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Covid Prescription: Get the Vaccine, Wait a Month, Return to Normal - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...h-return-to-normal-11615401516 vaccine effects consequences pandemic
shared by Javier E on 12 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • the CDC finally started telling vaccinated people that they can have normal interactions with other vaccinated people—but only in highly limited circumstances. Given the impressive effectiveness of the vaccine, that should have been immediately obvious by applying scientific inference and common sense.
  • Parts of the new guidelines are absurdly restrictive.
  • the CDC didn’t withdraw its advice to avoid air travel after vaccination. A year of prevaccine experience has demonstrated that airplanes aren’t a source of spread. A study conducted for the defense department found that commercial planes have HEPA filtration and airflow that exceed the standards of a hospital operating room.
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  • An unpublished study conducted by the Israeli Health Ministry and Pfizer showed that vaccination reduced transmission by 89% to 94% and almost totally prevented hospitalization and death, according to press reports. Immunity kicks in fully about four weeks after the first vaccine dose, and then you are essentially bulletproof.
  • On a positive note, the CDC did say that fully vaccinated people who are asymptomatic don’t need to be tested.
  • that obvious recommendation should have come two months ago, before wasting so many tests on people who have high levels of circulating antibodies from vaccination.
  • n its guidance the CDC says the risks of infection in vaccinated people “cannot be completely eliminated.” True, we don’t have conclusive data that guarantees vaccination reduces risk to zero. We never will. We are operating in the realm of medical discretion based on the best available data, as practicing physicians have always done
  • The CDC highlights the vaccines’ stunning success but is ridiculously cautious about its implications. Public-health officials focus myopically on transmission risk while all but ignoring the broader health crisis stemming from isolation. The CDC acknowledges “potential” risks of isolation, but doesn’t go into details.
  • Separating family members was excessive and cruel, driven by narrow thinking that focused singularly on reducing viral transmission risk, heedless of the harm to the quality of human life.
  • As people yearn to be with their loved ones and rebuild communities, we shouldn’t repeat that mistake. We cannot exaggerate the public-health threat, as we did with hospital visitation rules, and keep crushing the human spirit with overly restrictive policies for vaccinated Americans.
  • Loneliness has become a public-health crisis. In pre-Covid times, it was estimated that 20% of American’s struggled with loneliness, a figure that has surely multiplied faster than research has been able to measure
  • self-harm among kids increased as much as 300% last year in some parts of the country
  • I too will invoke “common sense” to answer the big question so many are asking: What am I allowed to do after I’ve been vaccinated? Once a month has passed after your first shot, go back to normal.
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Messenger RNA vaccines: Now proven against coronavirus, the technology can do so much m... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html Pandemic
shared by carolinehayter on 01 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • This astonishing efficacy has held up in real-world studies in the US, Israel and elsewhere. The mRNA technology -- developed for its speed and flexibility as opposed to expectations it would provide strong protection against an infectious disease -- has pleased and astonished even those who already advocated for it.
  • it's a technology that researchers had been betting on for decades. Now those bets are paying off, and not just by turning back a pandemic that killed millions in just a year.
  • showing promise against old enemies such as HIV, and infections that threaten babies and young children, such as respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and metapneumovirus. It's being tested as a treatment for cancers, including melanoma and brain tumors. It might offer a new way to treat autoimmune diseases. And it's also being checked out as a possible alternative to gene therapy for intractable conditions such as sickle cell disease.
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  • "If you want to make a new influenza vaccine using the traditional methods, you have to isolate the virus, learn how to grow it, learn how to inactivate it, and purify it. That takes months. With RNA, you only need the sequence,"
  • "When the Chinese released the sequence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, we started the process of making RNA the next day. A couple weeks later, we were injecting animals with the vaccine."
  • Weissman's lab is now working on a universal coronavirus vaccine that would protect against Covid-19, SARS, MERS, coronavirus that cause the common cold -- and future strains.
  • "We started working on a pan-coronavirus vaccine last spring," Weissman said. "There have been three coronavirus epidemics in the past 20 years. There are going to be more."
  • Another obvious use for mRNA technology is to fight cancer. The human body fights off cancer every day, and using mRNA could help it do so even better.
  • Different tumor cell types have various, recognizable structures on the outside that the immune system can recognize. "You can imagine being able to inject someone with an mRNA that encodes an antibody that specifically targets that receptor," McLellan said.
  • "We identify mutations found on a patient's cancer cells," the company says on its website. Computer algorithms predict the 20 most common mutations. "We then create a vaccine that encodes for each of these mutations and load them onto a single mRNA molecule," Moderna says.
  • BioNtech has been working with academic researchers to use mRNA to treat mice genetically engineered to develop a disease similar to multiple sclerosis -- an autoimmune disease that starts when the immune system mistakenly attacks the myelin, a fatty covering of the nerve cells.In the mice, the treatment appeared to help stop the attack, while keeping the rest of the immune system intact.
  • The idea behind gene therapy is to replace a defective gene with one that works properly.
  • The mRNA approach promises to send instructions for making the healthy version of a protein, and Weissman sees special promise in treating sickle cell disease, in particular.
  • "It's gene therapy without the half a million dollar price tag," he added. "It should be just an IV injection and that's it."
  • "The idea there is if you are immune to tick saliva proteins, when the tick bites you, the body produces inflammation and the tick falls off," Weissman said.
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Opinion | The Sound of Silence on Abortion - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...bortion-corporate-support.html politics US Culture policy opinion
shared by aleija on 03 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Back in 2014, when the Arizona Legislature passed a bill to provide business owners with a religious excuse to discriminate against gay people, the N.F.L. threatened to move Super Bowl XLIX out of the University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale. Gov. Jan Brewer vetoed the bill.
  • In 2015, when the N.C.A.A. led a pushback from its Indianapolis headquarters against a similar bill that the Indiana Legislature passed, Gov. Mike Pence said it was all a “great misunderstanding” and eventually signed a watered-down version that met the demands of the N.C.A.A. and other sports organizations that had protested.
  • In 2017, the North Carolina Legislature repealed an anti-transgender “bathroom bill” after the loss of the N.B.A. All-Star Game plus convention and tourism business cost the state millions of dollars in revenue and companies canceled plans to relocate there.
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  • This April, prodded or perhaps even shamed by prominent Black business leaders, 170 executives of major companies signed a statement protesting a vote-suppression measure enacted in Georgia and ones pending in other states.
  • And this brings us to a subject that corporate America would evidently prefer not to talk about: abortion. It’s possible I’ve missed something, but I’ve been listening hard, and so far all I’ve heard is the sound of silence.
  • . The article pointed out that in the four days between April 26 and April 29, 28 new abortion restrictions were signed into law in seven states. As of mid-May, bills proposing 549 separate abortion restrictions had been introduced in 47 states, including 165 that would ban abortion.
  • Much of this activity might have been shrugged off as just so much political theater had the Supreme Court not agreed last month to hear Mississippi’s defense of its ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, a law that under current doctrine is unconstitutional. While the country may not learn until a year from now how receptive the court is to revising or abandoning its abortion precedents, its acceptance of the Mississippi case for argument in the fall serves as a welcome mat to states trying to outdo one another in anti-abortion zealotry.
  • But nothing can compete with the law that Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas signed last month. Not only does it ban abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detected — which can occur as early as six weeks, before many women realize they are pregnant — but it effectively deputizes the entire world’s population to enforce the ban, authorizing “any person” to sue anyone who performs or facilitates an abortion outside that time frame
  • All would be subject to a $10,000 fine plus the plaintiff’s court costs for each successful lawsuit. At the same time, the law strips the state itself of enforcement power. The purpose of that novel provision is to prevent abortion providers from going to court, because there is no entity they can sue.
  • Abortion may be an uncomfortable subject to talk about, but don’t misunderstand the silence. Abortion is not rare. It is, in fact, a common female experience, although I’ll grant that it is not as common as voting. Nearly half of all pregnancies in the United States are unintended, and some 40 percent of those end in abortion. This is life as women live it, even in Texas.
  • Your silence is acquiescence; it’s a decision. You’re making a decision. Your silence is a decision. And when you recognize that, some of these issues are so salient and so critical that you have to take a position.
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The Truth is Out There. But With New UFO Report Expected to Land Soon, Talk of Alien Li... - 0 views

www.the74million.org/...the-nations-science-classrooms
shared by mattrenz16 on 02 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Researching more famous accounts of UFO sightings and purported alien abductions with students is how he’ll be spending the summer. And with the federal government’s report on “unidentified aerial phenomena” — or UAPs — expected as soon as this week, they’ll have new grainy videos to analyze and debate.
  • When former President Donald Trump signed a $2.3 trillion funding bill in December, educators were eye-balling the $54 billion in relief funds included for school reopening. But tucked into the more than 5,500 pages of legislative text was a Sen. Marco Rubio-sponsored provision directing Naval intelligence to uncover what they’ve been tracking in the skies. The bill asked for detailed reports of UAPs and knowledge of whether “a potential adversary may have achieved breakthrough aerospace capabilities” that might harm Earth, or at least the U.S. The report, combined with Navy pilots’ recent accounts of aircraft displaying unusual movements, provide fresh material for teachers who find that questions about alien visitors are a great way to engage students in science.
  • Highly trained military pilots admit they are taking the sightings of these unusual aircraft seriously — and think others should, too. With both Republicans and Democrats interested in the report’s findings and respected news shows like “60 Minutes” following the topic, the possibility that otherworldly beings are patrolling our atmosphere is no longer just the stuff of sci-fi movies and paranormal conventions.
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  • His suspicions that UFOs are more than a hoax began while he was in graduate school at Montana State University. In 1988, two cows from a nearby herd were mutilated with surgical precision, and a professor mentioned UFOs often interfered with nuclear missile systems at Malmstrom Air Force Base three hours away.
  • A paper Knuth co-authored in 2019 focuses on well-documented sightings of “unidentified aerial vehicles” that display “technical capabilities far exceeding those of our fastest aircraft and spacecraft.”
  • Knuth’s calculations of speed and acceleration are also good high school physics problems, said Berkil Alexander, who teaches at Kennesaw Mountain High School, outside Atlanta. His fascination with UFOs began when he saw “Flight of the Navigator,” a 1986 film about an alien abduction, and in 2019, he was chosen to participate in a NASA program focusing on increasing student engagement in STEM.
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The Warped Vision of "Anti-Racism" - Persuasion - 0 views

www.persuasion.community/...e-warped-vision-of-anti-racism anti-racism woke Critical Theory
shared by Javier E on 10 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • What kind of monster doesn’t support “anti-racism”? Who would put themselves on the other side of “social justice”? How could you be opposed to the notion of “racial equity”?
  • what began as a collective yen for racial equality—long overdue in our nation—has devolved into something dangerous that is actually undermining its own noble goals.
  • as high-minded as these ideas sound, they mark a shift away from the values they purport to represent—equality before the law; the consent of the governed; even democracy itself—and toward the opposite, with people ranked by immutable characteristics and ruled by a tiny elite.
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  • Those who disagree—most crucially, millions of working-class Americans of all ethnicities—are excised from the public square.
  • The social-justice movement comes at the expense of justice; “anti-racism” ends up exacerbating racism.
  • How could this be? It’s difficult to stand against “social justice,” especially for those of us who are deeply concerned about inequality. We feel humility toward activists, writers and politicians who take up the language of racial justice, given how urgent the cause is.
  • The basis for today’s social-justice movement is a deep skepticism about liberal values like equality, justice and democracy. This is rooted in an academic discipline known as “critical race theory,” which takes elements from Hegel and Marx, along with postmodernists like Foucault and Derrida, to assemble a worldview that does not accept that equality can exist.
  • Napoleon Bonaparte, and he was taking a victory lap through a German university town after defeating the Prussian army, when he happened to ride past a German philosopher with writer’s block, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
  • a key element of his work became associated with the concept of mastery and domination, of one man exerting his will over others.
  • Society, culture and history were produced in the back and forth, or “dialectic,” between the powerful and the powerless—the master-slave dialectic, as Hegel’s pairing became known in subsequent iterations.
  • When Marx articulated his thesis of class conflict as the basis for all modern social existence, he was—in the view of Jean-Paul Sartre among others—expanding on the master-slave dialectic.
  • And if history progressed through a changing cast of masters and slaves for Hegel, or class struggle for Marx, for critical race theorists and their “anti-racism” inheritors, it’s white people and people of color in a binary that gives one side all the power and the other side none.
  • Over time, three other key ideas were grafted onto the master-slave dialectic:
  • false consciousness
  • a belief that the ideals of a society mean less than do the exceptions to those ideals
  • and a commitment to undermining the grand narratives that a society relies upon.
  • “False consciousness” was an attempt by Marxists to explain why the working class wasn’t buying into their worldview.
  • It turns out that working-class people are often conservative, a fact that has never ceased to bedevil and infuriate educated leftists trying to impose their desire for revolution. Instead of trying to understand the preferences of the working class, Marxists asserted that the poor workers were merely deluded, in the grip of a “false consciousness,” instead of a revolutionary one.
  • You can see the concept of false consciousness—and the condescension that is its hallmark—everywhere in critical race theory.
  • Its proponents classify people of color who don’t have radical views on race or who vote Republican as the handmaidens of white supremacy;
  • The idea of false consciousness is everywhere in the work of Robin DiAngelo, a prominent proponent of “anti-racist” ideology whose book White Fragility has sold close to a million copies. DiAngelo contends that white people who cry when accused of being racists actually prove their bigotry via these “weaponized tears,” which she deems “white racial bullying.”
  • If a society claims as its foundation a narrative that some members are excluded from, then the true meaning of that narrative is found in the exception, rather than the rule.
  • Postmodernist philosophers added to this a mistrust of the ideals that society claims to be built on:
  • postmodernists argued that the explicit mores of a culture have no objective value, but are instead a way for one group to benefit at the expense of another.
  • From this perspective, the Constitution isn’t a document that established the United States on principles of equality and freedom that the country failed to live up to.
  • Instead, the Constitution is a document fundamental to denying rights to those deemed ineligible, and justifying the ownership of enslaved persons.
  • Your symbol of freedom and equality is nothing more than a tool of repression, postmodernists argue. Failures, even at the margins, expose the hypocrisy of the whole, and define it as a lie.
  • You can see this at work in The New York Times Magazine’s Pulitzer-prize winning “The 1619 Project,” which marks the year that the first African slave was brought to American shores.
  • argued that, while history teaches 1776 as the year of our nation’s founding, we should consider whether “the country’s true birth date, the moment that our defining contradictions first came into the world, was in late August of 1619,” as the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Jake Silverstein, put it in an introduction.
  • It can’t be that America was founded on values like equality and liberty and democracy that it imperfectly embodied and has subsequently strived to correct.
  • It must be that the true founding was slavery, its true nature revealed by this failure.
  • This is why the social-justice movement cannot recognize the huge gains that have been made in this nation on the question of race; if there is even one instance of racism left in America, it is proof again of this true nature.
  • As with America, some on the left find it impossible to see Israel as a flawed nation imperfectly striving toward the ideals of its founding. The occupation of the Palestinians can’t be a disastrous injustice. It must be that Israel’s foundation is defined by this injustice, that “Zionism is racism.”
  • the real threat here is not just mangled logic. It’s the erasure of the possibility of equality, of a common humanity, that requires we treat each other as equals before God and before the law.
  • Today’s progressive left, whose ideas have become prevalent in much of the American establishment that is now repeating its incantations, simply does not believe equality is possible, instead differentiating people by how much power they supposedly have, with no common humanity to call upon.
  • since the social-justice movement recognizes only power, every one of its proposals is designed not to create a more equal society, but to transfer power from oppressors to oppressed—while allowing those designated as victims to maintain claim to the status of oppressed.
  • Race is immutable, so it doesn’t matter how much real power a person of color wields; their race means they will never be anything but oppressed.
  • You might be wondering why this view, which erases equality and cites oppression as the root of everything, has mainstream appeal
  • It seems to me that progressive elites, despite their pieties, don’t really want to live in a more equal society. They prefer the imperfect meritocracy we live under—the rule of the smart, the talented and the rich, most of whom traffic in the fiction that their status was earned.
  • progressives see themselves as compassionate. What they needed was a way to explain the inequality found in the meritocratic system they hold dear, a way that made them feel they were still on the side of the good without having to disrupt what is good for them.
  • This is not the way to a more equal society. We cannot right the wrongs of racial inequality—an urgent task—by erasing the ideal of equality
  • Nor can we allow the fact that equality has been unequally enforced throughout most of our history to provide an excuse to throw it away, and build a newly racialized America.
  • the clues are elsewhere. At first, one notices them like glitches in the matrix. Maybe you read an unorthodox remark on Twitter, and watch as its author is insulted in the cruelest terms by thousands of people, many with words like “social justice” or “diversity and inclusion” in their bios
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Listen: Coronavirus Mutations - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...617696 Covid-19 research mutation
shared by Javier E on 16 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • this gets to a weird aspect of disease and transmissibility. If you get really sick, you actually don’t transmit the virus all that well because you’re really sick and you don’t interact with the same number of people, whereas a virus that causes less disease might actually be more transmissible in a sense, because, since you don’t feel as bad, you’re more likely to transmit it to other people.
  • So there’s a bit of a dichotomy in how viruses spread. This particular COVID-19 is kind of this Goldilocks of viruses. If it was a little bit more severe, it would be easier to control. If it was a little bit less severe, it wouldn’t be as disruptive.
  • These variants we’re seeing haven’t been pushed to evolve away from antibodies yet.
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  • Your antibodies may be not as effective, but they’re still going to be effective. If you have 10 times the amount of antibody that you need and you lose half of that, you’re still going to be well protected. And I think that’s where these variants are. Most people will be well protected from the worst aspects of disease.
  • There are four or five common-cold coronaviruses. Many of them have their roots in animals, whether they be bats or cows or other animal species, and then jumped into humans. None of those viruses cause severe disease. They’re all relatively transmissible, and you can get infected every two or three years with them.
  • There is some possibility [SARS-CoV-2] will go along that route. Once we’ve all gotten some level of baseline immunity—we’ve seen a virus like this or very similar to this—the next time you have it, it [may cause] a mild infection but, for the most part, you won’t end up in a hospital or on a respirator. That’s kind of the trajectory that you could expect, but again, we don’t know.
  • This event could have happened in 2002 with [SARS-CoV-1], but that virus was effectively stopped through quarantining and other procedures. We have an event now where most of the world will have seen this virus, either through a vaccine or through natural immunity, and so its trajectory in a few years is really hard to predict. I’m hopeful that it’s going to be more like a common-cold coronavirus. The best outcome would be that it’s like SARS 1 and it just disappears from the Earth.
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Tragedy of the Commons - Econlib - 0 views

www.econlib.org/...TragedyoftheCommons.html
shared by anonymous on 07 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • But each individual must first survive in the short run. If all decision makers were unselfish and idealistic calculators, a distribution governed by the rule “to each according to his needs” might work. But such is not our world.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 07 Oct 19
       
      Talking about how us humans do not think long term about the resources we use. We are so selfish in regards to overusing what we have and buying unessential items that we don't even need!
  • Each nation still has the problem of allocating fishing rights among its own people on a noncommonized basis. If each government allowed ownership of fish within a given area, so that an owner could sue those who encroach on his fish, owners would have an incentive to refrain from overfishing.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 07 Oct 19
       
      giving an interpretation of what could happen. Since we overfish so much, we could eventually run out. A point the author brings up is that since the oceans are free to everyone, anyone can fish as much as you want. We need to put more laws on this!
  • No one owns the Earth’s atmosphere. Therefore, it is treated as a common dump into which everyone may discharge wastes
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 07 Oct 19
       
      No one is thinking of the atmosphere-it is getting thinner and thinner.
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Trump's Climate Agenda May Not Help Energy Firms as He Says | Time - 0 views

time.com/...ump-climate-change-oil-and-gas crisis politics
shared by brookegoodman on 25 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • President Trump touted his deregulatory agenda on climate and energy in a speech in Pittsburgh Wednesday, describing his support as key to the industry
  • Many worry that public backlash over the industry’s role in causing climate change, as well as its reputation as an ardent opponent of environmental regulations, poses a serious, long-term threat to their business.
  • Bigger companies, like BP, are more likely to support limited climate regulation like methane rules than small ones because their deep pockets make it easier to meet regulatory costs. And European oil and gas firms are more likely to see a future beyond oil and gas than their American counterparts, in large part because of pressure in their home countries.
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  • That division came to a head earlier this year when the Trump Administration rolled back rules requiring oil and gas companies to halt methane emissions, the second-most common greenhouse gas.
  • API blasted out emails to reporters highlighting the role natural gas has played reducing emissions, praising the launch of a Senate climate group looking into potential bipartisan climate solutions, and saying that when it comes to climate change “we’re on it.”
  • A handful of oil majors, BP, ConocoPhilips, ExxonMobil, Shell and Total, are supporting a coalition pushing a proposal for a carbon tax at the federal level that would distribute the revenue back to taxpayers.
  • “Companies should not be so greedy,” he said, calling addressing emissions from methane an “asset protection strategy.”
  • Denying climate change is no longer viable, but trade groups often end up supporting the policy views of their lowest common denominator.
  • energy systems around the world need to shift dramatically to keep temperatures from rising more than 1.5°C by the end of the century,
  • Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who are polling alongside former Vice President Joe Biden in a close race for the Democratic presidential nomination, have both said they would ban fracking as part of a suite of policies targeting the industry.
  • President Trump, who regularly claims the climate measures amount to a “war” on American energy.
  • But the science is also clear that simply not addressing the issue will bring much worse economic catastrophe, from submerged cities to mass migration fueled by extreme weather.
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About 41% of the global population are under 24. And they're angry… | Opinion... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...e-up-established-order-protest protest activism youth generation global dissent culture politics
shared by Javier E on 27 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Are we entering a new age of global revolution? Or is it foolish to try to link anger in India over the price of onions to pro-democracy demonstrations in Russia?
  • recent upheavals do appear to share one key factor: youth. In most cases, younger people are at the forefront of calls for change. The uprising that unexpectedly swept away Sudan’s ancien regime this year was essentially generational
  • while younger people, in any era, are predisposed to shake up the established order, extreme demographic, social and political imbalances are intensifying present-day pressures
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  • There are more young people than ever before. About 41% of the global population of 7.7 billion is aged 24 or under. In Africa, 41% is under 15. In Asia and Latin America (where 65% of the world’s people live), it’s 25%.
  • In developed countries, imbalances tilt the other way. While 16% of Europeans are under 15, about 18%, double the world average, are over 65.
  • Recession, stagnant or falling living standards, and austerity programmes delivered from on high have shaped their experience
  • a common factor is the increased willingness of undemocratic regimes, ruling elites and wealthy oligarchies to use force to crush threats to their power – while hypocritically condemning protester violenc
  • they’re connected. More people than ever before have access to education. They are healthier. They appear less bound by social conventions and religion. They are mutually aware. And their expectations are higher.
  • thanks to social media, the ubiquity of English as a common tongue, and the internet’s globalisation and democratisation of information
  • younger people from all backgrounds and locations are more open to alternative life choices, more attuned to “universal” rights and norms such as free speech or a living wage – and less prepared to accept their denial
  • It is difficult, if not perverse, to watch protesters risking torture and death by challenging Egypt’s dictator, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, and not relate their daring both to Hong Kong and, say, to Kashmiris’ efforts to throw off the yoke imposed by another “strongman”, India’s Narendra Modi. When Palestinian youths taunt the Israel Defence Forces with flags and stones, are they not part of the same global fight for democratic self-determination, basic freedoms and human rights espoused by young Muscovites opposing Vladimir Putin’s cruel kleptocracy?
  • Any government, elected or not, that fails to provide jobs, decent wages and housing faces big trouble.
  • Another negative is the perceived, growing readiness of democratically elected governments, notably in the US and Europe, to lie, manipulate and disinform
  • disbelief is the new spirit of the age
  • The stifling silence that hangs over North Korea’s gulag, China’s Xinjiang and Tibet regions, and dark, hidden places inside Syria, Eritrea, Iran and Azerbaijan could yet descend on us all. What helps protect us is the noisy, life-affirming dissent of the young.
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Guinea Pigs Were Widespread as Elizabethan Pets - 0 views

www.nationalgeographic.com/...ope-south-america-pets-animals guinea pigs pets history culture
shared by bluekoenig on 28 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • bluekoenig on 28 Oct 19
     
    This article details how South American guinea pigs became common pets for the rich and middle class of Europe
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Bones of ape living 12m years ago point to genesis of upright walking | Science | The G... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-to-genesis-of-upright-walking history evolution
shared by brickol on 06 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • The distinctive human habit of walking upright may have evolved millions of years earlier than thought, according to researchers who uncovered the remains of an ancient ape in southern Germany.
  • Excavations from the Hammerschmiede clay pit in Bavaria turned up fossilised bones belonging to a previously unknown baboon-sized ape that lived nearly 12m years ago
  • Analysis of the bones shows that the animal, named Danuvius guggenmosi, had an unusual mix of anatomical features. While its long forearms, curved fingers and powerful, grasping thumbs were hallmarks of life spent dangling from branches, the hips, knees and feet were more human-like and better suited to walking upright, the scientists said.
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  • According to Böhme, the findings suggest that our upright posture can be traced to a common ancestor of humans and great apes that lived in Europe rather than Africa.
  • The clay pit haul of fossils included teeth, pieces of jaw and spine, and a big toe that would have been handy for grasping tree branches. Arguably the most important fossils were a forearm and shin bone, which informed the scientists’ speculation about how the ape moved around.
  • The most complete skeleton, with 21 bones, was thought to belong to a male that stood a metre high and weighed about 30kg. He had a broad chest and the curved, S-shaped spine seen in humans.
  • Some researchers believe dryopithecins were the ancestors of the ancient African apes who ultimately gave rise to great apes more generally, including the gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees, bonobos and humans.
  • Writing in the journal Nature, the scientists make the case for danuvius employing what they call “extended limb clambering” to get around. Rather than swinging from branches or walking cautiously on branches, extended limb clambering uses both arms and legs equally.
  • “Together, the mosaic features of D guggenmosi arguably provide the best model yet of what a common ancestor of humans and African apes might have looked like. It offers something for everyone: the forelimbs suited to life in the trees that all living apes, including humans, still have, and lower limbs suited to extended postures like those used by orangutans during bipedalism in the trees.”
  • “Danuvius is not a fossil hominin, but it does help inform how humans may have evolved.”
  • Some of the most compelling evidence for upright walking in human ancestors comes from Ardipithecus ramidus, a female skeleton dating back 4.4m years that was found in Ethiopia. Ardi, who stood about a metre tall, may not have been the most accomplished of walkers, but much of her skeleton shows adaptations to walking on two feet.
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Opinion | Who Killed the Knapp Family? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...deaths-despair-poverty.html American dream despair working class culture crisis jobs responsibility welfare state drugs
shared by Javier E on 12 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • there is a cancer gnawing at the nation that predates Trump and is larger than him.
  • Suicides are at their highest rate since World War II; one child in seven is living with a parent suffering from substance abuse; a baby is born every 15 minutes after prenatal exposure to opioids; America is slipping as a great power.
  • We have deep structural problems that have been a half century in the making, under both political parties, and that are often transmitted from generation to generation.
  • ...42 more annotations...
  • Deaton and the economist Anne Case, who is also his wife, coined the term “deaths of despair” to describe the surge of mortality from alcohol, drugs and suicide.
  • “The meaningfulness of the working-class life seems to have evaporated,” Angus Deaton, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, told us. “The economy just seems to have stopped delivering for these people.”
  • Only in America has life expectancy now fallen three years in a row, for the first time in a century, because of “deaths of despair.”
  • Even in this presidential campaign, the unraveling of working-class communities receives little attention. There is talk about the middle class, but very little about the working class
  • The suffering was invisible to affluent Americans, but the consequences are now evident to all: The survivors mostly voted for Trump, some in hopes that he would rescue them
  • The stock market is near record highs, but working-class Americans (often defined as those without college degrees) continue to struggle. If you’re only a high school graduate, or worse, a dropout, work no longer pays.
  • If the federal minimum wage in 1968 had kept up with inflation and productivity, it would now be $22 an hour. Instead, it’s $7.25.
  • we would return to the Kristof family farm in Yamhill and see a humanitarian crisis unfolding in a community we loved — and a similar unraveling was happening in towns across the country. This was not one town’s problem, but a crisis in the American system.
  • “I’m a capitalist, and even I think capitalism is broken,” says Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater, the world’s largest hedge fund.
  • One consequence is that the bottom end of America’s labor force is not very productive, in ways that reduce our country’s competitiveness
  • we discuss college access but not the one in seven children who don’t graduate from high school.
  • “We have to stop being obsessed over impeachment and start actually digging in and solving the problems that got Donald Trump elected in the first place,”
  • We have to treat America’s cancer.
  • the situation is worsening, because families have imploded under the pressure of drug and alcohol abuse, and children are growing up in desperate circumstances
  • In the 1970s and ’80s it was common to hear derogatory suggestions that the forces ripping apart African-American communities were rooted in “black culture.” The idea was that “deadbeat dads,” self-destructive drug abuse and family breakdown were the fundamental causes, and that all people needed to do was show “personal responsibility.
  • A Harvard sociologist, William Julius Wilson, countered that the true underlying problem was lost jobs, and he turned out to be right. When good jobs left white towns like Yamhill a couple of decades later because of globalization and automation, the same pathologies unfolded there.
  • Men in particular felt the loss not only of income but also of dignity that accompanied a good job. Lonely and troubled, they self-medicated with alcohol or drugs, and they accumulated criminal records that left them less employable and less marriageable.
  • Family structure collapsed.
  • The problems are also rooted in disastrous policy choices over 50 years
  • The kids on the No. 6 bus rode into a cataclysm as working-class communities disintegrated across America because of lost jobs, broken families, gloom — and failed policies.
  • The United States wrested power from labor and gave it to business, and it suppressed wages and cut taxes rather than invest in human capital, as our peer countries did.
  • Americans also bought into a misconceived “personal responsibility” narrative that blamed people for being poor.
  • It’s true, of course, that personal responsibility matters: People we spoke to often acknowledged engaging in self-destructive behaviors.
  • But when you can predict wretched outcomes based on the ZIP code where a child is born, the problem is not bad choices the infant is making.
  • If we’re going to obsess about personal responsibility, let’s also have a conversation about social responsibility.
  • Why did deaths of despair claim Farlan, Zealan, Nathan, Rogena and so many others?
  • First, well-paying jobs disappeared
  • Second, there was an explosion of drugs
  • Third, the war on drugs sent fathers and mothers to jail, shattering families.
  • Both political parties embraced mass incarceration and the war on drugs, which was particularly devastating for black Americans, and ignored an education system that often consigned the poor — especially children of color — to failing schools
  • Since 1988, American schools have become increasingly segregated by race, and kids in poor districts perform on average four grade levels behind those in rich districts.
  • Women in Recovery has a recidivism rate after three years of only 4 percent, and consequently has saved Oklahoma $70 million in prison spending,
  • ob training and retraining give people dignity as well as an economic lifeline. Such jobs programs are common in other countries.
  • For instance, autoworkers were laid off during the 2008-9 economic crisis both in Detroit and across the Canadian border in nearby Windsor, Ontario. As the scholar Victor Tan Chen has showed, the two countries responded differently
  • The United States focused on money, providing extended unemployment benefits. Canada emphasized job retraining, rapidly steering workers into new jobs in fields like health care, and Canadian workers also did not have to worry about losing health insurance.
  • The focus on job placement meant that Canadian workers were ushered more quickly back into workaday society and thus today seem less entangled in drugs and family breakdown.
  • Another successful strategy is investing not just in prisons but also in human capital to keep people out of prisons.
  • We attended a thrilling graduation in Tulsa, Okla., for 17 women completing an impressive local drug treatment program called Women in Recovery.
  • The graduates had an average of 15 years of addiction each, and all were on probation after committing crimes. Yet they had quit drugs and started jobs
  • Yet it’s not hopeless. America is polarized with ferocious arguments about social issues, but we should be able to agree on what doesn’t work: neglect and underinvestment in children. Here’s what does work.
  • Bravo for philanthropy, but the United States would never build interstate highways through volunteers and donations, and we can’t build a national preschool program or a national drug recovery program with private money.
  • For individuals trying to break an addiction, a first step is to face up to the problem — and that’s what America should do as well
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Opinion | Why Fiction Trumps Truth - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...why-fiction-trumps-truth.html truth fiction power politics history scholars fanaticism culture
shared by Javier E on 27 May 19 - No Cached
  • sticking with the truth is the best strategy for gaining power. Unfortunately, this is just a comforting myth
  • In fact, truth and power have a far more complicated relationship, because in human society, power means two very different things.
  • On the one hand, power means having the ability to manipulate objective realities: to hunt animals, to construct bridges, to cure diseases, to build atom bombs. This kind of power is closely tied to truth.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • On the other hand, power also means having the ability to manipulate human beliefs, thereby getting lots of people to cooperate effectively.
  • large-scale cooperation depends on believing common stories. But these stories need not be true. You can unite millions of people by making them believe in completely fictional stories about God, about race or about economics.
  • The dual nature of power and truth results in the curious fact that we humans know many more truths than any other animal, but we also believe in much more nonsense
  • When it comes to uniting people around a common story, fiction actually enjoys three inherent advantages over the truth. First, whereas the truth is universal, fictions tend to be local. Consequently if we want to distinguish our tribe from foreigners, a fictional story will serve as a far better identity marker
  • The second huge advantage of fiction over truth has to do with the handicap principle, which says that reliable signals must be costly to the signaler
  • If political loyalty is signaled by believing a true story, anyone can fake it. But believing ridiculous and outlandish stories exacts greater cost, and is therefore a better signal of loyalty.
  • Third, and most important, the truth is often painful and disturbing. Hence if you stick to unalloyed reality, few people will follow you
  • What’s true of the Nazis is true of many other fanatical groups in history. It is sobering to realize that the Scientific Revolution began in the most fanatical culture in the world. Europe in the days of Columbus, Copernicus and Newton had one of the highest concentrations of religious extremists in history, and the lowest level of tolerance.
  • The ability to compartmentalize rationality probably has a lot to do with the structure of our brain. Different parts of the brain are responsible for different modes of thinking. Humans can subconsciously deactivate and reactivate those parts of the brain that are crucial for skeptical thinking
  • Even if we need to pay some price for deactivating our rational faculties, the advantages of increased social cohesion are often so big that fictional stories routinely triumph over the truth in human history.
  • Scholars have known this for thousands of years
  • The most powerful scholarly establishments in history — whether of Christian priests, Confucian mandarins or Communist ideologues — placed unity above truth. That’s why they were so powerful.
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5-Marx's Comm M. - Google Drive - 0 views

drive.google.com/...0BxWXwwoF4MF-U2xGbnRZYjcwQlU homework
shared by brookegoodman on 15 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism.
  • Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power.
  • It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself.
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  • The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.
  • village communities were found to be, or to have been, the primitive form of society everywhere from India to Ireland.
  • the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms.
  • The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie.
  • The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour in each single workshop.
  • It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves.
  • the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.
  • The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.
  • The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production,
  • Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.
  • The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country.
  • The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property.
  • Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association in the medieval commune*
  • In one word, it creates a world after its own image.
  • He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth.
  • Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier, and one customs-tariff.
  • Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.
  • Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.
  • And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.
  • Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman.
  • But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labour, is equal to its cost of production. In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases.
  • Modern Industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organised like soldiers.
  • Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class. All are instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex.
  • At this stage, therefore, the proletarians do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of absolute monarchy, the landowners, the non-industrial bourgeois, the petty bourgeois.
  • the collisions between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions between two classes.
  • But every class struggle is a political struggle.
  • a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.
  • The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for
  • The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of the feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois.
  • The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.
  • It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.
  • Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.
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Third Estate makes Tennis Court Oath - HISTORY - 0 views

www.history.com/...estate-makes-tennis-court-oath history
shared by brookegoodman on 15 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • In Versailles, France, the deputies of the Third Estate, which represent commoners and the lower clergy, meet on the Jeu de Paume, an indoor tennis court, in defiance of King Louis XVI’s order to disperse.
  • Louis XVI, who ascended the French throne in 1774, proved unsuited to deal with the severe financial problems he had inherited from his grandfather, King Louis XV. In 1789, in a desperate attempt to address France’s economic crisis, Louis XVI assembled the Estates-General, a national assembly that represented the three “estates” of the French people–the nobles, the clergy, and the commons.
  • The Third Estate, which had the most representatives, declared itself the National Assembly and took an oath to force a new constitution on the king.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • In response, Parisians mobilized and on July 14 stormed the Bastille–a state prison where they believed ammunition was stored–and the French Revolution began.
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Marie Yovanovitch calls for investigation into 'disturbing' surveillance as ex-diplomat... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html
shared by katherineharron on 16 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Former US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch on Tuesday called for an investigation into the "disturbing" notion that she was under surveillance from associates of the President's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.
  • The texts released by the House Democrats Tuesday show Connecticut Republican congressional candidate Robert Hyde berating Yovanovitch and suggest he was monitoring her while she was in Kiev and relaying her movements to Parnas. Hyde declined to comment to CNN when asked if he had surveilled Yovanovitch, who served as a key witness in the House impeachment probe.
  • Another retired ambassador said they had "never heard of anything like it.""It's common that terrorists and former communists do this to us. It's appalling and incomprehensible that somebody who is working for the President's personal lawyer would have been doing this to our ambassador," they told CNN.That ambassador explained that surveillance is a "real problem" that's "unfortunately pretty common" for diplomats. Embassies have "surveillance detection teams" -- normally locally hired staff -- "who actually are out there looking to see if anyone is showing unwarranted interest" in embassy operations, they said.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Yovanovitch, who was recalled from her post in Kiev in May 2019 after a smear campaign led by Trump's allies, has been repeatedly maligned by the US President. He told his Ukrainian counterpart in July 2019 that she was "going to go through some things," according to a rough White House transcript of the presidents' conversation -- a message Yovanovitch said she found threatening.
  • McEldowney told CNN she believes Pompeo is "derelict in his duty for refusing to speak out about diplomats who are loyally and faithfully and professionally carrying out their responsibilities and who are being slandered by political attacks."The State Department did not reply to a request for comment about the criticism.
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Pete Buttigieg Dishes About Why He Appears On Fox News So Often | HuffPost - 0 views

www.huffpost.com/...iew_n_5fa1c85ec5b6869500334f59 politics US
shared by kaylynfreeman on 04 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • “I can’t blame somebody for not supporting my perspective if they have literally never heard it.”
  • we “don’t typically see very many Democrats,” and how he manages to stay so unflappable in his calm delivery of the facts.
  • Most of the viewers of Fox News don’t agree with me politically and definitely the people kind of controlling the content on that network, in my view, aren’t always being fair.”
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • “But ... I can’t blame somebody for not supporting my perspective if they have literally never heard it,” he continued. “So it’s my job to get that view in front of viewers who are tuning in in good faith.”
  • “The virus doesn’t care if you’re a Democrat or a Republican. ... It’s a threat to all of us, so we’ve got to build some common ground here,” he said.
  • “And to me, finding common ground doesn’t mean watering down your values or pretending to be something you’re not. It just means taking other people seriously and sharing why you care so much.”
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How Do Children Fight Off the Coronavirus? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ronavirus-children-immune.html children Covid-19 research
shared by Javier E on 26 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • When the body encounters an unfamiliar pathogen, it responds within hours with a flurry of immune activity, called an innate immune response. The body’s defenders are quickly recruited to the fight and begin releasing signals calling for backup.Children more often encounter pathogens that are new to their immune systems. Their innate defense is fast and overwhelming.
  • Over time, as the immune system encounters pathogen after pathogen, it builds up a repertoire of known villains. By the time the body reaches adulthood, it relies on a more sophisticated and specialized system adapted to remembering and fighting specific threats.
  • The adaptive system makes sense biologically because adults rarely encounter a virus for the first time
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • But the coronavirus is new to everyone, and the innate system fades as adults grow older, leaving them more vulnerable
  • In the time it takes for an adult body to get the specialized adaptive system up and running, the virus has had time to do harm
  • She and her colleagues compared immune responses in 60 adults and 65 children and young adults under the age of 24
  • Over all, the children were only mildly affected by the virus, compared with adults, mostly reporting gastrointestinal symptoms like diarrhea and a loss of taste or smell. Only five children needed mechanical ventilation, compared with 22 of the adults; two children died, compared with 17 adults.
  • If this virus becomes endemic, like the coronaviruses causing common colds, children eventually will develop adaptive defenses so strong that they will not experience the problems that adults are having now, Dr. Mina said.
  • “We think that also protects them from sort of making the more vigorous adaptive immune response that’s associated with that hyper-inflammation,”
  • Some scientists have suspected that children may fare better because they tend to have had more recent exposure to coronaviruses that cause common colds, which might offer them some protection.But the new study found no significant differences in the immune responses to those viruses between the groups
  • Another theory held that children generate a stronger antibody response that clears the virus more efficiently than in adults. But the new study found that the sickest older people actually produced the most powerful antibodies.
  • That result may confirm a nagging worry among researchers: that the presence of those potent antibodies contributes to the illness in adults
  • “Is it possible that high titers of some antibodies actually are bad for you, as opposed to good for you?
  • In some adult Covid-19 patients, she added, the lack of a strong early response also may be setting off an intense and unregulated adaptive reaction that may lead to acute respiratory distress syndrome and death.
  • “We will eventually age out of this virus.”
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The One Word That Bars Trump From Pardoning Himself - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...617170 pardon president trump politics history
shared by Javier E on 26 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Based solely on other uses of grant in the Constitution, a person could reasonably determine that a president cannot grant himself a pardon. But in evaluating the meaning of the Constitution’s words, the text of the Constitution isn’t all that counts
  • The most common interpretive method these days—championed by Justice Antonin Scalia and now broadly popular among conservatives—is to look for evidence of a term’s “original public meaning.” That, theoretically, is the meaning that ordinary English speakers of the late 18th century would have attached to a given term when coming upon it in a legal document like the Constitution.
  • to the extent that the most popular contemporaneous law dictionary is valuable in understanding what ordinary speakers of the founding era meant by “granting,” it seems clear that they probably had in mind an interpersonal transfer.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • in the time period from 1750 to 1800, essentially none of these appears. Transitive uses of the verb—“grant me,” “grant him,” “grant her,” “grant us,” “grant you,” and the like, where the person receiving the grant is different from the person doing the granting—are all common. But reflexive uses, where the person doing the granting is also the person on the receiving end? All but nonexistent
  • Can Donald Trump pardon himself? Perhaps, but that’s not the question the Constitution requires us to ask. Can Donald Trump grant himself a pardon? The evidence, at least according to the text of the Constitution and its original meaning, says no.
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