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National Statistics Day is more than just a date on the calendar. It plays a crucial role in raising awareness about the significance of statistics in our daily lives and decision-making processes. we delve into the importance of National Statistics Day, exploring its history, objectives, and impact on our society. We'll uncover why this day is celebrated, how it affects policy-making, and how statistics influence our world. Join us as we highlight the vital role of statistics and the professionals behind the numbers.

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I thought y'all should read this

I have a free trial to News+ so I copy-pasted it for you here. I don't think Jonathan Haidt would object to more people having this info.

Tumblr wouldn't let me post it until i removed all the links to Haidt's sources. You'll have to take my word that everything is sourced.

End the Phone-Based Childhood Now

The environment in which kids grow up today is hostile to human development.

By Jonathan Haidt

Something went suddenly and horribly wrong for adolescents in the early 2010s. By now you’ve likely seen the statistics: Rates of depression and anxiety in the United States—fairly stable in the 2000s—rose by more than 50 percent in many studies from 2010 to 2019. The suicide rate rose 48 percent for adolescents ages 10 to 19. For girls ages 10 to 14, it rose 131 percent.

The problem was not limited to the U.S.: Similar patterns emerged around the same time in Canada, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, the Nordic countries, and beyond. By a variety of measures and in a variety of countries, the members of Generation Z (born in and after 1996) are suffering from anxiety, depression, self-harm, and related disorders at levels higher than any other generation for which we have data.

The decline in mental health is just one of many signs that something went awry. Loneliness and friendlessness among American teens began to surge around 2012. Academic achievement went down, too. According to “The Nation’s Report Card,” scores in reading and math began to decline for U.S. students after 2012, reversing decades of slow but generally steady increase. PISA, the major international measure of educational trends, shows that declines in math, reading, and science happened globally, also beginning in the early 2010s.

As the oldest members of Gen Z reach their late 20s, their troubles are carrying over into adulthood. Young adults are dating less, having less sex, and showing less interest in ever having children than prior generations. They are more likelyto live with their parents. They were less likely to get jobs as teens, and managers say they are harder to work with. Many of these trends began with earlier generations, but most of them accelerated with Gen Z.

Surveys show that members of Gen Z are shyer and more risk averse than previous generations, too, and risk aversion may make them less ambitious. In an interview last May, OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman and Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison noted that, for the first time since the 1970s, none of Silicon Valley’s preeminent entrepreneurs are under 30. “Something has really gone wrong,” Altman said. In a famously young industry, he was baffled by the sudden absence of great founders in their 20s.

Generations are not monolithic, of course. Many young people are flourishing. Taken as a whole, however, Gen Z is in poor mental health and is lagging behind previous generations on many important metrics. And if a generation is doing poorly––if it is more anxious and depressed and is starting families, careers, and important companies at a substantially lower rate than previous generations––then the sociological and economic consequences will be profound for the entire society.

What happened in the early 2010s that altered adolescent development and worsened mental health? Theories abound, but the fact that similar trends are found in many countries worldwide means that events and trends that are specific to the United States cannot be the main story.

I think the answer can be stated simply, although the underlying psychology is complex: Those were the years when adolescents in rich countries traded in their flip phones for smartphones and moved much more of their social lives online—particularly onto social-media platforms designed for virality and addiction. Once young people began carrying the entire internet in their pockets, available to them day and night, it altered their daily experiences and developmental pathways across the board. Friendship, dating, sexuality, exercise, sleep, academics, politics, family dynamics, identity—all were affected. Life changed rapidly for younger children, too, as they began to get access to their parents’ smartphones and, later, got their own iPads, laptops, and even smartphones during elementary school.

As a social psychologist who has long studied social and moral development, I have been involved in debates about the effects of digital technology for years. Typically, the scientific questions have been framed somewhat narrowly, to make them easier to address with data. For example, do adolescents who consume more social media have higher levels of depression? Does using a smartphone just before bedtime interfere with sleep? The answer to these questions is usually found to be yes, although the size of the relationship is often statistically small, which has led some researchers to conclude that these new technologies are not responsible for the gigantic increases in mental illness that began in the early 2010s.

But before we can evaluate the evidence on any one potential avenue of harm, we need to step back and ask a broader question: What is childhood––including adolescence––and how did it change when smartphones moved to the center of it? If we take a more holistic view of what childhood is and what young children, tweens, and teens need to do to mature into competent adults, the picture becomes much clearer. Smartphone-based life, it turns out, alters or interferes with a great number of developmental processes.

The intrusion of smartphones and social media are not the only changes that have deformed childhood. There’s an important backstory, beginning as long ago as the 1980s, when we started systematically depriving children and adolescents of freedom, unsupervised play, responsibility, and opportunities for risk taking, all of which promote competence, maturity, and mental health. But the change in childhood accelerated in the early 2010s, when an already independence-deprived generation was lured into a new virtual universe that seemed safe to parents but in fact is more dangerous, in many respects, than the physical world.

My claim is that the new phone-based childhood that took shape roughly 12 years ago is making young people sick and blocking their progress to flourishing in adulthood. We need a dramatic cultural correction, and we need it now.

1. The Decline of Play and Independence 

Human brains are extraordinarily large compared with those of other primates, and human childhoods are extraordinarily long, too, to give those large brains time to wire up within a particular culture. A child’s brain is already 90 percent of its adult size by about age 6. The next 10 or 15 years are about learning norms and mastering skills—physical, analytical, creative, and social. As children and adolescents seek out experiences and practice a wide variety of behaviors, the synapses and neurons that are used frequently are retained while those that are used less often disappear. Neurons that fire together wire together, as brain researchers say.

Brain development is sometimes said to be “experience-expectant,” because specific parts of the brain show increased plasticity during periods of life when an animal’s brain can “expect” to have certain kinds of experiences. You can see this with baby geese, who will imprint on whatever mother-sized object moves in their vicinity just after they hatch. You can see it with human children, who are able to learn languages quickly and take on the local accent, but only through early puberty; after that, it’s hard to learn a language and sound like a native speaker. There is also some evidence of a sensitive period for cultural learning more generally. Japanese children who spent a few years in California in the 1970s came to feel “American” in their identity and ways of interacting only if they attended American schools for a few years between ages 9 and 15. If they left before age 9, there was no lasting impact. If they didn’t arrive until they were 15, it was too late; they didn’t come to feel American.

Human childhood is an extended cultural apprenticeship with different tasks at different ages all the way through puberty. Once we see it this way, we can identify factors that promote or impede the right kinds of learning at each age. For children of all ages, one of the most powerful drivers of learning is the strong motivation to play. Play is the work of childhood, and all young mammals have the same job: to wire up their brains by playing vigorously and often, practicing the moves and skills they’ll need as adults. Kittens will play-pounce on anything that looks like a mouse tail. Human children will play games such as tag and sharks and minnows, which let them practice both their predator skills and their escaping-from-predator skills. Adolescents will play sports with greater intensity, and will incorporate playfulness into their social interactions—flirting, teasing, and developing inside jokes that bond friends together. Hundreds of studies on young rats, monkeys, and humans show that young mammals want to play, need to play, and end up socially, cognitively, and emotionally impaired when they are deprived of play.

One crucial aspect of play is physical risk taking. Children and adolescents must take risks and fail—often—in environments in which failure is not very costly. This is how they extend their abilities, overcome their fears, learn to estimate risk, and learn to cooperate in order to take on larger challenges later. The ever-present possibility of getting hurt while running around, exploring, play-fighting, or getting into a real conflict with another group adds an element of thrill, and thrilling play appears to be the most effective kind for overcoming childhood anxieties and building social, emotional, and physical competence. The desire for risk and thrill increases in the teen years, when failure might carry more serious consequences. Children of all ages need to choose the risk they are ready for at a given moment. Young people who are deprived of opportunities for risk taking and independent exploration will, on average, develop into more anxious and risk-averse adults.

Human childhood and adolescence evolved outdoors, in a physical world full of dangers and opportunities. Its central activities––play, exploration, and intense socializing––were largely unsupervised by adults, allowing children to make their own choices, resolve their own conflicts, and take care of one another. Shared adventures and shared adversity bound young people together into strong friendship clusters within which they mastered the social dynamics of small groups, which prepared them to master bigger challenges and larger groups later on.

And then we changed childhood.

The changes started slowly in the late 1970s and ’80s, before the arrival of the internet, as many parents in the U.S. grew fearful that their children would be harmed or abducted if left unsupervised. Such crimes have always been extremely rare, but they loomed larger in parents’ minds thanks in part to rising levels of street crime combined with the arrival of cable TV, which enabled round-the-clock coverage of missing-children cases. A general decline in social capital––the degree to which people knew and trusted their neighbors and institutions––exacerbated parental fears. Meanwhile, rising competition for college admissions encouraged more intensive forms of parenting. In the 1990s, American parents began pulling their children indoors or insisting that afternoons be spent in adult-run enrichment activities. Free play, independent exploration, and teen-hangout time declined.

In recent decades, seeing unchaperoned children outdoors has become so novel that when one is spotted in the wild, some adults feel it is their duty to call the police. In 2015, the Pew Research Center found that parents, on average, believed that children should be at least 10 years old to play unsupervised in front of their house, and that kids should be 14 before being allowed to go unsupervised to a public park. Most of these same parents had enjoyed joyous and unsupervised outdoor play by the age of 7 or 8.

2. The Virtual World Arrives in Two Waves

The internet, which now dominates the lives of young people, arrived in two waves of linked technologies. The first one did little harm to Millennials. The second one swallowed Gen Z whole.

The first wave came ashore in the 1990s with the arrival of dial-up internet access, which made personal computers good for something beyond word processing and basic games. By 2003, 55 percent of American households had a computer with (slow) internet access. Rates of adolescent depression, loneliness, and other measures of poor mental health did not rise in this first wave. If anything, they went down a bit. Millennial teens (born 1981 through 1995), who were the first to go through puberty with access to the internet, were psychologically healthier and happier, on average, than their older siblings or parents in Generation X (born 1965 through 1980).

The second wave began to rise in the 2000s, though its full force didn’t hit until the early 2010s. It began rather innocently with the introduction of social-media platforms that helped people connect with their friends. Posting and sharing content became much easier with sites such as Friendster (launched in 2003), Myspace (2003), and Facebook (2004).

Teens embraced social media soon after it came out, but the time they could spend on these sites was limited in those early years because the sites could only be accessed from a computer, often the family computer in the living room. Young people couldn’t access social media (and the rest of the internet) from the school bus, during class time, or while hanging out with friends outdoors. Many teens in the early-to-mid-2000s had cellphones, but these were basic phones (many of them flip phones) that had no internet access. Typing on them was difficult––they had only number keys. Basic phones were tools that helped Millennials meet up with one another in person or talk with each other one-on-one. I have seen no evidence to suggest that basic cellphones harmed the mental health of Millennials.

It was not until the introduction of the iPhone (2007), the App Store (2008), and high-speed internet (which reached 50 percent of American homes in 2007)—and the corresponding pivot to mobile made by many providers of social media, video games, and porn—that it became possible for adolescents to spend nearly every waking moment online. The extraordinary synergy among these innovations was what powered the second technological wave. In 2011, only 23 percent of teens had a smartphone. By 2015, that number had risen to 73 percent, and a quarter of teens said they were online “almost constantly.” Their younger siblings in elementary school didn’t usually have their own smartphones, but after its release in 2010, the iPad quickly became a staple of young children’s daily lives. It was in this brief period, from 2010 to 2015, that childhood in America (and many other countries) was rewired into a form that was more sedentary, solitary, virtual, and incompatible with healthy human development.

3. Techno-optimism and the Birth of the Phone-Based Childhood

The phone-based childhood created by that second wave—including not just smartphones themselves, but all manner of internet-connected devices, such as tablets, laptops, video-game consoles, and smartwatches—arrived near the end of a period of enormous optimism about digital technology. The internet came into our lives in the mid-1990s, soon after the fall of the Soviet Union. By the end of that decade, it was widely thought that the web would be an ally of democracy and a slayer of tyrants. When people are connected to each other, and to all the information in the world, how could any dictator keep them down?

In the 2000s, Silicon Valley and its world-changing inventions were a source of pride and excitement in America. Smart and ambitious young people around the world wanted to move to the West Coast to be part of the digital revolution. Tech-company founders such as Steve Jobs and Sergey Brin were lauded as gods, or at least as modern Prometheans, bringing humans godlike powers. The Arab Spring bloomed in 2011 with the help of decentralized social platforms, including Twitter and Facebook. When pundits and entrepreneurs talked about the power of social media to transform society, it didn’t sound like a dark prophecy.

You have to put yourself back in this heady time to understand why adults acquiesced so readily to the rapid transformation of childhood. Many parents had concerns, even then, about what their children were doing online, especially because of the internet’s ability to put children in contact with strangers. But there was also a lot of excitement about the upsides of this new digital world. If computers and the internet were the vanguards of progress, and if young people––widely referred to as “digital natives”––were going to live their lives entwined with these technologies, then why not give them a head start? I remember how exciting it was to see my 2-year-old son master the touch-and-swipe interface of my first iPhone in 2008. I thought I could see his neurons being woven together faster as a result of the stimulation it brought to his brain, compared to the passivity of watching television or the slowness of building a block tower. I thought I could see his future job prospects improving.

Touchscreen devices were also a godsend for harried parents. Many of us discovered that we could have peace at a restaurant, on a long car trip, or at home while making dinner or replying to emails if we just gave our children what they most wanted: our smartphones and tablets. We saw that everyone else was doing it and figured it must be okay.

It was the same for older children, desperate to join their friends on social-media platforms, where the minimum age to open an account was set by law to 13, even though no research had been done to establish the safety of these products for minors. Because the platforms did nothing (and still do nothing) to verify the stated age of new-account applicants, any 10-year-old could open multiple accounts without parental permission or knowledge, and many did. Facebook and later Instagram became places where many sixth and seventh graders were hanging out and socializing. If parents did find out about these accounts, it was too late. Nobody wanted their child to be isolated and alone, so parents rarely forced their children to shut down their accounts.

We had no idea what we were doing.

4. The High Cost of a Phone-Based Childhood

In Walden, his 1854 reflection on simple living, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “The cost of a thing is the amount of … life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” It’s an elegant formulation of what economists would later call the opportunity cost of any choice—all of the things you can no longer do with your money and time once you’ve committed them to something else. So it’s important that we grasp just how much of a young person’s day is now taken up by their devices.

The numbers are hard to believe. The most recent Gallup data show that American teens spend about five hours a day just on social-media platforms (including watching videos on TikTok and YouTube). Add in all the other phone- and screen-based activities, and the number rises to somewhere between seven and nine hours a day, on average. The numbers are even higher in single-parent and low-income families, and among Black, Hispanic, and Native American families.

In Thoreau’s terms, how much of life is exchanged for all this screen time? Arguably, most of it. Everything else in an adolescent’s day must get squeezed down or eliminated entirely to make room for the vast amount of content that is consumed, and for the hundreds of “friends,” “followers,” and other network connections that must be serviced with texts, posts, comments, likes, snaps, and direct messages. I recently surveyed my students at NYU, and most of them reported that the very first thing they do when they open their eyes in the morning is check their texts, direct messages, and social-media feeds. It’s also the last thing they do before they close their eyes at night. And it’s a lot of what they do in between.

The amount of time that adolescents spend sleeping declined in the early 2010s, and many studies tie sleep loss directly to the use of devices around bedtime, particularly when they’re used to scroll through social media. Exercise declined, too, which is unfortunate because exercise, like sleep, improves both mental and physical health. Book reading has been declining for decades, pushed aside by digital alternatives, but the decline, like so much else, sped up in the early 2010s. With passive entertainment always available, adolescent minds likely wander less than they used to; contemplation and imagination might be placed on the list of things winnowed down or crowded out.

But perhaps the most devastating cost of the new phone-based childhood was the collapse of time spent interacting with other people face-to-face. A study of how Americans spend their time found that, before 2010, young people (ages 15 to 24) reported spending far more time with their friends (about two hours a day, on average, not counting time together at school) than did older people (who spent just 30 to 60 minutes with friends). Time with friends began decreasing for young people in the 2000s, but the drop accelerated in the 2010s, while it barely changed for older people. By 2019, young people’s time with friends had dropped to just 67 minutes a day. It turns out that Gen Z had been socially distancing for many years and had mostly completed the project by the time COVID-19 struck.

You might question the importance of this decline. After all, isn’t much of this online time spent interacting with friends through texting, social media, and multiplayer video games? Isn’t that just as good?

Some of it surely is, and virtual interactions offer unique benefits too, especially for young people who are geographically or socially isolated. But in general, the virtual world lacks many of the features that make human interactions in the real world nutritious, as we might say, for physical, social, and emotional development. In particular, real-world relationships and social interactions are characterized by four features—typical for hundreds of thousands of years—that online interactions either distort or erase.

First, real-world interactions are embodied, meaning that we use our hands and facial expressions to communicate, and we learn to respond to the body language of others. Virtual interactions, in contrast, mostly rely on language alone. No matter how many emojis are offered as compensation, the elimination of communication channels for which we have eons of evolutionary programming is likely to produce adults who are less comfortable and less skilled at interacting in person.

Second, real-world interactions are synchronous; they happen at the same time. As a result, we learn subtle cues about timing and conversational turn taking. Synchronous interactions make us feel closer to the other person because that’s what getting “in sync” does. Texts, posts, and many other virtual interactions lack synchrony. There is less real laughter, more room for misinterpretation, and more stress after a comment that gets no immediate response.

Third, real-world interactions primarily involve one‐to‐one communication, or sometimes one-to-several. But many virtual communications are broadcast to a potentially huge audience. Online, each person can engage in dozens of asynchronous interactions in parallel, which interferes with the depth achieved in all of them. The sender’s motivations are different, too: With a large audience, one’s reputation is always on the line; an error or poor performance can damage social standing with large numbers of peers. These communications thus tend to be more performative and anxiety-inducing than one-to-one conversations.

Finally, real-world interactions usually take place within communities that have a high bar for entry and exit, so people are strongly motivated to invest in relationships and repair rifts when they happen. But in many virtual networks, people can easily block others or quit when they are displeased. Relationships within such networks are usually more disposable.

These unsatisfying and anxiety-producing features of life online should be recognizable to most adults. Online interactions can bring out antisocial behavior that people would never display in their offline communities. But if life online takes a toll on adults, just imagine what it does to adolescents in the early years of puberty, when their “experience expectant” brains are rewiring based on feedback from their social interactions.

Kids going through puberty online are likely to experience far more social comparison, self-consciousness, public shaming, and chronic anxiety than adolescents in previous generations, which could potentially set developing brains into a habitual state of defensiveness. The brain contains systems that are specialized for approach (when opportunities beckon) and withdrawal (when threats appear or seem likely). People can be in what we might call “discover mode” or “defend mode” at any moment, but generally not both. The two systems together form a mechanism for quickly adapting to changing conditions, like a thermostat that can activate either a heating system or a cooling system as the temperature fluctuates. Some people’s internal thermostats are generally set to discover mode, and they flip into defend mode only when clear threats arise. These people tend to see the world as full of opportunities. They are happier and less anxious. Other people’s internal thermostats are generally set to defend mode, and they flip into discover mode only when they feel unusually safe. They tend to see the world as full of threats and are more prone to anxiety and depressive disorders.

A simple way to understand the differences between Gen Z and previous generations is that people born in and after 1996 have internal thermostats that were shifted toward defend mode. This is why life on college campuses changed so suddenly when Gen Z arrived, beginning around 2014. Students began requesting “safe spaces” and trigger warnings. They were highly sensitive to “microaggressions” and sometimes claimed that words were “violence.” These trends mystified those of us in older generations at the time, but in hindsight, it all makes sense. Gen Z students found words, ideas, and ambiguous social encounters more threatening than had previous generations of students because we had fundamentally altered their psychological development.

5. So Many Harms

The debate around adolescents’ use of smartphones and social media typically revolves around mental health, and understandably so. But the harms that have resulted from transforming childhood so suddenly and heedlessly go far beyondmental health. I’ve touched on some of them—social awkwardness, reduced self-confidence, and a more sedentary childhood. Here are three additional harms.

Fragmented Attention, Disrupted Learning

Staying on task while sitting at a computer is hard enough for an adult with a fully developed prefrontal cortex. It is far more difficult for adolescents in front of their laptop trying to do homework. They are probably less intrinsically motivated to stay on task. They’re certainly less able, given their undeveloped prefrontal cortex, and hence it’s easy for any company with an app to lure them away with an offer of social validation or entertainment. Their phones are pinging constantly—one study found that the typical adolescent now gets 237 notifications a day, roughly 15 every waking hour. Sustained attention is essential for doing almost anything big, creative, or valuable, yet young people find their attention chopped up into little bits by notifications offering the possibility of high-pleasure, low-effort digital experiences.

It even happens in the classroom. Studies confirm that when students have access to their phones during class time, they use them, especially for texting and checking social media, and their grades and learning suffer. This might explain why benchmark test scores began to decline in the U.S. and around the world in the early 2010s—well before the pandemic hit.

Addiction and Social Withdrawal

The neural basis of behavioral addiction to social media or video games is not exactly the same as chemical addiction to cocaine or opioids. Nonetheless, they all involve abnormally heavy and sustained activation of dopamine neurons and reward pathways. Over time, the brain adapts to these high levels of dopamine; when the child is not engaged in digital activity, their brain doesn’t have enough dopamine, and the child experiences withdrawal symptoms. These generally include anxiety, insomnia, and intense irritability. Kids with these kinds of behavioral addictions often become surly and aggressive, and withdraw from their families into their bedrooms and devices.

Social-media and gaming platforms were designed to hook users. How successful are they? How many kids suffer from digital addictions?

The main addiction risks for boys seem to be video games and porn. “Internet gaming disorder,” which was added to the main diagnosis manual of psychiatry in 2013 as a condition for further study, describes “significant impairment or distress” in several aspects of life, along with many hallmarks of addiction, including an inability to reduce usage despite attempts to do so. Estimates for the prevalence of IGD range from 7 to 15 percent among adolescent boys and young men. As for porn, a nationally representative survey of American adults published in 2019 found that 7 percent of American men agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “I am addicted to pornography”—and the rates were higher for the youngest men.

Girls have much lower rates of addiction to video games and porn, but they use social media more intensely than boys do. A study of teens in 29 nations found that between 5 and 15 percent of adolescents engage in what is called “problematic social media use,” which includes symptoms such as preoccupation, withdrawal symptoms, neglect of other areas of life, and lying to parents and friends about time spent on social media. That study did not break down results by gender, but many others have found that rates of “problematic use” are higher for girls.

I don’t want to overstate the risks: Most teens do not become addicted to their phones and video games. But across multiple studies and across genders, rates of problematic use come out in the ballpark of 5 to 15 percent. Is there any other consumer product that parents would let their children use relatively freely if they knew that something like one in 10 kids would end up with a pattern of habitual and compulsive use that disrupted various domains of life and looked a lot like an addiction?

The Decay of Wisdom and the Loss of Meaning 

During that crucial sensitive period for cultural learning, from roughly ages 9 through 15, we should be especially thoughtful about who is socializing our children for adulthood. Instead, that’s when most kids get their first smartphone and sign themselves up (with or without parental permission) to consume rivers of content from random strangers. Much of that content is produced by other adolescents, in blocks of a few minutes or a few seconds.

This rerouting of enculturating content has created a generation that is largely cut off from older generations and, to some extent, from the accumulated wisdom of humankind, including knowledge about how to live a flourishing life. Adolescents spend less time steeped in their local or national culture. They are coming of age in a confusing, placeless, ahistorical maelstrom of 30-second stories curated by algorithms designed to mesmerize them. Without solid knowledge of the past and the filtering of good ideas from bad––a process that plays out over many generations––young people will be more prone to believe whatever terrible ideas become popular around them, which might explain why videos showing young people reacting positively to Osama bin Laden’s thoughts about America were trending on TikTok last fall.

All this is made worse by the fact that so much of digital public life is an unending supply of micro dramas about somebody somewhere in our country of 340 million people who did something that can fuel an outrage cycle, only to be pushed aside by the next. It doesn’t add up to anything and leaves behind only a distorted sense of human nature and affairs.

When our public life becomes fragmented, ephemeral, and incomprehensible, it is a recipe for anomie, or normlessness. The great French sociologist Émile Durkheim showed long ago that a society that fails to bind its people together with some shared sense of sacredness and common respect for rules and norms is not a society of great individual freedom; it is, rather, a place where disoriented individuals have difficulty setting goals and exerting themselves to achieve them. Durkheim argued that anomie was a major driver of suicide rates in European countries. Modern scholars continue to draw on his work to understand suicide rates today. 

Durkheim’s observations are crucial for understanding what happened in the early 2010s. A long-running survey of American teens found that, from 1990 to 2010, high-school seniors became slightly less likely to agree with statements such as “Life often feels meaningless.” But as soon as they adopted a phone-based life and many began to live in the whirlpool of social media, where no stability can be found, every measure of despair increased. From 2010 to 2019, the number who agreed that their lives felt “meaningless” increased by about 70 percent, to more than one in five.

6. Young People Don’t Like Their Phone-Based Lives

How can I be confident that the epidemic of adolescent mental illness was kicked off by the arrival of the phone-based childhood? Skeptics point to other events as possible culprits, including the 2008 global financial crisis, global warming, the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting and the subsequent active-shooter drills, rising academic pressures, and the opioid epidemic. But while these events might have been contributing factors in some countries, none can explain both the timing and international scope of the disaster.

An additional source of evidence comes from Gen Z itself. With all the talk of regulating social media, raising age limits, and getting phones out of schools, you might expect to find many members of Gen Z writing and speaking out in opposition. I’ve looked for such arguments and found hardly any. In contrast, many young adults tell stories of devastation.

Freya India, a 24-year-old British essayist who writes about girls, explains how social-media sites carry girls off to unhealthy places: “It seems like your child is simply watching some makeup tutorials, following some mental health influencers, or experimenting with their identity. But let me tell you: they are on a conveyor belt to someplace bad. Whatever insecurity or vulnerability they are struggling with, they will be pushed further and further into it.” She continues:

Gen Z were the guinea pigs in this uncontrolled global social experiment. We were the first to have our vulnerabilities and insecurities fed into a machine that magnified and refracted them back at us, all the time, before we had any sense of who we were. We didn’t just grow up with algorithms. They raised us. They rearranged our faces. Shaped our identities. Convinced us we were sick.

Rikki Schlott, a 23-year-old American journalist and co-author of The Canceling of the American Mind, writes,

"The day-to-day life of a typical teen or tween today would be unrecognizable to someone who came of age before the smartphone arrived. Zoomers are spending an average of 9 hours daily in this screen-time doom loop—desperate to forget the gaping holes they’re bleeding out of, even if just for … 9 hours a day. Uncomfortable silence could be time to ponder why they’re so miserable in the first place. Drowning it out with algorithmic white noise is far easier."

A 27-year-old man who spent his adolescent years addicted (his word) to video games and pornography sent me this reflection on what that did to him:

I missed out on a lot of stuff in life—a lot of socialization. I feel the effects now: meeting new people, talking to people. I feel that my interactions are not as smooth and fluid as I want. My knowledge of the world (geography, politics, etc.) is lacking. I didn’t spend time having conversations or learning about sports. I often feel like a hollow operating system.

Or consider what Facebook found in a research project involving focus groups of young people, revealed in 2021 by the whistleblower Frances Haugen: “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rates of anxiety and depression among teens,” an internal document said. “This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.”

7. Collective-Action Problems

Social-media companies such as Meta, TikTok, and Snap are often compared to tobacco companies, but that’s not really fair to the tobacco industry. It’s true that companies in both industries marketed harmful products to children and tweaked their products for maximum customer retention (that is, addiction), but there’s a big difference: Teens could and did choose, in large numbers, not to smoke. Even at the peak of teen cigarette use, in 1997, nearly two-thirds of high-school students did not smoke.

Social media, in contrast, applies a lot more pressure on nonusers, at a much younger age and in a more insidious way. Once a few students in any middle school lie about their age and open accounts at age 11 or 12, they start posting photos and comments about themselves and other students. Drama ensues. The pressure on everyone else to join becomes intense. Even a girl who knows, consciously, that Instagram can foster beauty obsession, anxiety, and eating disorders might sooner take those risks than accept the seeming certainty of being out of the loop, clueless, and excluded. And indeed, if she resists while most of her classmates do not, she might, in fact, be marginalized, which puts her at risk for anxiety and depression, though via a different pathway than the one taken by those who use social media heavily. In this way, social media accomplishes a remarkable feat: It even harms adolescents who do not use it.

A recent study led by the University of Chicago economist Leonardo Bursztyn captured the dynamics of the social-media trap precisely. The researchers recruited more than 1,000 college students and asked them how much they’d need to be paid to deactivate their accounts on either Instagram or TikTok for four weeks. That’s a standard economist’s question to try to compute the net value of a product to society. On average, students said they’d need to be paid roughly $50 ($59 for TikTok, $47 for Instagram) to deactivate whichever platform they were asked about. Then the experimenters told the students that they were going to try to get most of the others in their school to deactivate that same platform, offering to pay them to do so as well, and asked, Now how much would you have to be paid to deactivate, if most others did so? The answer, on average, was less than zero. In each case, most students were willing to pay to have that happen.

Social media is all about network effects. Most students are only on it because everyone else is too. Most of them would prefer that nobody be on these platforms. Later in the study, students were asked directly, “Would you prefer to live in a world without Instagram [or TikTok]?” A majority of students said yes––58 percent for each app.

This is the textbook definition of what social scientists call a collective-action problem. It’s what happens when a group would be better off if everyone in the group took a particular action, but each actor is deterred from acting, because unless the others do the same, the personal cost outweighs the benefit. Fishermen considering limiting their catch to avoid wiping out the local fish population are caught in this same kind of trap. If no one else does it too, they just lose profit.

Cigarettes trapped individual smokers with a biological addiction. Social media has trapped an entire generation in a collective-action problem. Early app developers deliberately and knowingly exploited the psychological weaknesses and insecurities of young people to pressure them to consume a product that, upon reflection, many wish they could use less, or not at all.

8. Four Norms to Break Four Traps

Young people and their parents are stuck in at least four collective-action traps. Each is hard to escape for an individual family, but escape becomes much easier if families, schools, and communities coordinate and act together. Here are four norms that would roll back the phone-based childhood. I believe that any community that adopts all four will see substantial improvements in youth mental health within two years.

No smartphones before high school  

The trap here is that each child thinks they need a smartphone because “everyone else” has one, and many parents give in because they don’t want their child to feel excluded. But if no one else had a smartphone—or even if, say, only half of the child’s sixth-grade class had one—parents would feel more comfortable providing a basic flip phone (or no phone at all). Delaying round-the-clock internet access until ninth grade (around age 14) as a national or community norm would help to protect adolescents during the very vulnerable first few years of puberty. According to a 2022 British study, these are the years when social-media use is most correlated with poor mental health. Family policies about tablets, laptops, and video-game consoles should be aligned with smartphone restrictions to prevent overuse of other screen activities.

No social media before 16

The trap here, as with smartphones, is that each adolescent feels a strong need to open accounts on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and other platforms primarily because that’s where most of their peers are posting and gossiping. But if the majority of adolescents were not on these accounts until they were 16, families and adolescents could more easily resist the pressure to sign up. The delay would not mean that kids younger than 16 could never watch videos on TikTok or YouTube—only that they could not open accounts, give away their data, post their own content, and let algorithms get to know them and their preferences.

Phone‐free schools 

Most schools claim that they ban phones, but this usually just means that students aren’t supposed to take their phone out of their pocket during class. Research shows that most students do use their phones during class time. They also use them during lunchtime, free periods, and breaks between classes––times when students could and should be interacting with their classmates face-to-face. The only way to get students’ minds off their phones during the school day is to require all students to put their phones (and other devices that can send or receive texts) into a phone locker or locked pouch at the start of the day. Schools that have gone phone-free always seem to report that it has improved the culture, making students more attentive in class and more interactive with one another. Published studies back them up.

More independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world

Many parents are afraid to give their children the level of independence and responsibility they themselves enjoyed when they were young, even though rates of homicide, drunk driving, and other physical threats to children are way down in recent decades. Part of the fear comes from the fact that parents look at each other to determine what is normal and therefore safe, and they see few examples of families acting as if a 9-year-old can be trusted to walk to a store without a chaperone. But if many parents started sending their children out to play or run errands, then the norms of what is safe and accepted would change quickly. So would ideas about what constitutes “good parenting.” And if more parents trusted their children with more responsibility––for example, by asking their kids to do more to help out, or to care for others––then the pervasive sense of uselessness now found in surveys of high-school students might begin to dissipate.

It would be a mistake to overlook this fourth norm. If parents don’t replace screen time with real-world experiences involving friends and independent activity, then banning devices will feel like deprivation, not the opening up of a world of opportunities.

The main reason why the phone-based childhood is so harmful is because it pushes aside everything else. Smartphones are experience blockers. Our ultimate goal should not be to remove screens entirely, nor should it be to return childhood to exactly the way it was in 1960. Rather, it should be to create a version of childhood and adolescence that keeps young people anchored in the real world while flourishing in the digital age.

9. What Are We Waiting For?

An essential function of government is to solve collective-action problems. Congress could solve or help solve the ones I’ve highlighted—for instance, by raising the age of “internet adulthood” to 16 and requiring tech companies to keep underage children off their sites.

In recent decades, however, Congress has not been good at addressing public concerns when the solutions would displease a powerful and deep-pocketed industry. Governors and state legislators have been much more effective, and their successes might let us evaluate how well various reforms work. But the bottom line is that to change norms, we’re going to need to do most of the work ourselves, in neighborhood groups, schools, and other communities.

There are now hundreds of organizations––most of them started by mothers who saw what smartphones had done to their children––that are working to roll back the phone-based childhood or promote a more independent, real-world childhood. (I have assembled a list of many of them.) One that I co-founded, at LetGrow.org, suggests a variety of simple programs for parents or schools, such as play club (schools keep the playground open at least one day a week before or after school, and kids sign up for phone-free, mixed-age, unstructured play as a regular weekly activity) and the Let Grow Experience (a series of homework assignments in which students––with their parents’ consent––choose something to do on their own that they’ve never done before, such as walk the dog, climb a tree, walk to a store, or cook dinner).

Parents are fed up with what childhood has become. Many are tired of having daily arguments about technologies that were designed to grab hold of their children’s attention and not let go. But the phone-based childhood is not inevitable.

The four norms I have proposed cost almost nothing to implement, they cause no clear harm to anyone, and while they could be supported by new legislation, they can be instilled even without it. We can begin implementing all of them right away, this year, especially in communities with good cooperation between schools and parents. A single memo from a principal asking parents to delay smartphones and social media, in support of the school’s effort to improve mental health by going phone free, would catalyze collective action and reset the community’s norms.

We didn’t know what we were doing in the early 2010s. Now we do. It’s time to end the phone-based childhood.

This article is adapted from Jonathan Haidt’s forthcoming book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.

[nytb]

Hero At A Price

Click Here first <3

Alexia's injury hit Fc Barcelona at the worst possible time, heck it was the only player that they couldn't afford to lose. The team took a hit, a position was left to fill and the objective for the season remained the same - win everything.

Luckily, the team had a gem producing academy. Y/N Y/L/Y was one of the youngsters that had come through la Masia, but a stacked first team gave the future star no other choice, she had to leave.

After leaving Barcelona, Y/N established herself in the German league. The first season was rough, Eintracht Frankfurt fought to be one of the top sides, but as previous seasons dictated, they remained a stuck in mid table. That season was all it took to get Y/N familiarised with the style, the cold, the people. Now - Frankfurt had been fighting the top dogs two seasons in a row. They comfortably occupied the third position. Her connection with Laura Freigang and Géraldine Reuteler made them rise to the top of the goal and assist leaderboards.

Her unending run of form prompted Frankfurt to offer their star a new contract. Everything Y/N wanted, she got. The club was at her heels, they couldn't let their star go.

Her Barcelona past was known, Y/N was a la Masia graduate, she bled blaugrana. Throughout the years, Frankfurt carved their own little spot in the midfielders heart. She was now one of their own.

Before season-end, the Euros took place. The stacked up National team didn't let the Frankfurt star shine as she should - she wasn't even called up. To Spain's dismay, Alexia's injury hit them hard. Their star was out for the foreseeable future. Now Spain and Fc Barcelona were left scrambling, they needed the perfect replacement.

The past Y/N and Xavi Puig - now the sporting director at Fc Barcelona - shared prompted the man to seek out her services.

Xavi was Y/N's loyalest follower. He watched the Catalonian rise through the ranks, and as he didn't occupy a position within the club at the time, he watched how Y/N was forced out - his hands were tied. He kept watching Y/N grow, but this time from a distance.

Despite Frankfurts unwillingness to let their midfielder go, Xavi wasn't going to let his star go - not again. He moved hell on earth and got the German club to sign on the dotted line. A one year loan with an option to buy, a record signing fee attached to Y/N's name.

Now, Xavi only needed to break the news; "I've been trying to get you home" An unexpected call during Y/N's holiday with an unimaginable opportunity. The sporting director explained the ins and outs of the deal to his star.

Frankfurt Eintracht fans hearts were broken that day. The heir to the captain's band had switched sides. For most of them, hope dictated the return of their star; she wouldn't leave them stranded.

Returning to Barcelona, Y/N was hit with a wave of nostalgia. The blue sky, her old teammates, the Johan. Y/N was home.

The now Fc Barcelona midfielder was welcomed with open arms. Every training session had the academy players in the stands, the sporting director and captain joined in. Y/N was the talk of the town. Her precision on the ball, the technique, her utter class - Y/N was born to wear the Fc Barcelona badge on her chest.

Her statistics portrayed just that, leading the assist leaderboard - Y/N was an essential piece in Jonathan's XI. Her name rang everywhere. Frankfurt's local newspapers kept a reserved spot on their weekly issue for their star. She wasn't forgotten by her beloved club - something that Fc Barcelona had done way back when they let her go.

"They are in love with you" Mapi informed the midfielder as they returned to the dressing room post-match "Have you heard their chants?" Patri enquired further before Jana interjected "They're almost as loud as Mapi's" the defender laughed "I'm happy for you Y/N" she took the midfielder under her arm "You deserve this"

Jana and Y/N had risen through the ranks together, this made Jana's words that much meaningful for the Catalonian.

The conversations in the dressing room soon changed, the international break was imminent and everyone knew it. Y/N's name was amongst the possible call ups for Spain.

As per usual, Alexia joined in on the post-match celebrations in the dressing room and as it died down, she made her way to Fc Barcelona's new star - Y/N. "So, you're going" Alexia assumed the worst, the new midfielder would surely take advantage of the hole the 15 had left in the national team. It was the perfect opportunity to make herself an unquestionable starter, even if some of the 15 decided to return further down the line.

The captain's words cut deep. In Y/N's mind, Alexia had become a close friend, a role model. In her defence, Putellas didn't know where Y/N stood in the 15 vs Federation matter. "Well actually, I just asked my representative to put out a statement" the words left Y/N's lips without hesitation. The 24 year old was ready to make her opinion on the matter known.

Alexia's eyes shone brighter than ever. The possible jealousy, the anger, the sadness, the disappointment - it all went away. "They will retaliate" the captain warned Y/N before the midfielder made a further declaration "Let them come, I'm not scared" Y/N expressed nonchalantly as she made her way out of the dressing room, heading home after the match. Mapi, who was now left celebrating Y/N's words, was quick to verbalise how she felt "I told you, she's not here to mess around" the defender was beyond proud of Y/N's words "Y/N will change Spanish football - mark my words"

Y/N's statement hit the internet, followed by words of encouragement from her Barcelona teammates - but this time, the whole world echoed them. Frankfurt Eintracht had put out a statement of their own; they backed their star. Y/N was going up against the Spanish Federation and the whole world was watching.

Giving interviews to international news outlets, her words spread like wildfire. Y/N had the Spanish Federation scrambling. The National team's sponsors applying unimaginable pressure. For a long time, nobody wondered how the 15's fight switched the narrative and ended up on the winning side. They turned the "capricious" narrative upside down.

Vilda's mask fell. The whole world saw what the Spanish players had endured for years. Unprofessional treatment, lack of support from their federation, inadequate preparation.

Meanwhile, Y/N was seen attending Germany's games. Wearing her best friend's jersey - Y/N celebrated Freigang's call up. In the stadium, the Germans love and support for their Frankfurt stars was vocalised. After the game, not only Laura was praised. German fans approached Y/N, asking for pictures, autographs; they applauded Y/N's fight against the Spanish Federation. The midfielders heart was now divided. Not many people knew, but Eintracht Frankfurt's support in the matter came at a price.

The German club had soon realised that Fc Barcelona would gather the money for the transfer. The Catalan team wasn't going to let their star slip from their hands for a second time - so the German team proposed the only thing they could offer. A possibility to switch the narrative; make the Spanish Federations lies known. They fought Vildas statements to the nail. Every move they made, the German's came up with the perfect counter. Using all their contacts and influence, they directed Rubiales to a solution: fire Vilda and reinstate the 15. The so call blacklist had to be ripped to shreds.

The war had been won, but only the German club, the Spanish Federation and Y/N's close circle knew how.

For the rest of the season, Y/N's loyalties were shown. The midfielder traveled to watch every possible Eintracht Frankfurt game she could. Showing the German team her dedication and love for them.

Back in Barcelona, nobody seemed to understand what was going on. The dressing room was questioning Y/N's motives. How could an academy player, a blaugrana bleeding Fc Barcelona player stop fighting to stay. Nobody dared to enquire on the matter, not until Jana was fed up with the silence.

Fc Barcelona had lifted the Supercopa trophy, they had won the league before it even ended, they reached the Champions league final and were on their way to the Copa de la Reina final. "Spit it out" the defender confronted Y/N "You can win everything here, you can make our childhood dreams come true. Why don't you want to stay?" Jana's enquiry left Y/N speechless. The whole dressing room was watching - silence struck.

Alexia Putellas was silently watching, seeing how Y/N was lost for words - she soon realised what had happened months prior. There was no way that a 24 year old had managed to win a war against the Spanish Federation all by herself.

Y/N's love for the blaugrana club was big - but the midfielders desire to fight for what's right won.

The dressing room; Jana, were left without an answer. It wasn't for a lack of trying, every time anybody brought up Y/N's possible departure up, Y/N fled the scene.

That same week, Fc Barcelona were up against Wolfsburg in the Champions league final. A hard fought match, but Fc Barcelona came out victorious. Y/N's performance against the German team left everyone speechless. The midfielder became Wolfburgs nightmare, ending the match with a goal and a hat trick of assists.

Her performance in the Copa de la Reina final - what would be Y/N's last match with Fc Barcelona - had her leaving with the trophy and the MOTM award. Celebrating it with tears in her eyes, Y/N's short stay at her beloved club was coming to an end.

The very next day, Y/N made her way to the Ciutat Deportiva. Everyone on the team was given a day off, even Y/N; but that didn't matter. This was Y/N's final week with Fc Barcelona.

Alexia Putellas, the captain, didn't take days off; today wasn't an exception. The Catalonian made her way onto the training field, sitting herself down next to Y/N "Thank you" the Spaniard had been looped in, she knew what Y/N had done.

The ultimate sacrifice; Frankfurt's help was a quid pro quo. If the 15 were to win, Y/N had to lose - she had to return to them.

[old-school-butch]

go fuck yourself, you genocide-denying pig. i hope you never have to find the children of your community blown into pieces, but that you live everyday with the knowledge you supported the genocidal government that did this to others.

I'd like to take a moment to discuss the words you're using and what they actually mean.

genocide, the deliberate and systematic destruction of a group of people because of their ethnicity, nationality, religion, or race.

It can usually be objectively verified through population data. A concerted effort at genocide causes a total population loss on a global or regional scale.

For example, here's a graph of the global Jewish population since 1900.

Notice that big dip in population after 1939? That was a Jewish genocide in Europe.

The Tutsi genocide in Rwanda resulted in the deaths of 77% of the Tutsi population with 700,000 people killed in just 100 days. Look at the graph of the total Rwandan population to spot when this happened.

The Khmer Rouge killed 70% of it's Cham Muslim population in 5 years, along with many other minorities and political opponents. See the dip in the total population between 1974 and 1979?

Now here's Palestine's population. It looks remarkably healthy for people being genocided, in fact it doubles every 25 years. Life expectancy for a Palestinian is 74.62 years. The adult obesity rate is 18%.

On October 7th Hamas killed 1400 Israelis in a single day - pretty heavy losses for a nation of 7 million, especially considering there was a ceasefire in effect.

Let's take Hamas' casualty count at face value of 12,000 deaths over 6 weeks - that's about 285 deaths per day. That means the IDF at war kills people at 1/5 the rate than Hamas does during a ceasefire.

These statistics represent real people, and it's important to remember that and understand the impact of war on human suffering. But it's disinformation to call this genocide, and does nothing to help bring peace.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Dave Whammond

* * * *

Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV. Double Standard.

July 8, 2024

ROBERT B. HUBBELL

JUL 08, 2024

The mainstream media continues its whisper campaign against President Biden, as they report that anonymous “senior leaders” talk “in private” about approaching Joe Biden to urge him to drop out. At least Adam Schiff had the guts to express his qualms in public respectfully, even though I strongly disagree with his views (on this subject).

One evolving narrative among the press is that the Biden administration “concealed” the truth of Biden’s cognitive state—which supposedly justifies their righteous anger. Bull****. This is another example of a double standard applied by a media that is intent on driving Joe Biden out of the race—damn the facts!

Joe Biden has been transparent with the American people about his health—which cannot be said about Trump.

Remember Trump's unexplained visit to Walter Reed for a treatment that remains secret to this day? Or showing up to a debate in 2020 knowing he had tested positive for Covid but concealed that fact from Joe Biden, the debate moderators, and the American public?

Or having a doctor release a statement about Trump's health that was dictated by Trump? Or when the White House physician provided false information about Trump's vital statistics—like his weight—and said that Trump might be the first president to live to be 200?

Amid all the calls for “cognitive tests” for Biden—but not Trump—journalists are committing malpractice by failing to note that President Biden released a detailed summary of his annual physical in February of this year.

The full report is here: Health-Summary-2.28.pdf (whitehouse.gov). The examination included consultations with neurological experts at Walter Reed hospital. I urge you to read the entire report and consider how you would measure up to such a battery of tests!

[...]

So, Biden did have a “detailed neurological exam” four-and-half months ago. The widespread media demands that Biden “take a neurological exam” should be directed to Trump instead.

Predictably, this “proof” won’t be enough for the media. Just as the media refused to accept a certified copy of President Obama’s birth certificate, the goalposts will keep shifting.

The issue is not Joe Biden. It is Donald Trump—and the media’s arrogant refusal to apply the same scrutiny to Trump that it is applying to Biden. If they did, they would be demanding neurological exams of Trump and his withdrawal from the race. So far as we have been informed by Trump, his cognitive test consisted of recalling five objects: “Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.” Can you say, “double standard”?

Why isn’t the media making demands that Trump submit to “extremely detailed neurologic testing” by experts from a nationally recognized hospital?

The answer is simple. Trump has quashed dissent within his party. Anyone who dares raise a voice in dissent is the immediate recipient of anonymous death threats and public ridicule on Trump's vanity media platform. And Trump's para-military press surrogates leap into action, declaring that the dissidents are dead to MAGA.

So, the press's application of the same standards to Trump has no upside because it won’t incite the mass panic among Republicans that Democrats are willing to supply by the bucketful.

I accept at face value the good faith of readers who say they have lost confidence in Biden because of the debate or any other reason. That is a personal judgment only you can make. But I again remind everyone that “Biden should withdraw” is not a plan. If you believe a different path to victory is appropriate, then you must devote yourself to that path with all the vigor and financial resources you can muster.

[...]

Timothy Snyder (author of On Tyranny and Substack blog Thinking About), addressed the role that the press has been playing in whipping up “fascist froth” that helps Trump. See Timothy Snyder, Fascism and Fear (substack.com)

There are three tests of good faith for those who are proposing that President Biden step down. The first is recognition that Biden’s first term has been one of extraordinary achievement. The second is a plan for what the Democrats would do, should Biden withdraw, to select a nominee and win the election. The third is recognition that the threat of regime change is what might justify changing the nominee.

If I am right that much of the energy behind the Biden pile-on is displaced fear of a regime change, much of the media will continue to generate fascist froth for Trump, whether or not Biden is the Democratic nominee — unless, of course, journalists confront their fears, and keep the issue of regime change inside the story, and provide a constructive alternative alongside personal criticism.

[I inverted the order of Snyder’s two paragraphs above so they made more sense in a short quotation.]

And, finally, Rebecca Solnit wrote what I wish I had written. See her essay in The Guardian: Why is the pundit class so desperate to push Biden out of the race?

Solnit begins:

I am not usually one to offer diagnoses of people I’ve never met, but it does seem like the pundit class of the American media is suffering from severe memory loss. Because they’re doing exactly what they did in the 2016 presidential race – providing wildly asymmetrical and inflammatory coverage of the one candidate running against Donald J Trump. They have become a stampeding herd producing an avalanche of stories suggesting Biden is unfit, will lose and should go away, at a point in the campaign in which replacing him would likely be somewhere between extremely difficult and utterly catastrophic. They do this while ignoring something every scholar and critic of journalism knows well and every journalist should. As Nikole Hannah-Jones put it: “As media we consistently proclaim that we are just reporting the news when in fact we are driving it. What we cover, how we cover it, determines often what Americans think is important and how they perceive these issues yet we keep pretending it’s not so.” They are not reporting that he is a loser; they are making him one. And so it goes with what appears to be a journalistic competition to outdo each other in the aggressiveness of the attacks and the unreality of the proposals. It’s a dogpile and a panic, and there is no one more unable to understand their own emotional life, biases and motives than people who are utterly convinced of their own ironclad rationality and objectivity, [also known as] pundits.

Here's my advice to everyone—regardless of what side of the issue you take regarding Joe Biden’s continued candidacy. The issue is Trump, not Biden. Whether Biden drops out is not something you or I have control over. (Readers frequently write to me and say, “Please tell Joe Biden . . . .” The only thing Joe Biden knows about me is my credit card number.)

Joe Biden has control over his choices; his close advisors and family have influence; some senior leaders in the Democratic Party have some influence. They are talking amongst themselves. Let them have a rational, private conversation not played out on the front pages of the NYTimes and WaPo minutes after the latest exchange of views.

However, the one institution that has demonstrated it cannot be trusted to deal with this question is the media. They have a perverse financial incentive: Chaos = profit. They are agents of chaos at this moment in pursuit of the mighty dollar.

I believe that Joe Biden is the best candidate to defeat Trump, that replacing him at this point poses unacknowledged and unknowable risks, and that those who advocate a different path have the burden of identifying and funding an alternative candidate.

Our task has not changed. It is our moral and patriotic duty to alert all Americans about the threat posed by Trump and his fascist plan to undermine democracy. We have plenty of work and precious little time left to accomplish our task.

Let us channel all our energy away from debating Joe Biden’s age and health into defeating Trump. In that task, we must speak with one voice.

[MORE]

[Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter]

[covid-safer-hotties]

Reference archived on our website

Highlights • Long-COVID is heterogeneous in its symptoms, severity, and illness duration. • There was no association between long-COVID and cognitive performance. • Cognitive symptoms may represent functional cognitive disorders. • Long-COVID had lower mean diffusivity on diffusion imaging than normal recovery. • Diffusion imaging differences may suggest gliosis as a mechanism of long-COVID.

To be clear: There was no cognitive difference between people post infection. I can see some people misunderstanding what this says. It says there is some form of brain damage from covid across the board, even if you don't have long covid symptoms or diagnosis.

Abstract

Background

The pathophysiology of protracted symptoms after COVID-19 is unclear. This study aimed to determine if long-COVID is associated with differences in baseline characteristics, markers of white matter diffusivity in the brain, and lower scores on objective cognitive testing.

Methods

Individuals who experienced COVID-19 symptoms for more than 60 days post-infection (long-COVID) (n = 56) were compared to individuals who recovered from COVID-19 within 60 days of infection (normal recovery) (n = 35). Information regarding physical and mental health, and COVID-19 illness was collected. The National Institute of Health Toolbox Cognition Battery was administered. Participants underwent magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) with diffusion tensor imaging (DTI). Tract-based spatial statistics were used to perform a whole-brain voxel-wise analysis on standard DTI metrics (fractional anisotropy, axial diffusivity, mean diffusivity, radial diffusivity), controlling for age and sex. NIH Toolbox Age-Adjusted Fluid Cognition Scores were used to compare long-COVID and normal recovery groups, covarying for Age-Adjusted Crystallized Cognition Scores and years of education. False discovery rate correction was applied for multiple comparisons.

Results

There were no significant differences in age, sex, or history of neurovascular risk factors between the groups. The long-COVID group had significantly (p < 0.05) lower mean diffusivity than the normal recovery group across multiple white matter regions, including the internal capsule, anterior and superior corona radiata, corpus callosum, superior fronto-occiptal fasciculus, and posterior thalamic radiation. However, the effect sizes of these differences were small (all <|0.3|) and no significant differences were found for the other DTI metrics. Fluid cognition composite scores did not differ significantly between the long-COVID and normal recovery groups (p > 0.05).

Conclusions

Differences in diffusivity between long-COVID and normal recovery groups were found on only one DTI metric. This could represent subtle areas of pathology such as gliosis or edema, but the small effect sizes and non-specific nature of the diffusion indices make pathological inference difficult. Although long-COVID patients reported many neuropsychiatric symptoms, significant differences in objective cognitive performance were not found.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Senate Republicans on Wednesday blocked efforts by Senate Democrats to pass an assault weapons ban and universal background checks legislation after the United States over the weekend broke the record for the most mass shootings in a single year.

Republican Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) objected to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-N.Y.) request for unanimous consent to pass the assault weapons ban, despite the pleas of Democratic senators who took to the Senate floor to cite the harrowing statistics of gun violence in America.

“The scourge of gun violence in America is a national crisis. The American people are sick and tired of enduring one mass shooting after another. They’re sick and tired of vigil and moments of silence for family, friends, classmates, coworkers,” Schumer argued on the Senate floor.

The assault weapons ban, originally sponsored by the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), would ban semiautomatic rifles with pistol grips, forward grips and folding or telescoping stocks, as well as rifles outfitted with grenade launchers, barrel shrouds or threaded barrels to allow for noise and flash suppressors to be attached.

But Barrasso argued that the Democratic-drafted bill would infringe on the Second Amendment and deprive law-abiding gun owners of an important liberty.

“Americans have a constitutional right to own a firearm. Every day, people across Wyoming responsibly use their Second Amendment rights to keep and bear arms,” he said. “Democrats are demanding that the American people give up their liberty.”

He said that Democrats are trying to ban many types of semiautomatic firearms “because of the way they look.”

He asserted that popular rifles such as AR-15s “work the same way as popular shotguns and other rifles used for hunting and personal protection.”

“The Second Amendment is freedom’s essential safeguard. Without it, there can be no liberty and there can be no security. So Mr. President, I object.”

Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy (Conn.) later stood up on the floor to ask for unanimous consent to pass legislation to require universal background checks for firearms purchases.

“We don’t have more mental illness in this country, we don’t spend less money on law enforcement, we don’t have angrier people, we have more guns, and we are much more permissive in this country about allowing felons, dangerous people, to get their hands on guns,” he said.

A Gallup poll conducted in June 2022 found that 92% of Americans favor requiring background checks for all firearm sales.

“This just feels like a test of democracy. It really does. Like, how does democracy survive if 90% of Americans, 90% of Republicans, 90% of Democrats want something, and we can’t deliver it?” Murphy asked before he asked for unanimous consent to pass the background checks bill.

Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee took to the floor immediately to object.

“I want to note at the outset we’re not asked to vote in this chamber on polling questions. We vote on legislation,” he said.

He said the legislation to expand background checks “has some real problems with it.”

“This is not solely about transactions involving guns at gun stores. This is about the father who wishes to pass down a hunting rifle to his son or the friend who wants to lend a shotgun to his neighbor who is in need of protection at the time,” Lee said before objecting to Murphy’s request.

[qedmirage]

As most of my international followers know here in the US we're having a presidential election this year. Well, that means each major party has to select their candidate, and the process for that has been going on for a while now. See, in the US, state-level parties have a lot of say in how they select candidates, so they randomly jockey for more important slots than each other, and this is why the party elections for their candidate take months and not, like, a week. Well for the past several months, in the lead up to actual voting, we've been obligated to pretend that several people with a snowball's chance in hell were serious candidates to control the world's [EDIT: second-] largest nuclear arsenal. I want to briefly commemorate/memorialize one of those candidacies, that of Ron DeSantis of florida.

See just a few days ago we had the iowa caucuses, a silly way to select presidential candidates that is ALSO unrepresentative of who the final nominee will be, as the winner secures an objectively tiny amount of points (called 'delegates') towards gaining a party's nomination and the system is designed to make it impossible for introverts to participate. You get like a tiny sliver of a party's membership voting in caucuses and it's weighted to favor the freaks and fanatics. And yet that simple, first contest, was enough to cause all but two of the field of GOP candidates to give up and go home. Because throughout the pre-pre-election season they would give fawning, obsequious praise to Donald Trump - the best president since Washington, possibly even better - and then be asked: "Isn't he also running for president? Why should people vote for you over him, if they like Trump?" to which the answer would be some vague mumbling about his legal challenges or age or how statistically most of the country wants to murder him with knives. (The notable exception here is wannabee mafioso Chris Christie, who at least does not forgive trying to kill him). Anyways, in final results Trump got 20 points, Ron DeSantis got 9, Nikki Haley got 8, and 4chan shitposter Vivek Ramaswamy got 3. Of those, only Trump and Nikki Haley didn't immediately give up. So anyways. Ron DeSantis. Actually presently a governor of a major state, and Florida at that - one which has shifted from 'swing' to 'republican' over his tenure. You could be forgiven for thinking he's a skilled politician. And yet. He repeatedly promised that his first day in office would start with war with mexico, which he never described in those terms. Rather he'd just

blockade mexican ports

shoot mexican nationals on the southern border without a trial ('people who have backpacks', apparently)

Send US military forces into mexico to kill more mexican citizens without trial

Cool. Normal. We're allies with that country, you know? He'd say such policies were informed by his military service as a lawyer in Iraq and then (he does not mention this part) Guantanomo Bay. Yeah, I bet they are. Though, for some reason, he always leaves off the "as a lawyer" part. DeSantis's team also produced some of the most deranged and openly fascist ads of a major candidate. See, the DeSantis campaign was oriented around "the war on woke", his efforts to use state power to roll back civil rights in general, progressives existing in government, and the rights of LGBT people in particular. Already cloaked in the language of online reactionaries it was always gonna attract freaks, and as a result, the ads made by younger staffers (released, not by the official campaign, but to pro-DeSantis meme accounts secretly run by his staffers) are totally deranged. Here's one of them; I'm going to warn you, it's intensely homophobic, to the point that a republican presidential candidate had to apologize for the homophobia.:

crazy ass moments in american politics on X: "The Ron DeSantis campaign team post a Trump attack ad feat. phonk. (2023) https://t.co/cwaWnZInG7" / X (twitter.com)

For those who don't wish to watch such things, the core thesis of the ad is that the republican party under Trump was captured by and coddled LGBT people, and DeSantis will restore strong masculinity and crush LGBT americans. DeSantis is paralleled to noted straight Achilles, those sigma chad memes, and fictional murderer Patrick Bateman, all while heavy bass music plays. My personal favorite stills:

Again, these are from an ad for a guy who quit after literally the first contest. Truly a fighter.

But even that pales in comparison to the "running up that hill" ad. That one is one of the most straightforwardly fascist pieces of advertising a modern american politician has made. While perhaps less directly offensive, viewer be warned, this is nazi shit: Luke Thompson on X: "The @desantiscams account just deleted this video after at least one campaign staffer RT'd it. I wonder if this was also made in-house. https://t.co/JA1D9qqONF" / X (twitter.com) (It was, in fact, made in-house).

The esoteric nazi symbolism did not go unnoticed. Nor the fact that it ends on DeSantis's paramilitary "florida guard" (not the national guard!) marching forward into a bright dawn while he looks down approvingly. The aide who made that video was fired, but it's no wonder he felt at home; DeSantis's whole appeal is about threatening to use extralegal power against conservatism's enemies. He tried to revoke Disney's special tax statuses based purely on an extremely beige statement in support of LGBT rights they issued, and again, established a paramilitary force under his command. There are far more examples than those two. Not a 'normal' politician. Aside from setting millions of dollars of republican donor money on fire, DeSantis's campaign leaves behind a legacy of the various 'posting is life' type laws he enacted in Florida to raise his public profile. These include a raft of laws that target and victimize LGBT americans: [Thread of several such stories, reported in major outlets]

And he was also a noted figure in the conservative turn against COVID precautions, defenses, and vaccinations. While we'll never know such things to precision, Florida's COVID deaths record was considerably worse than many other states, despite its wealth and good climate. They chose not to pursue safer methods so as to buoy DeSantis's future presidential ambitions, now dead in the street. Like most failed presidential primary candidates he will probably not have a long future in national politics; DeSantis is a weirdo who eats pudding with his bare fingers, he's profoundly uncharismatic, and he's fought against his team's de facto leader. But before it's all consigned to dust of history, I'd just like to take a moment to remember all the real people who have suffered for his campaign, and for what? So he can make a 72 second ad with him shooting lightning from his eyes, get 21% of the vote in Iowa, and give up after 8 days.

A statesman for the ages, truly.

[thoughtportal]

Whiteness riots have familiar features: police partisanship, local and national media fomentation, moral panics about crime and ‘race-mixing’, followed by calls for new criminal and immigration legislation.

The riots in Southport are just the latest flashpoint in a long history of British reactionary politics. In Fractured, Michael Richmond and Alex Charnley move away from the ahistorical temper of the identity politics debate, exploring how historical class struggles were formed and continue to determine the possibilities for new forms of solidarity in an increasingly dangerous world.

In this edited excerpt the authors explore the relationship between street racism and the modernisation of policing and immigration controls.

Conservative reactions to anti-racist movements are sensitive to temporal shifts in street protests and uprisings. The most dangerous point in a movement cycle is when things quiet down. State functionaries and journalists work hard to alienate the integrity of the utopian moment by generating debates that trivialise its political nucleus, while police move in to make arrests. Conservatives are aware of this and choose their moments carefully. The conservative claim that anti-racism causes racism (or makes racism worse) can be convincing because the state and the press personalise its causes. The pitting of opinions about ‘race’ at the national level creates hypervisibility for racialised people in schools, workplaces and streets. Those who ‘innocently’ identify with Britishness are painted as victims of anti-racist ‘race-baiting’, with many people of colour alienated by the direction this discourse takes, and the dangers it presents. State racism cannot proceed without this kind of maintenance, the ultimate goal being to enhance state powers over the organisation of workers and working-class communities more generally.

After Colston, we saw precisely how this happened. Within days, thousands of white supremacists gathered to protect a Churchill statue. Similar marches engulfed memorial squares across the country. In Coventry, a viral video showed a mass of white male and female football fans mobbing two young Black men. Dozens approached them, hurling glass bottles and racist epithets. When police arrived, the crowd accused one of the Black men of having a knife, even as weapons were visible in the hands of those crowding them. Cops moved in to arrest the two men. As part of the fans’ celebrations, BLM placards, left behind in the town centre from two recent multiracial anti-racist marches, were destroyed. Police later announced the incident wasn’t ‘racially motivated’. Two weeks later, ‘WHITE LIVES MATTER’ was scratched onto a hill in huge letters in a Coventry park, a video showed someone wearing a KKK hood next to it.

One year on, the government commissioned a race report to find out if there was really a racism problem in Britain: ‘In many areas of investigation, including educational failure and crime, we were led upstream to family breakdown as one of the main reasons for poor outcomes.’ The report found prejudice had statistically declined and that a ‘highly subjective dimension’ entered into ‘references to “systemic”, “institutional” or “structural racism” ’. The Daily Mail heralded the report: ‘Britain’s Race Revolution: Landmark report says UK “a model to the world” on diversity – and finds NO evidence of institutional racism.’ Other threats were detected, however,

A strident form of anti-racism … reinforced by a rise of identity politics, as old class divisions have lost traction … tend to stress the ‘lived experience’ of the groups they seek to protect with less emphasis on objective data.

The same oppositions between ‘identity politics’ and class, inculcated on the left for decades, were used as part of a government offensive. If anything was systemic, it was ‘anti-racism’, and with exclusionary effects: ‘the UK is open to all its communities. But we are acutely aware that the door may be only half open to some, including the white working-class.’ Whereas data on various ethnicities were compared, horizontally, and related to cultural or familial explanations, the ‘white working class’ was the only identity where systemic injustice could be explained. The report was launched with an almost trollish smirk from politicians. They searched and searched but no structural racism could be found in the data (except for a disregarded white working class). All this commotion and yet Britain was more inclusive than ever? ‘BLM’ was wrong to make British people feel otherwise. The report was immediately repudiated and discredited, even by some falsely credited as authors. But the government just pushed through the media cycle and pressed harder.

That same month, the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill was proposed. This was an opportunity to rubberstamp the far right reaction to ‘wokeness’ with concrete legislation that could suppress future protest waves and direct action tactics. The bill had a broader outlook, however, threatening the very existence of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities, by awarding police – and landowners – new powers to criminalise trespass and seize transport, that is, homes. Digital surveillance powers were enhanced, stop and search, as well as legal barriers to protest, including ten-year sentences for vandalising statues. ‘Back to the 80s,’ wrote Liz Fekete, ‘into the kind of territory that led to … the 1981 and 1985 inner city rebellions, the 1984–85 miners’ strike, and the mass unrest that followed the introduction of the Poll Tax’. The Nationality and Borders Bill followed. It presented a heinous broadening of deportation powers. Clause 9 would allow the state to deport any of six million naturalised or dual national British citizens, ‘without notice’, if the decision corresponded with the ‘public interest’. Nisha Kapoor predicts, ‘disqualification from voting rights, the withdrawal of access to services and provisions – bank accounts, passports, driving lessons – already administered … in counterterrorism cases, may become more routine. And should citizenship deprivation come, offshore detention centres will be waiting.’ The verticalisation of far-right social media trends and mainstream policymaking deserves proper attention. Undoubtedly, fascism and electoral politics are aligning. The ramping up of state powers to police, prosecute, deport and brutalise, depends on money and media pressure organised through liberal, conservative and fascist elites. That being said, reasoning around these authoritarian turns can also be underwhelming when the charisma of authoritarians, or fascism more broadly, is isolated as the cause. Racist anti-immigration legislation has been built piece by piece, over time, by politicians of every stripe.

In his writing on the Notting Hill riots of 1958, Peter Fryer describes ‘thousands’ of whites storming migrant neighbourhoods. Rioters surrounded Black people’s cars, shouting ‘let’s lynch them!’ Tory and Labour MPs joined the press (and a returned Oswald Mosley) in calling on the government to halt ‘coloured’ immigration and demanding deportations. The Tory government’s solution to the unrest was the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, ending automatic right of entry and settlement in Britain for Commonwealth subjects. Labour initially opposed the broadening of controls, though largely based on a colonial sentimentality about ‘Mother Country’ duties and maintaining good trade relations with Commonwealth states. Harold Wilson embraced controls once in government,* further restricting ‘coloured’ immigration with a 1965 white paper. Labour’s 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act built on this precedent. It was rushed through amidst government fears Britain would have to accept all Kenyan Asians made stateless by an independent Kenya’s ‘Africanisation’ policy. Restrictions didn’t apply to white Commonwealth settlers, because these ‘patrials’, as they were called, could trace their family lineage back to British blood and soil. Jim Callaghan, future Labour Prime Minister, told Tony Benn: ‘We don’t want any more blacks in Britain.’ The TUC supported Labour policy throughout.

The historical mutability of ‘whiteness’ is concretely determined by the peculiarity of the given racial regime and the stresses of the historical conjuncture. However, over time, best practises and rules of thumb are distinguished and generalised. What we refer to as ‘whiteness riots’ are ‘sparks’ of violence, routinely followed by ‘race reports’ and legislative reactions, designed to impart control through indirect means: the market, but also courts, social care, schools, border forces, policing. 

Through these instruments of the liberal democratic state, in the name of equality, racism is not only preserved, but also formalised, nationalised and modernised. It is important therefore to apprehend racist street violence – and the infantilising, innocent register used to explain it – as structural, indeed, as bordering, an action that seeks to incite and lobby for state violence further up the chain. This is why Sivanandan made racism central to his analysis of fascism, rather than isolating the fascist as an egregious extremist: ‘We have fought the idea that racism was an aspect of fascism – our take was that racism was fascism’s breeding ground.’

Whiteness riots have familiar features: police partisanship, local and national media fomentation, moral panics about crime and ‘race-mixing’, followed by calls for new criminal and immigration legislation. They have also operated as significant flash points for constituting the public interest as white. Labour passed a flurry of laws in the 2000s. Help for asylum seekers was cut. New detention centres were built to buttress a new ‘biometric’ regime. Deportations, including charter flights, accelerated with claimants having no right to appeal until they had been ‘returned home’.

Enoch Powell personifies the psychodrama of Britishness. He was an early adopter of post-war immigration as a minister, who later mourned an English race contaminated and in decline. The post-war moment has ever since remained the freezing point for British imaginaries of the migrant – as nation-builder, or nation-destroyer. Powell framed the colonial anxieties of post-war liberal democracy in his 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. It infamously depicted a foreboding future of racial role-reversal, of who would soon hold the ‘whip hand’. He referenced the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. and the riots that followed in the USA, warning similar would befall Britain unless immigration was halted. Powell’s dismissal from the Tory front bench for his speech was met with solidarity strikes by East End dockers. In an era when strike action was invariably economistic, a ‘political’ strike in support of a Tory politician was extraordinary. Over a thousand dockers and several hundred meat-porters from Smithfield Market marched to Westminster with signs saying: ‘We back Enoch!’ and ‘Back Britain, not Black Britain’. Harry Pearman led the strike, demanding a ‘total ban on immigration because there were enough already here’. After meeting Powell, he declared: ‘It made me feel proud to be an Englishman … We are representatives of the working man. We are not racialists.’ Powell’s popularity with a section of the working class, as Shilliam explains, is due to a perennial ‘defence of the ordinary, deserving working class as the white working class’. Tory legislation in 1971 and 1981,23 as well as its 1972 accession to what would become the EU, cemented Britain’s racist immigration policy.

[grits-galraisedinthesouth]

NYC Agrees To Pay MILLIONS To BLM Rioters In Settlement $13,000,000

NEW: NYC Agrees To Pay MILLIONS To BLM Rioters In Shocking Settlement

By ChrisJuly 20, 2023

New York City has reached an agreement to compensate over 1,000 protesters with a sum exceeding $13 million. These individuals were either arrested or had encounters with the police during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. This settlement, which is currently awaiting a judge’s approval, is one of the largest ever in terms of mass arrests and was filed in Manhattan’s federal court.

The lawsuit pertains to 18 protests that took place in New York City in the week following the tragic death of George Floyd in May 2020. Those eligible for the settlement can expect to receive $9,950 each. The aftermath of Floyd’s death led to protests and riots that caused at least 18 fatalities, property damage amounting to $350 million in the Minneapolis area, and nearly $2 billion across the nation. In just a few days, about 10,000 people were arrested.

The settlement provides a way for the city to sidestep a potentially costly and politically sensitive trial. This comes as numerous other cities across the U.S. are in the process of negotiating their own settlements related to the handling of protesters, some of whom caused fires, threw objects, broke windows, and damaged buildings.

However, the settlement excludes protesters who were arrested in connection with violent activities — those charged with trespassing, property destruction, assaulting an officer, arson, or weapons possession. Also, those captured on video obstructing police from making arrests may be deemed ineligible.

The lawsuit lists former Mayor Bill de Blasio, retired NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea, and other police leaders as defendants. As per the settlement agreement, neither the city nor the NYPD is obliged to admit any wrongdoing. The National Lawyers Guild, representing the plaintiffs, accused the NYPD leaders of violating protesters’ First Amendment rights through harsh tactics and unlawful arrests.

City attorneys defended the police officers, stating they were responding to an unruly and unprecedented situation. They pointed out protests where police vehicles were set ablaze and officers were attacked with rocks and plastic bottles, arguing that there was no systematic effort to suppress people’s right to protest.

This settlement does not mandate any changes in NYPD’s policing practices, unlike several other ongoing lawsuits seeking injunctive relief. Earlier this year, another class-action settlement was announced that would award $21,500 to protesters arrested in the Bronx, potentially totaling around $10 million, including legal fees.

In addition, over 600 individuals have lodged separate claims against New York City relating to police action during the 2020 protests, according to the city’s comptroller, Brad Lander. The settlements in these cases have so far cost the city nearly $12 million.

The 2020 protests were a catalyst for what could potentially set a precedent for how similar lawsuits are handled in the future.

However, the ongoing lawsuits could potentially lead to further changes in NYPD’s policing practices, a city that’s been plagued with crime over recent months. Just a few weeks ago, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg confessed his own personal anxieties about crime in the city, despite his office’s attempts to reduce crime rates.

This confession occurred against a backdrop of public belief that crime is widespread in New York, a belief that contradicts the most recent NYPD statistics. “I know the statistics that transit crime is down. But when one of my family members gets on the train, I get a knot in my stomach,” Bragg said.

“I live here, I’m raising my family here, so we have a lot more work to do. We do a number of long-term investigations involving wire taps,” state the DA who indicted Trump. “We do targeted enforcement, so we are seeing the returns on that investigative work, and we’re going to do that kind of work.”

[haggishlyhagging]

“What is our primary fear when we entertain the idea of leaving our husband the state? That he will kill us and destroy everything. Though the truth is . . . that he will kill us and destroy everything if we stay; like the battered women we are, we believe deeply that our presence, our pleading and begging, is what is keeping him from his ultimate destructiveness. Our conviction that if we stop fearing and monitoring him, he will go berserk, is such nonsense that it is clearly a deliberate part of our terror-based programming. He has gone berserk anyway. With our eyes pinned to his lapels day and night for thousands of years he has grown increasingly lunatic. With our eyes riveted upon him he has been killing us and the world around us since the day god became male. The evidence is that our behavior and our emotional and economic support has facilitated our monster husband the patriarchal state in all his manifestations throughout history.

I mention economic support because one of women's most frequent objections to my suggestion that we stop resisting Fred the Fed and divorce him at once is that we must stay in order to stop him from building more, and more lethal, bombs. At this point, I remind my terrified sisters of the United Nations' statistic that confirms our slavery: women do two-thirds of the world's work, make one-tenth of the world's money, and own less than one-hundredth of the world's property. If we are doing most of the work and men are making nine-tenths of the money, it means that women are men's resources, that we are men's wealth—as the slaves' bodies and energy and labor and creativity and loyalty and emotional richness and culture are always the source of the master's wealth. Therefore our presence in patriarchy is absolutely necessary in order for men to have the wherewithal to do their war work, day by day. Our presence in this marriage makes possible men's bombs and tanks and guns and bullets and planes and ships. Our leaving this marriage, taking ourselves and all our abundance away from Fed Fred, is the fastest and surest way to stop his production of death machines.”

-Sonia Johnson, Wildfire Igniting the She/volution

[ammg-old2]

Librarians and archivists in Ukraine today are fighting to retain control of the country’s institutional repositories of memory. The bodies of knowledge for which they are responsible are under attack from Russian forces. According to the Ukrainian Library Association, three national and state libraries, including the National Scientific Medical Library of Ukraine, as well as some 25 university libraries, have been severely damaged or destroyed. The most shocking statistics relate to public libraries: 47 have been completely destroyed beyond repair; another 158 are badly damaged and in need of repair; and a further 276 have received less serious damage.

The toll of ruination includes several buildings of the Karazin University Library in Kharkiv, which held more than 3 million volumes, including many early printed books and manuscripts, as well as important Ukrainian archival collections. In March 2022, a missile exploded in the Rare Book Library, destroying or damaging more than 60,000 precious volumes, and leaving the University Library staff with a daunting task to rescue books damaged by fire, water, and shrapnel. The Ukrainian poet Serhiy Zhadan is among those who have pledged funds to help rebuild the library.

The destruction of libraries was inevitable given such frequent and heavy bombardment of Ukrainian towns and cities, but some evidence suggests that Russian forces not only targeted universities, but homed in on their libraries—and deliberately so. The day after the Tarnovsky House and Library for Youth in Chernihiv, northern Ukraine, was hit by Russian ordnance in March last year, the governor, Vyacheslav Chaus, went to inspect the damage and caustically remarked on his Telegram channel, “A stadium and a library. Such strategic objects.” His sarcasm missed the point: The destruction of knowledge and erasure of memory has always been a war aim for those who seek to impose their own version of history on the next generation.

An even more stark example was the attack in March 2022 on the archives of the State Security Service of Chernihiv Oblast. Tens of thousands of records of Ukrainians, collected by KGB agents during the Soviet era, were destroyed by occupying Russian forces. These archives had been one of the most accessible sources of declassified KGB records from the former Soviet Union. There are also reports of archival documents being seized by Russian occupiers, and that the Russian state archival agency, Rosarkhiv, has been active in occupied territories. Many of these archives contain records of Ukraine’s centralized rule during the Soviet period, including accounts of the oppression and torture of Ukrainian citizens—an uncomfortable story for today’s Kremlin.

Speaking recently from Kyiv, Oksana Bruy, the president of the Ukrainian Library Association, told me, “With the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Russia into Ukraine, new challenges related to this war were added to those that Ukrainian libraries already faced.” She highlighted “the damage and destruction of library buildings, equipment, technology and collections by Russian rockets and bombs. In this context, preserving valuable and rare documents, which are the heritage not only of Ukraine, but of the whole world, is particularly acute.”

In occupied Ukraine, Russian troops are taking books from libraries and ruining them by dumping them in brine. To Bruy, this is a systematic attack on the very idea of Ukraine. “The Russians are destroying Ukrainian historical literature and fiction,” she said. In the district of Kupyansk, in Kharkiv Oblast, the Russian occupying forces ordered all school-library books published after 1991 to be registered and destroyed, even children’s books and fairy tales. They were replaced with officially sanctioned materials brought in from the Russian Federation.

[beardedmrbean]

The Italian city of Venice is expected to approve the trial of a €5 (£4.30; $5.35) fee for daily visitors, in a bid to control tourism.

All visitors over the age of 14 will have to pay the charge and book their entry to the city in advance.

City council member for tourism Simone Venturini says the trial will run during peak tourist periods next year.

"Venice is among the most visited European cities... [and so] suffers the most from excess tourism," he said.

Over-tourism is widely recognised as an urgent issue for Venice.

The city is just 7.6 sq km (2.7 sq miles) in size, but it hosted almost 13 million tourists in 2019, according to the Italian national statistics institute. Numbers of visitors are expected to exceed pre-pandemic levels in the coming years.

"The objective is to invite daily tourists to choose [off-peak] days," Mr Venturini said. Tourists who stay overnight in the city will be exempt.

"We want to test [the fee] and, if needed, improve it. We cannot discuss for [an]other 40 years what's best to do."

Earlier this year Unesco said the city should be added to a list of world heritage sites in danger, as the impact of climate change and mass tourism threaten to cause irreversible changes to it.

In 2021, large cruise ships were banned from entering the historic centre of Venice via the Giudecca canal after a ship crashed into a harbour. Critics had also argued that the ships were causing pollution and eroding the foundations of the city, which suffers from regular flooding.

It is not clear, however, if the plan to introduce a daily charge will deter tourists.

Karina, from Germany, said she would have no problem paying the fee. "We are on holiday, €5 is not too much."

But other visitors agree something should be done.

"It's definitely crowded," said Cal, a student from Ireland. "We went to the main square and we were planning on going to St Marks, but the line was too long.

"But I suppose €5 is quite a lot to walk around for a day."

More and more residents in Venice are choosing to leave, as tourists threaten to overwhelm the historic island city.

Valentini Rizzi, a PhD student at Iuav University, has lived in Venice for five years. She struggled to find a place to live, but eventually found a landlord willing to give a long contract to a student. Others, though, have not been so lucky.

"I know students who had to leave their accommodation in May or June, because their landlord wanted to rent the house to tourists during summer, and they could go back in October. That was their deal," she said.

Citizen associations Ocio and Venissa have launched studies to monitor the number of beds for tourists and the number of beds for residents in the city.

According to the most recent update, while there are 49,693 beds for tourists, there are 49,308 for residents - meaning that beds for tourists exceed beds for residents.

Maria Fiano, a teacher who runs Ocio, said she was surprised by what the data revealed after her organisation began its study in April.

"In only five months, the number of beds for tourists increased by 1,000 units," she explained.

She said many former government buildings like the Chamber of Commerce have now been converted into hotels.

"It's a dramatic situation, because it marks the transformation from a city to a non-city, populated by temporary visitors."

Ms Fiano believes the way to tackle the issue is to limit rental accommodation for tourists. She is not convinced the daily fee will work.

"I think the measure by the town hall is smoke and mirrors," she said.

[theculturedmarxist]

Benjamin Mateus, Evan Blake

10 November 2022

A major study published Thursday in the scientific journal Nature Medicine found that each COVID-19 reinfection causes cumulative damage to patients and significantly increases their risk of death, hospitalization, and long-term sequelae referred to under the umbrella term “Long COVID.”

The study, titled “Acute and postacute sequelae associated with SARS-CoV-2 reinfection,” was conducted by noted COVID-19 researcher Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly and his colleagues from Washington University in St. Louis. It is believed to be the first study to date on the risks associated with COVID-19 reinfections, which have become increasingly common over the past year with the highly infectious and immune-resistant Omicron subvariants. Official data from Singapore indicates that at the peak of the recent surge of the Omicron XBB subvariant, roughly 18 percent of all cases were reinfections.

More so than any other study, this paper exposes the horrifying reality of the “forever COVID” policy imposed by the Biden administration in the United States and nearly every other world government outside China. Upending Biden’s lie that “the pandemic is over,” the study makes clear that each new wave of COVID-19 infections and reinfections will progressively kill and debilitate wider sections of the population.

Summarizing their findings, the authors write, “Compared to no reinfection, reinfection contributed additional risks of death… hospitalization… and sequelae including pulmonary, cardiovascular, hematological, diabetes, gastrointestinal, kidney, mental health, musculoskeletal and neurological disorders. The risks were evident regardless of vaccination status. The risks were most pronounced in the acute phase but persisted in the postacute phase at 6 months. Compared to noninfected controls, cumulative risks and burdens of repeat infection increased according to the number of infections.”

[[Figure 1: Risk and 6-month excess burden of all-cause mortality, hospitalization, at least one sequela and sequelae by organ system. [Photo by Benjamin Bowe et al / CC BY 4.0]]]]

When the preprint version of this study was published in June, its dire findings were denounced by various right-wing figures and unprincipled scientists who have minimized the ongoing dangers of the pandemic. However, the fundamental results and analysis have weathered the objective process of professional review and remain unchanged from the preprint version.

All-cause mortality risk more than doubles after reinfection

As in their previous studies documenting the impacts of Long COVID, the research team relied on enormous electronic healthcare databases from the US Department of Veterans Affairs.

The study compared 443,588 people with a single COVID-19 infection with 40,947 who had reinfections. Of those reinfected, 37,997 had two infections, 2,572 had three infections, and 378 suffered four or more infections. All were followed-up 180 days after their last infection or reinfection and their risks for various health outcomes including mortality were assessed and compared.

In the study, the mean age of the group with one infection and the reinfection group was the same at roughly 60 years of age. Although the study does not provide all-cause mortality rates for the non-infected in the same 180-day window, life tables from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) indicate that before the pandemic, a person that was 60 years old had a burden of death of 11.5 per 1,000 people over a 12-month window, meaning that around 1.15 percent of all people 60 years of age would have died before reaching 61.

According to the data from the reinfections study, for those with only one COVID-19 infection, the burden of death at six months post-infection was 16.77 for 1,000 people. Thus, a single COVID-19 infection significantly increases one’s chances of dying should they survive the acute phase of their infection.

However, among those who were reinfected with COVID-19, the burden of deaths per 1,000 people jumped to a staggering 36.10. This figure is more than three-fold higher than what would be expected before the pandemic and more than double the burden of mortality of the first infection. In essence, having a single COVID-19 reinfection is equivalent to having aged several years beyond one’s stated age.

Vaccines, “hybrid immunity” and Long COVID

One of the most alarming aspects of the study is its finding that prior vaccination with one, two or more jabs before reinfection did not curtail long-term all-cause mortality risks. Although all-cause mortality risks declined after the acute phase of the infection (the first 30 days), after three months the risk of dying plateaued above the baseline throughout the six-month period of analysis.

[[Figure 2: Risk of all-cause mortality, hospitalization, at least one sequela and sequelae by organ system are plotted. At the time of comparison, there were 51.3%, 12.6% and 36.2% with no, one and two or more vaccinations, respectively, among those who had reinfection. At the time of comparison, there were 41.1%, 11.7% and 47.2% with no, one and two or more vaccinations, respectively, among the no reinfection group. [Photo by Benjamin Bowe et al / CC BY 4.0]]]

The authors note that the compounding damage of reinfections “was evident even among fully vaccinated people, suggesting that even combined (a hybrid of) natural immunity (from previous infection) and vaccine-induced immunity does not abrogate the risk of adverse health effects after reinfection.”

They add, “The mechanism underpinning the increased risks of death and adverse health outcomes in reinfection are not completely clear. Previous exposure to the virus may be expected to hypothetically reduce risk of reinfection and its severity; however, SARS-CoV-2 is mutating rapidly and new variants and subvariants are replacing older ones every few months. Evidence suggests that the reinfection risk is especially higher with the Omicron variant, which has shown to have a marked ability to evade immunity from previous infections.”

These findings are a damning indictment of the false and unscientific conception of “hybrid immunity,” advanced by most politicians and official scientists worldwide, in which “natural” infections with Omicron have been touted as a positive good that will cause COVID-19 to become “endemic.”

Last January, Dr. Anthony Fauci stated, “It is an open question as to whether or not Omicron is going to be the live virus vaccination that everyone is hoping for.” These lies went unchallenged by every political tendency and media outlet except the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) and the World Socialist Web Site.

Significantly, the study finds that long-term sequelae affecting various organs like the heart, kidneys, lungs, brain, and general constitution were all persistently elevated throughout the six-month post-reinfection assessment. Additionally, this burden of poorer health was cumulative between first, second, third and fourth reinfections. In particular, the lungs, heart, and vascular system were most impacted by repeat infections, leading to a considerable burden of disease.

[[Figure 4: Risk and 6-month excess burden of sequelae by organ system of SARS-CoV-2 reinfection versus no reinfection in 30-d intervals covering the acute and postacute phases of reinfection. [Photo by Benjamin Bowe et al / CC BY 4.0]]]

In another study published earlier this year, Dr. Al-Aly and his team found that people with breakthrough infection after being vaccinated only had a 15 percent lower chance of developing Long COVID and were at increased risk of death and organ damage compared to controls who never were infected.

In their reinfections study, the authors hypothesize that “impaired health as a consequence of the first infection” might increase one’s risk of more adverse health outcomes with repeat infections. Indeed, studies have shown that COVID-19 can injure one’s immune system, potentially setting them up for more onerous sequalae upon reinfection with COVID-19 or other viruses. These studies provide firm evidence that infection with SARS-CoV-2 qualifies as a consequential pre-existing health condition irrespective of one’s vaccination status.

A recent report in The Tyee reviews the science behind these concerns and the critical role of immunologist Dr. Anthony Leonardi, who has spoken out continuously on dangers of the “herd immunity” strategy, particularly for children. Ultimately at play here is the idea that allowing the virus to rip through communities, wave after wave, is a public health hazard that is having dire repercussions.

Conclusion

The results of the reinfection study are of immense importance in that they validate in the negative the precautionary principle that many scientists have advocated against the “forever COVID” policy that places the interests of Wall Street above humanity.

They also underscore the salient point that COVID is in no way comparable to the flu. Indeed, SARS-CoV-2, if not fatal, can lead to multi-organ injury with long-term consequences to the health of those infected, with compounding risks upon each reinfection.

Due to the conscious repudiation of all public health measures to mitigate against COVID-19, society confronts the unimpeded evolution of increasingly immune-evasive variants which steadily raise the risk of reinfections. Each wave of infection will further drive non-COVID excess deaths, which remain invisible to the public, and further strain healthcare systems already brought to their knees globally after three years of the pandemic.

[[Figure 5: Risk and 1-year excess burden of hospitalization, at least one sequela and sequelae by organ system are plotted. Results from one SARS-CoV-2 infection (n = 234,990), two SARS-CoV-2 infections (n = 28,509) and three or more SARS-CoV-2 infections (n = 1,023) versus noninfected controls (n = 5,334,729), in those with a first infection before the Omicron wave, are compared. [Photo by Benjamin Bowe et al / CC BY 4.0]]]

Despite repeated claims that the number of deaths caused by COVID-19 are at pandemic lows, excess non-COVID deaths reported by various countries such as Peru, the UK, Northern European countries, and Australia are anywhere from five to 20 percent over pre-pandemic baselines. These are astronomical figures of which there is no mention in the corporate media.

These extra deaths can only be explained by the horrendous experiences of the last three years, in which the population has been left to fend for itself and subject to unending waves of mass infection, death and debilitation.

In many respects, the reports by Dr. Al-Aly and his colleagues have an evidentiary quality to them. They function as a forensic analysis of the crime of “social murder” committed by the ruling elites globally. Although an autopsy report is detached and formal in meticulously describing the trauma or disease sustained by the deceased, a dispassionate and objective introduction of the facts in an inquest, once made public, cannot be overlooked.

The policy makers guilty of this social crime must be held to account for the deaths of an estimated over 20 million people worldwide and the disabling of hundreds of millions more with Long COVID. Fundamentally, the ongoing disaster of the pandemic is an irrefutable indictment of world capitalism, which subordinates all social needs to the profit interests of a rapacious financial oligarchy. This outmoded system must be replaced by a world socialist society which reorganizes world economy to ensure the health and decent living conditions of all of humanity.

[bopinion]

2023 / 05

Aperçu of the Week:

"People owe progress to the discontented."

(Aldous Huxley, British writer and philosopher, i. e. Brave New World)

Bad News of the Week:

One in three people in Germany will need a blood donation in their lifetime, according to statistics from the German Blood Donor Service. This is only in rare cases (12%) due to blood loss in accidents or injuries, as seen on TV. Much more frequently, for example, cancer patients (19%), gastrointestinal patients (16%) or heart patients (16%) are dependent on it during operations or treatments. Even the most modern medicine cannot do without the red lifeblood. Since blood still cannot be produced artificially.

This is why the current development is so dramatic: presumably because of the Corona pandemic, many people stayed as far away from medical facilities as possible. Out of fear of becoming infected as well as out of good will not to be a burden on the already overloaded health care system. Blood donations have therefore fallen dramatically. Currently, only about half of the required blood is available. Regular willingness to donate is also important, because the blood components remain usable only up to the 42nd day after donation.

The situation is just as bleak for organ donations. According to the German Foundation for Organ Transplants (DSO), there are currently around 8,500 seriously ill people urgently waiting for a donor organ - of which there are too few. In 2022 alone, 407 kidney and 86 heart patients therefore died. Yet (to put it sarcastically) no one who dies as a healthy person, for example in an accident, still needs their organs. Others do. Leaving religious convictions aside, the reason for the lack of willingness to donate organs is a frighteningly stupid one: the lack of documentation.

According to the German Federal Center for Health Education (BZgA), 82% of the population is basically willing to donate an organ. But only 44% have documented this - the easiest way is an organ donor card, about which relatives are informed. And this even includes the refusals. The way out could be simple: the so-called "contradiction solution". In this way, everyone would be an organ donor in principle, unless he or she expressly objects. But neither the health minister of the last government - Jens Spahn of the conservative CDU - nor the current one - Karl Lauterbach of the social democratic SPD - could get their way politically. In addition, a national register would have to be set up first. This would take years just for data protection reasons. So for the foreseeable future, only one thing remains: the rare commodity of solidarity. Sadly, this is obviously not enough right now. It costs lives. In Germany alone, every single day.

Good News of the Week:

Like Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has tinkered "his" state to maintain his personal power. The principle is called the "presidential system," which tends to weaken parliament and strengthen the position of the president. Many can't even remember a time before Erdogan; the leader of the AKP (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi) party has now been in power for twenty years. Elections are due again on May 14 of this year, and of course the autocrat is seeking re-election.

But headwinds are forming: six Turkish opposition parties forged an alliance this week to prevent just that. The alliance wants to transform the presidential system back into a parliamentary system, strengthen the rule of law and freedom of the press, and bring the president's power back to a democratic level. For example, the president should no longer be able to rule by decree, and his term of office should be limited to seven years.

The initiative comes at just the right time. Many opposition figures have been muzzled by Erdogan's power apparatus in recent years. Most recently, Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, who was considered a promising candidate. He was sentenced to two years in prison and banned from politics for allegedly insulting the election commission. Perhaps for this reason, the newly formed alliance has not yet named a top candidate.

That alone will not end in one fell swoop the massive economic, administrative, monetary, and judicial crisis that Turkey has now endured for years. But the mere prospect that there might be an alternative with a realistic chance of success to the increasingly inevitable permanent president is welcome. Especially for the fragile democracy on the Bosporus. After all, democracy is the essential basis for Turkey's perspective in the EU. And the nation will not be able to achieve lasting peace, prosperity and security any other way.

Personal happy moment of the week:

Last week I got a new colleague. I was allowed to choose him myself. The good impression his application made was confirmed in an online meeting. We agreed before we had even met in person. Because that didn't happen until his first day at work. Which started chaotically right away, because we had just learned that the office would be moving in the next few days. So the actual work is left undone and we have to deal with sorting out documents, clarifying furniture, planning workstations, packing office supplies, etc. And the new colleague proves to be helpful, hands-on, uncomplicated and resilient. It's nice when the second impression even surpasses the first.

I couldn't care less...

...how the U.S. is now dealing with the alleged Chinese spy balloon in their airspace. Shoot it down? Let it fly on? Protest diplomatically? Surprise: China is spying on the West. Ugh. It would be easy if China actually needed balloons for that. That would be like hoping to prevent Russian disinformation campaigns by restricting the supply of newsprint. Both take place primarily on the Internet. Which is as open as a barn door. When the Corona pandemic caused x million employees worldwide to move to the home office, not even a quarter of companies took security measures to protect all their private data connections. Any questions?

As I write this...

...I am disappointed in Brazil's President Lula da Silva. He wanted to do many things differently and better than his unspeakable predecessor Jair Bolsonaro. In environmental protection, for example. But even he did not prevent what had been looming for a few weeks and actually happened yesterday: the so-called "controlled sinking" of an ailing aircraft carrier full of pollutants. Robin Wood speaks of a "30,000-ton toxic package." Just like that. Because it's cheap. The "São Paulo" now lies at a depth of 5,000 meters in international waters. And I wonder if this is not only shockingly ignorant of the marine ecosystem, but not actually illegal. If not, it must become so as soon as possible, before this example is copied.

Post Scriptum

In the British cabinet of Rishi Sunak, as before, there is no responsibility for climate protection. Instead, there are separate ministers for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, as well as cabinet members with no area of responsibility and three for the military complex. There is also - whatever that means - a "Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster" and a "Lord Keeper of [the] Privy Seal" with cabinet rank. Is it just me who feels that the United Kingdom is clinging more to the long-gone past than actively tackling the challenges of the future?

[brookston]

Holidays 9.26

Holidays

Armed Forces Day (Mozambique)

Bandaranaike Day (Sri Lanka)

Ceremony of the Dead (Khmer Republic)

Cheval Day (Horse Day; French Republic)

Childhood Brain Cancer Awareness Day (Australia)

Cordyceps Pandemic Day (The Last of Us)

Dive Bomb Day

Dominion Day (New Zealand)

European Day of Languages (EU)

Feast of Lamps (India)

Federal Trade Commission Day

Flag Day (Ecuador)

Fortnite Day

Ghatasthapana (Nepal)

Gilligan's Island Day

Grand Magal de Touba (Senegal)

Human Resource Professional Day

IgA Nephropathy (IgAN) Awareness Day

International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons (UN)

International Happiness at Work Day

International Tool Day

The Last of Us Day (a.k.a. Outbreak Day)

Lumberjack Day (a.k.a. Talk Like a Lumberjack Day, Eat Like a Lumberjack Day, Attack Wooden Objects Like a Lumberjack Day) [also Last Friday of Last Full Weekend]

Matchbook Day

Mesothelioma Awareness Day

Mid-Autumn Day (Scottish Highlands)

National Alpaca Day

National Amanda Day

National Black Men Day

National Compliance Officer Day

National Day of Praise and Worship

National Family Day

National Good Neighbor Day

National GORDIEday

National Got Checked Day

National Hari Day

National Law Enforcement Suicide Awareness Day

National Manufacturing Day (UK)

National PRIOR Tactile Pre-Baille Learning Day

National Ranboo Day

National Robot Day

National Situational Awareness Day

National Statistics Day (Indonesia)

NICU Remembrance Day

Old Holy Rood Day

Pearl Thusi Day

Revolution Day (Yemen)

Search For Your Baseball Cards Again Day

Shamu the Whale Day

Sharpfight Meadow Dragon Fight Day (Suffolk, UK)

Stanislav Petrov Day

Today's Awesome Because You Totally Don't Have To Bathe Day

United States Postal Service Day

Winnie Mandela Day (South Africa)

World Cassowary Day

World Contraception Day

World Day for the Prevention of Adolescent Unwanted Pregnancies

World Day of Multiple Births

World Environmental Health Day

World Horizontal Directional Drilling Day

Food & Drink Celebrations

Balaclava Day

Johnny Appleseed Day

Key Lime Cheesecake Day

National Better Breakfast Day

National Chimichanga Day

National Dumpling Day

National Key Lime Pie Day

Pancake Lovers Day

Independence & Related Days

National Day (a.k.a. 1st Revolution Day; Republic of Yemen; 1962)

New Zealand (Constituted a Dominion; 1907)

Petorio (Declared; 2008) [unrecognized]

4th & Last Thursday in September

Arthur's Day (Arthur Guinness) [4th Thursday]

National Fårikål Day (Norway) [Last Thursday]

National Fitness Day (Ireland) [4th Thursday]

National School Parent Group Day [4th Thursday]

National School Support Staff Day (Canada) [4th Thursday]

Remember Me Thursday [4th Thursday]

Thinking Thursday [4th Thursday of Each Month]

Thirsty Thursday [Every Thursday]

Three-Bean Thursday [Last Thursday of Each Month]

Three for Thursday [Every Thursday]

Thrift Store Thursday [Every Thursday]

Throw Away Thursday [Last Thursday of Each Month]

Throwback Thursday [Every Thursday]

Thuringer Thursday [4th Thursday of Each Month]

World Maritime Day [Last Thursday]

World Trenchless Day [4th Thursday]

Weekly Holidays beginning September 26 (4th Full Week of September)

American Apple Week (thru 10.1) [From 9.26]

Festivals Beginning September 26, 2024

Alligator Festival (Luling, Louisiana) [thru 9.29]

Barnesville Pumpkin Festival (Barnesville, Ohio) [thru 9.29]

Barry Apple Festival (Barry, Illinois) [thru 9.29]

Black Walnut Festival (Stockton, Missouri) [thru 9.28]

Buffalo Roundup & Arts Festival (Custer, South Dakota) [thru 9.28]

Chicago Gourmet (Chicago, Illinois) [thru 9.29]

Comic Con Africa (Johannesburg, South Africa) [thru 9.29]

Dublin Theatre Festival (Dublin, Ireland) [thru 10.13]

Durham Agricultural Fair (Durham, Connecticut) [thru 9.29]

FanX Salt Lake Comic Convention (Salt Lake City, Utah) [thru 9.28]

Festival of Tolerance [JFF Zagreb] (Zagreb, Croatia) [thru 9.29]

Four Flags Area Apple Festival (Niles, Michigan) [thru 9.29]

Gothenburg Book Fair (Gothenburg, Sweden) [thru 9.29]

Great Northwest Oktoberfest (Whitefish, Montana) [thru 9.28 & 10.3-5]

International Book Festival Budapest (Budapest, Hungary) [thru 9.29]

International Festival of Contemporary Music [Biennale Musica] (Venice, Italy) [thru 10.11]

Morganfield Corn Festival (Morganfield, Kentucky) [thru 9.28]

New Glarus Oktoberfest (New Glarus, Wisconsin) [thru 9.29]

Ohio Swiss Festival (Sugarcreek, Ohio) [thru 9.28]

Preston County Buckwheat Festival (Kingwood, West Virginia) [thru 9.29]

Reykjavik International Film Festival (Reykjavik, Iceland) [thru 10.6]

Sugar Cane Festival (New Iberia, Louisiana) [thru 9.29]

Taste of Long Beach (Long Beach, Mississippi)

Tokyo Game Show (Chiba, Japan) [thru 9.29]

Tulsa State Fair (Tulsa, Oklahoma) [thru 10.6]

Valley of the Moon Vintage Festival (Sonoma, California) [thru 9.29]

Vancouver International Film Festival (Vancouver, Canada) [thru 10.6]

World Chicken Festival (London, Kentucky) [thru 9.29]

Züri-Wiesn [Swiss Oktoberfest] (Zürich, Switzerland) [thru 10.19]

Feast Days

Azazel Goat Sacrifice (Everyday Wicca)

Bernice L. McFadden (Writerism)

Bob Staake (Artology)

Bureflex (Discordian)

Canadian Martyrs (Catholic Church in Canada)

Cobweb Pie Making (Shamanism)

Colman of Lann Elo (Christian; Saint)

Cosmas and Damian (Christian; Saint)

Cyprian and Justina (Christian; Martyrs)

Cyprian, Old Gods Patron of Sorcerers (Starza Pagan Book of Days)

Eusebius (Christian; Saint)

Fairy Napmother (Muppetism)

Feast of Aphrodite (Pagan)

The Feast of the Martyrs of North America (Christian)

Feast of Zame ye Mebege (God of Narcotics; Gabon)

Festival of Venus Genetrix (Ancient Rome)

Franz Liszt Day (Church of the SubGenius; Saint)

Gordon Brewster (Artology)

Jane Smiley (Writerism)

John of Meda (Christian; Saint)

Mark Haddon (Writerism)

Mme. de Sévigné (Positivist; Saint)

Neldoracht (Celtic Book of Days)

Nilus the Younger (a.k.a. Nilus of Rossano; Christian; Saint)

Scrub the Poop Deck Day (Pastafarian)

Sébastien Leclerc (Artology)

Théodore Géricault (Artology)

Theseia (Ancient Greece) [until 9.29]

T.S. Eliot (Writerism)

Wilson Carlile (Anglican)

Lucky & Unlucky Days

Prime Number Day: 269 [57 of 72]

Sensho (先勝 Japan) [Good luck in the morning, bad luck in the afternoon.]

Premieres

Abbey Road, by The Beatles (Album; 1969)

Animal Cracker Circus (Color Rhapsody Cartoon; 1938)

Barber of Seville, by Giovanni Paisiello (Comic Opera; 1782)

The Beverly Hillbillies (TV Series; 1962)

Book of Love, by The Monotones (Song; 1957)

The Boxtrolls (Animated Film; 2014)

The Brady Bunch (TV Series; 1969)

A Broken Leghorn (WB LT Cartoon; 1959)

Crocodile Dundee (Film; 1986)

The Crystal Gazer (Phantasies Cartoon; 1941)

Cupid (TV Series; 1998)

Desiderata, by Max Ehrmann (Poem; 1927)

Downtown Abbey (TV Series; 2010)

A Dream Walking (Fleischer Popeye Cartoon; 1934)

El Terrible Toreador (Disney Silly Symphony Cartoon; 1929)

The Flintstones’ New Neighbors (Hanna-Barbera Animated TV Special; 1980)

Gilligan’s Island (TV Series; 1964)

Good Charlotte, by Good Charlotte (Album; 2000)

Half-Pint Palomino, featuring Barney Bear (MGM Cartoon; 1953)

Here Comes the Sun, by The Beatles (Song; 1969)

Hypnotic Hick (Woody Woodpecker Cartoon; 1953)

Jail Birds (Ub Iwerks Flip the Frog MGM Cartoon; 1931)

Jenny from the Block, by Jennifer Lopez (Song; 2002)

Knight Rider (TV Series; 1982)

Liberty Bell March, by John Philip Sousa (March; 1892)

Lumber Jack-Rabbit (WB LT Cartoon; 1953)

Miracle at St, Anna (Film; 2008)

Monkey Melodies (Disney Silly Symphony Cartoon; 1930)

The Music Makers, by Edward Elgar (Ode for Singer, Chorus & Orchestra; 1912)

Mythology Edith Hamilton (Mythology; 1942)

The Name of the Rose (Film; 1986)

Oliver! (Film; 1968)

Poker Face, by Lady Gaga (Song; 2008)

Prisoners of the Sun, by Hergé (Graphic Novel; 1949) [Tintin #14]

Purple Rain (Film; 1984)

Red Planet, by Robert A. Heinlein (Novel; 1949)

Riptide Rocky or Drips Adrift (Rocky & Bullwinkle Cartoon, S3, Ep. 112; 1961)

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Film; 1975)

The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie (Novel; 1988)

September Song, by Kurt Weill (Song; 1938)

Shout at the Devil, by Mötley Crüe (Album; 1983)

Stand on Zanzibar, by John Brunner (Novel; 1968)

Stardust Memories (Film; 1980)

Straight Outta Lynwood, by Weird Al Yankovic (Album; 2006)

Superman (Fleischer Cartoon; 1941) [#1]

Three Blind Mouseketeers (Disney Silly Symphonies Cartoon; 1936)

Under the Tuscan Sun (Film; 2003)

The Unicorn (TV Series; 2019)

U2-3, by U2 (EP; 979)

Walls and Bridges, by John Lennon (Album; 1974)

West Side Story (Broadway Musical; 1957)

The Wizard Biz or Bullwinkle Lays an Egg (Rocky & Bullwinkle Cartoon, S3, Ep. 111; 1961)

You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling, recorded by The Righteous Brothers (Song; 1964)

Today’s Name Days

Cosima, Damian, Eugenia, Kosmas (Austria)

Damir, Damjan, Gideon, Kuzma (Croatia)

Andrea (Czech Republic)

Adolph (Denmark)

Valve, Valvi, Velve, Vilve, Vilvi (Estonia)

Kuisma (Finland)

Côme, Damien (France)

Cosima, Damian, Kosmas (Germany)

Jusztina, Pál (Hungary)

Cosma, Damiano, Nilo (Italy)

Egmonts, Gundars, Knuts, Kurts (Latvia)

Gražina, Justė, Justina, Kipras, Vydenis (Lithuania)

Einar, Endre (Norway)

Cyprian, Euzebiusz, Justyna, Łękomir (Poland)

Edita (Slovakia)

Cosme, Damián (Spain)

Einar, Enar (Sweden)

Grazina, Juste, Justina, Kipras, Vydenis (Ukraine)

Newton, Renata, Renault, Rene, Renee, Renny (USA)

Today is Also…

Day of Year: Day 270 of 2024; 96 days remaining in the year

ISO: Day 4 of Week 39 of 2024

Celtic Tree Calendar: Muin (Vine) [Day 26 of 28]

Chinese: Month 8 (Guy-You), Day 24 (Guy-Si)

Chinese Year of the: Dragon 4722 (until January 29, 2025) [Wu-Chen]

Hebrew: 23 Elul 5784

Islamic: 22 Rabi I 1446

J Cal: 30 Gold; Lastday [30 of 30]

Julian: 13 September 2024

Moon: 32%: Waning Crescent

Positivist: 18 Shakespeare (10th Month) [Sterne]

Runic Half Month: Gyfu (Gift) [Day 5 of 15]

Season: Autumn or Fall (Day 5 of 90)

Week: 4th Full Week of September

Zodiac: Libra (Day 4 of 30)