NYTimes | Millions Are Skipping Their Second Doses of Covid Vaccines
Nearly
8 percent of those who got initial Pfizer or Moderna shots missed their
second doses. State officials want to prevent the numbers from rising.
More than five million people, or nearly 8
percent of those who got a first shot of the Pfizer or Moderna
vaccines, have missed their second doses, according to the most recent
data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That is more
than double the rate among people who got inoculated in the first several weeks of the nationwide vaccine campaign.
Even
as the country wrestles with the problem of millions of people who are
wary about getting vaccinated at all, local health authorities are
confronting an emerging challenge of ensuring that those who do get
inoculated are doing so fully.
The
reasons vary for why people are missing their second shots. In
interviews, some said they feared the side effects, which can include
flulike symptoms. Others said they felt that they were sufficiently
protected with a single shot.
The stakes are high because there is only
one vaccine authorized in the United States that is given as a single
shot. The use of that vaccine, made by Johnson & Johnson, was paused
this month after it was linked to a very rare but serious side effect
involving blood clotting. Federal health officials on Friday recommended restarting use of the vaccine, but the combination of the safety scare and ongoing production problems is likely to make that vaccine a viable option for fewer people.
The
C.D.C.’s count of missed second doses is through April 9. It covers
only people who got a first Moderna dose by March 7 or a first Pfizer
dose by March 14.
RT | A hospital system in Houston, Texas has required all staff to be
vaccinated against the coronavirus by summertime, prompting protests
from employees, who’ve launched a petition against the mandate as the
deadline draws near.
The Houston Methodist
hospital system said its employees must take the shot by June 7, making
it the first healthcare provider to issue a mandate, stiffening its
rules after previously offering $500 to any worker who received the
inoculation voluntarily. Those who decline may be fired.
“Mandating
the vaccine was not a decision we made lightly, but science has proven
that the Covid-19 vaccines are very safe and very effective,” said Houston Methodist CEO Marc Boom in a message to staff reported by CBS News on Friday.
By
choosing to be vaccinated, you are leaders – showing our colleagues in
health care what must be done to protect our patients, ourselves, our
families and our communities.
Consisting
of a medical center and six community hospitals, Houston Methodist may
soon be joined by other Texas healthcare facilities, with Boom noting
that the Memorial Hermann hospital and Baylor College of Medicine have
concrete plans to follow suit, and that “countless” others around the US are now considering the move.
A
majority of workers at Houston Methodist have already been vaccinated,
or around 89% as of Friday. Of the hospital network’s 1,200 managers,
who were given an earlier deadline of April 15, two decided to leave
their positions – later criticized by Boom for “putting themselves before the safety of our patients.”
The rule-change has prompted some pushback, however, with Houston Methodist nurse Jennifer Bridges launching an online petition against it last week, garnering more than 3,100 signatures by Friday evening.
“If
you want the vaccine that is great but it should be your choice. It
should not be forced into your body if you are not comfortable with it!” the petition says.
Many
employees are scared that they will lose their job or be forced to
inject the vaccine into their body against their will to keep their jobs
and feed their family. We just want the power to choose for
ourselves...
Bridges later told
the Houston Chronicle that she would only take the immunization once it
received full FDA approval, potentially a years-long process.
CDC | Racism is a system pdf icon[224 MB, 16 Pages]external icon—consisting
of structures, policies, practices, and norms—that assigns value and
determines opportunity based on the way people look or the color of
their skin. This results in conditions that unfairly advantage some and
disadvantage others throughout society.
Racism—both interpersonal and structuralexternal icon—negatively
affects the mental and physical health of millions of people,
preventing them from attaining their highest level of health, and
consequently, affecting the health of our nation.
A growing body of research shows that centuries of racism in this
country has had a profound and negative impact on communities of color.
The impact is pervasive and deeply embedded in our society—affecting
where one lives, learns, works, worships and plays and creating
inequities in access to a range of social and economic benefits—such as
housing, education, wealth, and employment. These conditions—often
referred to as social determinants of health—are key drivers of health inequities within communities of color, placing those within these populations at greater risk for poor health outcomes.
The data show that racial and ethnic minority groups, throughout the
United States, experience higher rates of illness and death across a
wide range of health conditions, including diabetes, hypertension,
obesity, asthma, and heart disease, when compared to their White
counterparts. Additionally, the life expectancy of non-Hispanic/Black
Americans is four years lower than that of White Americans. The COVID-19
pandemic, and its disproportionate impact among racial and ethnic minority populations is another stark example of these enduring health disparities.
To build a healthier America for all, we must confront the systems
and policies that have resulted in the generational injustice that has
given rise to racial and ethnic health inequities. We at CDC want to
lead in this effort—both in the work we do on behalf of the nation’s
health and the work we do internally as an organization.
About those "rulers of BLM" - Never forget that Obama is the poster child and his cousin Warren Buffett is the money behind Black Lives Matter. Once you understand these basic facts, you can transcend the useless idiocy of talking in terms of "left" and "right", communist, fascist, conservative, progressive, etc..., rather, you can maintain laser-focus on who is doing the behavior and what their concrete-specific objectives can be discovered to be.
There
is, however, another version of events, in which the heartfelt
dedication to racial justice is only the forward-facing side of a more
complicated movement. Behind the street level activism and emotional
outpouring is a calculated machinery built by establishment money and
power that has seized on racial politics, in which some of the biggest
capitalists in the world are financially backing a group of
self-described “trained Marxists”—a label that Cullors enthusiastically
applies to herself and the group’s other co-founders.
These
bedfellows, whose stories and fortunes are never publicly presented as
related, are in reality intertwined under the umbrella of a fiscal
sponsor named the International Development Exchange. A modestly endowed
West Coast nonprofit with origins in the Peace Corps—which for decades
supported local farmers, shepherds, and agricultural workers across the
Global South—IDEX has, in the past six years, been transformed into two
distinct new things: the infrastructure back end to the Black Lives
Matter organization in the United States and also, at the very same
time, an investment fund vehicle driven by recruited MBAs and finance
experts seeking to leverage decades of on-the-ground grantee
relationships for novel forms of potentially problematic lending
instruments . And it did so with help from the family of one of the most
famous American billionaires in history—the Oracle of Omaha
himself.
About the police, as currently
configured, these economic burdens have been determined to be obsolete and a decision has been taken to do away with
their current barely governable configuration. Part of the War on Drugs
was to keep cops from policing their own neighborhoods. Even if they
live in the city they serve, they cannot work in the jurisdiction they
live in, as it may create a conflict of interest. Police not knowing
residents is policy, not accident.
Many police,
firefighters/EMTs, and other city employees do not live in the cities
that employ them. As the ratio of local residents working for a city
steadily declines, so does the performance of that city’s government.
It’s a terrible situation, made demonstrably worse by state laws that
struck down residency requirements for city employees statewide, in
contravention of home rule guarantees. State preemption of local control
is destroying municipal governments throughout numerous states. Again, this is a matter of policy, not accident.
With
the military, it seems odd that progressives are just now waking up to
the idea that an all-volunteer force somehow may mysteriously end up
with a disproportionate number of right-wing members. Maybe we have a
similar phenomenon with police. So I would suggest a draft not only for
the military but also for local police. Everyone at a young age should
experience one or the other, or maybe both, for a few years. Then
perhaps we could have informed discussions and dispense with most of the
righteous ranting.
We should also dispassionately
consider how dangerous a police officer’s job actually is – compared to a
truck driver, carpenter, farmer and host of other jobs…. hint, you will
find that a cops level of danger in their job does not make the top ten
list. And as for stopping crime, the police are
really, really bad at it. According to FBI stats, only 4% of major
crimes reported to police end in someone being convicted of a
crime and only half of all major crimes are reported. Again, this is a matter of policy, not accident.
If
we are actually concerned with public safety, with crime control, with
having a public institution who’s mandate is actually to serve and
protect the citizenry, then we need to design a whole new system from
the ground up. Trying to reform the policing system we have into doing
what we want it to do is doomed to fail. We need to start with a system
that is accountable to the populace it serves, and that is designed
specifically to provide security to that populace. We should not waste another moment trying to reform a
system that was designed for entirely different purposes than to protect
and serve the public.
So all the soap opera and
machismo pushed by cops – that their job is so tough and dangerous –
reduces to mush when held to the light of evidence. Continuing in that
vein, by and large, police officers are exceptionally well-paid for the
minimal qualifications required to get the job. Moreover, there are the
power and prestige attractions associated with being narratized as
heroic first responders and all that folderal. When you take into
consideration official overtime pay, and the pay available for
moonlighting, policing is one of the few remaining occupations in which a
certain demographic with nothing more than a high-school diploma can
realistically achieve a 6 figure income. Again, this is a matter of policy, not accident.
This is why
police have so little difficulty parting with the 6-8% annual vigorish
to their “fraternal orders”. The fraternal lodges are the real command
and control systems for police departments. The chief of police is
typically a bureaucratic figurehead whose job it is to run interference
with politicians – and to a limited degree – the public.
In the interest of supporting citations – I offer the following link - but recommend a google search on – fop brad lemon tow lot scandal
This
is a wonderful mid-sized urban anecdote of most of the moving parts
involved with the structure of power, prestige, and accountability in
contemporary policing. Abusive policing is concentrated among a
relatively small proportion of police officers. The majority of U.S.
police probably spend their entire careers without any incidence of
corruption or brutality. The problem is that police
abuse is protected, unconditionally, resulting in either no or
disproportionately low consequences for their actions. What results is
that some naturally violent or naturally corrupt people will seek out
police careers because it allows them to fulfill these desires without
consequence. Again, this is a matter of policy, not accident.
There’s an endemic debate over what people are saying when they refer
to ‘the west’. Is the west defined by its whiteness, its wealth, its
liberal democracy? Should we call it the ‘highly developed countries’,
the ‘advanced economies’, the ‘first world’, or the ‘global north’? I
think most of these terms misses what is distinctive about this set of
places. The countries we think of as ‘western’ are all countries where
Catholicism was once dominant but is now in varying levels of retreat.
Western countries are ‘post-Catholic’.
Catholicism
has certain distinctive effects on a place. Crucially, Catholicism
situates politics as subordinate to morality. In medieval Catholic
states, the monarch derives authority from the pope or from divine
right. This means the monarch’s legitimacy depends on the monarch having
the right moral orientation. In other parts of the world, politics and
morality were more heavily enmeshed. In the Byzantine Empire, the
emperor was supreme in both religious and temporal matters. In the
Islamic world, the caliph combined both political and religious
authority. In China, different dynasties embraced and promoted the
teachings of many different schools of thought at varying points. It was
only in the Catholic west that politics and morality were firmly
separated, with the former rendered clearly subordinate to the latter.
Are
corporations now deriving their "authoriteh" from the rump
"professional" class mediocrities comprising the
diversity-inclusion-equity clergy? Can the ecclesiastical congregation
of diversity-inclusion-equity offer absolution? Or merely economic cancellation...,
Given the weakness of post-Catholic morality - the only pervasive corporate values I see nowadays boil down
to Overton's Window of permitted discourse - and - expected prompt and
unquestioning compliance on the part of economically captured consumers. The pretend ethics of
diversity-inclusion-equity have been quickly and none too subtly
supplemented by "trust the science" indoctrination and compliance. If
our corporate feudal lords can only police what we say or have ever
said, that only scratches the surface of intended moral orthodoxy. If they can
police what we do in ways that extend down to our genomes, then the post-Catholic corporatism has transcended the wildest fantasies of the pre-reformation Holy Roman Church.
The
government can't police your intentions or your expressions or your
behaviors anywhere near as well as corporations with amorphous
community standards and big data, algorithms, and inexpensive filipino and
south asian comment moderators.
Did you happen to see Warren Buffett's cousin and
the diversity commander-in-chief peddling some highly suspect
"trust the science" theocracy just last sunday on teevee? When everything's said and done, if
we can't persuade you to comply, we've got some community standard
digital passports coming your way here shortly so that you can show and
prove your true belief in a way that the penitents of old never previously had to do in their confessionals...,
WAP was the most well known feminist anti-pornography group out of many that were active throughout the United States and the anglophone
world, primarily from the late 1970s through the early 1990s. After
previous failed attempts to start a broad feminist anti-pornography
group in New York City, WAP was finally established in 1978. WAP quickly
drew widespread support for its anti-pornography campaign, and in late
1979 held a March on Times Square
that included over 5000 supporters. Through their march as well as
other means of activism, WAP was able to bring in unexpected financial
support from the Mayor's office, theater owners, and other parties with
an interest in the gentrification of Times Square.
WAP became known because of their anti-pornography informational
tours of sex shops and pornographic theaters held in Times Square. In
the 1980s, WAP began to focus more on lobbying and legislative efforts
against pornography, particularly in support of civil-rights-oriented antipornography legislation. They were also active in testifying before the Meese Commission
and some of their advocacy of a civil-rights based anti-pornography
model found its way into the final recommendations of the commission. In
the late 1980s, the leadership of WAP changed their focus again, this
time more on the issue of international sex trafficking, which led to the founding of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women. In the 1990s WAP became less active and eventually faded out of existence in the mid '90s.
The positions of Women Against Pornography were controversial. Civil liberties advocates opposed WAP and similar groups, holding that the legislative approaches WAP advocated amounted to censorship. In addition to this, WAP faced conflict with sex-positive feminists,
who held that feminist campaigns against pornography were misdirected
and ultimately threatened sexual freedoms and free speech rights in a
way that would be detrimental toward women and sexual minorities.
WAP and sex-positive feminists were involved in conflict in the events
surrounding the 1982 Barnard Conference. These events were battles in
what became known as the Feminist Sex Wars of the late 1970s and 1980s.
benjaminstudebaker | There’s an endemic debate over what people are saying when they refer
to ‘the west’. Is the west defined by its whiteness, its wealth, its
liberal democracy? Should we call it the ‘highly developed countries’,
the ‘advanced economies’, the ‘first world’, or the ‘global north’? I
think most of these terms misses what is distinctive about this set of
places. The countries we think of as ‘western’ are all countries where
Catholicism was once dominant but is now in varying levels of retreat.
Western countries are ‘post-Catholic’.
Catholicism has certain distinctive effects on a place. Crucially,
Catholicism situates politics as subordinate to morality. In medieval
Catholic states, the monarch derives authority from the pope or from
divine right. This means the monarch’s legitimacy depends on the monarch
having the right moral orientation. In other parts of the world,
politics and morality were more heavily enmeshed. In the Byzantine
Empire, the emperor was supreme in both religious and temporal matters.
In the Islamic world, the caliph combined both political and religious
authority. In China, different dynasties embraced and promoted the
teachings of many different schools of thought at varying points. It was
only in the Catholic west that politics and morality were firmly
separated, with the former rendered clearly subordinate to the latter.
Because Catholicism made politics subject to religion, it became
especially important for its theology to be clear. If the legitimacy of
the regime depends on the regime having the right moral orientation, a
moral consensus must be maintained and articulated. Any breakdown in the
consensus over religion would threaten to destroy the political
consensus, too. So in the Catholic world, heresy became extraordinarily
taboo. The effect of this was to make Catholicism steadily more rigid
over time. Its theology became enormously detailed and ornate, but it
also became less flexible. Eastern rulers could adjust moral and
religious emphases to suit their political needs, but Catholic rulers
were in a moral straightjacket. Over time, the tensions between the
Catholic moral vision and the political imperatives faced by Catholic
rulers intensified. Catholic kingdoms consolidated their power, and
monarchs sought to reduce their dependence on Catholicism for
legitimacy. This led to state-sponsored Protestantism, as well as the
promotion of secular humanism.
The trouble is that abstractions like the good, the true, or God are
inherently difficult for human beings to concretely define. Attempts to
capture them conceptually necessarily lead to simplification and
distortion. But because Catholicism had become the dominant legitimation
paradigm for medieval states, it had to articulate precise
conceptualizations of irreducibly abstract ideas. This was
understandable–without precision, how could we know the king really was
legitimate? But the subordination of politics to morality compelled
Catholics to develop a theology that was too precise to be accurate. In
other words, by trying to subordinate politics to morality, Catholics
were forced to subordinate morality to politics.
The excessively strong, excessively precise claims of the Catholics
led to the repudiation of these claims by the Protestants and humanists.
This tore apart the Catholic consensus and badly undermined political
legitimacy. For a while, Protestants and humanists tried to replace
Catholicism with another precise account of good/truth/God. But because
precise accounts necessarily distort these abstractions, it was
impossible to convince the public to embrace these substitutes with
anything like the level of conviction with which Catholicism had once
been embraced.
This forced post-Catholic states to make their peace with a level of
moral pluralism. But post-Catholics could not have the same attitude to
pluralism which the Romans or Persians or Chinese had. In these ancient
empires, politics and morality were inseparably bound up with one
another, and therefore as long as religious views remained compatible
with the law they posed no deep problems. In the post-Catholic world,
the state was still expected to justify itself in reference to morality.
Without a moral consensus, the basis of the state’s authority was in
jeopardy. So when post-Catholic states embraced pluralism, they had to
embrace pluralism as a morality in itself, so that this morality could
take on the role which Catholicism had previously played. This,
ultimately, is what liberalism is–a kind of pluralism fashioned into a
morality to which the state might be answerable.
NewYorker | Everyone’s fed
up with the baby boomers. Younger progressives charge them with a form
of generational hoarding—of titles and power but mostly of money. The
richest generation in the history of the world, the story goes, has
squandered its wealth on vanity purchases and projects while leaving
younger Americans with a debased environment and crazy levels of debt.
During the Presidency of Donald Trump—a
boomer himself, who drew some of his strongest support from other
boomers—the generation’s long-standing optimism seemed plainly
misleading. Why did anyone think that things were always bound to turn
out all right?
But for bleakness, scope, and
entropic finality, the progressive critique of boomers has nothing on
the Catholic social-conservative one, which measures the generation’s
sins not just in rising debt ratios but also in the corruption of souls.
In the view of an increasingly prominent cohort of Catholic
intellectuals, Americans have, in the long span of the boomer
generation, gone from public-spirited to narcotized, porn-addicted, and
profoundly narcissistic, incapable not only of the headline acts of
idealism to which boomers once aspired, such as changing the relations
between the races or the sexes, but also of the mundane ones, such as
raising children with discipline and care. That the arguments over the
boomer legacy quickly become fundamental—that they bring up the question
of national decline and the fate of liberalism—suggests that the
generation has so fully suffused cultural memory that, when we say
“boomer,” we might simply mean “American.”
The
more nakedly selfish and frankly pornographic American that society came
to seem during the Trump years, the more influence accrued to the
scolds. Much of this had to do with the singular presence of Ross Douthat,
a brilliant Catholic conservative intellectual and the best columnist
of the time. But even the optimists were seeking a darker palette, and
the Catholic conservatives were there to supply it. In 2018, Barack
Obama let it be known on Facebook that he had been reading “Why Liberalism Failed,”
by the Notre Dame political philosopher Patrick Deneen, whose writing
is suffused with a thistle-chewing pessimism. The project of
liberalizing markets and culture, Deneen argued, had made everyone feel
rootless, and was behind the yearning for a strongman that helped give
us Trump.
Deneen
made a certain amount of sense as a despair thermometer. The latest
impressions left by the boomers in that moment suggested that everything
had gone terribly wrong: Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein,
the racism and stupidity of the Trump Administration, and the spectre
of the religious grass roots in thrall to a man who had not only
allegedly cheated on his wife, with a porn star, shortly after she gave
birth but who had also imposed his adult children on the world, most
notably a daughter obsessed with the sheen of prosperity and a son who
broadcast brutality from a twitching mouth. So much seemed morally
repugnant. How had we, as a liberal society, become so fond of
corruption—and so gross?
The Catholic
intellectual right issued a correction, as quick and snappy as a nun’s
rap across the knuckles: you are looking for a different word, they
said. Not “gross,” but “decadent.”
politico | President Joe Biden needs the help of
the powerful farm industry to reach his sky-high climate goals. But his
plans for cutting agricultural emissions might not have enough teeth to
take a big bite out of global warming.
Biden on Thursday pledged
a drastic reduction in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. But the
White House hasn’t set any specific targets yet for agriculture, which
accounts for 10 percent of all U.S. emissions, according to the EPA.
Those discharges mostly stem from fertilizers, livestock and manure.
“To
be realistic, the administration has to look at cutting some of the
existing emissions,” said Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine), who sits on
the House Agriculture Committee. “We are going to have to talk about
cutting emissions from farms and changing some of the practices.”
The
administration has steered clear of discussing stricter environmental
regulations that could scare off the largely conservative farm sector,
as well as the rural lawmakers that Biden will need to advance many of
his environmental goals. Farmers have been slow to wake up to the
reality of climate change, though increasingly extreme weather of late
has hammered farm country and forced a reckoning.
A summary
of Biden’s climate pledge notes that agriculture is both a source of
greenhouse gases and potentially a key piece of the solution by
capturing and storing heat-trapping carbon dioxide in forests and
farmland. Environmental advocates, like the left-leaning Institute for
Agriculture and Trade Policy, say the White House needs to address both
sides of that equation to make a dent in global warming.
KHN | Robin Hauser, a pediatrician in Tampa, Florida, got covid in February.
What separates her from the vast majority of the tens of millions of
other Americans who have come down with the virus is this: She got sick
seven weeks after her second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
“I was shocked,” said Hauser. “I thought: ‘What the heck? How did
that happen?’ I now tell everyone, including my colleagues, not to let
their guard down after the vaccine.”
As more Americans every day are inoculated, a tiny but growing number
are contending with the disturbing experience of getting covid despite
having had one shot, or even two.
In data released Thursday, the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention reported that at least 5,800 people had fallen ill or tested
positive for the coronavirus two weeks or more after they completed both
doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccine.
A total of about 78 million Americans are now fully vaccinated.
These so-called breakthrough infections occurred among people of all
ages. Just over 40% were in people age 60 or older, and 65% occurred in
women. Twenty-nine percent of infected people reported no symptoms, but
7% were hospitalized and just over 1%, 74 people, died, according to the
CDC.
Public health officials have said breakthrough infections were
expected, since manufacturers have warned loudly and often that the
vaccines are not 100% protective. The Pfizer and Moderna versions have
consistently been shown to be above 90% effective, most recently for at
least six months. Studies have also shown they are nearly 100% effective
at ensuring that the small fraction of vaccinated patients who do
contract the virus will not get severe cases or require hospitalization.
Still, people are usually shocked and befuddled when they become the
rare breakthrough victim. After months of fear and taking precautions to
avoid contracting covid, they felt safe once they got their shots.
NYTimes | In a follow-up, the scientists found that 34 percent of people taking the drug were protected after a single dose
of the Pfizer vaccine and only 27 percent after a single dose of the
AstraZeneca vaccine. (In Britain, the current practice is to delay
second doses to stretch vaccine availability.)
Likewise,
another study published last month indicated that fewer than 15 percent
of patients with cancers of blood or the immune system, and fewer than
40 percent of those with solid tumors, produced antibodies after
receiving a single dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
And a study
published last month in the journal JAMA reported that only 17 percent
of 436 transplant recipients who got one dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech or
Moderna vaccine had detectable antibodies three weeks later.
Despite
the low odds, immunocompromised people should still get the vaccines
because they may produce some immune cells that are protective, even
antibodies in a subset of patients.
“These
patients should probably be prioritized for optimally timed two doses,”
said Dr. Tariq Ahmad, a gastroenterologist at the Royal Devon and
Exeter NHS Foundation Trust who was involved in the infliximab studies.
He
suggested that clinicians routinely measure antibody responses in
immunocompromised people even after two vaccine doses, so as to identify
those who also may need monoclonal antibodies to prevent infection or a
third dose of the vaccines.
Wendy
Halperin, 54, was diagnosed at age 28 with a condition called common
variable immunodeficiency. She was hospitalized with Covid-19 in January
and remained there for 15 days. But the coronavirus induced unusual
symptoms.
“I was having trouble walking,” she recalled. “I just lost control of my limbs, like I couldn’t walk down the street.”
Because
she was treated for Covid-19 with convalescent plasma, Ms. Halperin has
had to wait three months to be immunized and has made an appointment
for April 26. But despite her condition, her body did manage to produce
some antibodies to the initial infection.
“The
take home message is that everybody should try and get the vaccine,”
said Dr. Amit Verma, an oncologist at Montefiore Medical Center.
In March, Dr. Fauci again incorrectly predicted that doom was upon us when Texas relaxed its pandemic rules.
Kahneman writes: “It is wrong to blame anyone for failing to forecast
accurately in an unpredictable world. However, it seems fair to blame
professionals for believing they can succeed in an impossible task.”
Perhaps, Kahneman is too kind. With Covid, predictions are founded on
politics, not science, as Bill Maher recently pointedly and humorously explained.
We are ignorant of our ignorance. It is time to look for new patterns in the evidence of those who have not survived.
Who Didn’t Come Back from Covid
The military was wise enough to listen to Wald. It would have been
perverse to ignore the cockpit and reinforce parts of the plane that
could survive bullet hits.
Policy makers, politicians, and the media have largely ignored the cockpit of good health: the human immunological system.
Maher pointed to a recent CDC study that reported the vast majority (78%) of those hospitalized or dead from Covid have been overweight or obese.
The Covid survival narrative has focused attention on lockdowns,
masks and vaccinations. Maher pointed out the role that obesity played:
“People died because talking about obesity had become a third rail in
America.” Maher continued, “the last thing you want to do is say
something insensitive. We would literally rather die. Instead, we were
told to lock down. Unfortunately, the killer was already in the house
and her name is Little Debbie.”
Little Debbie, of course, is Maher’s reference to heavily processed foods that are ubiquitous in the American diet.
A significant factor in the startling numbers of overweight Americans
is the consumption of high-fructose corn syrup in heavily processed
foods.
From 1995-2020, corn subsidies
in the United States totaled $116.6 billion. The subsidized and surplus
corn ends up not only as processed food but as animal feed.
counterpunch | We are currently seeing an acceleration of the corporate
consolidation of the entire global agrifood chain. The high-tech/data
conglomerates, including Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google, have joined traditional agribusiness giants,
such as Corteva, Bayer, Cargill and Syngenta, in a quest to impose a
certain type of agriculture and food production on the world.
Of course, those involved in this portray what they are doing as some
kind of humanitarian endeavour – saving the planet with
‘climate-friendly solutions’, helping farmers or feeding the world. This
is how many of them probably do genuinely regard their role inside
their corporate echo chamber. But what they are really doing is
repackaging the dispossessive strategies of imperialism as ‘feeding the world’.
Failed Green Revolution
Since the Green Revolution, US agribusiness and financial
institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund
have sought to hook farmers and nation states on corporate seeds and
proprietary inputs as well as loans to construct the type of agri
infrastructure that chemical-intensive farming requires.
Monsanto-Bayer and other agribusiness concerns have since the 1990s
been attempting to further consolidate their grip on global agriculture
and farmers’ corporate dependency with the rollout of genetically
engineered seeds, commonly known as GMOs (genetically modified
organisms).
“In the 1980s, the chemical corporations started to look
at genetic engineering and patenting of seed as new sources of super
profits. They took farmers varieties from the public gene banks,
tinkered with the seed through conventional breeding or genetic
engineering, and took patents.”
Shiva talks about the Green Revolution and seed colonialism and the
pirating of farmers seeds and knowledge. She says that 768,576
accessions of seeds were taken from farmers in Mexico alone:
“… taking the farmers seeds that embodies their
creativity and knowledge of breeding. The ‘civilising mission’ of Seed
Colonisation is the declaration that farmers are ‘primitive’ and the
varieties they have bred are ‘primitive’, ‘inferior’, ‘low yielding’ and
have to be ‘substituted’ and ‘replaced’ with superior seeds from a
superior race of breeders, so called ‘modern varieties’ and ‘improved
varieties’ bred for chemicals.”
It is now clear that the Green Revolution has been a failure in terms
of its devastating environmental impacts, the undermining of highly
productive traditional low-input agriculture and its sound ecological
footing, the displacement of rural populations and the adverse impacts
on village communities, nutrition, health and regional food security.
Fastcompany | The recently released Forbes World’s Billionaires List
includes some shocking figures about our tech overlords. At the start
of 2020, the tech barons were collectively worth $419 billion. A year
later, their wealth had soared to $651 billion—a 56% increase. The
hoarding of that wealth harms us all: It distributes resources away from
those who need it most and, by allowing the tech barons to influence
government policy, corrodes democratic society.
The
barons’ financial advantage over the average person is extraordinary.
While their median net worth is $90.2 billion, the net worth of the
median white American household is $189,000, while that of Black American families is $24,000.
In other words, the median Big Tech billionaire is more than 477,000
times wealthier than the median white American family, and more than 3.7
million times wealthier than the median Black family.
To get a
further sense of scale, consider what these billionaires could achieve
with their wealth if they decided to. Together, they could:
With that done, they would still have enough for each of them to
take home $2.6 billion. With their spare change, they could each afford
to collect the 10 most expensive works of art in the world ($2.3 billion) or take on another pet project, such as saving 520,000 lives by providing critical vaccines to children across the world.
Some
may find it unreasonable to ask the Big Tech barons to survive on just
$2.6 billion each. After all, the thinking goes, the barons earned that
money. But these billionaires could give away $144 billion—more than
enough to eradicate malaria on our planet—and still be as rich as they
were when the pandemic started in 2020.
While maintaining their
2020 level of wealth, these Big Tech billionaires could start a direct
cash transfer campaign and send $1,100 checks to every American family.
Or they could send $19 to every person in the world. (That would be far
more impactful: 689 million people around the world live on less than $1.90 a day.) Jeff Bezos would still walk away with $113 billion, and Mark Zuckerberg with $54.7 billion.
As
long as the tech barons remain in possession of extraordinary
concentrations of wealth, that inequity will continue to erode our
society’s democracy. At a time when Congress, independent agencies, and
state attorneys general are looking to rein in the power of Big Tech,
the sheer wealth of these individuals makes it hard to hold them and
their corporations accountable.
jacobin | The enterprise of big philanthropy ultimately benefits the wealthy a
great deal. Though this news is something less than earth shattering, a newly published review
of scholarship surrounding elite giving in the United States and UK
makes the case with particular force. Jointly authored by four academics
based at different universities in Britain, “Elite philanthropy in the
United States and United Kingdom in the new age of inequalities” both
lends weight to the existing critiques of big philanthropy and offers
some useful theoretical foundations for critics moving forward.
Today’s elites practice charitable giving largely for personal
benefit and because large-scale giving inevitably yields a kind of soft
power. “Elite philanthropy,” the authors write,
is rarely a “pure gift” motivated solely by altruism;
rather, it represents a means of converting surplus funds into prized
alternative forms of capital. . . . On this analysis, elites are drawn
to philanthropy not simply as a means of virtuously “giving back” to
society, as is so often claimed, but also as an unimpeachable source of
the complementary capitals needed to function effectively in the field
of power.
Indeed, visit any hospital, museum, or university today and you’ll
inevitably find the names of ultra-wealthy patrons emblazoned somewhere
prominent for all to see. Scale this up to the commanding heights of big
charity and you ultimately find figures like Bill Gates — who mysteriously increased his wealth
by about 60 percent in roughly the decade and a half after pledging to
give it all away. Gates’s giving may not have required much generosity
on his part, but it certainly yielded big returns for his public
reputation and, it would seem, for his own bottom line.
Elite philanthropy, far from being merely an inadequate solution to
social problems, ultimately works to entrench and perpetuate them —
offering a tiny handful of elites a useful vehicle for the purchase of
virtue, and the soft power that comes with it, at the expense of the
many.
charleshughsmith |The first question identifies the structural weak points in the system. These weak points could
have any number of sources: they could be perverse incentives embedded in the system, elites
caught up in their own enrichment, or even a willful blindness to the nature of the crisis
threatening the system.
Here's an example in the U.S. system: corporations reap $2.4 trillion in profits annually, roughly
15% of the nation's entire output. Politicians need millions of dollars in campaign contributions
to win elections. Those seeking political influence have not just billions but tens of billions.
Those needing to distribute political favors will do so for mere millions.
"I'd say that contrary to what decades of political science research might lead you to believe,
ordinary citizens have virtually no influence over what their government does in the United States.
And economic elites and interest groups, especially those representing business,
have a substantial degree of influence. Government policy-making over the last few decades reflects
the preferences of those groups -- of economic elites and of organized interests."
This asymmetry
cannot be overcome. Indeed, the past 40 years have witnessed an increasing concentration of
wealth and power in corporations and their lobbyists and a decline of political influence of
the masses to near-zero. Every reform has failed to slow this momentum, which is constructed
of incentives to maximize profits, gain political favors and win elections.
In a similar fashion, the Imperial Presidency has gained power at the expense of Congress for
decades--a reality that scholars bemoan but the reforms allowed by the system are unable to stop.
So we have endless wars of choice without a declaration of war by Congress, one of the core powers
of the elected body.
An analogy to these systemic weak points is the synergies of an organism's essential
organs: if any one organ fails, the organism dies even though the other organs are working
just fine. In other words, any system is only as robust as its weakest essential
component/process.
Whatever problems the system is incapable of resolving have the potential to bring down the system
once they interact synergistically.
The second question identifies how many groups have been suppressed, silenced or ignored by
those at the top of the heap. If these groups have an essential role in the system as producers,
consumers and taxpayers, their demand to have a say in decisions that directly affect them is natural.
Another group with understandable frustrations at being left out of the decision-making are those
in the educated upper classes whose expectations of roles in the top tier were encouraged by their
families, society and training. When these expectations are not met because there are no longer
enough slots in the top tier for the rapidly proliferating upper classes, the group left out in
the cold has the time, education and motivation to demand a voice.
In other words, those denied access to resources, capital and agency who felt entitled to this
access will not be as easily silenced as those who accept their low status and restricted access
to resources, capital and agency as "the natural order of things."
All the groups that are denied a voice and access to resources, capital and agency are in effect
a sealed pressure cooker atop a flame. The pressure builds and builds without any apparent consequence
until it explodes.
The more that power is concentrated in the hands of the few, the greater the desperation of the
groups who are locked out of power. As their desperation rises, some of these groups are willing
to go to whatever lengths are necessary to effect change.
The process of explosive demands for change erupting is difficult to manage once released.
The system's essential subsystems may be destabilized--the equivalent of organ failure--and
once destabilized, it's often no longer possible to restore the previous stability.
In this environment, the common good falls by the wayside and the system collapses.
Politico | Embattled New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, continuing an April tour of the
state with another press-free press conference in Buffalo, got a vote
of confidence Friday from one of the biggest names in tech: Former
Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
Cuomo, who faces an impeachment inquiry and multiple investigations
into allegations of misconduct, has been parading around the state in
the days since he cut a deal with lawmakers on a state budget.
As the governor signed one of the budget bills Friday, Schmidt joined
Cuomo to help tout an effort to expand broadband access — and give the
Democrat a public boost of confidence.
“Governor, your leadership in general over this pandemic has been extraordinary,” Schmidt said.
As with other events in recent weeks, Cuomo was flanked by supporters who praised his handling of the Covid-19 crisis.
“I trust Gov. Cuomo’s leadership,” Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown said.
“I’ve worked with him long enough to know that he truly cares about our
great city … Thank you for your vision and your bold leadership toward
building back a better and stronger New York."
Key context: The purpose of Friday’s event was to sign the
Education, Labor and Family Assistance portion of the budget, which
Cuomo was due to act on by Monday.
Another closed press event: Cuomo stopped letting reporters attend these events in December, citing concern about the spread of Covid-19.
The Buffalo event was his fourth one this week. One closed press
event held at an apple orchard on Tuesday was outside. On Wednesday, his
schedule said the media was prohibited from an event at Belmont Park
“due to COVID restrictions” — a few hours later, the governor announced
that it is now safe for more than 20,000 spectators to attend races
there.
theintercept |For a few fleeting moments during New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s
daily coronavirus briefing on Wednesday, the somber grimace that has
filled our screens for weeks was briefly replaced by something
resembling a smile.
“We are ready, we’re all-in,” the governor gushed.
“We are New Yorkers, so we’re aggressive about it, we’re ambitious
about it. … We realize that change is not only imminent, but it can
actually be a friend if done the right way.”
The inspiration for these uncharacteristically good vibes was a video
visit from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who joined the governor’s
briefing to announce that he will be heading up a blue-ribbon commission
to reimagine New York state’s post-Covid reality, with an emphasis on
permanently integrating technology into every aspect of civic life.
“The first priorities of what we’re trying to do,” Schmidt said, “are
focused on telehealth, remote learning, and broadband. … We need to
look for solutions that can be presented now, and accelerated, and use
technology to make things better.” Lest there be any doubt that the
former Google chair’s goals were purely benevolent, his video background
featured a framed pair of golden angel wings.
Just one day earlier, Cuomo had announced
a similar partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to
develop “a smarter education system.” Calling Gates a “visionary,” Cuomo
said the pandemic has created “a moment in history when we can actually
incorporate and advance [Gates’s] ideas … all these buildings, all
these physical classrooms — why with all the technology you have?” he
asked, apparently rhetorically.
It has taken some time to gel, but something resembling a coherent
Pandemic Shock Doctrine is beginning to emerge. Call it the “Screen New
Deal.” Far more high-tech than anything we have seen during previous
disasters, the future that is being rushed into being as the bodies
still pile up treats our past weeks of physical isolation not as a
painful necessity to save lives, but as a living laboratory for a
permanent — and highly profitable — no-touch future.
FAIR |New York Times columnist Paul Krugman (Twitter, 12/29/20) described a $2,000 Covid relief check as “divisive,” even though 75% of Americans (and 72% of Republicans) wanted
the government to prioritize another universal payment. All too often,
words such as “divisive,” “contentious” or “controversial” are used
merely as media codewords meaning “ideas unpopular with the ruling
elite”—what FAIR calls “not journalistically viable.”
Medicare for All is a prime example of this. At least since the issue
began receiving national media attention as a result of Sen. Bernie
Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, a majority of Americans have supported some form of national, publicly funded healthcare system. Some polls have found
nearly three in four support the idea, including a majority of
Republican voters. Yet corporate media continue to disparage universal
public health insurance, labeling it “divisive” (Axios, 2/14/20), “controversial” (Christian Science Monitor, 6/4/19; Time, 10/24/19; New York Times, 1/1/20) or “politically perilous” (Associated Press, 3/25/19).
In an article entitled “Medicare for All Is Divisive (in the Democratic Party),” the New York Times (3/18/19)
described giving people free healthcare “immensely contentious,”
framing it as a risky and enormously expensive gamble that centrists in
swing districts could ill afford to take coming up to an election. The
reality, of course, was the opposite: Every single Democratic incumbent
in a swing district who endorsed Medicare for All won reelection in 2020. The same cannot be said for those that did not endorse it.
There can be few policies that would so directly and immediately
benefit so many Americans as raising the minimum wage to $15 (though
that’s still not enough to afford rent in most US states). Forty percent of the country toldReuters/Ipsos
pollsters in February that they or someone close to them would be
positively impacted by such a change. The same poll found that
supporters of raising the minimum wage outnumbered opponents by 25
percentage points. Regardless, increasing it is often described as
“divisive” (e.g., Bloomberg, 10/2/17; Politico, 3/16/21; Delaware News Journal, 3/10/21).
mtracey | Deliberately vague weasel-word terms like “election interference” and/or
“influence” gained such purchase in the past four-to-five years for a
simple reason: the deliberate vagueness allowed people in power —
elected officials, pundits, Intelligence Community functionaries — to
claim unspecified expertise on a supposedly emerging range of threats.
The threats were portrayed as particularly scary because of their
alleged potential to Undermine Our Democracy. Consequently, these
power-wielding people acquired a potent tool in their arsenal to accuse
political enemies, whether foreign or domestic, of contributing to the
proliferation of new and scary threats. The accusations were so
deliberately vague that it was almost impossible to ever rebut them;
sometimes even retweeting a meme
was sufficient to be implicated in a foreign plot to destroy the very
foundations of America. If an act so trivial as clicking one’s mouse on a
social media post could be spun as abetting a foreign-backed
“interference” or “influence” scheme, then that created an endless
number of booby-traps for you to walk into.
So there was nothing new about the suite of anti-Russia charges
promulgated Thursday by the US federal government, and parroted as
usual with maximum credulity across the US media ecosystem. The charges
were again predicated on the idea that Russian “interference” and/or
“influence” is an extremely foreboding test for the survival of US
Democracy. Taking bold action, the Treasury Department levied sanctions
against a bunch more Russians for their claimed nefarious behavior in
carrying out this interference/influence — a fulfillment of Joe Biden’s
oft-stated campaign pledge
that under his watch, Russia would finally “pay a price” for allegedly
engaging in such activities. Donald Trump, it was thought, had been
appallingly lax in his resolve to confront this threat; now, a new
sheriff is in town.
Leaving aside the question of whether it’s
prudent to assume that Janet Yellen is suddenly in possession of a
foolproof methodology for attributing the provenance of “cyber
operations” to specific foreign individuals and nation-states, it’s
worth emphasizing what exactly is being alleged in the statement. The
Treasury Department document reads: “Outlets operated by Russian
Intelligence Services focus on divisive issues in the United States,
denigrate US political candidates, and disseminate false and misleading
information.”
Noting that these same characteristics could be
just as easily applied to US corporate media outlets is so blindingly
self-evident as to almost be redundant. Were there not “outlets” during
the 2020 election that were “focused” on “denigrating” Donald Trump? Or
for that matter, Joe Biden? Do “divisive issues” not tend to be “focused
on” by these same outlets as a basic precept of their core business
model? Controversy = clicks/views, which equals revenue. Everyone knows
this. Yet when scary Russian outlets are said to employ this same logic
in their own content-production enterprises, it magically becomes
dangerous enough to justify all manner of punitive government and
corporate action. Including but not limited to: censorship purges,
tighter regulation of online speech, and, as Biden announced Thursday,
sanctions and expulsion of diplomats. “Disseminating false and
misleading information”? The entire US media just got caught
“disseminating” a fake story about Russians putting bounties on the
heads of US soldiers in Afghanistan. If you’re truly concerned about the
dissemination of “false and misleading information” having deleterious
effects on the health of US political culture, your first target should
be CNN.
npr |"This release includes bug fixes, increased stability and performance improvements."
The
routine software update may be one of the most familiar and least
understood parts of our digital lives. A pop-up window announces its
arrival and all that is required of us is to plug everything in before
bed. The next morning, rather like the shoemaker and the elves, our
software is magically transformed.
Last spring, a Texas-based
company called SolarWinds made one such software update available to its
customers. It was supposed to provide the regular fare — bug fixes,
performance enhancements — to the company's popular network management
system, a software program called Orion that keeps a watchful eye on all
the various components in a company's network. Customers simply had to
log into the company's software development website, type a password and
then wait for the update to land seamlessly onto their servers.
The routine update, it turns out, is no longer so routine.
Hackers
believed to be directed by the Russian intelligence service, the SVR,
used that routine software update to slip malicious code into Orion's
software and then used it as a vehicle for a massive cyberattack against
America.
"Eighteen thousand [customers] was our best estimate of who may have
downloaded the code between March and June of 2020," Sudhakar
Ramakrishna, SolarWinds president and CEO, told NPR. "If you then take
18,000 and start sifting through it, the actual number of impacted
customers is far less. We don't know the exact numbers. We are still
conducting the investigation."
On Thursday, the Biden administration announced a roster of tough sanctions against Russia as part of what it characterized as the "seen and unseen" response to the SolarWinds breach.
You have to click through to NPR to read its TLDR chindribble agitprop and entirely evidence-free Russian attribution. However, what little we saw and could opine about wrt that event is compiled right'chere with Whitney Webb's vastly more persuaive and internally consistent attribution to the Israeli IT company acquired by Solarwinds in 2019 SAManage.
antiwar | Today Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky seconded a statement by
Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili that “it is time for concrete proposals for Ukraine and Georgia to obtain a NATO MAP and a plan to join the EU.”
The two countries have been paired as partners for future NATO
membership, with both being promised membership in the global military
bloc at the NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania in 2008.
Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany, Andriy Melnyk, seconded Zelensky’s
demand that NATO admit Ukraine as a full member, stating that only that
move would prevent a Russian invasion: “The only possibility for this
[to prevent alleged invasion plans] is for Ukraine to finally become a
NATO member.” He also claimed that had his country been in NATO in 2014
the secession of Donetsk, Lugansk and Crimea would not have occurred;
neither would the now seven-year was in the Donbass. He neglectd to
state whether the U.S.-engineered uprising and overthrow of an
internationally-recognized government would also have occurred. Most
likely not, as the populations of NATO nationsare not allowed to elect,
or if elect, keep any government Washington and Brussels view with
disapprobation.
He also claimed there were 90,000 Russian military personnel deployed
to the Donbass border and to Crimea; in his words, “We are dealing with
the largest troop movement in Russia since the Second World War.” Which
is arrant nonsense.
When the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991 a third of total Soviet
nuclear weapons were in Ukraine; with 1,700 warheads in the country it
had the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world after the U.S. and
Russia. In 1994 Ukraine joined the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of
Nuclear Weapons as a non-nuclear-weapon nation. It’s that decision the
above-cited ambassador suggested be reversed. In fairness, this isn’t
the first time the question of Ukraine developing its own nuclear
weapons capacity has been broached. Over the past twenty years
NATO-trained military leaders have raised the issue. But never before,
and never during a crisis remotely comparable to the present one, has
the issue been phrased so brutally: either place Ukraine under NATO
Article 5 mutual military assistance status – and NATO acknowledges
itself a nuclear alliance – or Ukraine will reassert itself as a nuclear
power.
thesaker | A terrible war is about to erupt on Russia's border with the
Ukraine—or not—but there is some likelihood of a significant number of
people getting killed before project Ukraine is finally over. Given that
around 13 thousand people have been killed over the past seven
years—the civil war in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine has gone on
for that long!—this is no laughing matter. But people get desensitized
to the mostly low-level warfare that has killed over ten thousand
people. Just over the past couple of weeks a grandfather was shot by a
Ukrainian sniper while feeding his chickens and a young boy was killed
by a bomb precision-dropped on him from a Ukrainian drone.
But
what's about to happen now is forecasted to be on a different scale:
the Ukrainians are moving heavy armor and troops up to the line of
separation while the Russians are moving theirs up to their side of the
Ukrainian border, a position from which they can blast any and all
Ukrainian troops straight out of the gene pool without so much as
setting foot on Ukrainian territory—should they wish to do so. The
Russians can justify their military involvement by the need to defend
their own citizens: over the past seven years half a million residents
in eastern Ukraine have applied for and been granted Russian
citizenship. But how exactly can Russia defend its citizens while they
are stuck in the crossfire between Russian and Ukrainian forces?
The
rationale of defending its citizens led to conflict in the briefly
Georgian region of South Ossetia, which started on August 8, 2008 and
lasted barely a week, leaving Georgia effectively demilitarized. Russia
rolled in, Georgia's troops ran off, Russia confiscated some of the more
dangerous war toys and rolled out. Georgia's paper warriors and their
NATO consultants and Israeli trainers were left wiping each others'
tears. Any suggestion of arming and equipping the Georgians since then
is met with groaning and eye-rolling. Is the upcoming event in eastern
Ukraine going to be similar to the swift and relatively painless
defanging of Georgia in 2008? Given that the two situations are quite
different, it seems foolish to think that the approach to resolving them
would be the same.
Is it different this time and is World War
III is about to er upt with eastern Ukraine being used as a trigger for
this conflagration? Do the various statements made at various times by
Vladimir Putin provide a solid enough basis for us to guess at what will
happen next? Is there a third, typically, infuriatingly Russian
approach to resolving this situation, where Russia wins, nobody dies and
everyone in the West is left scratching their heads? Fist tap Dale.
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