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Javier E

Opinion | The Wisdom and Prophecy of Jimmy Carter's 'Malaise' Speech - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...mmy-carter-malaise-speech.html

wisdom prophecy carter president presidency speech malaise culture crisis history politics us

shared by Javier E on 24 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • Carter had canceled vacation plans and spent more than a week cloistered at Camp David, where he met with a “steady stream of visitors” who shared their hopes and fears about a nation in distress, most immediately thanks to another in a series of energy crises.
  • Carter, however, discerned a deeper problem. America had a wounded heart. The president believed it suffered from a “crisis of the spirit.”
  • the best word to describe the speech would have been “pastoral.” A faithful Christian president applied the lessons he’d so plainly learned from years of Bible study and countless hours in church. Don’t look at the surface of a problem. Don’t be afraid to tell hard truths. Be humble, but also call the people to a higher purpose.
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  • The resulting address was heartfelt. It was eloquent. Yet it helped sink his presidency.
  • “For the first time in the history of our country a majority of our people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years,”
  • By 1979, this country had experienced a recent string of traumatic political assassinations, urban riots that dwarfed the summer riots of 2020 in scale and intensity, campus unrest that makes the current controversies over “wokeness” look civil and quaint, the defeat in Vietnam, and the deep political corruption of Richard Nixon. At the same time, inflation rates dwarfed what we experience today.
  • Carter took a step back. With his trademark understated warmth, he described his own period of reflection. He’d taken the time to listen to others, he shared what he heard, and then he spoke words that resonate today. “The symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us,” he said, and he described symptoms that mirror our current reality.
  • Read the speech now, and you’ll see its truth and its depth. But, ironically, it’s an address better suited to our time than to its own. Jimmy Carter’s greatest speech was delivered four decades too soon.
  • There was more. “As you know,” he told viewers, “there is a growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools, the news media, and other institutions.”
  • We were sure that ours was a nation of the ballot, not the bullet, until the murders of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. We were taught that our armies were always invincible and our causes were always just, only to suffer the agony of Vietnam. We respected the presidency as a place of honor until the shock of Watergate.
  • Carter’s central insight was that even if the country’s political branches could deliver peace and prosperity, they could not deliver community and belonging. Our nation depends on pre-political commitments to each other, and in the absence of those pre-political commitments, the American experiment is ultimately in jeopardy.
  • we’re not familiar with speeches that ask the American people to reflect on their own role in a national crisis. Carter called for his audience to look in the mirror:
  • In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.
  • Carter correctly described a country of mutual, interlocking responsibilities between the government and the people. Yet he was ultimately unable to deliver the results that matched his pastoral message.
  • the speech was successful, at first. His approval rating shot up a remarkable 11 points. Then came chaos — some of it Carter’s fault, some of it not. Days after the speech, he demanded the resignation of his entire cabinet. (He ultimately fired five.) It was a move that communicated confusion more than conviction.
  • The failed rescue was a hinge moment in history. It’s hard to imagine the morale boost had it succeeded, and we know the crushing disappointment when it failed. Had the Army’s Delta Force paraded down New York’s “Canyon of Heroes” with the liberated hostages, it would have probably transformed the public’s perception of the president. But just as presidents own military victories, they also own defeats.
  • The story of the next 10 years, moreover, cast Carter’s address in a different light. The nation went from defeat to victory: Inflation broke, the economy roared, and in 1991 the same military that was humiliated in the sands of Iran triumphed
  • The history was written. Carter was wrong. There wasn’t a crisis of confidence. There was no malaise. There was instead a failure of leadership. Better, or at least luckier, leaders revived a broken nation.
  • Yet with every passing year, the deeper truths of Carter’s speech become more apparent. His insights become more salient. A speech that couldn’t precisely diagnose the maladies of 1979 more accurately describes the challenges of 2023. The trends he saw emerging two generations ago now bear their poisonous fruit in our body politic.
  • last year a record 58 percent of Americans told NBC News pollsters that our nation’s best years are behind it.)
  • In 1979, Carter spoke of our civil liberties as secure. They’re more secure now.
  • We’re free, prosperous and strong to a degree we couldn’t imagine then. Yet we’re tearing each other apart now.
  • We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I’ve warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility.
  • With these words, Carter raised the question, what is our freedom for, exactly? While we want to better ourselves and our families, we cannot become self-regarding. We have obligations to each other. We have obligations to our community. The best exercise of freedom is in service to others.
  • Yet one of the stories of our time is the abuse of liberty, including the use of our freedoms — whether it’s to boycott, condemn or shame — to try to narrow the marketplace of ideas, to deprive dissenters of their reputations and their livelihoods.
  • as Carter noted, our huge wealth cannot heal the holes in our hearts, because “consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.”
  • there’s another word: prophetic. His words were not the clarion call necessary for his time, but they are words for this time. As Jimmy Carter spends his last days on this earth, we should remember his call for community, and thank a very good man for living his values, serving his neighbors, and reminding us of the true source of strength for the nation he loved.
  • On July 15, 1979, President Jimmy Carter emerged from days of isolation to deliver the most important and memorable address of his life
  • The speech was among the most unusual in presidential history. The word that has clung to it, “malaise,” was a word that didn’t even appear in the text.
Javier E

Gen Z isn't interested in driving. Will that last? - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...gen-z-driving-less-uber

driving trends miss Gen Z

shared by Javier E on 14 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • a growing trend among Generation Z, loosely defined as people born between the years of 1996 and 2012. Equipped with ride-sharing apps and social media, “zoomers,” as they are sometimes called, are getting their driver’s licenses at lower rates than their predecessors. Unlike previous generations, they don’t see cars as a ticket to freedom or a crucial life milestone.
  • Those phases “are consistently getting later,” said Noreen McDonald, a professor of urban planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Gen Zers are more likely to live at home for longer, more likely to pursue higher education and less likely to get married in their 20s.
  • The trend is most pronounced for teens, but even older members of Gen Z are lagging behind their millennial counterparts. In 1997, almost 90 percent of 20- to 25 year-olds had licenses; in 2020, it was only 80 percent.
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  • Others point to driving’s high cost. Car insurance has skyrocketed in price in recent years, increasing nearly 14 percent between 2022 and 2023. (The average American now spends around 3 percent of their yearly income on car insurance.) Used and new car prices have also soared in the last few years, thanks to a combination of supply chain disruptions and high inflation.
  • E-scooters, e-bikes and ride-sharing also provide Gen Zers options that weren’t available to earlier generations. (Half of ride-sharing users are between the ages of 18 and 29, according to a poll from 2019.) And Gen Zers have the ability to do things online — hang out with friends, take classes, play games — which used to be available only in person.
  • Whether this shift will last depends on whether Gen Z is acting out of inherent preferences, or simply postponing key life milestones that often spur car purchases. Getting married, having children, or moving out of urban centers are all changes that encourage (or, depending on your view of the U.S. public transit system, force) people to drive more.
  • In 1997, 43 percent of 16-year-olds and 62 percent of 17-year-olds had driver’s licenses. In 2020, those numbers had fallen to 25 percent and 45 percent.
  • Millennials went through a similar phase. Around a decade ago, many newspaper articles and research papers noted that the millennial generation — often defined as those born between 1981 and 1996 — were shunning cars. The trend was so pronounced that some researchers dubbed millennials the “go-nowhere” generation.
  • The average number of vehicle miles driven by young people dropped 24 percent between 2001 and 2009, according to a report from the Frontier Group and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. And at the same time, vehicle miles traveled per person in the United States — which had been climbing for more than 50 years — began to plateau.
  • adult millennials continue to drive around 8 percent less every day than members of Generation X and baby boomers. As millennials have grown up, got married and had kids, the distance they travel in cars has increased — but they haven’t fully closed the gap with previous generations.
  • data has shown that U.S. car culture isn’t as strong as it once was. “Up through the baby boom generation, every generation drove more than the last,” Dutzik said. Forecasters expected that trend to continue, with driving continuing to skyrocket well into the 2030s. “But what we saw with millennials, I think very clearly, is that trend stopped,”
  • If Gen Zers continue to eschew driving, it could have significant effects on the country’s carbon emissions. Transportation is the largest source of CO2 emissions in the United States. There are roughly 66 million members of Gen Z living in the United States. If each one drove just 10 percent less than the national average — that is, driving 972 miles less every year — that would save 25.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from spewing into the atmosphere. That’s the equivalent to the annual emissions of more than six coal-fired power plants.
Javier E

Katie Duke struggles to navigate advocating for nurses and working as one - The Washing... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...uke-instagram-nursing-pandemic

nurse experience culture crisis pandemic

shared by Javier E on 25 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • Nurses don’t dispute that patients deserve compassion and respect, but many feel that their roles are misunderstood and their expertise undervalued; as Duke repeatedly told me, people don’t respect nurses like they do doctors. As a result, nurses are leaving hospitals in droves. And they’re establishing new careers, not just in health care but as creatives and entrepreneurs.
  • Duke argues that nurses are especially fed up and burned out. And yet, as caretakers, nobody expects them to put their physical and emotional well-being first. But that’s starting to change. Once a lone voice, Duke is now a representative one.
  • Nurses make up the nation’s largest body of health-care workers, with three times as many RNs as physicians
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  • They also died of covid at higher rates than other health-care workers, and they experience high rates of burnout, “an occupational syndrome characterized by a high degree of emotional exhaustion and depersonalization, and a low sense of personal accomplishment at work,” according to the World Health Organization
  • high stress and anxiety are the “antecedents” to burnout. But you know you’ve hit the nadir when you become emotionally detached from your work. “It’s almost like a loss of meaning,” she said.
  • Before the pandemic, between a third and half of nurses and physicians already reported symptoms of burnout. A covid impact study published in March 2022 by the American Nurses Foundation found this number had risen to 60 percent among acute-care nurses. “Reports of feeling betrayed, undervalued, and unsupported have risen,
  • Miller said nurses are experiencing “collective trauma,” a conclusion she reached by studying their social media usage through the pandemic
  • In April 2020, Miller said the public was “exalting nurses as these superheroes and angels,” while nurses themselves were tweeting about “the horrible working conditions, enormous amount of death without any break … being mentally and completely worn down and exhausted.”
  • Miller and Groves also found a fivefold increase in references to quitting between the 2020 study and the 2021 study. “Our profession will never be the same,” Miller told me. “If you talked to any nurse who worked bedside through the pandemic, that’s what they’ll tell you.” From this, she says, has grown a desire to be heard. “We feel emboldened. We’re not as willing to be silent anymore.”
  • then, in late February 2013, Duke was abruptly fired. She’d posted a photo on Instagram showing an ER where hospital staff had just saved the life of a man hit by a subway train. It looked like a hurricane had blown through. There were no people in the photo, but Duke titled the post, “Man vs. 6 train.” She told me she wanted to showcase “the amazing things doctors and nurses do to save lives … the f---ing real deal.”
  • Duke says her superiors called her an “amazing nurse and team member” before they told her that “it was time to move on.” Her director handed her a printout of the Instagram post. According to Duke, he acknowledged that she hadn’t violated HIPAA or any hospital policies but said she’d been insensitive and unprofessional. She was escorted out of the building by security. When the episode aired, it showed Duke crying on the sidewalk outside the hospital.
  • She’d reposted the photo, with permission, from a male doctor’s Instagram account. He faced no repercussions. She now admits her caption was rather “cold” — especially compared with the doctor’s, “After the trauma.” In hindsight, she said, she might have been more sensitive. Maybe not even posted the photo at all. And yet this frustrates her. Why shouldn’t the public see nursing culture for what it really is? Man vs. 6 Train. “That’s ER speak,” she told me. “We say ‘head injury in room five.’ We don’t say ‘Mr. Smith in room five. We talk and think by mechanism of injury.”
  • But this is at odds with the romanticized image of the nurturing nurse — which hospitals often want to project. In some cases, nurses are explicitly told not to be forthright with their patients. “I know nurses in oncology who are not allowed to say to a patient and their family, ‘This will be the fourth clinical trial, but we all know your family member is dying,”
  • “The most frequent question is, ‘Katie, I have to get out of the hospital, but I don’t know what else to do.’” Her advice: “You have to create your own definition of what being a nursing professional means to you.” She has a ready list of alternative jobs, including “med spa” owner, educational consultant and YouTuber.
Javier E

The Neoracists - by John McWhorter - Persuasion - 0 views

www.persuasion.community/...john-mcwhorter-the-neoracists

identity anti-racism racism

shared by Javier E on 24 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • Third Wave Antiracism exploits modern Americans’ fear of being thought racist, using this to promulgate an obsessive, self-involved, totalitarian and unnecessary kind of cultural reprogramming.
  • The problem is that on matters of societal procedure and priorities, the adherents of this religion—true to the very nature of religion—cannot be reasoned with. They are, in this, medievals with lattes.
  • We need not wonder what the basic objections will be: Third Wave Antiracism isn’t really a religion; I am oversimplifying; I shouldn’t write this without being a theologian; it is a religion but it’s a good one; and so on
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  • first, what this is not.
  • It is not an argument against protest
  • I am not writing this thinking of right-wing America as my audience.
  • This is not merely a complaint.
  • Our current conversations waste massive amounts of energy in missing the futility of “dialogue” with them. Of a hundred fundamentalist Christians, how many do you suppose could be convinced via argument to become atheists? There is no reason that the number of people who can be talked out of the Third Wave Antiracism religion is any higher.
  • our concern must be how to continue with genuine progress in spite of this ideology. How do we work around it?
  • My interest is not “How do we get through to these people?” We cannot, at least not enough of them to matte
  • We seek change in the world, but for the duration will have to do so while encountering bearers of a gospel, itching to smoke out heretics, and ready on a moment’s notice to tar us as moral perverts.
  • We will term these people The Elect. They do think of themselves as bearers of a wisdom, granted them for any number of reasons—a gift for empathy, life experience, maybe even intelligence.
  • they see themselves as having been chosen, as it were, by one or some of these factors, as understanding something most do not.
  • “The Elect” is also good in implying a certain smugness, which is sadly accurate as a depiction.
  • But most importantly, terming these people The Elect implies a certain air of the past, à la Da Vinci Code. This is apt, in that the view they think of as sacrosanct is directly equivalent to views people centuries before us were as fervently devoted to as today’s Elect are
  • Following the religion means to pillory people for what, as recently as 10 years ago, would have been thought of as petty torts or even as nothing at all; to espouse policies that hurt black people as long as supporting them makes you seem aware that racism exists;
  • o pretend that America never makes any real progress on racism; and to almost hope that it doesn’t because this would deprive you of a sense of purpose.
Javier E

Ukraine Is the West's War Now - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-is-the-wests-war-now-5d468bdb

ukraine war history west crisis policy us europe

shared by Javier E on 27 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • A year later, the war in Ukraine has become, to a large extent, the West’s own. True, no American or NATO soldiers are fighting and dying on Ukrainian soil. But the U.S., its European allies and Canada have now sent some $120 billion in weapons and other aid to Ukraine, with new, more advanced military supplies on the way. If this monumental effort fails to thwart President Vladimir Putin’s ambitions, the setback would not only undermine American credibility on the world stage but also raise difficult questions about the future of the Western alliance.
  • “In many ways, we’re all-in, and we’re all-in because the realization has dawned in Europe that showing weakness to President Putin, showing no response to his atrocities, only invites him to go further and further,” said Sjoerd Sjoerdsma, a Dutch politician and member of parliament. “We have also realized that it is not only the safety and security of Ukraine that is at stake but also our own.”
  • The Russian military’s mixture of unexpected ineptitude and shocking cruelty has pulled the U.S. and allies deeper and deeper into the conflict. With one self-imposed constraint falling after another, Western goals have gradually moved from preventing the obliteration of Ukraine to supporting its military victory over Russia.
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  • It’s a more ambitious commitment that carries much higher risks—but also strategic rewards—for the Western alliance.
  • “Nobody thought the Russians would start a medieval war in the 21st century,” said Sen. James Risch, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “This conflict is going to change the face of Europe as much as World War II did.”
  • In Asia, the Middle East and elsewhere, the West’s geopolitical adversaries are calculating whether the U.S. and its allies have the stamina and cohesion to defend the rules-based international order that has benefited the West for decades.
  • In particular, the future of Taiwan and the South China Sea is closely linked to the West’s record in Ukraine.
  • “If Putin wins in Ukraine, the message to him and other authoritarian leaders will be that they can use force to get what they want. This will make the world more dangerous and us more vulnerable.”
  • The Munich conference capped several weeks in which the U.S. and its allies have dramatically expanded the scope of their military aid, an indication that Mr. Putin’s expectation that the West will eventually tire of helping Ukraine hasn’t materialized just yet
  • Both sides believe they can win on the battlefield, and little room exists for peace negotiations. Ukraine is preparing offensives to regain the roughly 18% of its territory still occupied by Moscow, including the Crimea peninsula and parts of the eastern Donbas region that Mr. Putin seized in 2014. Russia has declared four Ukrainian regions, none of which it fully controls, to be its own sovereign territory and seeks, at the very least, to conquer those lands. Mr. Putin, in a speech on Tuesday, indicated that his aspirations remain much broader, referring to Russia’s “historical territories that are now called Ukraine.”
  • A year into Europe’s bloodiest conflict since World War II, Ukraine’s own military industries have been shattered by Russian missile strikes, and its reserves of Soviet-vintage weapons are running out. By now, Kyiv can keep fighting only as long as Western assistance continues apace
  • “The next months will be very critical. If, say, another Ukrainian offensive fails, if it becomes the public narrative that it’s going to be a stalemate, support in the West might drop—perhaps not substantially, but some of the politicians will see the writing on the wall,
  • “In diplomacy, morality is part of the public narrative, but rarely part of the real decision-making process. But Ukraine’s case was one of the examples in history when you can argue that sympathy based on moral arguments was a game changer,”
  • “Some governments acted the way they did not merely based on their practical considerations but under enormous pressure of their public opinion. And that public opinion was based on moral compassion for the victim of the aggression.”
  • Mr. Putin has tried to counter the Ukrainian message by appealing to fear. On the first morning of the war, he alluded to nuclear weapons to deter the West from helping Ukraine.
  • “Putin is threatening Armageddon, and the Russians are doing it all the time, sometimes in oblique ways and sometimes in a more direct way,
  • “But when you actually poke at that and provide weapons gradually over time, there hasn’t been the catastrophic response that Putin promised.”
  • “boiling the frog.” As the U.S. began to introduce new weapons systems, it did so slowly and, initially, in limited numbers. None of these individual decisions were of sufficient scope to provoke a dramatic escalation by Moscow. But over the past 12 months, the cumulative effect of these new weapons has transformed the balance of power on the battlefield and enabled a string of strategic Ukrainian victories.
  • “If you look at the arc of Western involvement, no one would have predicted where we are now six months ago, and the same goes for six months before that. It’s a crisis response that has evolved into a policy—a policy that, probably, no one would have prescribed at the outset,” said Samuel Charap, a senior political scientist at Rand Corp. who has urged caution on arming Ukraine
  • “The West is also the frog that is boiling itself. With each incremental increase in assistance, qualitative or quantitative, we become accustomed to that being normal, and the next one doesn’t seem so extreme,”
  • “There is a dynamic here where we become desensitized to what is going on. We are in a bit of a slow-moving spiral that shows no signs of letting up.”
  • In 2014, after Mr. Putin annexed Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula and triggered a bloody war in the eastern Donbas region, covertly sending troops and heavy weapons across the border, the American and European response was limited to sanctions that only marginally affected Russia’s economy.
  • Back in 1991, President George H.W. Bush viewed Ukraine’s desire for freedom as a dangerous nuisance. That year, just months before the Soviet Union’s collapse, he delivered to the Ukrainian parliament his infamous “Chicken Kiev” speech, urging Ukrainians to abandon “suicidal nationalism” and permanently remain under the Kremlin’s rule.
  • Other analysts and policy makers argue that the true danger lies in excessive caution over accelerating Western military involvement. “We have been slow in delivering certain capabilities. We keep climbing the stairs, but it goes through a tortuous process, and in the meantime Ukrainians are dying,” said ret. Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, a former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe. “It has taken the Pentagon a long time to come to the realization that Ukraine can win, and will win, especially if we give them what they need. There has been all too much defeatist hand-wringing.”
  • At the time, President Barack Obama resisted calls to help Ukraine militarily as he sought Mr. Putin’s cooperation on his presidency’s main foreign-policy priority, the nuclear deal with Iran
  • Ukraine, Mr. Obama said in an interview with the Atlantic in 2016, “is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do.” All the evidence of the past 50 years, he added, suggested that Russian (and Chinese) decision-making wouldn’t be influenced by “talking tough or engaging in some military action.”
  • Mr. Biden, speaking in front of U.S., Polish and Ukrainian flags to a cheering crowd in Warsaw on Tuesday, had a different message. “Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia,” he pledged. “Appetites of the autocrat cannot be appeased. They must be opposed.”
Javier E

College Should Be More Like Prison - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...ements-administration-60881077

college prison education trends learning attitude culture crisis humanities

shared by Javier E on 06 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • Many of us who care deeply about education in the humanities can only feel despair at the state of our institutions of “higher” learning. Enrollment in these subjects is plummeting, and students who take literature and history classes often come in with rudimentary ideas about the disciplines.
  • , Prof. James Shapiro of Columbia said teaching “Middlemarch” to today’s college students is like landing a 747 on a rural airstrip.
  • Technology such as messaging apps, digital crib sheets and ChatGPT, which will write essays on demand, has created a culture of casual cheating.
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  • They tend to read each assignment two or three times before coming to class and take notes as well. Some of them have been incarcerated for 20 or 30 years and have been reading books all that time. They would hold their own in any graduate seminar. That they have had rough experiences out in the real world means they are less liable to fall prey to facile ideologies. A large proportion of them are black and Latino, and while they may not like David Hume’s or Thomas Jefferson’s ideas on race, they want to read those authors anyway. They want, in short, to be a part of the centuries-long conversation that makes up our civilization
  • My students there, enrolled in a for-credit college program, provide a sharp contrast with contemporary undergraduates. These men are highly motivated and hard-working
  • Never have I been more grateful to teach where I do: at a men’s maximum-security priso
  • Best of all from my selfish point of view as an educator, these students have no access to cellphones or the internet
  • they have retained their attention spans, while those of modern college students have been destroyed by their dependence on smartphones
  • My friends who teach at Harvard tell me administrators have advised them to change topics or activities several times in each class meeting because the students simply can’t focus for that long.
  • My students at the prison sit through a 2½-hour class without any loss of focus. They don’t yawn or take bathroom breaks
  • I have taught classes on the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, Romanticism, George Orwell, South Asian fiction. We’ve done seminars on Adam Smith and Alexis de Tocqueville. Together we have read Montaigne, Rousseau, Keats, Erasmus, Locke, Montesquieu, Wollstonecraft, Byron, Goethe, Petrarch, Rabelais, Saadat Hasan Manto, Rohinton Mistry
  • We encourage them to treat different societies in history as experiments in time travel, where they try to understand the mores of particular eras as though from the inside. They are very open to that approach, unlike university students, who tend see the past only as one long undifferentiated era of grievous unenlightenment: not just one damn thing after another, but one damn oppressive thing after another.
  • Like students at elite institutions, most of my incarcerated scholars are politically liberal. Unlike them, many are religious, and that proves surprisingly enriching in studying these authors
  • My hours at the prison are rich in such moments. In many ways, it is the Platonic ideal of teaching, what teaching once was. No faculty meetings, no soul-deadening committee work, no bloated and overbearing administration. No electronics, no students whining about grades.
  • Quite a few of our students are serving life sentences and will never be able to make use of their hard-won college credits
  • No student debt, no ideological intolerance, no religious tests—whoops, I mean mandatory “diversity” statements.
  • And in our courteous, laughter-filled classroom there is none of the “toxic environment” that my friends in the academy complain about, and that I experienced during my own college teaching career.
  • If prison inmates, many of whom have committed violent crimes, can pay close attention for a couple of hours, put aside their political and personal differences, support one another’s academic efforts, write eloquent essays without the aid of technology and get through a school year without cheating, is it too much to ask university students to do the same?
  • Or ask professors to try to create an atmosphere where these habits can prevail
kennyn-77

Global Public Opinion in an Era of Democratic Anxiety | Pew Research Center - 0 views

www.pewresearch.org/...n-an-era-of-democratic-anxiety

pew public opinion politics democracy

shared by kennyn-77 on 28 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • For many, democracy is not delivering; people like democracy, but their commitment to it is often not very strong; political and social divisions are amplifying the challenges of contemporary democracy; and people want a stronger public voice in politics and policymaking.
  • Across the 38 countries polled, a median of 66% said “a democratic system where citizens, not elected officials, vote directly on major national issues to decide what becomes law” is a very or somewhat good way to govern their country.
  • In all of the publics surveyed, fewer than three-in-ten say the political system should not be changed at all.
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  • However, there is widespread skepticism about the prospect for change. In eight of the 17 publics, roughly half or more of those polled say the political system needs major changes or a complete overhaul and say they have little or no confidence the system can be changed effectively.
  • We found that the strongest predictor of being dissatisfied was being unhappy with the current state of the national economy. Another significant predictor was how someone feels about economic opportunity.
  • dissatisfaction with the way democracy is working was much more common among people who expect that when children in their country today grow up, they will be worse off financially than their parents. The economic pessimists are also especially likely to think their country’s political system needs major changes or needs to be completely reformed. For example, in the United Kingdom, 61% of respondents who are pessimistic about the next generation’s financial prospects think their country needs significant political reform, compared with just 34% among those who are optimistic that the next generation will do better financially than their parents.
  • People who believe their country is doing a poor job of dealing with the pandemic are consistently more likely to say they are dissatisfied with the way their democracy is working and that they want significant changes to the political system. For instance, 73% of Germans who feel their country is handling the crisis poorly say they believe their political system needs major changes or should be completely overhauled, while just 32% of those who think the country is handling it well express this view.
  • Across 27 nations we polled in 2018, a median of 54% said that most politicians in their country are corrupt. This sentiment was especially high in Greece (89%) and Russia (82%). When we asked Americans a similar question in the fall of 2020, two-thirds said most politicians are corrupt.
  • A median of 78% across the 38 nations polled said that “a democratic system where representatives elected by citizens decide what becomes law” is a very or somewhat good way to govern their country. More than half expressed this view in every country polled. However, even at this broad level, enthusiasm for representative democracy was somewhat subdued – a median of only 33% said it is a very good approach to governing.
  • Across the 16 advanced economies surveyed, a median of just 17% consider American democracy a good model for other countries to follow. A median of 57% think it used to be a good example but has not been in recent years. And around a quarter say the U.S. has never been a good example. The belief that democracy in the U.S. has never been a good model for other nations is especially common among young adults.
  • For example, a median of 49% believed a system in which “experts, not elected officials, make decisions according to what they think is best for the country” would be very or somewhat good. 
  • A median of 26% considered “a system in which a strong leader can make decisions without interference from parliament or the courts” a very or somewhat good way to govern.
  • A median of 24% said “a system in which the military rules the country” would be a very or somewhat good system. In five countries – Vietnam, Indonesia, India, South Africa and Nigeria – roughly half or more expressed this opinion, as did at least 40% in another six nations. And higher-income nations weren’t completely immune: 17% in the United States, Italy and France believed military rule could be a good way to run the country.
  • For example, 27% of Americans who identified as conservative thought autocracy would be a good way to govern, compared with 14% who identified as liberal. And 20% of conservatives supported military rule, compared with 12% of liberals. People with lower levels of educational attainment were more likely to consider military rule a good way to govern in 23 countries.
  • A median of more than 67% across 34 countries rated a fair judicial system, gender equality and freedom of religion as very important. But there was less support for holding regular competitive elections, freedom of speech and press freedom. A median of roughly six-in-ten or fewer said it was very important to have free expression on the internet or to allow human rights groups and opposition parties to operate freely.
  • In Greece, for example, the share who say having people of many different racial, ethnic and religious backgrounds makes their country a better place to live more than doubled between 2017 and 2021. Over the same period, favorable views of diversity increased by about 10 percentage points or more in Japan, the Netherlands, the UK and Spain. Slightly smaller increases can be seen in Germany, South Korea, Australia and Sweden.
  • A median of 67% across the same 17 publics say racial or ethnic discrimination is a problem where they live. Roughly three-in-ten or more in Germany, Spain, the UK, Greece, France, the U.S. and Italy say it is a very serious problem in their country. Younger adults and those on the ideological left are often more convinced on this point. In the U.S., about two-thirds of Americans on the left say racial and ethnic discrimination is a very serious problem in their country, compared with only 19% of Americans on the political right.
  • median of 56% across 17 advanced economies surveyed in 2021 say their political system needs major changes or needs to be completely reformed. Roughly two-thirds or more express this opinion in Italy, Spain, the U.S., South Korea, Greece, France, Belgium and Japan.
  • Across the 17 advanced economies we surveyed in 2021, a median of 61% say their country is more divided than before the outbreak. Moreover, the share of the public that feels this way has risen substantially as the pandemic has worn on. In the spring of 2020, only months into the crisis, just 29% of Canadians believed they were more divided, but a year later 61% express this view.
  • a median of 64% disagreed with the statement “most elected officials care what people like me think.”
  • A median of 50% disagreed with the statement “the state is run for the benefit of all the people,” while 49% agreed.
  • For example, 88% of Italians in 2002 said their government was run for the benefit of all, but only 30% held this view in 2019.
  • Across 34 nations polled in 2019, a median of 67% agreed that voting gives ordinary people some say about how the government runs things.
Javier E

Open Everything: End COVID Restrictions - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...621627

pandemic restrictions crisis culture policy

shared by Javier E on 10 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • The risk posed by bacteria and viruses remains much lower today than it was for the majority of human history. In the America of 1900, for example, nearly 1 percent of people died from infectious diseases every year, about an order of magnitude higher than today.
  • yet Americans exposed to such dangers chose to engage in a full social life, judging that the risk of pestilence—however serious—did not justify forgoing human connection.
  • Just as we are willing to take on calculated risks in other areas of life, so we should be willing to tolerate some risk of infectious disease. When you set out to drive across the country, you know that you could get into an accident. You might get hurt, and so might another driver, or even a child crossing the road. But that does not create a moral obligation to stay put for the rest of your life.
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  • If no one ever went out to a restaurant or threw a party again, we’d slow the spread of COVID as well as that of plenty of other infectious diseases. But that would be a cure worse than the disease. Like our ancestors, we should prioritize the living of life over the minimizing of mortality.
woodlu

How to predict winners at the winter Olympics | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...winners-at-the-winter-olympics

culture policy

shared by woodlu on 10 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • The strongest countries have arrived with ambitious medal targets and will be keeping track of their chances of matching those tallies throughout the games. Until recently working out who was likely to win an Olympic event was a guessing game based on hunches and limited data.
  • Some of the most popular sports, like athletics and swimming, have had unofficial world rankings based largely on form in any given season. But generally onlookers have had to rely on the odds produced by bookmakers for a guide of who is likely to win Olympic glory.
  • The most comprehensive publicly available projection belongs to Gracenote Sports, an analytics company owned by Nielsen, an American market-research firm.
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  • A handful of financial institutions produced them when Rio de Janeiro hosted in 2016, using a mixture of macroeconomic indicators and performances at previous Olympics to forecast total medal hauls for each country.
  • Gracenote’s distinguishing feature is the ability to produce quantitative analysis for each event.
  • The company has created a performance index that tracks around 500 events across the various sports in the summer and winter Olympic programmes.
  • Gracenote still uses the old system to produce its public medal table, which also deals in absolute forecasts, rather than fractional ones. If a French athlete, say, is the most likely to win an event, France gets awarded one gold medal in the table, even though the true probability of the athlete winning gold is less than 100% and his chances of claiming silver and bronze are greater than 0%.
  • the Elo rating system, which was developed for chess by Arpad Elo, a Hungarian physicist. The formula exchanges ranking points from the loser to the winner, with greater rewards for beating stronger opponents. The difference in ratings points between two rivals can be easily used to calculate the probability that one will beat the other.
  • Yet only two events on the winter Olympics programme, curling and ice hockey, involve head-to-head contests.
  • Gracenote devised an Elo-style mechanism with modifications. Rather than simply measuring whether an athlete wins or loses a competition, the system predicts the share of opponents that he beats. If he finishes higher than expected, based on his previous rating and the strength of the field for the competition in question, his rating improves.
  • Those that compete in teams have their scores blended with their compatriots. And for those that participate in a number of events, such as Ms Dahlmeier, results in related disciplines affect multiple ratings. A strong performance in the biathlon sprint, a group race, would boost her ranking in the pursuit, a staggered race, for example.
  • The best way to answer that question is to take every previous contest in the sport and analyse how past results correlate with future success.
  • The bans have benefited Norway most, as the country will likely gain of the five of the 12 foregone medals—enough to nudge it ahead of Germany into first place in terms of total medals won.
  • Mr Gleave notes that the favourite only wins about 30% of the time, a lower share than in any other winter sport. Ms Dahlmeier’s rating has dwindled a little, but not by enough to suggest that last year’s record breaker has become this year’s flop.
  • Gracenote’s research into age curves for each sport shows that the best biathletes can maintain their peak performance into their early 30s (see chart). Expect to see more event-by-event forecasting at future Olympics, too.
Javier E

Opinion | Jeff Zucker Was Right to Resign. But I Can't Judge Him. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-zucker-workplace-romance.html

office romance ethics human nature

shared by Javier E on 12 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • As animals, we are not physically well designed to sit at a desk for a minimum of 40 hours a week staring at screens. That so many of our waking hours are devoted to work in the first place is a very modern development that can easily erode our mental health and sense of self. We are a higher species capable of observing restraint, but we are also ambulatory clusters of needs and desires, with which evolution has both protected and sabotaged us.
  • Professional life, especially in a culture as work-obsessed as America’s, forces us into a lot of unnatural postures
  • it’s no surprise, when work occupies so much of our attention, that people sometimes find deep human connections there, even when they don’t intend to, and even when it’s inappropriate.
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  • it’s worth acknowledging that adhering to these necessary rules cuts against some core aspects of human nature. I’m of the opinion that people should not bring their “whole self” to work — no one owes an employer that — but it’s also impossible to bring none of your personal self to work.
  • There are good reasons that both formal and informal boundaries are a necessity in the workplace and academia
Javier E

COVID Is More Like Smoking Than the Flu - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...622819

pandemic flu smosing analogy analysis

shared by Javier E on 23 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • The “new normal” will arrive when we acknowledge that COVID’s risks have become more in line with those of smoking cigarettes—and that many COVID deaths, like many smoking-related deaths, could be prevented with a single intervention.
  • The pandemic’s greatest source of danger has transformed from a pathogen into a behavior. Choosing not to get vaccinated against COVID is, right now, a modifiable health risk on par with smoking, which kills more than 400,000 people each year in the United States.
  • if COVID continues to account for a few hundred thousand American deaths every year—“a realistic worst-case scenario,” he calls it—that would wipe out all of the life-expectancy gains we’ve accrued from the past two decades’ worth of smoking-prevention efforts.
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  • The COVID vaccines are, without exaggeration, among the safest and most effective therapies in all of modern medicine. An unvaccinated adult is an astonishing 68 times more likely to die from COVID than a boosted one
  • Yet widespread vaccine hesitancy in the United States has caused more than 163,000 preventable deaths and counting
  • Even in absolute numbers, America’s unvaccinated and current-smoker populations seem to match up rather well: Right now, the CDC pegs them at 13 percent and 14 percent of all U.S. adults, respectively, and both groups are likely to be poorer and less educated.
  • Countries such as Denmark and Sweden have already declared themselves broken up with COVID. They are confidently doing so not because the virus is no longer circulating or because they’ve achieved mythical herd immunity from natural infection; they’ve simply inoculated enough people.
  • data suggest that most of the unvaccinated hold that status voluntarily at this point
  • The same arguments apply to tobacco: Smokers are 15 to 30 times more likely to develop lung cancer. Quitting the habit is akin to receiving a staggeringly powerful medicine, one that wipes out most of this excess risk.
  • If everyone who is eligible were triply vaccinated, our health-care system would be functioning normally again.
  • With a vaccination timeline that stretches over years, our patience for restrictions, especially on the already vaccinated, will be very limited. But there is middle ground. We haven’t banned tobacco outright—in fact, most states protect smokers from job discrimination—but we have embarked on a permanent, society-wide campaign of disincentivizing its use.
  • We should neither expect that every stubbornly unvaccinated person will get jabbed before next winter nor despair that none of them will ever change their mind. Let’s accept instead that we may make headway slowly, and with considerable effort
  • Long-term actions for COVID might include charging the unvaccinated a premium on their health insurance, just as we do for smokers, or distributing frightening health warnings about the perils of remaining uninoculated
  • And once the political furor dies down, COVID shots will probably be added to the lists of required vaccinations for many more schools and workplaces.
  • nother aspect of where we’re headed with COVID. Tobacco is lethal enough that we are willing to restrict smokers’ personal freedoms—but only to a degree. As deadly as COVID is, some people won’t get vaccinated, no matter what, and both the vaccinated and unvaccinated will spread disease to others.
  • anti-COVID actions, much like anti-smoking policies, will be limited not by their effectiveness but by the degree to which they are politically palatable.
  • Without greater vaccination, living with COVID could mean enduring a yearly death toll that is an order of magnitude higher than the one from flu.
  • this, too, might come to feel like its own sort of ending. Endemic tobacco use causes hundreds of thousands of casualties, year after year after year, while fierce public-health efforts to reduce its toll continue in the background. Yet tobacco doesn’t really feel like a catastrophe for the average person.
  • Losing a year or two from average life expectancy only bumps us back to where we were in … 2000.
  • We still care for smokers when they get sick, of course, and we reduce harm whenever possible. The health-care system makes $225 billion every year for doing so—paid out of all of our tax dollars and insurance premiums
  • Hospitals have a well-honed talent for transforming any terrible situation into a marketable “center of excellence.”
  • But we shouldn’t forget the most important reason that the coronavirus isn’t like the flu: We’ve never had vaccines this effective in the midst of prior influenza outbreaks, which means we didn’t have a simple, clear approach to saving quite so many lives. Compassionate conversations, community outreach, insurance surcharges, even mandates—I’ll take them all. Now is not the time to quit.
Javier E

Alexander Gabuev writes from Moscow on why Vladimir Putin and his entourage want war | ... - 0 views

www.economist.com/...tin-and-his-entourage-want-war

analysis russia goals strategy elite interests

shared by Javier E on 23 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • What actually drives the Kremlin are the tough ideas and interests of a small group of longtime lieutenants to President Vladimir Putin, as well as those of the Russian leader himself. Emboldened by perceptions of the West’s terminal decline, no one in this group loses much sleep about the prospect of an open-ended confrontation with America and Europe
  • In fact, the core members of this group would all be among the main beneficiaries of a deeper schism.
  • Consider Mr Putin’s war cabinet, which is the locus of most decision-making
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  • Their average age is 68 years old and they have a lot in common. The collapse of the Soviet Union, which Mr Putin famously described as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century, was the defining episode of their adult lives
  • Four out of five have a KGB background, with three, including the president himself, coming from the ranks of counterintelligence. It is these hardened men, not polished diplomats like Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who run the country’s foreign policy.
  • In recent years members of this group have become very vocal. Messrs Patrushev and Naryshkin frequently give lengthy interviews articulating their views on global developments and Russia’s international role.
  • According to them, the American-led order is in deep crisis thanks to the failure of Western democracy and internal conflicts spurred by the promotion of tolerance, multiculturalism and respect for the rights of minorities. A new multipolar order is taking shape that reflects an unstoppable shift in power to authoritarian regimes that support traditional values.
  • Given the state of affairs in Western countries, the pair contend, it's only natural that they seek to contain Russia and to install pro-Western regimes in former Soviet republics. The West’s ultimate goal of a colour revolution in Russia itself would lead to the country’s conclusive collapse.
  • Washington sees unfinished business in Russia’s persistence and success, according to Mr Putin’s entourage. As America’s power wanes, its methods are becoming more aggressive. This is why the West cannot be trusted
  • The best way to ensure the safety of Russia’s existing political regime and to advance its national interests is to keep America off balance.
  • Seen this way, Ukraine is the central battleground of the struggle. The stakes could not be higher. Should Moscow allow that country to be fully absorbed into a western sphere of influence, Russia’s endurance as a great power will itself be under threat
  • The fact that the new elite in Kyiv glorifies the Ukrainian nationalists of the 20th century and thumb their noses at Moscow is a huge personal affront.
  • Messrs Patrushev, Bortnikov and Naryshkin all find themselves on the US Treasury’s blacklist already, along with many other members of Mr Putin’s inner circle. There is no way back for them to the West’s creature comforts. They are destined to end their lives in Fortress Russia, with their assets and their relatives alongside them.
  • As for sanctions by sector, including those that President Joe Biden’s team plans to impose should Russia invade Ukraine, these may end up largely strengthening the hard men’s grip on the national economy
  • Import substitution efforts have generated large flows of budget funds that are controlled by the coterie and their proxies, including through Rostec. The massive state conglomerate is run by a friend of Mr Putin’s from his KGB days in East Germany, Sergey Chemezov
  • In a similar vein, a ban on food imports from countries that have sanctioned Russia has led to spectacular growth in Russian agribusiness. The sector is overseen by Mr Patrushev’s elder son Dmitry, who is Mr Putin’s agriculture minister.
  • further sanctions wouldn’t just fail to hurt Mr Putin’s war cabinet, they would secure its members' place as the top beneficiaries of Russia’s deepening economic autarky.
  • The same logic is true of domestic politics: as the country descends into a near-permanent state of siege, the security services will be the most important pillar of the regime. That further cements the hard men’s grip on the country
  • Russia’s interests are increasingly becoming conflated with the personal interests of the people at the very top of the system.
Javier E

China Declared Its Russia Friendship Had 'No Limits.' It's Having Second Thoughts. - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-putin-ukraine-war-11646279098

china russia friendship axis politics

shared by Javier E on 05 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • Western nations including the U.S., the U.K. and Canada were laying the groundwork for a diplomatic boycott of the Games over China’s human-rights record. The Biden administration was about to kick off a Summit for Democracy in early December that sought to establish a clear alternative to Beijing’s autocratic rule.
  • Those moves infuriated Beijing and drove its decision-making, say the officials and advisers, who are familiar with the process leading to the Feb. 4 declaration.
  • One of Mr. Xi’s objectives was to lay out an ideological foundation for the partnership between China and Russia, those people said. To that end, the Chinese ambassador to Washington teamed up with his Russian counterpart in publishing an unusual joint opinion piece in late November in the magazine of the Center for the National Interest
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  • The two argued that democracy “can be realized in multiple ways” and isn’t the prerogative of any one country or group of countries. It called China “a whole-process, socialist democracy” and said democracy was the fundamental principle of Russia’s “democratic federative law-governed state.”
  • The Feb. 4 joint statement said both countries “have profound democratic traditions rooted in a thousand years of development,
  • It was Beijing that suggested including that the two countries’ friendship has “no limits”—wording read with apprehension in the West—according to the officials and advisers. The intention was less a declaration China would stand by Russia in case of war than a strong message to the U.S. about the resolve the two have in confronting what they see as increased American threats, the people said.
  • “China’s eagerness to present a strong alignment with Russia to counter the U.S. caused it to miss all the signs and to go in a dangerous direction,” said Yun Sun, director of the China program at the Stimson Center, a Washington think tank focused on promoting peace and security.
  • “It’s undeniable that right now, China is occupying an awkward nexus in which they’re trying to sustain their deep and fundamental relationship with Russia,”
  • “We believe they chose not to weigh in in advance.”
  • Beijing has refrained from coming to Moscow’s aid in a significant way. China is taking steps to buy Russian farm and energy products. But it is complying with the more damaging financial sanctions the U.S. has imposed on Russia, for fear of losing access to the dollar-dominated global trading system, say some Chinese bankers. They say their default position is to comply with the sanctions unless higher-ups tell them otherwise.
  • China’s ambiguous stance on the Russia-Ukraine war will likely speed up moves by countries from the U.K. and Australia to Japan to guard against Beijing,
  • a planned summit between China and the EU for April, if it isn’t canceled, is now likely to be dominated by discussions of China’s position on Ukraine.
  • Beijing’s most difficult contortions are on territorial sovereignty. China has built its foreign policy around the principle that a country’s territory is inviolable and its internal affairs should be free from interference by others.
  • China’s commitment to that principle seemingly would force it to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, something it has refrained from doing. Its policy statements have called for dialogue to resolve the crisis, avoiding the word invasion. Meanwhile, Western officials worry that Russia’s actions based on the argument that Ukraine is historically a part of Russia could embolden China to step up its own long-stated goal to bring Taiwan into its fold.
  • Since rising to power in late 2012, Mr. Xi has made himself the dominant force in China’s foreign policy and put emphasis on what he calls “big-power diplomacy”—a marked change from the relatively unassuming foreign-policy agendas of previous Chinese leaders that featured compromise and focused on building up ties with the U.S.
  • Today, despite Chinese state media’s pro-Russia rhetoric, some advisers privately question whether the partnership could cut China off from Western technologies and other resources and hurt its development, according to the foreign-policy advisers. After all, they have noted in private discussions, it is China’s opening to the U.S. and its allies that has propelled enormous Chinese growth in the past four decades.
  • China and Russia’s shared interest in confronting the U.S. has helped drive their relationship to its closest point since early in the Cold War. Part of that is due to the personal ties between Messrs. Xi and Putin, authoritarians who have visions of restoring their countries to past glory, even if in China’s case that past was centuries ago.
  • Sergey Radchenko, an international-relations professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, pointed to instances where Mr. Putin would be deliberately late for meetings with foreign dignitaries. On one occasion, he brought out his dog to a meeting with then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel who, Mr. Putin knew, was terrified of dogs.
  • “He would never let himself do anything like that to Xi,” Mr. Radchenko said. “He’s extremely respectful to Xi because he sees a close relationship with China as one of Russia’s most valuable political assets.”
Javier E

This war will be a total failure, FSB whistleblower says | News | The Times - 0 views

www.thetimes.co.uk/...b-whistleblower-says-wl2gtdl9m

FSB russia war failture ukraine whistleblower crisis

shared by Javier E on 07 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • Spies in Russia’s infamous security apparatus were kept in the dark about President Putin’s plan to invade Ukraine, according to a whistleblower who described the war as a “total failure” that could be compared only to the collapse of Nazi Germany.
  • A report thought to be by an analyst in the FSB, the successor agency to the KGB, said that the Russian dead could already number 10,000. The Russian defence ministry has acknowledged the deaths of only 498 of its soldiers in Ukraine.
  • The report said the FSB was being blamed for the failure of the invasion but had been given no warning of it and was unprepared to deal with the effects of crippling sanctions.
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  • The whistleblower added that no one in the government knew the true figure of the dead because “we have lost contact with major divisions”.
  • FSB officers had been ordered to assess the effects of western sanctions, they said, but were told that it was a hypothetical box-ticking exercise. “You have to write the analysis in a way that makes Russia the victor . . . otherwise you get questioned for not doing good work,” they wrote. “Suddenly it happens and everything comes down to your completely groundless analysis.
  • “[We are] acting intuitively, on emotion . . . our stakes will have to be raised ever higher with the hope that suddenly something might come through for us.
  • “By and large, though, Russia has no way out. There are no options for a possible victory, only defeat.”
  • The letter said that Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen leader and an ally of Putin, was on the verge of outright conflict with the Russians after his “hit squad”, sent to kill President Zelensky, was destroyed by Ukrainian forces.
  • Even if Zelensky were killed, the report said, Russia would have no hope of occupying Ukraine. “Even with minimum resistance from the Ukrainians we’d need over 500,000 people, not including supply and logistics workers.”
  • The analyst said that the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service, was trying to “dig up dirt” to claim that Ukraine had built nuclear weapons, a pretext for a pre-emptive strike.
  • The 2,000-word document was published by Vladimir Osechkin, a Russian human rights activist who runs the anti-corruption website Gulagu.net.
  • Christo Grozev, an expert on the Russian security services, said he had shown the letter to two FSB officers, both of whom had had “no doubt it was written by a colleague”.
  • The war, the writer said, had been given a “provisional deadline” of June because by then the Russian economy will have collapsed. “I have hardly slept at all recently, working all hours, in a brain-fog,” they wrote. “Maybe it’s from overwork, but I feel like I am in a surreal world. Pandora’s Box has been opened.”
  • The author said they could not rule out international conflict and that they were expecting “some f***ing adviser to convince the leadership” to send an ultimatum to the West threatening war if sanctions were not lifted.
  • “What if the West refuses?” they wrote. “In that instance I won’t exclude that we will be pulled into a real international conflict, just like Hitler in 1939.” Elsewhere in the letter they said: “Our position is like Germany in 1943-44 — but that’s our starting position.”
criscimagnael

Methane Leaks Plague New Mexico Oil and Gas Wells - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...methane-leaks-new-mexico.html

shared by criscimagnael on 25 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • Startlingly large amounts of methane are leaking from wells and pipelines in New Mexico, according to a new analysis of aerial data, suggesting that the oil and gas industry may be contributing more to climate change than was previously known.
  • The study, by researchers at Stanford University, estimates that oil and gas operations in New Mexico’s Permian Basin are releasing 194 metric tons per hour of methane, a planet-warming gas many times more potent than carbon dioxide. That is more than six times as much as the latest estimate from the Environmental Protection Agency.
  • He and Ms. Chen, a Ph.D. student in energy resources engineering, said they believed their results showed the necessity of surveying a large number of sites in order to accurately measure the environmental impact of oil and gas production.
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  • The largest previous assessment of methane emissions from oil and gas in the United States, published in 2018, reviewed studies covering about 1,000 well sites, a tiny fraction of the more than one million active wells in the country. The new study, by contrast, used aerial data to examine nearly 27,000 sites from above: more than 90 percent of all wells in the New Mexico portion of the Permian Basin, which also extends into Texas.
  • estimated about a decade ago that the break-even point — the point above which natural gas would actually hurt the climate more than coal — was a 3.1 percent methane leakage rate. Based on more recent data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Dr. Howarth estimates that the threshold is closer to 2.8 or 2.9 percent.That makes the 9.4 percent leakage rate in the new study highly alarming,
  • Methane can be released by wells both on purpose, in a process known as venting, and through unintentional leaks from aging or faulty equipment.
  • Natural gas accounts for about a third of American energy consumption, and because it is less costly than coal in terms of carbon dioxide emissions, many policymakers have promoted it as a “bridge” that could do less damage to the climate while society works on a longer-term transition to renewable energy. But compared to coal, natural gas results in much higher emissions of methane, which is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, but doesn’t last as long in the atmosphere.
  • They found that a small number of wells and pipelines accounted for “the vast majority” of methane leaks, Ms. Chen said, adding, “Comprehensive point source surveys find more high-consequence emission events, which drive total emissions.”
  • If there was good news in the study, it was that a small number of oil and gas sites contributed disproportionately to emissions — suggesting that, if the worst offenders change their practices, it is possible for the industry to operate more cleanly.
  • The Stanford researchers emphasized that the same methodology they used to quantify methane emissions could be used to identify problem sites and target regulations accordingly.“Aerial technology found high methane emissions,” Ms. Chen said, “but can also help fix them cost effectively.”
lilyrashkind

California gas prices: If Gov. Newsom's $400 rebate plan gets approved, how soon could ... - 0 views

abc7.com/...11678265

california gas prices

shared by lilyrashkind on 25 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • CALIFORNIA -- Californians shouldering the nation's highest gas prices could soon get a tax break, free rides on public transit and up to $800 on debit cards to help pay for fuel under a proposal revealed Wednesday by Gov. Gavin Newsom, but how soon could taxpayers start seeing the money?Gas prices have soared in recent weeks, the result of pandemic-induced inflation and Russia's invasion of Ukraine
  • State governments across the country have been debating what to do about it, with the most popular choices being slashing fuel taxes or offering rebates to taxpayers.Last week, the governors of Maryland and Georgia signed laws temporarily suspending their state's gas taxes, while Georgia on Wednesday also offered $1.1 billion in refunds to taxpayers in a separate action.California's average gas prices hit a new state record Wednesday at $5.88 per gallon, more than $2 higher than it was a year ago, according to AAA. California has the second-highest gas tax in the country at 51 cents per gallon. But the state's Democratic leaders have been wary of suspending the gas tax because they fear oil companies would not pass along the savings to drivers.
  • RELATED: Are California drivers paying a hidden gas fee?
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  • "This package is also focused on protecting people from volatile gas prices, and advancing clean transportation," Newsom said.Rebates like the ones Newsom is proposing take time to deliver, with the governor's office saying people could see the money by July.Rising fuel prices are a tricky policy issue for Newsom, who is trying to wean the state off fossil fuels. He has signed executive orders aimed at banning the sale of new gas-powered cars in the state by 2035 and halting all oil extraction by 2045.He has proposed a total of $10 billion in funding over six years to boost zero-emission vehicle production and build charging stations.
  • Newsom's plan must be approved by the Legislature, where Democrats dominate both the Assembly and the Senate. Democratic leaders, however, don't like the idea of giving money to rich people.They have been discussing their own rebate proposal, one that would give $200 rebates to every taxpayer and their children with taxable income less than $125,000 for single filers and $250,000 for joint filers. That means a family of five would get $1,000 while a single parent with two children would get $600.
  • A spokesperson for Democratic Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon called Newsom's idea "consistent with the Speaker's goal of providing targeted financial relief to Californians most in need" but stressed the idea is "in the very early stages."Newsom's plan is similar to a separate proposal floated last week by more moderate Democrats in the state Assembly that would give every taxpayer $400, regardless of income.
  • "People need relief now," said Assembly Republican Leader James Gallagher. "We've got now, like, four different competing plans amongst the Democrats. These guys are going to negotiate against themselves for weeks to months and who knows what we're going to get."
lilyrashkind

Utah bans transgender athletes in girls sports : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...sgender-athletes-veto-override

politics us

shared by lilyrashkind on 26 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • SALT LAKE CITY — Utah lawmakers voted Friday to override GOP Gov. Spencer Cox's veto of legislation banning transgender youth athletes from playing on girls teams — a move that comes amid a nationwide culture war over transgender issues. Before the veto, the ban received support from a majority of Utah lawmakers, but fell short of the two-thirds needed to override it. Its sponsors on Friday successfully flipped 10 Republicans in the House and five in the Senate who had previously voted against the proposal.
  • Salt Lake City is set to host the NBA All-Star game in February 2023. League spokesman Mike Bass has said the league is "working closely" with the Jazz on the matter.
  • I cannot support this bill. I cannot support the veto override and if it costs me my seat so be it. I will do the right thing, as I always do," said Republican Sen. Daniel Thatcher. With the override of Cox's veto, Utah becomes the 12th state to enact some sort of ban on transgender kids in school sports. The state's law takes effect July 1.
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  • Leaders in the deeply conservative Utah say they need the law to protect women's sports. As cultural shifts raise LGBTQ visibility, the lawmakers argue that, without their intervention, more transgender athletes with apparent physical advantages could eventually dominate the field and change the nature of women's sports.
  • he team is also partially owned by NBA all-star Dwyane Wade, who has a transgender daughter.
  • The looming threat of a lawsuit worries school districts and the Utah High School Athletic Association, which has said it lacks the funds to defend the policy in court. Later Friday, lawmakers are expected to change the bill so state money would cover legal fees.
  • The group Visit Salt Lake, which hosts conferences, shows and events, said the override could cost the state $50 million in lost revenue. The Utah-based DNA-testing genealogy giant Ancestry.com also urged the Legislature to find another way. The American Principles Project is confident that states with bans won't face boycotts like North Carolina did after limiting public restrooms transgender people could use. It focused on legislation in populous, economic juggernaut states like Texas and Florida that would be harder to boycott, Schilling said.
  • Friday's deliberations came after more than a year of debate and negotiation between social conservatives and LGBTQ advocates. Republican sponsor Rep. Kera Birkeland worked with Cox and civil rights activists at Equality Utah before introducing legislation that would require transgender student-athletes to go before a government-appointed commission.
  • The proposal, although framed as a compromise, failed to gain traction on either side. LGBTQ advocates took issue with Republican politicians appointing commission members and evaluation criteria that included body measurements such as hip-to-knee ratio.
  • But the ban won support from a vocal conservative base that has particular sway in Utah's state primary season. Even with primaries looming, however, some Republicans stood with Cox to reject the ban.
  • Ready for more bad infectious diseases news? There's an outbreak of bird flu making its way into U.S. poultry flocks. If the virus continues to spread, it could affect poultry prices — already higher amid widespread inflation. The price of chicken breasts this week averaged $3.63 per pound at U.S. supermarkets — up from $3.01 a week earlier and $2.42 at this time last year, the Agriculture Department says.
  • The latest data from the USDA show 59 confirmed sites of avian flu across commercial and backyard flocks in 17 states since the start of the year. That figure includes chickens, turkey and other poultry. The USDA identified a case of avian flu in a wild bird in mid-January, the first detection of the virus in wild birds in the U.S. since 2016. Wild birds can spread the virus to commercial and backyard flocks. By Feb. 9, the virus had been identified in a commercial flock in Indiana.
  • The last major avian flu outbreak in the U.S. was from December 2014 to June 2015, when more than 50 million chickens and turkeys either died from highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) or were destroyed to stop its spread.
  • Whether the 2022 avian flu will affect the price of eggs and poultry depends on how widespread it becomes, says Ron Kean, a poultry science expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Animal and Dairy Sciences. "In 2015, we did see quite an increase in egg prices," Kean told Wisconsin Public Radio. "The chicken meat wasn't severely affected at that time. We did see quite a loss in turkeys, so turkey prices went up. So, we'll see. If a lot of farms contract this, then we could see some real increases in price."
  • For producers who suspect their flock may be affected by avian flu, the USDA has a guide to the warning signs, including a sudden increase in bird deaths, lack of energy and appetite, and a decrease in egg production. If a flock is found to be infected by bird flu, the USDA moves quickly — within 24 hours — to assist producers to destroy the flock and prevent the virus from spreading.
  • A new Virginia state law prohibiting mask mandates in public schools does not apply to 12 students with disabilities whose parents challenged the law, a federal judge has ruled. Last month, the parents of 12 students across Virginia asked the court to halt enforcement of the law, saying it violated their rights under the federal American with Disabilities Act. The law, signed by newly elected Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, went into effect March 1; it gives parents a say over whether their children should wear masks in school.
  • The group of parents have children whose health conditions range from cystic fibrosis to asthma that put them at heightened risk for COVID-19.
  • The American Civil Liberties Union, which was one of several legal organizations that filed on behalf of the plaintiffs, said the injunction served as a "blueprint."
  • In a statement, Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares said the ruling affirms that "parents have the right to make choices for their children."
  • When Judge Katanji Brown Jackson entered the Senate chamber this week to face questions on her readiness to join the Supreme Court, she did so as the first Black woman in the nation's history to be nominated to that position. For many Black law students and professionals, including a group of 150 who traveled from across the country to watch the historic hearing, Jackson's rise to likely associate justice gives a message of profound hope for what they too might one day be able to accomplish.
  • Dudley was one of 100 law students selected nationwide to attend a series of events and watch parties for Jackson's nomination, hosted by the progressive organization, Demand Justice. The group also included 50 public defenders — a nod to Jackson's own background in that field. "I see a lot of myself in her. I see a lot of my friends in her, and I wanted to be there to support," Dudley said, calling Jackson "overly qualified to sit on the Supreme Court."
  • The cohort of legal professionals cheered on Jackson as she faced questions from Republicans about her past cases, particularly those relating to child sex abuse, and on what school of thought she would bring to determining the constitutionality of high-profile cases. Republicans had vowed to oppose President Joe Biden's nominees to the court, and when news of Justice Stephen Breyer's imminent retirement broke, the GOP quickly mobilized to attack potential nominees who might replace the longtime liberal justice on the bench.
  • Particularly, some sentencing decisions in child pornography cases drew GOP fire. But Jackson's measured responses throughout the three days of questioning solidified the support of many onlookers, who reveled in what it would mean to have a Black woman sit on the bench for the first time in the court's 233-year history. "The fact of the matter is that I'm the father of three black girls, right? And to be able to tell them that finally, someone who is Black — female nonetheless — is finally on the precipice of a mountain that has never been climbed before by any other Black woman, is huge," said Edrius Stagg, a third-year law student at Southern University Law Center in Baton Rouge.
  • Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia — whose break from Democrats on a number of politically fraught votes had worried some as to whether he would support Biden's nominee — announced on Friday he would vote in favor of Jackson's confirmation, all but assuring her path to join the bench.
  • For some, the optics of seeing Jackson — a Black woman — defend her credentials to a group of largely white, predominantly male detractors, was a familiar scene. It has played out, students said, in workplaces the world over and across the socioeconomic spectrum.
  • Booker called the attacks on Jackson's record "dangerous" and "disingenuous," noting the complexities of cases that had been boiled down to their basest points in order to damage Jackson's image.
  • "I'm not gonna let my joy be stolen," he continued. "Because I know, you and I, we appreciate something that we get that a lot of my colleagues don't." And while Jackson's opponents peppered her with politically polarizing questions, her supporters grew even more convinced that Jackson was qualified for the job. "To see her hold her composure and just answer the questions just to the best of her capabilities was just really great to see," said Jasmine McMillion, a third-year law student at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University College of Law.
woodlu

How the Ukrainian refugee crisis will change Europe | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...ugee-crisis-will-change-europe

politics crisis history

shared by woodlu on 30 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • the UN High Commissioner for Refugees said on March 30th had passed 4m. That does not count the 6.5m people displaced within Ukraine by Russia’s invasion.
  • Nearly a quarter of the population has been forced to move.
  • So far, the western response has been enlightened and generous. But that could change if governments mismanage the reception and integration of refugees, and disillusionment and fatigue set in.
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  • The Ukrainian exodus is nearly triple the size of the wave of Syrians and others who reached Europe in 2015.
  • Germany and Sweden were initially welcoming, but there was then a surge in support for anti-immigrant politicians all across Europe. This led to a hardening of Europe’s borders, a deal with Turkey to prevent Syrian refugees from proceeding to other parts of Europe, “push-backs” of asylum-seekers arriving by boat and challenges by politicians to the very idea of asylum.
  • In response to the Ukrainian crisis, Europe has rolled out welcome mats, both metaphorical and literal.
  • On March 3rd the European Union invoked for the first time its temporary-protection directive, giving Ukrainians the right to live, work and receive benefits in 26 of its 27 member countries.
  • Poland has taken in 2.2m. Hungary, whose prime minister, Viktor Orban, was the first European leader to build a fence to keep out refugees in 2015, has admitted 340,000.
  • America is joining in. On March 24th President Joe Biden said his country would take in up to 100,000 Ukrainian refugees and contribute $1bn to help Europe cope with the influx. Canada, which has the world’s biggest Ukrainian diaspora outside Russia, has said it will take as many Ukrainians as want to come.
  • Poland’s government encourages such generosity by offering hosts 40 zloty ($9) per day per refugee for two months.
  • Britain’s is giving £350 ($460) a month per household, although its forbidding bureaucracy has made it hard for many Ukrainians to come.
  • The contrast with the reaction to Syrians in 2015 is due not just to the lighter skin and Christian religion of most Ukrainians, though that is surely part of the explanation. It is also that welcoming refugees is part of a mobilisation for a nearby war in which NATO and Europe, although non-combatants, are passionately partisan.
  • Ukraine’s closest neighbours are already feeling strained. Moldova, which has received 370,000 refugees, equivalent to about a tenth of its population, is overwhelmed.
  • Newer refugees, who tend to be poorer and are less likely to have family already in western Europe, may also stay in larger numbers.
  • Parts of Poland, too, are buckling. Around 300,000 refugees have come to Warsaw, the capital, increasing its population by 17%. More than 100,000 are in Krakow, the second-largest city, which is usually home to 780,000 people. “[T]he more people, the worse the conditions will be,”
  • Countries on the route taken by refugees in 2015, from Greece to Belgium, have greatly improved their ability to register and process them.
  • Some, such as Germany, passed laws and set up institutions to integrate refugees.
  • For economies, refugees could be both a burden and a boon.
  • the EU’s four biggest countries will spend nearly 0.2% of GDP to support the influx, assuming 4m refugees come to the region.
  • Ukrainians already in Germany have higher qualifications than did Syrian refugees, which should help them find work. The relative abundance of work means that there is little risk that Germans will accuse the newcomers of taking their jobs.
  • The forecasters may also be overestimating how much work single mothers, traumatised by their flight from Ukraine and worried about the husbands they left behind, will be able to do, especially where day-care places are scarce and expensive.
  • If the war grinds on, economies slow and governments fail to provide the newcomers with housing, services and jobs, Europe’s welcome mats could be withdrawn.
  • Dissent can already be heard in some overburdened countries. In Romania a nationalist fringe contends that Ukraine, not Russia, is the enemy. In Moldova some Ukrainians’ cars have been vandalised. Filippo Grandi, the head of the UN’s refugee agency, fears that hostility will spread.
Javier E

The Morning Dispatch: Why Your Rent Is Up - 0 views

morning.thedispatch.com/...ing-dispatch-why-your-rent-594

house prices rent

shared by Javier E on 31 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • housing prices nationwide were 19.2 percent higher in January 2022 than January 2021.
  • to put that average 19.2 percent figure in perspective, a house that sold for $600,000 a year ago would typically go for about $715,000 now.
  • Incomes have not kept pace, rising an average of 5.5 percent over the same time period.
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  • Per real estate company Redfin, rent prices jumped a record 15 percent year over year in January. 
Javier E

If We Knew Then What We Know Now About Covid, What Would We Have Done Differently? - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...covid-lessons-learned-9dd5566f

politics us history crisis culture policy trump pandemic response

shared by Javier E on 12 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • A small cadre of aerosol scientists had a different theory. They suspected that Covid-19 was transmitted not so much by droplets but by smaller infectious aerosol particles that could travel on air currents way farther than 6 feet and linger in the air for hours. Some of the aerosol particles, they believed, were small enough to penetrate the cloth masks widely used at the time.
  • For much of 2020, doctors and public-health officials thought the virus was transmitted through droplets emitted from one person’s mouth and touched or inhaled by another person nearby. We were advised to stay at least 6 feet away from each other to avoid the droplets
  • The group had a hard time getting public-health officials to embrace their theory. For one thing, many of them were engineers, not doctors.
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  • “My first and biggest wish is that we had known early that Covid-19 was airborne,”
  • , “Once you’ve realized that, it informs an entirely different strategy for protection.” Masking, ventilation and air cleaning become key, as well as avoiding high-risk encounters with strangers, he says.
  • Instead of washing our produce and wearing hand-sewn cloth masks, we could have made sure to avoid superspreader events and worn more-effective N95 masks or their equivalent. “We could have made more of an effort to develop and distribute N95s to everyone,” says Dr. Volckens. “We could have had an Operation Warp Speed for masks.”
  • We didn’t realize how important clear, straight talk would be to maintaining public trust. If we had, we could have explained the biological nature of a virus and warned that Covid-19 would change in unpredictable ways.  
  • In the face of a pandemic, he says, the public needs an early basic and blunt lesson in virology
  • “The science is really important, but if you don’t get the trust and communication right, it can only take you so far,”
  • and mutates, and since we’ve never seen this particular virus before, we will need to take unprecedented actions and we will make mistakes, he says.
  • Since the public wasn’t prepared, “people weren’t able to pivot when the knowledge changed,”
  • By the time the vaccines became available, public trust had been eroded by myriad contradictory messages—about the usefulness of masks, the ways in which the virus could be spread, and whether the virus would have an end date.
  • , the absence of a single, trusted source of clear information meant that many people gave up on trying to stay current or dismissed the different points of advice as partisan and untrustworthy.
  • We didn’t know how difficult it would be to get the basic data needed to make good public-health and medical decisions. If we’d had the data, we could have more effectively allocated scarce resources
  • For much of the pandemic, doctors, epidemiologists, and state and local governments had no way to find out in real time how many people were contracting Covid-19, getting hospitalized and dying
  • Doctors didn’t know what medicines worked. Governors and mayors didn’t have the information they needed to know whether to require masks. School officials lacked the information needed to know whether it was safe to open schools.
  • people didn’t know whether it was OK to visit elderly relatives or go to a dinner party.
  • just months before the outbreak of the pandemic, the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists released a white paper detailing the urgent need to modernize the nation’s public-health system still reliant on manual data collection methods—paper records, phone calls, spreadsheets and faxes.
  • While the U.K. and Israel were collecting and disseminating Covid case data promptly, in the U.S. the CDC couldn’t. It didn’t have a centralized health-data collection system like those countries did, but rather relied on voluntary reporting by underfunded state and local public-health systems and hospitals.
  • doctors and scientists say they had to depend on information from Israel, the U.K. and South Africa to understand the nature of new variants and the effectiveness of treatments and vaccines. They relied heavily on private data collection efforts such as a dashboard at Johns Hopkins University’s Coronavirus Resource Center that tallied cases, deaths and vaccine rates globally.
  • With good data, Dr. Ranney says, she could have better managed staffing and taken steps to alleviate the strain on doctors and nurses by arranging child care for them.
  • To solve the data problem, Dr. Ranney says, we need to build a public-health system that can collect and disseminate data and acts like an electrical grid. The power company sees a storm coming and lines up repair crews.
  • If we’d known how damaging lockdowns would be to mental health, physical health and the economy, we could have taken a more strategic approach to closing businesses and keeping people at home.
  • t many doctors say they were crucial at the start of the pandemic to give doctors and hospitals a chance to figure out how to accommodate and treat the avalanche of very sick patients.
  • The measures reduced deaths, according to many studies—but at a steep cost.
  • The lockdowns didn’t have to be so harmful, some scientists say. They could have been more carefully tailored to protect the most vulnerable, such as those in nursing homes and retirement communities, and to minimize widespread disruption.
  • Lockdowns could, during Covid-19 surges, close places such as bars and restaurants where the virus is most likely to spread, while allowing other businesses to stay open with safety precautions like masking and ventilation in place.  
  • If England’s March 23, 2020, lockdown had begun one week earlier, the measure would have nearly halved the estimated 48,600 deaths in the first wave of England’s pandemic
  • If the lockdown had begun a week later, deaths in the same period would have more than doubled
  • The key isn’t to have the lockdowns last a long time, but that they are deployed earlier,
  • It is possible to avoid lockdowns altogether. Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong—all countries experienced at handling disease outbreaks such as SARS in 2003 and MERS—avoided lockdowns by widespread masking, tracking the spread of the virus through testing and contact tracing and quarantining infected individuals.
  • Had we known that even a mild case of Covid-19 could result in long Covid and other serious chronic health problems, we might have calculated our own personal risk differently and taken more care.
  • Early in the pandemic, public-health officials were clear: The people at increased risk for severe Covid-19 illness were older, immunocompromised, had chronic kidney disease, Type 2 diabetes or serious heart conditions
  • t had the unfortunate effect of giving a false sense of security to people who weren’t in those high-risk categories. Once case rates dropped, vaccines became available and fear of the virus wore off, many people let their guard down, ditching masks, spending time in crowded indoor places.
  • it has become clear that even people with mild cases of Covid-19 can develop long-term serious and debilitating diseases. Long Covid, whose symptoms include months of persistent fatigue, shortness of breath, muscle aches and brain fog, hasn’t been the virus’s only nasty surprise
  • In February 2022, a study found that, for at least a year, people who had Covid-19 had a substantially increased risk of heart disease—even people who were younger and had not been hospitalized
  • respiratory conditions.
  • Some scientists now suspect that Covid-19 might be capable of affecting nearly every organ system in the body. It may play a role in the activation of dormant viruses and latent autoimmune conditions people didn’t know they had
  •  A blood test, he says, would tell people if they are at higher risk of long Covid and whether they should have antivirals on hand to take right away should they contract Covid-19.
  • If the risks of long Covid had been known, would people have reacted differently, especially given the confusion over masks and lockdowns and variants? Perhaps. At the least, many people might not have assumed they were out of the woods just because they didn’t have any of the risk factors.
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