#She was definitely at the institute program longer then Sam was

[captaincrazycreative]

Litteraly everyone in this podcast knows WAY more than they're letting on and it's driving me insane

[ladyfantasy98]

Flyers and Favors, Part 2!

Hello! First, thank-you for the wonderful response to my Danny Phantom fanfic, Flyers and Favors! I’m really honored that so many people have liked and reblogged -- some of them twice!

So while I had intended it to be a one-shot, inspiration struck, and I’ve added a second part! With a possible third part to come at a later date.

Chapter 2 deals with Dani battling Skulker when he comes to bother Danny during study time. It ended up longer and a bit more serious than I intended, but I think it’s still humorous and a good read (if I do say so myself ;) ).

Let me know what you think! I’d love to hear your thoughts on it!

You can read this second part either below the cut, or on my Fanfiction.net account. Happy Reading!

Danielle knew the instant a ghost showed up. A shiver ran through her body and she gasped, releasing a small blue puff of air.

With a grin, she jumped up from her brown wooden desk and transformed, letting two white lights wash over her body and change her into her ghost form, Dani Phantom. Her shoulder-length black hair (layered with triangle cuts in the back) became white, and a black-and-white jumpsuit replaced her purple pajama shorts and button-up top.

She turned intangible and flew up through the ceiling of her bedroom - created by siphoning off sections of the Fenton family's lab - until she reached her older cousin/brother/creator Danny's room. She poked her head through his floor just in time to see him finish his own transformation into Danny Phantom.

"Hey!" Dani called, startling him and making him jump up into the air. Hovering there, Danny looked over at her.

"What's up, Elle?" he asked. Ever since she had moved in with the Fentons a year ago as their adopted daughter, the family had taken to calling her Elle, Ellie, or Annie to differentiate between her and Danny. Dani didn't mind, but she still introduced herself to new people as Dani-with-an-I, and she would always be Dani Phantom.

"I got this one," she answered Danny. "Go back to studying."

"But - "

"I can handle whoever it is, I promise," Dani insisted. "That's the whole reason you went into the Ghost Zone the other day, right? To make sure they'd leave you alone so you could study?"

"Well, yeah, but -"

"Then study. These exams are really important to you, I know."

Danny lowered himself until he was back on the floor. He glanced over at his desk, which was covered with pencils, textbooks, and loose-leaf paper filled with scientific equations. "I mean...this can wait. You have homework, too, I know. I'll just stay up and -"

She narrowed her glowing green eyes - the same as Danny's - at him. "Danny. Please. My Pre-Calc homework is not going to determine whether I graduate or get into my dream college program this week. Just let me. Handle. The ghost."

Danny stared at her for a moment, looking torn, before he finally sighed. Twin flashes of light raced up his body, and his eyes turned blue, his white hair - cut shorter and closer to his head than when he was 14 - became black, and his own black and white jumpsuit disappeared to reveal a NASA T-shirt and a pair of blue boxers.

"Alright, you win," he conceded. "Just...be careful. And you'll get me if you need help?"

Dani rolled her eyes. "Yes, Dad, I promise. Now go do you homework!"

Danny laughed. "Alright, Mom." But he waited and watched as Dani pulled out her phone and quickly shot off a text to Valerie, saying the exact same thing she'd told Danny, before turning intangible again and flying through the roof.

Bursting into the night air, Dani took a second to enjoy the rush of flight, before putting herself into a fighting mindset. Looking around at the houses, clearly illuminated by the giant green Fenton Works sign attached to the Fentons' home, Dani couldn't see any signs of a recent ghost attack. No broken windows, no smoking buildings, no screaming people.

But she'd definitely sensed a ghost earlier. Maybe it was something small? Or it was still in the lab? Now that she thought about it, she should have just checked out the lab first, especially since it was right next to her bedroom. But she'd wanted to make sure Danny didn't go after the ghost himself. He'd been super stressed over his final AP Chem and AP Physics tests this week and she had wanted to do him a favor by taking care of any ghostly threats that came through.

Not to mention it would show him and the rest of Team Phantom that she was mature and skilled enough to protect Amity without any of them breathing down her neck. Honestly, she loved her cousin, and Sam and Tucker and Valerie, but sometimes they were way too overprotective. They acted like she hadn't spent over a year living on her own, fighting ghosts and for her own survival. And they had been worse lately; their impending collegehood must have been making them overly nostalgic and worried and adult-like.

Dani was about to head back inside, when she gasped, her Ghost Sense alerting her once again. Then, sensing something coming towards her from behind, she dodged to the left - just in time to avoid the grappling hook/claw that zipped by her. It landed in the sidewalk down below, cracking the concrete.

Dani spun around, following the mechanical line up from the hook to the ghost who had fired it. When she saw who it was, she groaned.

"Oh, come on, Skulker? Really? Do you know what time it is?" she demanded.

"Ah, the Ghost Girl. Nice to see you. I'd been planning on hunting your sire, but a fight with you should warm me up nicely!" Skulker exclaimed. He pressed a button on his suit, and the grappling hook shot up from the sidewalk and returned to Skulker with a hissing sound. "And, yes, I know it's late. My apologies. Believe it or not, it's morning right now in the Ghost Zone."

Dani rolled her eyes. "Yeah, yeah, whatever." Floating higher until she was eye level with Skulker, she prepared her own ecto-blast, green light coiling around her hand. "Also, how many times do I have to tell you, Danny is my cousin, or maybe my brother. He's not my sire. That makes him sound like a medieval king or something. It's weird."

Skulker chuckled. "You're more right than you know, child." Then, raising his arm to ready an ecto-energy cannon blast, he added, "Now, enough talk. Let the hunt begin!"

Danielle smirked. "You're on."

She took aim at the center of the robotic suit and launched her ecto-blast. Skulker simply dodged it, and fired his own attack. Danielle turned intangible and let the cannon fire pass right through her. Undeterred, Skulker launched a type of flaming arrow, burning with his signature green-blue fire.

I should probably move the fight away from the neighborhood so nothing gets too damaged, thought Dani. Dodging the small projectile and flying over near the park, she asked,

"Didn't you get the flyer?"

"Of course I got the flyer. The Ghost Child littered them all over my front lawn!" Skulker exclaimed, shooting out three more rockets from the launcher on his right shoulder.

"And, what, you just decided to ignore it? That's so not cool." Dani reached out her hand and encased the rockets in her ecto-energy, containing their explosions; smoke billowed within the green spheres as she lowered them to the ground.

Dani then flew towards the park, where there would be less people to hurt and less buildings to damage. Skulker chased after her, donning a pair of night-vision goggles, even though there were still street lamps in the park.

"I thought you guys were allies sometimes," Dani added, stopping in mid-air above one of the public fountains. She could hear the water gurgling slightly in its concrete bowl.

"Yes, when the fate of the Ghost Zone is at stake," Skulker answered. He hovered on the opposite side of the fountain, arm outstretched towards her. "The whelp failed to explain in his flyer how him failing a test would be the end of the world."

Dani narrowed her eyes at the hunter. "It'd be the end of his world," she told him. She held up both hands and formed two more ecto-blasts. "What's important to Danny is important to me, so I'm not gonna let you ruin this for him."

"How admirable." Skulker fired another blue laser at her, which she dodged. She released her ecto-blasts, hitting Skulker in the chest. He crashed into a nearby tree, breaking the poor plant in half. When Skulker remained on the ground, Dani hovered closer to him. Placing both hands on her hips, she said,

"You don't plan on following him to college, too, do you? 'Cause that would be even more uncool."

Skulker merely grinned at her from among the wood splinters. "But of course! Where the prey goes, the hunter goes. The whelp doesn't think he can shake me just by going to a different learning institution, does he? How foolish!"

Dani fired another ecto-blast at him. He yelled in pain as it hit, pounding him into the ground. Dani smirked as the dust settled. That oughta teach him.

Only to widen her eyes in surprise when she saw that Skulker was no longer on the ground. "Wha - ?"

A presence behind her. She looked over her shoulder just in time to see Skulker's grin before he backhanded her, sending her crashing into another tree. Dani groaned as the tree fell, sending a shock wave of pain up her body. Spitting out leaves, she gathered herself, then rose up into the sky.

"Alright, Skulker, not ba - aaahhh!" Dani screamed as a ghost-proof net wrapped around her, knocking her back onto the ground and sending bolts of electricity through her body. She was left panting and jittery once it passed.

"Haha, you underestimated me, didn't you, Ghost Girl?" Skulker crowed as he walked towards her, his metal boots crushing the grass underfoot.

Danielle scrunched her eyes in pain, before opening them and glaring at the ghost hunter. She wriggled in the net, frustration building as she failed to free herself.

Skulker picked up the net and Danielle, holding her as if she weighed nothing. She'd gotten a bit of a growth spurt once she'd turned fourteen, reaching Danny's old height, but Skulker was still much larger than she was. Well, his suit was, at least.

"You know," Skulker began, regarding her thoughtfully, "I've never understood why you cling to human traditions so much. You, Phantom, even Plasmius - you all plan and prepare for human lives, human futures, but why? You're ghosts. And sure, lots of my neighbors concoct plans for world domination - even I like the occasional vacation out in the human world. But ultimately, we all belong in the Zone. Even you three."

Dani blinked up at him, surprised by his sudden philosophical demeanor. Even as she huffed and struggled in the net, she couldn't help but agree with him. There were times - when she was flying, high above the earth, or slipping between buildings without a care for the laws of physics, or using her powers to fight ghosts intent on doing evil - she wondered why she wanted to be human. Why did she want to pretend to be an ordinary girl, when there were people like the Guys in White that would capture and dissect her and her cousin the first chance they got? Why should she hide herself in this world, when in the Ghost Zone no one cared that she was part human?

But then...

Then she remembered the look on Danny's face as he taught her how to use her powers to help people. How excited he was to receive the acceptance letter from Amity University, contingent on his grades though it was. The joy and pride Danielle felt when Jack and Maddie welcomed her into their family, ghost powers and all. Going shopping with Jazz, and having her explain things like bras and periods. Hanging out with Tucker, Sam, Danny, and Valerie, listening to them joke around and plan for the future, even as they made Amity Park a safer place.

Dani sucked in a deep breath. "Skulker, you're right," she said. "We are half ghost."

Then, hoping she was right, she transformed. The white rings washed over her, her ghost side tucked away for now, leaving her in all her human glory. And - to her delight - as soon as she was human, Dani fell out of the net.

She landed on her feet, and smiled up at Skulker, who looked confounded. He must have forgotten to use the anti-halfa net instead, or perhaps, like usual, he had underestimated her.

"But we're also half human. And so we decide where we belong."

Mid-transformation, Dani jumped up and decked Skulker in the face. The ghost sailed to the left, gouging a trench into the earth as he landed. Before he could get up, Dani unhooked the mini-Fenton Thermos she always kept with her from around her waist and aimed it at the ghost. The thermos' opening shone brightly, its light sucking Skulker up into its metal confines.

"No! No! I'll get you for this, Ghost Girl! You and the whelp!" Skulker thundered, his words becoming quieter and more distorted as he disappeared into the thermos. Dani capped it and twisted firmly, sealing him inside.

The night became quiet once again. Dani surveyed the former battleground, pleased to see that the park had sustained little damage, outside of a few broken trees. Hooking the thermos back onto her belt, she rose into the air and headed home.

Danielle didn't know where she quite fit in yet - in town, in school, in life - but there was plenty of time for her to discover that. Right now, all she wanted was to stay by her family and friends' sides. And if the the price for that was battling a few ghosts and sticking them in Fenton thermoses - for at least six months, she thought gleefully, imagining Skulker's misery -

Well, then it was a price she would gladly pay.

[ericvick]

Bond Market’s ‘Game of Chicken’ With Fed Is Set for a Reckoning

National Review

Treasurys Tremble

In a Capital Note last week, I wrote about the debate over inflation (coming or not?). With the minor exception of a $1.9 trillion spending package now passed into law, not much has changed since then, other than the fact that there will be more days when markets focus on inflation risk. Friday was one of those days. The Financial Times (late morning, Friday): A “storm” swept through the US government bond market on Friday, sending a key measure of long-term borrowing costs to the highest level since last February. Treasuries dropped in overnight trading after a large sale of long-dated bond futures in Asia, according to people familiar with the matter. Yields on the benchmark 10-year note, a key marker across global asset markets, jumped to 1.63 per cent, having traded around 1.53 per cent the day before. Analysts said the scale of the move underscored how jittery the $21tn market had become against the backdrop of a more robust economic rebound. Treasuries are the biggest and deepest market in the world, something that typically insulates it from sharp rises and falls in prices. Treasuries have been under pressure since the start of the year, as investors anticipate higher inflation and growth in the coming months following another enormous injection of fiscal stimulus with the passage of the Biden administration’s latest package. It is hard to deny that some anxiety over inflation is called for. With rates as low (in absolute terms) as they are, and with government debt so high, it is not as if there is much margin for error for bondholders. Back in December, Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, commented that he would not touch Treasurys at the rates that then prevailed “with a ten-foot pole.” While this was hyperbole (as CNBC pointed out, “a lending institution with $3.2 trillion in assets, JPMorgan has to continually purchase Treasurys and other low-yielding investments to earn a spread, a fact that Dimon acknowledged”), the point he was trying to make was a fair one. Since then, the yield on the ten-year has risen sharply in relative terms (when Dimon spoke, it was yielding around 0.9 percent, against 1.63 percent at the time of writing on Friday), but in absolute terms, meh. Let’s put it another (and wildly over-simplified, yet not) way. Would you lend money to Uncle Sam for ten years at that rate? Would you feel well rewarded for the risk that you were taking? The question, I think, answers itself. In an article for the FT earlier this week, Thushka Maharaj, global multi-asset strategist at, well, JPMorgan Asset Management, notes that, “after taking into account inflation, real 10-year yields remain deeply negative,” and observes how low nominal rates leave little room for maneuver: “As a result, the extent to which they can move lower and provide protection in times of stress is limited.” What is more: The policy mix is changing. Fiscal policy is being used more actively to stimulate growth and monetary policy is prioritising higher average inflation expectations. This implicitly imposes a floor for bond yields. In short, stronger economic growth sparked by unprecedented stimulus or the return of inflation, will eventually lead to a pullback in liquidity support from central banks. Investors today, perhaps, are preoccupied with the risk that the economic recovery is too sharp, rather than not sharp enough. That is a fear that is not well hedged by a large allocation to sovereign bonds. Indeed not, and that is even more the case in the euro zone where any recovery looks set to lag that in the U.S. by quite some while, not least thanks to the mess that the EU has made of COVID-19-vaccine procurement and rollout. Meanwhile, the European Central Bank’s interest-rate policy is forever mired in the contradictions of a monetary union that should never have been born, something at which we will again be taking another look before too long. In the meantime, those interested (and who are able to peer behind the Daily Telegraph’s paywall) should read Ambrose Evans-Pritchard’s latest article. Evans-Pritchard is not always the calmest columnist there is, but it is hard to push back against his argument that rising yields in the U.S. may well cause problems for the ECB (led by Christine Lagarde, a central bank president with no central-banking experience). Lagarde is being forced into a tricky balancing act. On the one hand, a number of the euro zone’s “northern” milch cows would have little objection to higher rates. On the other hand, at least one of the currency union’s southern laggards might find itself a touch squeezed if it had to pay them. Oh yes, as Evans-Pritchard points out, the ECB’s balance sheet has already ballooned to 71 percent of GDP — twice the levels of that of the U.S. Federal Reserve. Evans-Pritchard: Fear of a German and north European backlash is visibly constraining the ECB. It partly explains why the bank’s decision on Thursday to counter US bond market contagion with more QE pledges degenerated into incoherence, prompting a blizzard of criticism from analysts and veteran ECB-watchers. “The outcome of the governing council meeting does not, in our view, bring any meaningful clarity to what the ECB policy is, in theory or in practice,” said Citigroup. You can see the statement after the Governing Council meeting here. And here’s an account of the press conference that followed. Enjoy! Evans-Pritchard: Lagarde contradicted herself. She said the ECB is trying to control financial conditions (to ease stress) but is definitely not pursuing “yield curve control”. Citigroup said these two concepts are “substantially the same thing”, so what is she talking about? “It’s not QE, it’s not yield curve control, so what is it?” asked Ruben Segura-Cayuela and Evelyn Herrmann from Bank of America. “We now have more doubts about the ECB’s reaction function than we did before. Do they target prices? Do they target quantities? Both? None? The compromise today leaves us nowhere.” The ECB’s pledge did succeed in lowering bond yields for a few hours, but the effect has mostly dissipated. Bund yields are higher than they were before the announcement. Bank of America said the EU had inadvertently created a cliff-edge that will be tested by markets and could make matters worse: “We worry beyond the next few months. At a time when a long-term commitment is needed, the ECB has shortened the guidance to one quarter.” Pimco called it a “muddle-through compromise of a highly-divided governing council”. Axa’s Apolline Menut tried to be polite: “ECB will have to get lucky, as they are not targeting quantities and they are not targeting prices either.” What it reflects is intellectual chaos at a split institution that no longer knows what it is trying to do. All the while, the external threat builds. Yield contagion and imported monetary tightening from the US is only going to get worse this year. Looking at it from a purely selfish American perspective, perceptions of trouble in the euro zone might increase demand for Treasurys, as, among the safe havens, the U.S. is still seen as the healthiest horse in the glue factory, so there is that. This might come in handy, not least, possibly, in the very short term if a short-term break given to the banks last March is allowed to expire. The FT: Investors are also on edge about the potential for a regulatory change at the end of the month that may hamper Treasury market functioning, with Scott Thiel, chief fixed-income strategist at BlackRock calling it a “significant factor” contributing to the recent volatility. At the height of the coronavirus-induced financial ructions last year, US regulators introduced a temporary rule change that allowed banks to exclude Treasuries and cash reserves when calculating how much additional capital they need to hold. The aim, in part, was to encourage banks to step in more forcefully to stabilise whipsawing markets without worrying about balance sheet constraints. The exemption is set to expire at the end of the month, and analysts warn a failure to extend it could magnify the problems in the Treasury market, especially given the sheer size of the supply set to flood the market this year in order to fund the record-sized stimulus programmes passed to support the economic recovery. “If the rule is not extended, it is certainly possible, maybe even probable, that illiquidity returns to the Treasury market,” said Kelcie Gerson, an interest rate strategist at Morgan Stanley. The rule should be extended. Some say that this is an irrelevance (I don’t agree), but even risking a rerun of last March’s shambles in the Treasury market would be unwise at this point, even if it could give banker-bashers on the populist left (Hullo, Senator Warren!) a potentially useful talking point. Bloomberg’s Brian Chappatta details the issues involved in an excellent article here. The whole thing is well worth reading, but some key extracts: As a way to push banks to help the country get through the Covid-19 pandemic, regulators allowed them to temporarily exclude U.S. Treasuries and deposits at the Federal Reserve from the SLR denominator because they are the closest thing to risk-free assets. In addition to helping banks continue to take deposits and lend during the health crisis, it also served to ensure they would help backstop the unprecedented fiscal and monetary policy support that flooded the financial system with cash . . . The Fed has been unusually silent about the SLR’s fate ahead of its policy decision next week . . . Some background: First, it’s important to understand the mechanics behind the Fed’s bond-buying program. When it purchases Treasuries from a money manager, those securities become an asset on the central bank’s balance sheet. The seller will deposit the cash it received at a bank, which, left as reserves at the Fed, is an asset for that bank and a liability for the Fed. In other words, quantitative easing boosts the asset levels of U.S. banks, which, in turn, means they need to hold more capital. There’s nothing wrong with the Fed, as a regulator, requiring that banks maintain adequate capital to avoid another financial crisis. But it’s a hard sell when the Fed, as the nation’s monetary policy authority, is forcibly increasing the asset base. This kind of internal struggle explains why the SLR [Supplementary Leverage Ratio] exemption was put in place; it’s anyone’s guess what might have happened without it as the Fed expanded its balance sheet by almost $3 trillion in three months. So, what to do? At first glance, the easy answer seems to be to just extend the SLR exemptions for Treasuries and reserves to avoid disrupting this market plumbing. By some measures, this break allowed banks to expand their balance sheets by as much as $600 billion — why mess with that? However, the Fed created its own political problem by loosening its restrictions on banks’ cash distributions, which had been put in place after the pandemic. Banks are now buying back stock and distributing capital to shareholders, or, in SLR terms, willfully reducing their numerator. It stands to reason, then, that they could afford to have the denominator return to its usual form. This is the argument from Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Sherrod Brown of Ohio . . . That, I suppose, depends on how those numbers pan out, but even then, there is the issue of the banks being “forced” to increase their asset base. Please note this: Dimon, for his part, raised the specter of having to turn away deposits at some point without SLR relief during the bank’s earnings call in January, which would obviously be quite a drastic business decision. Indeed. To Cabana [Mark Cabana, head of U.S. rates strategy at Bank of America], the recent angst over the SLR extension has less to do with the actual mechanics and is more about the rapid increase in Treasury yields over the past two months, which happened to coincide with the expiring exemption. “What all of this indicates to me is there’s heightened sensitivity over where Treasury demand is going to come from and whether Treasury rates can remain here,” he said. “Because there’s a lot of debt out there, and it’s only going to keep growing.” Just the time to spend $1.9 trillion. On a brighter note, the Dow Jones Industrial and the S&P 500 closed up on Friday. The NASDAQ composite was off a little. GameStop (no note can pass without a mention of GameStop) was up around 1.73 percent on the day and closed at $264.50, compared with its close on March 5 of $137.74, and an intra-day peak of $295.50. All is well. The Capital Record We recently launched a new series of podcasts, the Capital Record. Follow the link to see how to subscribe (it’s free!). The Capital Record, which will appear weekly, is designed to make use of another medium to deliver Capital Matters’ defense of free markets. Financier and NRI trustee David L. Bahnsen hosts discussions on economics and finance in this National Review Capital Matters podcast, sponsored by National Review Institute. Episodes feature interviews with thenation’s top business leaders, entrepreneurs, investment professionals, and financial commentators. In the eighth episode, David Bahnsen (joined by himself and himself alone this week) examined the $1.9 trillion stimulus bill, looking at what it means to markets, to national debt, to economic growth, and more. And the Capital Matters week that was . . . The week began, gloomily as always, on this occasion with Wayne Crews looking at “the hidden tax of regulation”, and how the Biden administration seems set on increasing it. The Swamp floats thousands of other rafts, too. These are the guidance documents, memoranda, interpretative bulletins, circulars, letters, and various other kinds of “regulatory dark matter” that spew from agencies, that, while not law, add to federal regulatory-compliance burdens. In addition to striking one-in, two-out, Biden eliminated a Trump executive order requiring that these myriad proclamations be made readily available to the public . . . There is some time to correct course, if Congress takes note. As part of his order, Trump also directed executive agencies to issue a final rule on guidance — we’ve taken to calling them “FROGs” — and specifically to set up internal procedures for their creation and posting. Thirty agencies issued FROGs, all of which provided for searchable disclosures, by the time Biden took office. Since these “rules on rules” are part of the Code of Federal Regulations, Biden cannot strike them out with his pen as he did the underlying Trump order. Nonetheless, Biden has directed agencies to “promptly take steps to rescind any orders, rules, regulations, guidelines, or policies, or portions thereof, implementing or enforcing” the Trump orders that he rescinded. When asked at a briefing why President Biden rescinded an order aimed at transparency, White House press secretary Jen Psaki ducked and accused the Trump White House of erecting “unnecessary hurdles and cumbersome processes for agencies.” That is a clear signal that the Biden White House prioritizes the convenience of bureaucrats over the public’s right to know about the rules they are being told to follow. Of course it does. In the next in our Supply & Demand series, John Cochrane asked whether the Fed’s monetary policy threatens inflation: By conventional measures, yes. But those conventional measures have failed in the past. I believe that the short-run danger is less than it appears, but the long-run danger is larger . . . Brainard, like other Fed officials, speaks of “anchored” inflation expectations. Anchored by what? Are expectations an anchor, or a balloon in a temporarily windless sky? Given the number of words coming out of the Fed on this long-run strategy, perhaps they believe inflation expectations are anchored by great speeches. So did their predecessors in the 1970s, culminating in President Ford’s ludicrous Whip Inflation Now (“WIN”) buttons. Anchoring is important. If people do not expect inflation to continue, when they eventually see some of it, they treat it as a transitory blip and do not build inflation into the prices they charge or are willing to pay, the wages they offer or demand, and the prices of assets they buy and sell. Once people expect inflation in the future, we have inflation now. There is only one “anchoring” that makes sense: anchoring by actions. People must believe that if inflation got out of hand, the Fed would quickly do what it takes to bring it back. If that means reliving the awful recessions of 1980–1982, people must believe the Fed would do it. Today, anchored expectations depend on fiscal policy as well. People must believe that if inflation were to break out, the federal government would swiftly retrench, stop spreading money around like fertilizer, and put its house in order with a tax and entitlement reform. Indeed, Brainard writes, “If, in the future, inflation rises immoderately or persistently above target, and there is evidence that longer-term inflation expectations are moving above our longer-run goal, I would not hesitate to act and believe we have the tools to carefully guide inflation down to target.” It matters that people believe this, even if the actions cause immense short-term pain. Do people still believe the Fed has that will? Do people believe that the Treasury Department and Congress have the parallel will to take fiscal steps to contain inflation if it should come? Does the Fed really have the tools to do it? I am doubtful. For ten years, interest rates were zero. (Interest rates were either too high or too low, depending on your view of things, but stuck at zero in any case.) For ten years, the Fed ran massive quantitative easing after quantitative easing. Inflation just sailed along slightly below 2 percent. This episode suggests the Fed has a lot less power than it thinks. But that is also a cheery view, as if the Fed’s interest-rate and bond-purchase tools are relatively powerless, then not much of what the Fed is doing will cause inflation either. In the current economy, fiscal policy and fiscal anchoring seem the greater danger to inflation than even the monetary mistakes of the 1970s. Veronique de Rugy cast a skeptical eye over the administration’s climate policies, focusing on the role of the Ex-Im Bank: At the end of January, President Biden issued an executive order to combat climate change. The whole thing is what you’d expect from this administration. The EO is lots of signaling to the climate crowd, and it will likely offer fertile grounds for government failures and nasty unintended consequences . . . In the end, I predict that all we are likely to get from this EO is bad climate policies such as subsidies to well-connected green companies (see the 1705 loan program) and measures to destroy the domestic oil and gas industries while Ex-Im will continue to subsidize corrupt PEMEX. It’s messed up. Veronique returned to the topic of the administration’s greenery a few days later and explained that more contradiction and confusion was going to be added to a situation where both flourish already: On Tuesday, I mentioned that it is likely that the Biden administration will continue misguided green policies pursued by other Democrats of heavy green subsidies and attacks on gas and oil industries, all the while the federal government will continue to subsidize state-owned and private oil and gas companies abroad. Today, I came across this video from this brand new company Kite & Key Media, which touches on the internal conflict of the U.S. green-energy policy. This video, which is their first, is about such minerals as graphite, lithium, or manganese that are needed to produce many of the modern life products we love as well as several of the “green products” that environmentalists are so fond of. As the video narrator explains “the greener we try to be, the more mining it requires.” The Biden administration has made it clear that it will force more green energy on the U.S. through the regulatory process. In doing so, it will also both be making it harder to mine these minerals here at home and it will increase the amount of mining we buy from these less than environmentally friendly countries. That, of course, will happen all the while the administration continues to insist on idiotic “made in America” requirements and to demand repatriation of our supply chains in the name of propping up manufacturing jobs and national security . . . Good times. Michelle Minton highlighted yet another counter-productive move by Congress (in this case, the last one): Amid the economic devastation caused by COVID-19, one industry has actually thrived: the cigarette business. Some people are smoking to relieve the emotional and economic stress of lockdowns. But many others returned to smoking when the lower-risk options they relied on, such as nicotine vapor products, became too expensive or hard to find when compared with the combustible tobacco available at every gas station and corner store. Now, Congress wants to eliminate the ability for adults to receive e-cigarettes by mail, a measure that will reduce access to these life-saving options even after the lockdowns end. Buried within the omnibus spending bill passed at the end of last year was the “Preventing Online Sales of E-Cigarettes to Children Act.” The Act, colloquially called the “vape mail ban,” prohibits the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) from delivering nicotine or cannabis vaping products. One might think that e-cigarette makers could simply switch to private carriers, such as FedEx or UPS. But these private carriers don’t deliver to all addresses, particularly in rural areas. Private carriers actually rely on USPS to make “last mile” deliveries. Even if private carriers did deliver everywhere in the U.S., most — including FedEx, UPS, and DHL — have yielded to the anti-vaping mob, voluntarily ending e-cigarette deliveries . . . Robert VerBruggen wasn’t too sure about the polling on the Democrats’ expanded child tax credits: The Democrats’ COVID bill will send a lot of money to most parents — $3,600 for each kid under six, plus $3,000 for older kids up to age 17 — for the next year, the plan being to make it permanent in the future. This is controversial not only because it’s big new federal spending, but also because the money goes to parents regardless of whether they’re working. Skeptics say this basically brings back the pre-reform welfare system. A lot of liberals have convinced themselves this policy will be a huge hit. A CNN poll says it has 85 percent support! I’m not so sure. CNN asked people if they support “providing larger tax credits for families and making them easier for low-income households to claim,” which, er, doesn’t quite get at why this is controversial. By contrast, back in 2019 I wrote up a survey that asked people about several different options and was clearer about whether work was required. (It also offered a “neither favor nor oppose” response that was far more common than the “no opinion” answers in the CNN survey.) Two options were reasonably popular, garnering much more support than opposition: A tax credit that goes to all parents who pay income taxes, and a tax credit where parents with lower incomes “get back” relatively more. The former is framed as broad tax relief for parents and was popular across the political spectrum; the latter is framed a little more as welfare and was much more popular with Democrats. You know what bombed? A child allowance for everyone “whether they pay income taxes or not.” Only about 30 percent of respondents favored this; about 40 percent opposed it . . . And David Harsanyi wasn’t too sure about the polling on the Biden spending package: There is overwhelming bipartisan support for the $1.9 trillion “American Rescue Plan.” No doubt about it. Every poll says so. The latest Morning Consult poll, for instance, informs us that Americans support the bill by a wide 75–18 percent margin. Among Democrats, it’s 90–5. Among the GOP, it’s 59–35. Among independents, it’s 71–20. As the Washington Post’s lead “fact-checker” Glenn Kessler put it recently on Twitter, presidents dream “of getting numbers like this for a major piece of legislation — especially if no one from the opposition party votes for it.” Indeed, they do. But the dream can be made reality only if the media abdicate their responsibility of critically reporting and properly highlighting the partisan boondoggles in trillion-dollar legislation. How popular would the “American Rescue Plan” be if pollsters asked voters grown-up questions rather than push-polling for Democrats? I’ll take one of David’s questions: Do you support an emergency-rescue bill that spends a third of proposed funding, around $700 billion, in 2022 or later, rather than right now? Ought to answer itself. Ought to. Robert P. O’Quinn thought the package was a waste of over a trillion dollars: At a time when Dr. Seuss is being canceled, it might seem as if nothing could be more ridiculous. But consider this: The economy is currently growing at an annual rate of 8.4 percent, and Democrats have decided, nevertheless, that it is time for a massive stimulus. Never has such a massive policy come at a time that is more inconsistent witheconomic reason. Why the rush to have a stimulus when none is needed? You guessed it. Democrats won the election and are engaged in an effort, in the false name of stimulus, to transfer a massive pile of taxpayer cash to their pet projects and constituencies. Indeed, the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 is loaded with more than $700 billion in payoffs to such causes, completely unrelated to the pandemic. Claiming that any of this wasteful spending is stimulative is laughable. In another Supply & Demand, Casey Mulligan and Tomas Philipson made clear that they didn’t think too much of it either: As an economic stabilizer, Congress has long been recognized to be notoriously bad in its timing. Such packages take a long time to debate, and many of its projects are not within a year of being “shovel ready,” long after downturns have subsided. Lawmakers can’t keep up and often end up either stimulating an already growing economy or restraining an economy that is already contracting. Meanwhile, the private sector steams ahead as we saw in the February job gains and in the surprisingly low unemployment claims that were reported last week. Failing to argue that the Recovery Act is a stimulus, some economists have instead resorted to arguing that it should be viewed as a liquidity bridge. In other words, the measures harm economic incentives but provide a bridge to an economy saved by the vaccines that the private sector produced with record speed under Operation Warp Speed . . . Since last summer, we have argued that there has been a massive fiscal overreaction to COVID in terms of liquidity. Bothe the CARES Act and the December bailout was subject to this and the same is true of the Recovery Act. At first glance, it would seem that the $1.9 trillion would increase national spending as Americans begin to cash the government checks. But aggregate spending includes not only the spending of government-program participants, but also the spending (both consumption and investment) of those who finance the government. When government redistributes, the taxpayers and lenders to our government have less to spend and save. Even a foreign lender who decides to lend that extra $1 million to our government may well be lending less to U.S. households and companies. At best, redistribution from workers to the unemployed reallocates aggregate demand rather than increases its total. Indeed, retail sales really started to grow in August and September when parts of the March 2020 CARES Act began to expire, in direct contradiction to the “Keynesian” predictions. Maybe a better path for mitigating harm to the economy would be for Congress to acknowledge its own handicaps and stop inflicting more damage. Less is more when it comes to governments helping economies. Robert VerBruggen noted a revealing catch amid all the largesse: Jared Walczak of the Tax Foundation has a fascinating blog post about one of the amendments that made it into the COVID-relief bill. The bill doles out $350 billion to state and local governments, nearly $200 billion of it to states. (There’s also, separately, money for schools and public transportation.) But states haven’t seen their revenues decline anywhere near that much, and some states aren’t hurting at all. So for many governments this is just a big windfall to spend. But not so fast! The Democrats who passed the bill don’t want the free money to go to something icky, and they especially don’t want it to go to something really icky like tax cuts . . . We ran a lightly edited extract from Donald Devine’s new book, The Enduring Tension: Capitalism and the Moral Order: When 60 percent of stock-market gains have come on dates that the Fed made a policy announcement, the stock markets have been driven not by capitalist supply and demand, but by investor reactions to mostly misguided governmental calculations. Earlier, in 2014, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) observed that it once appeared that “economic science had conquered the business cycle” after the Great Depression. There had been inflationary recessions in the 1970s and 1980s, but “long expansionist runs” from 1961 to 1969, and from 1991 to 2001. BIS noted, however, that even with multiple billions of dollars of stimulus spending, Federal Reserve policy since 2007 had failed to increase U.S. output, which was then 13 percent below where it would have been if previous growth rates had continued. The pattern was similar in other capitalist countries: output was 19 percent below earlier projections in Britain, 12 percent below in France, and 3 percent below in Germany. In fact, analysts had ignored the fact that bank and treasury stimulus did not work in the 1930s, 1970s, or 1980s either. By 2014, the idea that central banks could actually control economies was seriously in question. As early as the financial crisis of 2007–08, it seemed clear that those in charge at Treasury and the Fed were operating by the seat of their pants each day, without any guiding plan, in the face of enormous market complexity. Indeed, all three top managers of the crisis — Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner, and Henry Paulson — would later essentially admit as much in their book on the subject, Firefighting. As the title suggests, they conceded that they had simply been putting out fires on the spot, with no comprehensive, rationalized plan to direct the markets. Casey B. Mulligan, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, argued that the unintended effects of firefighting based on instinct might even have made things worse. He maintained that the incentives to work, earn, and recover had been reduced by the stimulus programs, the six-year “emergency assistance” for the long-term unemployed, the expansion of the food-stamp program, the mortgage-assistance programs, and the like. The result was the lowest labor-force-participation rate in 30 years and a historically slow recovery . . . Kevin Williamson discussed the contemporary cult of asceticism (which bears quite a resemblance to a good number of its predecessors): Like its cousin misery, asceticism loves company, and so Manjoo proposes to begin his campaign of moral improvement with . . . you peons, of course. “Do you really need to fly?” the headline asks. Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe you need to mind your own goddamned business. But, why not play the game? Do you really need a tomato? You can live a perfectly happy life without one. The tomato, too, was once regarded as sinful: Europeans once thought of it as excessively voluptuous, associating it with the forbidden fruit of the Bible, believing alternately that it was poisonous or an aphrodisiac. Tomatoes apparently used to be sexy, which probably is why “tomato” used to be slang for an attractive woman. Nobody needs a tomato. Nobody needs fine Au Lit sheets or a Tesla. Nobody needs to go to the moon. Nobody needs more than one pair of shoes. Nobody needs another self-righteous New York Times columnist. How about another book? How about an Internet connection? Do you really need . . . to be a blue-nosed busybody? We are in the midst of a great national moral panic. It is a secular moral panic, but one of the interesting things about American political culture is that our secular social movements almost always simply recapitulate old-fashioned Christian practice in some bizarre new way. The green cathedral has its own stations of the cross and liturgy, its sacrament of reconciliation (carbon offsets), its saints and martyrs (Greta Thunberg), its sacred scripture, its confession of faith and apostles’ creed . . . Michael Brendan Dougherty approved of Marco Rubio’s support for the unionization drive among Amazon workers in Alabama: Lots of the talk about the Republican Party becoming a “multi-ethnic workers’ party” has been a little premature, even if I’ve been hoping for it all my life. The great populist GOP president passed a corporate tax cut that wasn’t even popular when it passed. Everyone can recognize that affluent and educated voters are moving en masse into the Democratic Party, and some downwardly mobile people are trickling in to the GOP. But what does it mean? All this talk of workers has been met with taunts from liberals in the media: “Fine, but when will the GOP ever take the side of workers against an owner?” Marco Rubio has done just that in an op-ed today, supporting the unionization drive among Amazon’s workers in Alabama. Rubio’s critics have been quick to point out that he doesn’t offer a pro-worker rationale and doesn’t even seem to like unions. All the rhetorical emphasis seems to be on spite. “For decades, companies like Amazon have been allies of the left in the culture war,” Rubio writes, “but when their bottom line is threatened they turn to conservatives to save them.” Rubio is looking down and whispering “No.” And listen, it’s high time that conservatives recognize that corporate America is not a friend. And Rubio is right to recognize that this enmity isn’t just over culture-war issues — like censorship of conservative views — but also at an international level, where global corporations feel empowered to push around democratically elected governments at home, while serving the interests of dictators like Xi Jinping abroad . . . Veronique de Rugy is no more impressed by the third airline bailout than she was by its two predecessors: No one seems to care anymore but airlines will receive their third bailout in a year thanks to the new COVID-19 relief bill. That will make a total of $79 billion in airline bailout: $50 billion in the CARES Act ($25 billion in payroll support and $25 billion in subsidized loans), $15 billion in December 2020, and finally $14 billion for commercial airlines as part of the American Rescue Plan. I have written many times about why most of the money goes to bailing out shareholders and creditors rather than workers. In part, it is because the amount of each bailout covers more than the payroll costs of those workers who would have gotten furloughed. Oh, and by the way, airlines are receiving subsidies even when they have committed not to furlough anyone in 2021 even without a bailout, like Southwest has. Gary Leff of View from the Wing also notes that while the airlines are picking our pockets, “Delta is even paying out large management bonuses” and that “American even figured out how to keep workers they let go from collecting on payroll support.” . . . It being that time of year, Steve Hanke and Christopher Arena argued that it was time to scrap the move to Daylight Savings Time, and then took it a step further with the suggestion that we all adopt UTC, a harder sell. It’s that time of year when we “spring ahead” and switch to daylight saving time (DST). There is a good chance that this annual adjustment of the clock will damage not only your wallet but your health, too. Before the adoption of standard measures of time, churches, city halls, and trains kept solar time. Every city, depending on its location, observed its own solar time, once referred to as “true time” in the United States. In the early 19th century, there were more than 300 “sun zones” in the U.S. alone. It wasn’t until the proliferation of railways that time standardization arose to resolve logistical and scheduling nightmares and passenger confusion, not to mention fatal railroad accidents. In 1875, there were 75 different railway times in the United States, with three in Chicago and six in St. Louis alone. In 1883, the time zones we know today were introduced as Standard Railway Time. It wasn’t until 1918, with the passage of the Standard Time Act, that our five current time zones (excluding Hawaii) were enacted into law. In an attempt to conserve energy during World War I, the United States, armed with the Standard Time Act, followed Germany’s lead and adopted daylight saving time. The idea was that if daylight lasted for one more hour, that was one hour less of darkness during which people would need to use artificial lighting. But in today’s highly technological world, we are plugged in whether or not the sun is up. As a result, this original energy-conservation rationale for daylight saving no longer makes sense . . . Finally, we produced the Capital Note, our “daily” (well, Tuesday–Friday, anyway). Topics covered included: GameStop, ice-cream cones, sock puppets and other fundamentals, China’s coal, Tesla and Texas, ghost kitchens, no, the financial markets are not “rigged,” retail investors calling the shots, sidewalk robots, DNA’s day in court, pay toilets, the bombing of Wall Street, $1.9 trillion, you say, the coming attack on Big Tech, inflation, when the selling starts, accounting for Bitcoin, woke capitalism, it’s here to stay; working from home, not the route to promotion; Germany’s energy mess (and India’s coal); bubble update; and Cisco’s hard lesson (now being ignored).

[thisdaynews]

Kamala's health care stumbles fuel rough stretch for her campaign

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/kamalas-health-care-stumbles-fuel-rough-stretch-for-her-campaign/

Kamala's health care stumbles fuel rough stretch for her campaign

Democratic health care experts are fretting that the fight over Sen. Kamala Harris’ plan, and the broader battle over Medicare for All, threatens to eclipse voters’ biggest health policy priorities. | John Locher/AP File Photo

2020 Elections

She’s getting hit from all sides as her poll numbers are dropping.

Kamala Harris offered her health care plan expecting to bridge the party’s divides and decisively answer doubts about her see-sawing positions.

But in the month since, the California Democrat is still struggling to rebut attacks from her chief rivals who are poking holes in its specifics and accusing Harris of putting political calculation before true conviction. Joe Biden’s campaign dismisses it as a “have-it-every-which-way” plan while Bernie Sanders’ camp ripped it as “cobbled together to address various poll numbers.”

Story Continued Below

Harris’ universal coverage plan has been praised by more than a dozen health policy wonks and former Obama administration officials, including some who prefer it to Sanders’ version of Medicare for All. But politically, it’s been a muddle: It’s testing whether a senator not known for her health care expertise has the dexterity to thread the needle between Sanders and Biden on a complicated policy. And it’s accelerated questions about why Harris supported Sanders’ plan for nearly two years, standing with him at the 2017 unveiling, before admitting this week to long harboring doubts about the Vermont senator’s proposal.

For Harris, the health care morass is also threatening to become an ominous symbol for why, after her surge following the first debate, she’s fallen back since early July to where she started. She now polls closer to Pete Buttigieg and Beto O’Rourke than Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

“I believe that when Senator Harris is confident in what she’s saying and what she believes, she’s very good,” said Rebecca Katz, a Democratic strategist aligned with progressives. “I am just not sure what she believes when it comes to Medicare for All.”

The questions swirling around Harris’ health plan come amid an intensifying battle within the Democratic Party to define Medicare for All. Sanders’ campaign argues his is the only pure version, with the senator touting an aggressive plan to transition the entire U.S. health system to a government-run health program within four years.Sanders’ campaign pushed back Thursday against a report that he was adjusting his plan in the face of union opposition, which the campaign denied. Under Sanders’ newly released labor proposal, unions would renegotiate their contracts to capture wages or benefits they sacrificed for more generous health packages, since those plans would disappear under Medicare for All.

Multiple presidential contenders have sought to capitalize on the seeming popularity of the term “Medicare for All” among voters — while distancing themselves from raising taxes on the middle class and eliminating private insurance companies, which critics say it would do.

The issue has been driven by a narrow fight in the Democratic primary, said Larry Levitt of the Kaiser Family Foundation, which has conducted polls and interviews on how voters are responding to Medicare for All proposals.

“There is a group of activist voters who are very focused on whether a candidate is supporting Medicare for All, and beyond that what flavor of Medicare for All he or she is supporting,” Levitt said.

But most voters aren’t focused on the nuances, he added.

The internecine battle over Medicare for All could backfire on the eventual nominee. Biden, Harris and Sanders have all leveled attacks that Republicans could repurpose in the general election. The focus also means Democratic candidates have spent less time in debates and on the campaign trail talking about issues like high drug prices and the Trump administration’s efforts to scuttle the Affordable Care Act altogether

But the Democratic infighting isn’t likely to subside anytime soon. And Harris isn’t the only candidate facing questions about her health plan.

Biden, who wants to create a government-run alternative while preserving a role for private insurers, almost flippantly suggested that his administration could “easily” add a public option, a decade after the Obama administration was forced to retreat from the idea despite having full control of Congress. Biden’s plan as written also would leave 10 million people uninsured.

Meanwhile, Sanders and Warren continue to face questions about higher taxes, which Sanders has been more open to acknowledging.

But Harris has given her opponents more ammunition than any other candidate. Early in the campaign, while still running on Sanders’ plan, she wavered on whether she favored eliminating private insurance. Harris raised her hand at June’s debate, suggesting she supported abolishing private insurers, but the next day said she had misinterpreted the question.

In Iowa and Nevada in recent weeks, Harris said she decided to issue her own plan after conversations on the trail — with union members who wanted a longer runway to serve out their bargained health plans and with people who don’t want to abolish private insurers. Compared to Sanders’ proposal, Harris’ plan has a longer, 10-year implementation period, and maintains a role for private insurers by building on the existing Medicare Advantage program.

Addressing her pivot away from Sanders’ plan, Harris argued at a union forum earlier this month that other Democratic hopefuls have also embraced different health care plans over time.

“Most of us, I’ll speak for myself, say, ‘Hey, it’s a good idea. I support it.’ The question becomes, ‘Is it the best idea?’” Harris added. “And, for me, that Medicare plan that almost everyone has signed off on, I realized it’s just not the best plan. And so, I decided to come up with my own.”

But at a fundraiser in the Hamptons last weekend, Harris acknowledged to donors that “over the course of many months, I’ve not been comfortable with Bernie’s plan, the Medicare for All plan.” The admission — in front of a pool of wealthy supporters — called into question why Harris cosponsored Sanders’ bill in 2017 and remained a supporter for so long in the first place.

Sanders’ campaign pounced. Sanders tweeted about the Hamptons remarks and his speechwriter, David Sirota, accused Harris and other Democrats of letting Donald Trump off the hook while “attacking the Medicare for All framework that now has the support of the majority of Democratic lawmakers in the U.S. House.”

“The Harris flip-flop is a reminder that while Medicare for All received an enthusiastic response at Bernie’s Fox News townhall in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania,” Sirota wrote in his newsletter, “it doesn’t get that kind of response on the big-dollar fundraising circuit in the Hamptons.”

Harris spokesman Ian Sams responded that while other candidates may want to “play politics” or “implement ideological purity tests” on this issue, Harris is focused on getting the policy right.

“Her plan covers everyone, ends co-pays and deductibles, gives Americans a choice between public and private plans, and forces insurance companies to stop ripping people off,” Sams said in a statement. “Experts agree this is the best plan to get us to universal coverage, and in 2019, Democrats should be laying out a bold vision to cover every American while being responsive to people’s real concerns about how we get there.”

Democratic health care experts are fretting that the fight over Harris’ plan, and the broader battle over Medicare for All, threatens to eclipse voters’ biggest health policy priorities.

“I definitely do not think they should be fighting about this,” said Arielle Kane, who directs health policy for the Progressive Policy Institute. “The public as a whole does not understand the nuances of health care policy — they just want to know the candidates’ big ideas and values. Can they shop? Is it free? Will they be protected financially?”

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How Art Museums Can Remain Relevant in the 21st Century

Last spring, Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Till, Open Casket (2016), spawned calls for the painting’s destruction, an on-air discussion on the daytime chat show The View, and a protest within the Whitney Museum of American Art, where it was exhibited. Over a year later, much of the furor has subsided. The painting is intact and away from public view, but the conflict has reverberated throughout a variety of other controversies. Reformers have made it clear that the issue at stake goes beyond an isolated work of art. They’re demanding that museums address how they display art, source funds, collect objects, and engage their own staff.

“What institutions hang on their walls or put on their pedestals is a clear articulation of who they imagine their audience to be,” writes Aruna d’Souza in a new book, Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts, which asserts that American art institutions have long centered on whiteness, or catered to white audiences. Recent efforts to rectify this, or to “decolonize” museums, include calls to reconsider the hiring of a white woman for a position as an African art curator at the Brooklyn Museum, burn or bury an offending artwork by Sam Durant, and even to rethink what we mean when we say “decolonize” (as it often denies Indigenous issues).

One major question, still far from resolved, lies at the heart of these demands: How can 21st-century museums both operate with the greatest sense of equity and ensure that they remain a relevant part of American cultural life? While some professionals are all but ready to give up, others are just getting started.

A very old problem

Western art institutions have always been exclusive. Britain’s first public museum, the Ashmolean at the University of Oxford, opened in 1683 to house the collection of antiquarian Elias Ashmole. Architect Charles Robert Cockerell designed an imposing Neoclassical structure to hold the founder’s “curiosities,” many culled from overseas travels. Over the past few centuries, the curators and directors have added to the original bounty, amassing hundreds of thousands of ceramics, paintings, sculptures, textiles, coins, and more from Egypt, Japan, colonial America, and beyond.

The Ashmolean’s founding principle—that “knowledge of humanity across cultures and across times is important to society”—had a major limiting element: Who, exactly, was included in its definition of “society”? Indeed, Oxford itself didn’t allow women to become full-time students until 1920, and its first black student didn’t matriculate until 1873. At its inception, and for about 200 years after, the Ashmolean museum apparently served a fairly narrow society: the predominantly white men who were wealthy enough to attend Oxford.

Orlando Jewitt, Interior of the Ashmolean, 1836, from the title page of A Catalogue of the Ashmolean Museum. Courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum.

As it placed a value on “curiosities,” the Ashmolean also initiated a long tradition of Westerners laying claim to (and often outright stealing) objects from far-flung, exoticized locales and building impressive galleries for their safekeeping. As Helen Molesworth, former chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), recently wrote, “[The museum,] with its familiar humanist offerings of knowledge and patrimony in the name of empathy and education, is one of the greatest holdouts of the colonialist enterprise. Its fantasies of possession and edification grow more and more wearisome as the years go by.” Ultimately, she questions whether the entire “project of collecting, displaying, and interpreting culture might just be unredeemable.”

Yet many other curators, artists, and museum directors have not yet (entirely) lost faith. With artworks, new initiatives, and alternate models, they’re attempting to redefine what institutions can look like, and what they can achieve.

The Ashmolean initiated a long tradition of Westerners laying claim to objects from exoticized locales and building impressive galleries for their safekeeping.

In her 2013 book Radical Museology: Or What’s Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art? Claire Bishop suggests that through innovative curating and programming, culture can become “a primary means for visualizing alternatives; rather than thinking of the museum collection as a storehouse of treasures, it can be reimagined as an archive of the commons.”

She cites the example of Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofía, which historicizes many artworks by placing them among the output of our wider visual culture: posters, documentaries, magazines, and so on. “Rather than being perceived as hoarded treasure, the work of art would be mobilized as a ‘relational object,’” Bishop writes, with the goal of ultimately liberating the viewer from entrenched social and political beliefs. This strategy also helps to dispel ideas of the artist-as-genius (which have long allowed such figures to abuse power and act poorly). Instead, artists become products of their time, situated among advertisers, graphic designers, and journalists.

Contemporary collecting practices

Collecting institutions, by their very nature, place large values on objects: They purchase artworks at galleries, auctions, and art fairs, often helping establish benchmarks for what the work is worth. Although this function is invisible to the daily visitor, museums remain important players in the art market.

Skeptics claim that this process fetishizes commodities, placing greater value on things than on people—indeed, a museum may be more likely to spend millions of dollars acquiring an important painting than it is to offer higher wages for its staff. Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) employees are protesting this disparity with perhaps the most aplomb: Many attended a protest on May 31st, just before MoMA’s annual Party in the Garden fundraiser, and collective bargaining agreements regarding salaries and benefits are ongoing.  

It’s the collecting and displaying process, ostensibly in the name of a greater social good, that Molesworth condemns. “Not everything is available to everyone, not even to a privileged gatekeeper of culture such as myself. Such are the ongoing fantasies of the colonialist mindset,” she writes. “An overconfidence in the power of critique might itself be a vestige of privilege.” She leaves collecting institutions with little choice: adhere to long-established structures, or disband entirely.

If an art museum is not quite prepared to overthrow capitalism, it can still develop more ethical collecting practices. Justine Ludwig, the outgoing deputy director-slash-chief curator at Dallas Contemporary, who becomes the executive director of New York’s public arts organization Creative Time this month, tells Artsy that “we still need collecting institutions that invest in contemporary art, that create a codex or a legacy for what is happening in the now and generate scholarship.”

If an art museum is not quite prepared to overthrow capitalism, it can still develop more ethical collecting practices.

Museums have the power to support artists not just by giving them exhibitions, but by acquiring their work, as well. By embracing artwork by a diverse group of practitioners, museums can create a more equitable public understanding of art and artists. Done right, this helps guard against the case of under-recognized artists who don’t get their due as a result (most often) of their gender, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status. When future generations think of the art of the early 21st century, they’ll conceive a group that extends far beyond white men. Collecting institutions have the power to push this reality even further.

Carin Kuoni, the director of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School, adds that it’s no longer sufficient to just show art by a varied group of individuals. “There is an expectation that museums and cultural institutions have to change structurally and have to be reflective of the constituents they serve and the programs they deliver,” she says. Everything about a museum, from its governing board to its shows, should reflect the same values.  

Similarly, Bishop writes that “representation of the other is not enough.” An institution must address societal issues and movements in its displays and its educational offerings. She praises the Reina Sofía’s free, intensive seminars on critical practices and workshops, which teach teenagers how to view the museum itself—not just the art inside. (That museums are the venue for and creator of such forums designed for their own critique is an ironic problem that, probably, has no real solution.)

Another option: Don’t collect

In 1830s Europe, the “Kunsthalle” emerged as a new model of display. Instead of amassing objects and focusing on their preservation, these institutions borrowed works for rotating exhibitions and emphasized community engagement. In 1872, Kunsthalle Basel opened in order to “provide a place for the fine arts that would foster friendly relations between artists and art lovers and would stimulate, promote and spread artistic interest in its hometown,” according to its website.

Germany and Switzerland, in particular, embraced the structure. Art flourished in cities small and large as a result of this decentralized model. Kunsthalle Bern, located in the Swiss capital, gained renown in the mid-20th century. Its star curator, Harald Szeemann, mounted a seminal 1969 exhibition entitled “Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form,” which shaped worldwide perceptions of experimental art of the time, far from Paris, London, or New York. Kunsthalle Basel (Switzerland), Tensta Kunsthalle (Stockholm, Sweden), and Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna, Austria) have all gained renown for their programming, as well.  

Not worrying about acquiring, storing, and displaying a permanent collection frees up resources for supporting ambitious and challenging new art.

“I really see it as the ideal way to present most contemporary art, especially when you’re focusing on new commissions,” Ludwig says about the Kunsthalle structure. “It allows you to fully invest within that specific project.” Not worrying about acquiring, storing, and displaying a permanent collection frees up resources for supporting ambitious and challenging new art.

Dallas Contemporary operates this way, as do a handful of other American institutions including the Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati, the Aspen Art Museum, and the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia. Yet the U.S. is still getting up-to-speed with a model our European counterparts have long embraced. American materialism, perhaps, extends to how we believe our institutions should function: identity is too often tied up with the things we own.

Structural issues

��At the end of the day,” writer, activist, and curator Laura Raicovich tells Artsy, “the institution is the people.” She served as executive director of the Queens Museum from 2014 through this past winter, when she stepped down following well-publicized disagreements with the museum’s board. Raicovich highlights how, especially given the institution’s lack of “an enormous collection of extremely precious art,” she prioritized funding and educating her own staff. (The Queens Museum does have a collection, which includes Tiffany glass and over 10,000 objects related to the 1939–40 and 1964–65 World’s Fairs, though these are rarely its major draw.)

She describes one of her prime initiatives as “re-imagining museum interpretations,” or rethinking the display strategies and language (in wall texts, brochures, and the like) that institutions use as intermediaries between the artwork and the viewer. By reconsidering the register, tone, and particulars of their language, museums also reconceive—and welcome—a broader viewership.

To this end, Caroline Goeser, chair of the department of learning and interpretation at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, developed audience surveys. “Visitors are often browsers, and they have their own agenda,” she said. “It’s really important to provide visitors with as many entry points into either an exhibition or the permanent collection galleries that might connect with their personal lives.” Goeser believes that museums should focus on being more welcoming and offering immersive experiences. To attract local Latino communities, her team creates “anchored partnerships” with nearby organizations, inspiring interest via connection with trusted groups. (Artists can also be a uniting force: During a residency at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, New York-based painter Aliza Nisenbaum rendered portraits of city residents, and then welcomed them into the museum for additional dialogue.)

Aliza Nisenbaum painting a portrait of a Minneapolis resident. Courtesy of the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Through their research, Goeser’s team learned that audiences valued understanding how objects were made—a theme they could best address by going beyond standard interpretation strategies. For an exhibition on textiles, the museum created videos and interactive iPad stations that explored who the artisans were, and how they created the objects in the show. Additionally, the museum included hands-on tools, including a cart with fabric and thread that viewers could touch. “We are aware that often, your sense of touch is not addressed in a museum,” Goeser said. Tactile experiences, of course, transcend nearly all social barriers.

Echoing Bishop, Raicovich advocates a series of programs that can help lead a museum to become more of a “commons,” a place to have difficult conversations framed by culture and art. For that to work, she believes that institutions must first find a way to prioritize equity in their structures.

Though Raicovich admits she doesn’t have all the answers, and that these kinds of changes don’t happen overnight, the American Alliance of Museums also offers some guidelines. Its 2018 pamphlet, “Facing Change,” suggests that “broadening the pathways to employment helps create systemic change in the museum workplace.”

Raicovich advocates a series of programs that can help lead a museum to become more of a “commons,” a place to have difficult conversations framed by culture and art.

In addition to ending unpaid internship programs (which privilege applicants from comfortable financial backgrounds), the report suggests targeted recruitment efforts. It’s a museum’s responsibility to proactively engage with talent that might not otherwise consider a position. “Inclusion requires an institutional orientation toward listening,” the pamphlet suggests. “It requires a willingness to invest in equity just as enthusiastically as we invest in our operations.”

Of course, if a museum recruits from Ph.D. programs for its most prominent curatorial positions, academia must also address the dearth of diversity in its own programs. At the university level, educators should already be promoting art as a valid career path, no matter what a student’s financial or ethnic background—and offering funding, if necessary, to even the playing field.

Curatorial constraints and artist complaints

For about 60 years, artists have been some of museums’ greatest detractors. “Institutional Critique,” pioneered in the 1960s and ’70s by artists such as Hans Haacke, Daniel Buren, and Vito Acconci, has become a major theme throughout Conceptual art practices. While these artists led the charge against what was happening inside museum walls, the contemporaneous land art movement created massive earthworks that were impossible to bring into the gallery space.

For example, Haacke proposed different pieces in which he’d survey museum visitors as to their backgrounds; expose the corporate affiliations of museum trustees by posting them on the gallery wall; or condemn city slumlords. If institutions were initially wary—the Guggenheim Museum cancelled a Haacke exhibition in 1971 and fired its curator, Edward Fry—they’re now more welcoming to such perspectives.

Museum Highlights, 1989. Andrea Fraser Hammer Museum

In the 1980s, artist Andrea Fraser notably took up the charge: In her 1989 piece Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk, she led a wry tour of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, employing the often reverent language of docents as she praised everything from an exit sign to the bathrooms.    

Yet a major challenge persists: how to display such challenging art in a compelling, engaging manner. Conceptual artwork, most often, is more about ideas than a highly-structured aesthetic experience (less “retinal” than “in the service of the mind,” in the words of Marcel Duchamp). Privileging this kind of work can help defetishize museum objects, though perhaps at the cost of alienating burgeoning art enthusiasts. A famous painting or sculpture is often more approachable, a kind of gateway drug into more intensive art appreciation.

Barriers to access

Often, enhancing accessibility comes down to less lofty solutions. Ludwig mentions two easy, obvious ways for museums to become more accessible: offer free admission and parking. At Dallas Contemporary, she and her staff also ensured that all wall text is presented in English and Spanish. That small endeavor, Ludwig says, speaks directly to the city’s demographics.

At her new post, Ludwig will have the opportunity to engage different communities in a new way. Creative Time emphasizes “placing projects in the ideal location and speaking to the community,” she says. After Hurricane Sandy, the organization mounted “Waiting for Godot” in New Orleans. Artist Paul Chan connected the seminal Samuel Beckett play to the plight of the city anticipating the aid it needed.

City-wide events, similarly, can reach broader local audiences. In both Cincinnati and Baltimore, large-scale festivals (Blink and Light City, respectively) connect light-based art with urban architecture, music, and public celebration. With Pacific Standard Time, Los Angeles has mounted one of the country’s most ambitious attempts to unite a community through art: A series of thematically connected exhibitions at institutions large and small, encouraging deeper engagement and exploration of the cultural offerings throughout the city.

Though public arts organizations are designed to extend beyond the brick-and-mortar boundaries that constrain traditional museums, the latter can still take a cue from their broad-reaching counterparts and respond to community struggles as they arise.

The Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA launch party in Grand Park, 2017. Photo by Ryan Miller/Capture Imaging.

Indeed, innovative spaces and events are cropping up in New York and beyond in order to address such issues. The Shed, which will open in 2019, claims to be “the first arts center designed to commission, produce, and present all types of performing arts, visual arts, and popular culture.” Its inaugural program includes work by writer Anne Carson, filmmaker Steve McQueen, and director Chen Shi-Zheng (who’s conceiving an “immersive multimedia interpretation of a Chinese myth”). Alex Poots, who previously directed the Manchester International Festival and the Park Avenue Armory—another multimedia-friendly institution in New York—is at the helm.  

It’s also important to note that inclusivity measures should span beyond ethnicity, language, socioeconomic status, and education level. The Metropolitan Museum of Art provides multi-sensory workshops for children with autism. At MoMA, Francesca Rosenberg, the museum’s director of community, access, and school programs, has undertaken major efforts to reframe disability among her staff. She sought to help her colleagues “embrace the social model of disability, which emphasizes that limitations and impairments are a normal part of the human condition and that what actually disables people are systemic barriers, negative attitudes, and exclusion by society.”

To that end, Rosenberg established an “Accessibility Task Force” to address issues of inclusivity; created a special program for visitors with Alzheimer’s; initiated a studio program for visitors with developmental disabilities; and recruited artists to help with her efforts. From creating a video loop with amplified sound for the hard-of-hearing to generating verbal descriptions of performance pieces, artists from Christian Marclay to Walid Raad have reached broader audiences thanks to small efforts and encouragements by the institution.

Digital strategies

Twenty-first-century museums now exist far beyond their walls, and so should their accessibility efforts. Institutions’ websites are often the first point of contact for their audiences, and they’re getting creative with their operations in the digital space. The Brooklyn Museum’s ASK app allows visitors to upload a snapshot of an artwork and ask any corresponding question they may have. Trained employees immediately field the inquiries, sometimes infusing their responses with their own opinions (as opposed to a rote message).

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Send Me app is similarly interactive. Anyone, inside the museum or out, can text “send me” to the number 572-51, requesting a particular color or thing. The app automatically responds by sending an image of a related artwork from the collection.

The Getty360 app, built for the Getty Center and Villa in Los Angeles, allows users to filter content by their preferences: events, talks, family, food, et cetera. In-depth glimpses of exhibitions allow deeper engagement with particular artworks and ideas. The trick, of course, is to enhance the museum-going experience, not replace it.

Finally, an app called Smartify launched last fall, billing itself as a kind of Shazam for artworks. Users can scan a work at a roster of museums that includes the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Met, and receive supplemental information in return. Instead of reprimanding millennial phone users, such institutions are beginning to cater to them. Museums become friendlier places; like a good friend, they’re just a text message away.

But undertaking major digital endeavors, making a museum free to enter, financing staff member positions to support accessibility, and broadening the scope of educational programming are all noble goals that often require something far more base: money.

$$$

American museums receive most of their funding privately. The typical complaint here is that wealthy individuals, whose net worth derives from a variety of sources, are making the decisions that drive museum staffing and programming.

Most notably, the Sackler family (patrons of the Brooklyn Museum, the Dia Art Foundation, the Guggenheim Museum, and a variety of non-art institutions) is currently under fire for projecting a spirit of philanthropy with money earned from OxyContin sales, which have contributed to the nationwide opioid epidemic.

Yet, says Ludwig, private funding isn’t always necessarily a negative. “We are not beholden to the needs of our government,” she says. Alternatively, U.S. institutions often require donations from board members to fulfill costs.

“We have to create these ways in which a general public from a wide variety of backgrounds feels like the institutions speak directly to them.”

Again, Ludwig views this as a positive. “Individuals are coming together to realize the dreams and ambitions of these cultural institutions,” she says. Governing bodies put up their own money, signifying just how critical museums are for framing our societies. This system also avoids unilateral and narrow thinking: Ludwig offers that she’s “never met a board where everybody sees something the exact same way.”

Money, and where it comes from, is always a dicey topic. When asked about museums’ acceptance of funds from corporations or boards, Raicovich offers: “One of the hardest parts of doing any of this work right now is delving into that complexity, rather that pretending it’s a black-and-white situation.” It’s important to be cognizant of where money comes from, but it’s perhaps more important to do the right thing with it.

Ludwig goes so far as to suggest that museums are more important than ever, despite the persistent complaints, protests, and negations they face. “Visual language is becoming privileged as the lingua franca of the younger generation,” she says, pointing out our growing reliance on communication via image-based memes and emojis. “We have to create these ways in which a general public from a wide variety of backgrounds feels like the institutions speak directly to them.”

from Artsy News

[apsbicepstraining]

The chicken store mile and how Britain went fat

With cheap and fattening nutrient everywhere, the committee had been a condition alter that intends beings do not recognise obesity when they see it in the mirror

The Mile End Road in east London is awash with chicken browses not homes to buy fresh poultry but takeaways where the lubricant is always rippling and everything comes with microchips. One patch of chicken in batter with fries and a can of full-sugar sip for PS1. 99. Two segments for PS2. 79. “Theres” utilitarian counters inside with red-faced and white plastic cloths and large containers of ketchup, but many of the customers feed as they stray home in their school uniform.

In this London borough Tower Hamlets one in eight children starting elementary school are obese, and that doubleds to more than one in four when they leave, at age 11. The parish has the fifth-highest rate of child obesity in London and the sixth in the country.

Sir Sam Everington, a GP, deplores the chicken patronize mile that begins merely a short path from his innovative Bromley-by-Bow health centre, where social and psychological questions are taken as seriously as the diseases that producing parties in. There are all sorts of reasons why people become obese, but the 42 chicken patronizes per secondary school in the parish are definitely among them.

The child obesity digits are a disaster, is in accordance with Everington, who chairs the boroughs clinical commissioning group. Its a spectrum of hunger, he says over coffee in the delightful cafe that is an integral part of the health core. My assumption is everything their own children are malnourished.

Chicken patronizes on Mile End Road, east London. Composite: Graeme Robertson

One of the worlds more affluent municipalities has children with questions we acquire do not subsist outside the developing world. Hunger is not just about starvation. And apart from the real danger that obesity will lead to heart disease, stroking and cancer in later life, the diet children are chewing too leads to vitamin shortages and mouths full of rotten teeth.

For the NHS, this scenario is destroying. Even now, character 2 diabetes which relates to obesity eats nearly a 10 th of the annual budget. There is some proof that the rise in obesity in children nationally may have stumbled a plateau, but it is stabilising , not removing. And weight particularly in adults but also in children is very hard to switch, thanks to our inbuilt biological excuses. Our metabolism dramatically slow-going weight loss after a couple of months to prevent us starving to death.

Graph obesity in UK

Obesity is the new smoking, Simon Stevens, NHS Englands chief executive, has told the Guardian. It represents a slow-motion car clang to its implementation of avoidable illness and rising healthcare expenses. If as a commonwealth we prevent piling on the pounds around the waistline, well be piling on the pounds in terms of future taxes necessitated simply to keep the NHS afloat.

Britain invests more on obesity-related healthcare rates than on the police, the fire services, prisons and the criminal justice system blended, he says. Obesity-related status expense the NHS PS6bn a year and rising. The diabetes invoice is PS9bn more. Its not just the wellbeing of beings in this country and our children, but its too the sustainability of the NHS itself, Stevens said.

The NHS has to prevent people growing ill in the first place. Stevens lately pledged a price rise for sugary sips sold on NHS propositions to staff and patients. Its a start, but theres a long way to go.

Obseity

Around the country, merely the type of takeaway goes, from fried chicken to fish in calorie-loaded batter to curries and burgers( all offered with sugary alcohols ). The difficulty is the same. A cultural transformation has taken place over the past few decades. Cheap and fattening nutrient is everywhere in pub, eateries, fast-food shops and supermarkets. A chassis alter has followed. Those living in areas where people are mainly overweight no longer recognise obesity where reference is gazes back at them from the mirror.

In the north-east of England, Sean Woodcock, a bariatric surgeon, are dealing here with the consequences. There is a treatment that works, “but its” drastic and not for everybody. Stomach-shrinking surgery actions those who go through it to devours little, because they appear full after minuscule sums of meat. Beings shed significant amounts of weight, get out of their wheelchairs and regain their lives. But its a hard street to travelling and Woodcock tells them so.

Bariatric surgeon Sean Woodcock contains a framework of a stomach. Photo: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian

At a meeting in Monkseaton medical core near Newcastle, where the Northumbria healthcare NHS foundation trust has taken over infinite for a dedicated bariatric outpatient gang, Woodcock looks all over the semicircle of morbidly obese surgery nominees sitting on extra large chairs. He flicks up a slip of a glinting cartoon fairy godmother. I guided out of fairy dust a long time ago, he tells them. There is no quick fix. It is hard work before the surgery because it is hard work after surgery. Motivated and advised patients get the best results.

Who has had a takeaway in the last week? he questions. A couple of handwritings go up. In the last month? Most handwritings are in the breath. That has to end, he tells them. Who boozes fizzies daddy? Everybody does. Some of my patients drink litres of the stuff every day, he says. My patients booze three or four litre-bottles of full fortitude[ sugar-sweetened] and say: I dont know why I dont lose weight, Mr Woodcock.

Graph obesity in Europe

Beer is an underestimated question, very. John Smiths contains 250 calories a beer and Stella Artois 300. Ten pints is up to 2,500 or 3,000 calories and thats without going for your kebab, he tells them.

Nobody goes surgery without undertaking a weight handling direction, in which they find themselves teach about diet and nutrition, fitness and exercise. They must demonstrate they are serious by misplacing a significant amount of load thats where the avoidance of takeaways and fizzy pa be coming back.

And they must also learn how to eat, pole surgery. Some meat, such as bread and chewy meat, will not go down. They cannot booze and eat at the same occasion there must be at least half an hour between. Meals will be tiny. Anita Attala, expert dietitian at the unit, says: You cant have the sugared occasions and you have to eat in a certain lane and munch the nutrient well. There is a risk of malnutrition and people must take vitamin supplements.

It represents a slow-motion vehicle clang in terms of avoidable illness and rising healthcare payments. Simon Stevens Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian

The staff, unlike much of the public, have infinite approbation for the people they ascertain. In most cases, there are mental prompts behind the load amplification and many people have cleared big efforts to lose weight. The vast majority are on a diet cycles/second, says Attala. They follow a commercial-grade nutrition, lose weight, plateau and then pile everything there is on again. They start again and neglect again. Commercial slimming organisations know it happens. Its why it is such a good business prototype. It is demoralising for parties because they think its their lack. We had one patient “whos been” been a slimmer of the year.

Claire Browell has been trying to lose weight since she was 18 Weight Watchers, Slimming World, commercial-grade foods, capsules you appoint it, she has done it. Aged 41, she was morbidly obese, with arthritis in her knees. She could not walk and was depressed. She has managed to lose more than 19 kg( 3 stone) on the educational weight handling its programs and Woodcock has just countenanced her for surgery on 15 June. She is joyous.

She has taken to heart what Woodcock tells his patients that obesity-related cancers could cut their lifespan by 11 years. But Browell has not gone into this gently. Surgery has its own risks. I have two children and it was a example of who is going to look after them if something happens to me? she says. If anything bad is going to happen, it is generally happens to me. Who would look after my sons?

But eventually she came to realise her fortunes were worse without surgery. Who would look after the boys if she died from a blow or heart attack as a result of her weight?

Claire Browell. Photo: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian

Stevens says bariatric surgery is not the answer for all 1.4 million people who are severely obese. It would cost PS8. 4bn same to the pledged authority increase in the NHS budget by 2021. It could bankrupt the health services. The explanation, he says, has to lie upstream. We have to prevent obesity in the first place.

Everington concurs. It should begin with babies and breastfeeding, which safeguards children against excessive load gain. In academies, the GP says, I personally think health should be a obligatory part of the curriculum, ahead of maths and English. What is more important in life than health? I exactly miss my kids to be happy and healthy. So all children should be taught cooking throughout their school vocation, and they need to run about much more. He quotes the Stirling primary school that cut its obesity pace to zeroby instituting a one-mile running or gait every day for all staff and pupils.

Outside school, we need safe cycles/second roads( Tower Hamlets is constructing them ), commons and restrictions on brand-new takeaways. The existing practice cannot be closed. And, says Everington, GP practises, schools and other “communitys institutions” must all understand that they are well placed to help changeour minds about the method we live and its impact on our health. A culture alteration adjusted us off down this road. There needs to be another.

Sarah Boseley is the author of The Shape Were In: how junk food and nutritions are abridging our lives, published by Guardian Faber .

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A Peek Inside the Strange World of Fake Academia

Kevin Carey, NY Times, Dec. 29, 2016

The caller ID on my office telephone said the number was from Las Vegas, but when I picked up the receiver I heard what sounded like a busy overseas call center in the background. The operator, “John,” asked if I would be interested in attending the 15th World Cardiology and Angiology Conference in Philadelphia next month.

“Do I have to be a doctor?” I said, because I’m not one. I got the call because 20 minutes earlier I had entered my phone number into a website run by a Hyderabad, India, company called OMICS International.

“You can have the student rate,” the man replied. With a 20 percent discount, it would be $599. The conference was in just a few weeks, I pointed out--would that be enough time for the academic paper I would be submitting to be properly reviewed? (Again, I know nothing about cardiology.) It would be approved on an “expedited basis” within 24 hours, he replied, and he asked which credit card I would like to use.

If it seems that I was about to be taken, that’s because I was. OMICS International is a leader in the growing business of academic publication fraud. It has created scores of “journals” that mimic the look and feel of traditional scholarly publications, but without the integrity. This year the Federal Trade Commission formally charged OMICS with “deceiving academics and researchers about the nature of its publications and hiding publication fees ranging from hundreds to thousands of dollars.”

OMICS is also in the less well-known business of what might be called conference fraud, which is what led to the call from John. Both schemes exploit a fundamental weakness of modern higher education: Academics need to publish in order to advance professionally, get better jobs or secure tenure. Even within the halls of respectable academia, the difference between legitimate and fake publications and conferences is far blurrier than scholars would like to admit.

OMICS is on the far end of the “definitely fake” spectrum. Real academic conferences evaluate potential participants by subjecting proposed papers and presentations to a rigorous peer-review process. Some 15,000 people attend the American Educational Research Association’s annual conference, for example, and only about a third of submitted proposals are accepted.

In October, a New Zealand college professor submitted a paper to the OMICS-sponsored “International Conference on Atomic and Nuclear Physics,” which was held last month at the Hilton Atlanta Airport. It was written using the autocomplete feature on his iPhone, which produced an abstract that begins as follows: “Atomic Physics and I shall not have the same problem with a separate section for a very long long way. Nuclear weapons will not have to come out the same day after a long time of the year he added the two sides will have the two leaders to take the same way to bring up to their long ways of the same as they will have been a good place for a good time at home the united front and she is a great place for a good time.”

The paper was accepted within three hours.

An OMICS employee who identified himself as Sam Dsouza said conference papers are reviewed by its “experts” within 24 hours of submission. He couldn’t provide a list of its reviewers or their credentials.

Having dispensed with academic standards, OMICS makes money on volume. Its conferenceseries.com website lists hundreds of so-called academic meetings, many at vacation destinations like Las Vegas and Orlando, Fla. On Dec. 1 and 2, the “2nd International Congress on Neuroimmunology and Therapeutics,” the “13th International Conference on Vaccines, Therapeutics and Travel Medicine: Influenza and Infectious Diseases,” and the “International Conference on Clinical and Medical Genetics” were all held, simultaneously, at the Hilton Atlanta Airport.

Stacking multiple fake conferences at the same hotel is a common practice, says Jeffrey Beall, a tenured University of Colorado Denver librarian. He maintains a website for identifying “predatory open access scholarly publishers” that masquerade as scholarly journals, but are actually in the business of pumping out worthless articles and exploiting scholars with hidden fees. “You just rent a hotel, make up a name and stand around while everyone is reading their papers,” Mr. Beall says. “It’s easy money.”

Mr. Beall’s list, which has grown to 923 publishers from 18 in 2011, also includes a British company called the “Infonomics Society.” Like OMICS, it publishes a raft of journals, 17 in all, with legitimately dry-sounding titles like “International Journal of Sustainable Energy Development.” Mr. Beall calls Infonomics an “impostor scholarly society” that is “designed to generate as much revenue as possible.” All 17 journals are run by a single person named Charles Shoniregun out of a modest two-story attached brick home in the outer suburbs of London.

Infonomics also sponsors a series of conferences. But when I looked into one of them, the “World Conference on Special Needs Education,” or W.C.S.N.E., the story was more complex than I expected.

Like many predatory publishers, the Infonomics website for W.C.S.N.E. has a certain word-salad, shaky-command-of-English-syntax quality familiar to anyone who reads the spam folder in their email. “The Infonomics Society has an established reputation for promoting research esteem that is valued by research community,” it says. The W.C.S.N.E. is attended by “Policy Makers and Stakeholders who care deeply about bringing creative, innovative and rigorous learning practices barriers.”

The W.C.S.N.E. paper submissions guidelines warn that all papers must be strictly limited to “a total of 4 to 6 pages.” That includes all figures, tables and references. Robert Kelchen, a professor of higher education at Seton Hall, says that this is “a red flag.” Education research papers are typically much longer, he notes--the tables and reference pages alone can run to double digits. But short papers are easier to pack into a single “journal.”

The website included a long list of “Program Committee members” with impressive academic credentials, as well as “Keynote Speakers” for the coming conference, scheduled to be held in August at Temple University, the W.C.S.N.E. host for the last three years.

But when I contacted those identified as committee members and speakers, many immediately replied that they had no idea they were on the website and had no affiliation with the W.C.S.N.E. The announced keynote speakers told me they were nothing of the kind. Within 24 hours of my inquiries, someone removed their names and biographies from the site and replaced them with a page that said “Keynote Speakers to be Announced!”

A spokesman for Temple, Hillel Hoffmann, said the university condemned “predatory open-access publishing” and said no university money had been spent on the conference. He said that special-needs learners in the community, including adult literacy students, had attended parts of the conference and had benefited from it, but that none had paid to participate. He added that the W.C.S.N.E. would no longer take place at Temple.

Richard Cooper, the director of disability services at Harcum College, a private two-year institution in Philadelphia, helped create W.C.S.N.E. along with Mr. Shoniregun. He says he has no involvement with the paper selection process or financial aspects of the conference, simply serving as an organizer, presenter and master of ceremonies. He described it as a worthwhile gathering of scholars, many of whom live in Africa and India and pay hundreds of dollars in conference fees to attend.

The papers presented at previous W.C.S.N.E. conferences don’t appear to have been composed using the autocomplete function on an iPhone. They mostly describe small qualitative studies and surveys that examine well-established ideas, break little new ground and use statistical jargon to make their findings seem more complicated than they really are. They very likely would be rejected by the American Educational Research Association. But they are also well within the bounds of what gets published in many scholarly journals that, while not prestigious, have never been called a fraud.

Barba Patton, an education professor at the University of Houston-Victoria in Victoria, Tex., defended the W.C.S.N.E. unreservedly. “I have attended ten to fifteen of the conferences in the U.S., Canada and in Europe,” she wrote via email. “I have no concerns about the website. You must remember that the conference reaches many who are using the British English rather than the American.”

Mr. Shoniregun did not respond to messages sent to his several email addresses. But he appears to have created a kind of hybrid conference that combines the shady, volume-first internet marketing practices of OMICS with the more quotidian inattention to academic rigor that characterizes much of legitimate academia.

Take the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), by all accounts a legitimate organization. This year, Peter Dreier, chair of the Urban and Environmental Policy department at Occidental College, described how he submitted a proposal full of jargon, misquotation, non sequitur and general academic gobbledygook to an international conference sponsored by the 4S. It was accepted. “I look forward to meeting you in Tokyo,” the panel organizer wrote.

Lucy Suchman, a sociologist at Britain’s Lancaster University and the president of 4S, acknowledges that the abstract review process is “not perfect” and that she would have rejected Mr. Dreier’s submission. But, she notes, 4S reviews hundreds of submissions every year with an “assumption of good faith.” It would not have occurred to them that someone of Mr. Dreier’s standing in academia was engaged in such an “unfortunate prank,” she said, emphasizing the overall high quality of 4S presentations.

There are real, prestigious journals and conferences in higher education that enforce and defend the highest standards of scholarship. But there are also many more Ph.D.-holders than there is space in those publications, and those people are all in different ways subject to the “publish or perish” system of professional advancement. The academic journal-and-conference system is subject to no real outside oversight. Standards are whatever the scholars involved say they are.

So it’s not surprising that some academics have chosen to give one another permission to accumulate publication credits on their C.V.’s and spend some of the departmental travel budget on short holidays. Nor is it surprising that some canny operators have now realized that when standards are loose to begin with, there are healthy profits to be made in the gray areas of academe.