https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melungeon

I had never heard this word until today.

Melungeon = Member of a triracial (black, white, native) group that supposedly is most prominent around Cumberland Gap, not that far from where I grew up.  I saw an article suggesting that Abraham Lincoln was a melungeon.

The melting pot effect: we're all related whether we admit it or not.

And here I thought BLM was for the Bureau of Livestock and Mining.  There is so much noise today, every day, about racism and rump. I've heard there are apps out there that will filter out all mentions of the name of our president.   Not a bad idea.

People with African noses and brown skin have legitimate grievances from slavery, Jim Crow, policing and harsh inequalities in economic and incarceration statistics. So do many others. Japanese were in carcerated en mass and suffer under rediculous stereotypes.  Hispanics in Arizona were terrorized by Arapaio and he got pardoned today. Jews that live all around me here in Portland are terrified at the resurgence of Nazi-ism. The natives of this continent were actively exterminated by our government and settlers, and they have a right to be mad about it. And in the midst of all this the white skinned middle-aged dudes are committing suicide both actively and passively at astounding rates.

There's plenty wrong, no doubt about that.

When I walk around the park that is in front of my house, I feel racial tension. There are blacks and hispanics walking there, but they are either in the company of a white person, or they are walking as families. Today the Latinas were in conversation and tending to the children, but the men are watching for trouble. When they see me coming, a big white woman moving fast, and they look hard.  They don't nod in return.  I saw a Middle Eastern family too.  The women were similarly dedicated to their kids, and one man swung his keys on the end of a lanyard as if to say fuck with me and I'll take your face off with my keys.

I wish we could all just chill out.  I don't think the tension will reduce until the next changing of the guard, and I hope it comes soon.

"The search for unpolluted drinking water is as old as civilization itself. As soon as there were mass human settlements, waterborne diseases like dysentery became a crucial population bottleneck. For much of human history, the solution to this chronic public-health issue was not purifying the water supply. The solution was to drink alcohol. In a community lacking pure-water supplies, the closest thing to "pure" fluid was alcohol. Whatever health risks were posed by beer (and later wine) in the early days of agrarian settlements were more than offset by alcohol's antibacterial properties. Dying of cirrhosis of the liver in your forties was better than dying of dysentery in your twenties. Many genetically minded historians believe that the confluence of urban living and the discovery of alcohol created a massive selection pressure on the genes of all humans who abandoned the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Alcohol, after all, is a deadly poison and notoriously addictive. To digest large quantities of it, you need to be able to boost production of enzymes called alcohol dehydrogenases, a trait regulated by a set of genes on chromosome four in human DNA. Many early agrarians lacked that trait, and thus were genetically incapable of "holding their liquor." Consequently, many of them died childless at an early age, either from alcohol abuse or from waterborne diseases. Over generations, the gene pool of the first farmers became increasingly dominated by individuals who could drink beer on a regular basis. Most of the world population today is made up of descendants of those early beer drinkers, and we have largely inherited their genetic tolerance for alcohol. (The same is true of lactose tolerance, which went from a rare genetic trait to the mainstream among descendants of the herders, thanks to domestication of livestock.) The descendants of hunter gatherers--like many Native Americans or Australian Aborigines--were never forced through this genetic bottleneck, and so today they show disproportionate rates of alcoholism. The chronic drinking problem in Native American populations has been blamed on everything from the weak "Indian constitution" to the humiliating abuses of the U.S. reservation system. But their alcohol intolerance most likely has another explanation: their ancestors didn't live in towns."
--Steven Johnson, in The Ghost Map, pages 103-4.

The letter behind the cut has been circulating for years. It helps.
( With Deep Gratitude to our Native Elders.Collapse )

to screw in a light bulb?
( answer per Dr FrancesCollapse )

Support the Indian Health Care Improvement Act

The Indian Health Care Improvement Act has been reintroduced in the House, and is expected to be reintroduced in the Senate in September. The House bill, H.R. 2708, includes naturopathic medicine in the definition of "health profession," allowing NDs to provide primary care health services to Indian communities. It also will allow NDs to participate in a federal health program and gain eligibility to a federal loan repayment program. I would be very happy if this passed, because I have long thought that I would like to serve certain tribes in my work.

Please ask your Senators to include naturopathic medicine in the Senate version of the Indian Health Care Improvement Act.

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