralize power often do so to suppress sectarian tension. That inability to handle diversity, whether political or ethnoreligious, further adds to their fragility.

Although countries that allow their sectarian splits to remain out in the open may seem to experience political turmoil, they are considerably more stable than those that artificially repress those splits, which creates a discontented minority group that brews silently. Iraq, for example, had a Sunni-minority-led regime under Saddam Hussein that repressed the Shiites and the Kurds; the country overshot in the opposite direction after Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, took office in 2006 and began excluding the Sunnis. Indeed, research by the scholar Yaneer Bar-Yam has shown that states that have well-defined boundaries separating various ethnic groups experience less violence than those that attempt to integrate them. In other words, people are better next-door neighbors than roommates. Thus, in countries riven by sectarian divides, it makes more sense to give various groups their own fiefdoms than to force them to live under one roof, since the latter arrangement only serves to radicalize the repressed minority.

Christian Jarrett mulls over a finding that students who are assigned to sit in the center of the classroom are more popular than those assigned to sit on the margins:

Why should seating position have these associations with children’s perceptions of their peers? The researchers think two psychological mechanisms are pertinent. Social psychology research on race relations and prejudice finds that the more we interact with other people, the more positive our views of them tend to be. School pupils naturally interact and socialise more with the children located near to them, and so this interaction could encourage more positive perceptions. There is also a psychological phenomenon known as the “mere exposure effect”, which describes how familiarity with something or someone breeds more positive feelings towards them.sdgsdg

[Researchers Yvonne] Van den Berg and [Antonius] Cillessen also conducted a second study with 158 more school children, in which they asked them to rate each others’ popularity, and also to say where they would position themselves and their classmates if they could choose. Perhaps unsurprisingly, children said they’d like to sit nearer to their peers who were more liked and more popular. The researchers said this provided an insight into what’s known as the “cycle of popularity” – well-liked and popular children typically attract more social interactions with others, this then reinforces the popular perception that others have of them via the mechanisms mentioned earlier.

Toward the beginning of her essay about her complicated religious faith, Ayana Mathis announces that all of her attempts to describe it “begin with theological assertions and devolve into some syrupy business about the cosmos and the presence of God in all things.” She doesn’t give herself enough credit – it’s an elegant attempt well worth reading. A sample of her prose:

A few years before I left the church as a teenager, my mother and I became estranged from my grandparents and aunts and uncles. She and I were a little battalion of two, fighting our way through the world without family or neighborhood or most of the things that bond people to places and to each other. I suppose it could be said that we were impoverished by this circumstance. It is truer to say that ours was simply one in the infinite variety of human experience, with its accompanying difficulties and mercies. For a long time I held onto my unbelonging like a jewel, as though it were the most precious thing I had. And I liked tumbling around the world and sending dispatches to my mother who was, for a very long time, most of what I knew about love.

But it is time, as the saying goes, to put away childish things.

I am not, as I would like to think, hatched from an egg. It has taken me all my life to understand that I am a link in a long chain of fearless and flawed people: my grandparents, now dead; my aunts and uncles; my great-grandparents who came to Philadelphia from the South under harrowing circumstances at the beginning of the twentieth century. Also mine are Bettie Mae Fikes, and the millions who fled the Jim Crow South with nothing but a crumpled address and a few dollars in their pockets, the little children in those old colored schools with handed-down textbooks and more pride and hope than I can conceive of, and the children in the present iterations of those schools in Philadelphia and New York and all across this country. Also mine: Bessie Smith and Blind Lemon Jefferson. Nina Simone and Stevie Wonder and Lauryn Hill. To think that for so many years I refused to turn my head to see these luminous chains of souls, stretching across time and geography, to which I belong. I still turn away frequently. It is difficult for me to cede any bit of my growling individuality. But I have a few family photos, and I have the music I love, to chastise me when I am arrogant and to brace me when I falter.

God is in all of this. I don’t mean the God I encountered at church when I was a girl, the bearded tyrant up in the firmament jerking us around like marionettes. Rather, I believe in the God of the links in the chain of being. This includes ancestry and culture and history, but it extends beyond those particularities into a vast constellation of belonging, which seems to me to be a form of grace, and a bulwark against despair and disconnection. Certainly, it is what I mean by love.

(Photo by Diganta Talukdar)