#apparently we are now calling covid an individual problem not a pandemic

[emoclone]

[recentlyheardcom]

'San Francisco is like a failed state': Joe Rogan hammers the 'next level' crime in the Golden Gate City — which is fast 'becoming a ghost town.' Is he right?Podcaster Joe Rogan has taken a shot at San Francisco, calling out the California city for its “next level” lawlessness and disorder.In conversation with stand-up comedian and actor Gabriel Iglesias on a recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, Rogan said: “San Francisco is like a failed state."Don't missThe two men agreed that crime in the city is “next level.”“No one’s stopping anybody from doing anything,” Rogan added. “It’s crazy how quick San Francisco has [declined]. Everyone’s pulling out of there. Hotels are pulling out. Chains like Walgreens are pulling out.”Businesses have been fleeing downtown San Francisco to the extent that “it’s becoming a ghost town,” according to Iglesias, who added: “And they’re not pumping the breaks on it.”Now, the pair did make these comments from the comfort of Rogan’s podcast studio in Austin, Texas. But is San Francisco as bad as they make it out to be?Retail crimeOne type of crime that has apparently been on the rise in San Francisco is retail crime.In a brazen example, CNN Senior National Correspondent Kyung Lah claimed to witness three thefts in 30 minutes while filming a television report on July 24 at the Walgreens in San Francisco’s Richmond neighborhood. News cameras captured at least one individual walking out of the pharmacy without paying for any items. Many products at the store are kept under lock and key.Read more: Thanks to Jeff Bezos, you can now use $100 to cash in on prime real estate — without the headache of being a landlord. Here's howStory continuesIn recent months, several retail giants — including Nordstrom, H&M, Marshall's, Gap, Banana Republic, Anthropologie and Office Depot — have announced they’re pulling out of some San Francisco locations. Crime levels were cited as playing a role in some of these decisions.Rising concern over retail crime is not isolated to the Golden Gate City. According to a report from the National Retail Federation, a majority of retailers surveyed between 2020 and 2022 reported annual increases in organized retail crime activity at their stores.To combat the problem, Home Depot CEO Ted Decker announced in June that the home improvement company would be “investing in more security guards” to protect the safety of its employees and customers. This decision sadly followed the deaths of two Home Depot employees during theft incidents.'A ghost town'To call downtown San Francisco a “ghost town” may be a bit of an exaggeration, but there are several factors playing into this perception.When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the city’s tech-heavy workforce embraced remote work and its return to the office has been slow. According to real estate company Savills, San Francisco had one of the lowest office availability rates in the U.S. before the pandemic at 9.5%; however, vacancy is now 30%, a 30-year high.This major drop in in-office workers has contributed to the diminishment of the city’s once-buzzing downtown core. Even hotels are cutting their losses and bidding farewell to the city.John Chachas, the CEO of Gump’s, a 166-year-old department store in San Francisco, recently penned a chilling review of the current state of play.“As we prepare for our 166th holiday season at 250 Post Street, we fear this may be our last,” Chacas wrote in an open letter to California Governor Gavin Newsom, Mayor London Breed, and the city’s Board of Supervisors, published as a paid advertisement in the San Francisco Chronicle.“San Francisco now suffers from a ‘tyranny of the minority’ — behavior and actions of the few that jeopardize the livelihood of the many.“The ramifications of COVID policies advising people to abandon their offices are only beginning to be understood. Equally devastating have been a litany of destructive San Francisco strategies, including allowing the homeless to occupy our sidewalks, to

openly distribute and use illegal drugs, to harass the public and to defile the city’s streets.”What to read nextThis article provides information only and should not be construed as advice. It is provided without warranty of any kind.

[thatguywhoplaysmusicloud]

Yeah, Digital Equity it's really important!

When someone lacks the resources to fully participate in our modern online culture they are experiencing what is now called the digital divide.  These resources can be technologically related e.g. modern hardware or broadband internet capable of accessing the internet.  The resources can also be educationally related e.g. knowledge on how to implement / maintain these systems or even the lack of digital literacy or know-how to participate in online culture.  Digital equity can be thought of as the tools, resources or education needed for everyone to be able to equally participate in our online culture.

The National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA), defines digital equity “as a condition in which all individuals and communities have the information technology capacity needed for full participation in our society, democracy and economy”.  So much of our culture is currently available online.  As technology continues to develop we will enter broad new digital frontiers, but these resources in whatever form they may take will only be accessible by those who are on the “right” side of the digital divide.  Individuals who have the resources and knowledge to engage online are at a significant advantage compared to those who lack access.  “Access to information is the key to an individual's position in society” (Radovanovic, 2011).  Digital equity is the attempt at a solution to the problem of the digital divide.  Effectively digital equity bridges the digital divide!  To have digital equity means everyone has the same online access to governmental and political resources, educational and employment opportunities, as well as social networking and online participatory culture. 

When we think of the digital divide it is important to realize the reality of not having access to digital technology, knowledge or skills and how this can have adverse outcomes:

Healthcare access - nearly all major healthcare providers now have online access for patients to their medical records, appointments, and consultation services.  “The American Public Health Association now recognizes that Broadband Internet Access Is a Social Determinant of Health!” (Benda & Ancker, 2020)

Educational opportunity - According to the UN “A staggering two-thirds of world’s school-aged children – 1.3 billion children aged 3-17 – do not have internet connection in their homes, preventing them from learning vital skills needed to compete in the modern economy, a new UN report has revealed.”  Adults are also adversely affected by the same lack of access to educational opportunities.   “This gap perpetuates unequal learning outcomes and has been particularly difficult during the COVID-19 pandemic.” (deSantillana, 2020)

Economic opportunity - Affecting both employees and employers, “lack of quality broadband means decreased economic opportunities and competitiveness in the digital economy.” (Muller, 2022)

Social and networking opportunities - This an overarching complexity - As so much of our own social needs are met online through social media sites, chatting, video conferencing, etc.  Those without access will be unable to enjoy the same benefits (group affiliation, political research, etc) that open up with social networking.  

In conclusion it’s very apparent that a widening digital divide can have dire consequences for our society.  It is imperative we strive find some form digital equity so that we are all represented equally and have equal access to all that life online has to offer.

Sources

Benda, N. and Ancker, J., “Broadband Internet Access Is a Social Determinant of Health!”, 2020, https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.2020.305784

Definitions. National Digital Inclusion Alliance. (2021). https://www.digitalinclusion.org/definitions/.

deSantillana A., “Internet Society“COVID-19 Magnifies Inequality in Internet Accessibility”, 2020, https://www.internetsociety.org/news/press-releases/2020/covid-19-magnifies-inequality-in-internet-accessibility/

Muller, C., “What Is the Digital Divide?”, 2022, https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/2022/03/what-is-the-digital-divide/

Radovanovic, D.,”Digital Divide and Social Media: Connectivity Doesn't End the Digital Divide, Skills Do”, 2011, https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/digital-divide-and-social-media-connectivity-doesnt-end-the-digital-divide-skills-do/

UN News, “A ‘digital canyon’: 1.3 billion school-aged children can’t log on to internet at home.”, 2020, https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/12/1078872

[tonkipenny]

Bible commentary on simon the sorcerer

BIBLE COMMENTARY ON SIMON THE SORCERER HOW TO

13 Simon himself believed and was baptized. 12 But when they believed Philip as he proclaimed the good news of the kingdom of God ( D) and the name of Jesus Christ, they were baptized, ( E) both men and women. He boasted that he was someone great, ( B) 10 and all the people, both high and low, gave him their attention and exclaimed, “This man is rightly called the Great Power of God.” ( C) 11 They followed him because he had amazed them for a long time with his sorcery. His consort Helen was regarded by his followers as the earthly manifestation of Athena.9 Now for some time a man named Simon had practiced sorcery ( A) in the city and amazed all the people of Samaria. In the 2nd century a Simonian sect arose that viewed Simon Magus as the first God, or Father, and he was sometimes worshipped as the incarnation of the Greek god Zeus. The mythic form of these documents raises doubts as to whether the biblical Simon Magus and the Simon of later apocryphal sources are the same. Simon’s quasi-Trinitarian Gnostic teaching, wherein he, with the title “the Great Power of God,” appeared to the Jews as a mediating, suffering “Son of God,” to the Samaritans as “Father,” and to the pagan world as “Holy Spirit,” is contained in the early Christian writings known as the Clementine literature. Still other sources portray him as the individual responsible for the eclectic fusion of Stoicism and Gnosticism, known as “The Great Pronouncement.” According to legend, on challenging the Apostle before the emperor Nero (54–68), Simon fell to his destruction from atop the Roman Forum in an attempt to demonstrate his occult ability to fly. Other Christian documents of the 3rd century state that Simon Magus, in the role of false Messiah, had further confrontations with St. Archaeological finds reputed to have confirmed Simon’s divinization have not proved genuine. The 2nd-century theologian Justin Martyr relates that Simon visited Rome at the time of the emperor Claudius (41–54) and was there deified by followers fascinated with his miracle working. The biblical account concludes with Simon’s repentance and apparent reconciliation with Christianity after his condemnation by St. Having been revered by the people of northern Palestine as possessing vast preternatural powers, Simon Magus manifested his own admiration for the power of Christian evangelization when, in the New Testament story, he requested Baptism from Philip the Deacon. Later references in certain early Christian writings identify him as the founder of post-Christian Gnosticism, a dualist religious sect advocating salvation through secret knowledge, and as the archetypal heretic of the Christian Church. Simon, according to the New Testament account in Acts of the Apostles 8:9–24, after becoming a Christian, offered to purchase from the Apostles Peter and John the supernatural power of transmitting the Holy Spirit, thus giving rise to the term simony ( q.v.) as the buying or selling of sacred things or ecclesiastical office. Simon Magus, (Latin), English Simon the Magician, or The Sorcerer, (flourished 1st century ad), practitioner of magical arts who probably came from Gitta, a village in biblical Samaria.

SpaceNext50 Britannica presents SpaceNext50, From the race to the Moon to space stewardship, we explore a wide range of subjects that feed our curiosity about space!.

Learn about the major environmental problems facing our planet and what can be done about them!

Saving Earth Britannica Presents Earth’s To-Do List for the 21st Century.

Britannica Beyond We’ve created a new place where questions are at the center of learning.

100 Women Britannica celebrates the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment, highlighting suffragists and history-making politicians.

BIBLE COMMENTARY ON SIMON THE SORCERER HOW TO

COVID-19 Portal While this global health crisis continues to evolve, it can be useful to look to past pandemics to better understand how to respond today.Student Portal Britannica is the ultimate student resource for key school subjects like history, government, literature, and more.From tech to household and wellness products. Britannica Explains In these videos, Britannica explains a variety of topics and answers frequently asked questions.This Time in History In these videos, find out what happened this month (or any month!) in history.#WTFact Videos In #WTFact Britannica shares some of the most bizarre facts we can find.Demystified Videos In Demystified, Britannica has all the answers to your burning questions.Britannica Classics Check out these retro videos from Encyclopedia Britannica’s archives.

[victimhood]

Nicolò Di Genova: “Football is my faith, San Siro is my church”

The Guardian, 22 May 2028

“I have no regrets, not even the World Cup.” Inter Milan captain Nicolò Di Genova has announced his retirement from club football. He will play on with the national squad for the 2028 Euros this summer, where his country plays host, his swan song before the final bow.

The man and the mystery started out as a 7 year old with the youth side of Genoa Cricket and Football Club, the oldest football team in Italy. He played with his hometown club for 10 years, making nearly 30 appearances for the under-17s before moving on to the Primavera side, where he established himself as a regular starter at the center of defence. Before the age of 18, he was named to the first team bench, and after only 3 starting appearances, he was snapped up by Inter Milan for €30 million.

A crowded roster meant that he was loaned out to get playing time, and he made his way to England, for the Wolverhampton Wolves under the prophetic Nuno Espírito Santo. The Wolves were a well-regarded team of underdogs, and during his spell, the team reached the semifinals of the FA Cup and achieved a 7th place finish, sneaking into the Europa League under special circumstances.

He was recalled to Inter Milan from the 2019-2020 season onwards, a season of unusual circumstances when the COVID-19 pandemic spiraled in Italy, leading to the declaration of a total lockdown in early March 2020 that delayed the season end until August of the same year. The pandemic also meant that the 2020 Euros were postponed to the following year. Where the early buzz was that this player might be Chiellini’s heir in the lineage of great Italian defenders, it was the summer of 2021 that he sealed his place as the heir apparent.

Against a host of superstars old and new, in a tournament star-studded with the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo, Kylian Mbappé, and Erling Haaland, one man rose to brutalize them all. Fearless, reckless, and with a single-minded focus on preventing a goal at all costs, Di Genova was the insatiable black hole to these superstars, swallowing all their light and shine, with no regard to the entertainment value of TV audiences worldwide. Quickly building a reputation as a fearsome menace and a bully, his playing style did not make for attractive viewing, at times defying the stereotype of the measured Italian defender with his English-style grit as if in homage to the origins of his boyhood club.

Then again, the best central defenders make the most natural candidates for captaincy, and this is where Di Genova’s reputation acquired some polish. After a league-winning 2020-2021 season beset with financial problems, in which the majority of Inter players went unpaid for months, the older players and bigger names were sold to keep the club liquid. Di Genova found himself in the fortuitous position of going from substitute captain to a permanent one, at the tender age of 24. Blessed with a chiseled face like a Roman statue, emanating a raw, unbridled masculinity and sporting a fresh haircut that signaled the beginning of the post-vaccine era, his popularity began to surge on account of being the subject of viral memes.

Adversity sometimes breeds success, and in the midst of Inter Milan’s financial turmoil, together with Yusuf Al Kaysani and Dominik Brunczvik, he formed the steadfast backbone of Antonio Conte’s old-school catenaccio-flavored 3-5-2. Discipline, organization and solidity were key values, leading to a consecutive scudetto win even as the club had to undergo financial restructuring. His partnership with Yusuf Al Kaysani in particular withstood the onslaught of uncertainty that plagued the club for years, and a revolving door of managers who flip flopped between a back three and back four lineup. At Inter, they were the new “silk and steel” in the tradition of Claudio Gentile and Gaetano Scirea, with Di Genova providing the mettle and Al Kaysani the flair.

Though he is not a one club man, his near decade of service at Inter Milan have made him the bastion of loyalty, earning the undying adulation of all Interisti. Other clubs have tried to come knocking, and yet those efforts to lure him away never amounted to much. His devotion to the club is such that even rival fans cite him as a player with old-school values they truly respect, in a world where money speaks loudest.

For all his loyalty to his club, there is one other that takes precedence—the national team. Sometimes seeming like he stepped off from a different era into the modern game, Di Genova radiates the energy of a classic man-of-the-people footballer for whom a call-up to the national team is the highest honor. Putting in solid performances in the 2022 World Cup, Italy made it to the finals with the fewest goals conceded, only to lose the trophy to Germany in a penalty shootout. By Euro 2024, he was named captain of the Azzurri, and he took his team to an inspired victory over Belgium. As for the 2026 World Cup, despite the controversy of the final, it was his ability to stop important goals that brought the Azzurri there, and he has a winner’s medal to prove his worth despite being unable to lift the trophy.

A fiercely private individual, he keeps his personal life strictly out of the public eye. This hard boundary only serves to further the enigma and mystique, such that he is spoken of with the kind of mythos usually reserved for the ancient gods. He started out as a brute and a bully, the burden of captaincy taming his wilder impulses, with years of dependability to burnish his credibility. He now has the unassailable reputation of a great military general, a charismatic leader able to command authority over a field of jostling, overinflated egos.

Never one to shy from an ugly victory when the circumstances call for it, he provided the grit and backbone to Andy Skifska’s glitzy, fast-attacking team. Trusted by Skifska to lock the deadbolt across goal, he finally achieved the coveted Champions League in the 2026-2027 season, with a garnish of the Club World Cup in 2028.

He retires as someone who has taken his team to victory in every major tournament, the faithful servant of club and country. Within Italy, he is an undisputed national hero with a permanent spot in the pantheon of calcio greats. To his legions of adoring fans, he remains a former heartthrob, or absolute beast, depending on who you ask, and a role model and cautionary tale at the same time.

It is difficult to get any quotes from the man himself, but when asked about his retirement plans at the final league match of the season, he coyly replies, “I am going to take a long holiday, and then, we will see.”

(taken from Chapter 103 of The Beautiful Game)

[mostweakhamlets]

genuine question: why is staged cringe?

I want to preface this by saying that I loved Staged initially. I thought it was a super cool concept with actors I’m fans of. I still think that it is a really cool concept! I think it’s great that these actors hatched this idea of acting from home over video chat. I love it when people are experimental. I love it when people break the status quo with art. 

However, I think that this is one of the downfalls with Staged. There’s so much potential there, and you really notice how much of that was squandered when you start noticing the things about the show that don’t sit right with you. At least, that’s how I felt. 

It really is a matter of, “I feel like this show aged poorly. For the love of God, make series two different.”

I have a lot to say about this, so I’ll put it under the cut and in sections haha

Superwomen

This was my biggest peeve with Staged. I felt like the women (mostly Anna and Georgia) couldn’t just exist. It felt so unnatural and so forced. Like “Look, these women are just any women.” 

I know that Georgia Tennant already has this sort of public image of being this super productive mom (which I have more feelings about but won’t go into it here). I think that’s awesome! But Staged hammed that up. I know that it was supposed be a satire version of her, but come on. She’s Supermom to the point that her husband is incompetent? That he really can’t make dinner for his own children? That he has to just reheat something she made that week? 

We see Georgia as the perfect woman—helps a friend with childbirth, writes a book, she apparently does all the cooking and cleaning (judging by how surprised she looks when she notices all the laundry folded and put away when she returns from the childbirth), and is the perfect mom and wife. And I know that she had little screentime, but why couldn’t we see any actual flaws? Why does she have to be Supermom every time we see her while her husband seemingly dicks around on Zoom all day? 

And then there’s Anna. She’s much more private than Georgia is irl, so she doesn’t already have this crafted public persona. We see less of her in Staged. The Tennants have more of a story than she and Michael do. And with that time, they really made sure to make… smart. I guess you could call it that. 

It felt like there was an attempt to make her smart when she had all this information about—what was it? Italian fascism?—on the top of her head. But it definitely felt “smart” in the way that men often think people are “smart.” They can just regurgitate facts rather than actually say anything constructive. It felt like she had just played Trivial Pursuit a lot or binged watched every single episode of QI. I’ve no idea why they felt the need to just awkwardly shoehorn that in when there are so many other ways to show that a woman is intelligent. 

It makes me wonder what the creative team thinks of women—at what point is a woman valuable in front of a camera? Could a character like me, who doesn’t know a lot of trivia or isn’t an exceptional cook or can be a birthing partner, earn screentime in a production by these men? Are women allowed to be flawed beyond “Haha yeah I’m eating cake while watching yoga videos” and agreeing to put recycling in someone else’s bin? 

Is there an oversaturation of the male ego in Staged? Kinda. It was all about three men’s shit show while girlfriends and wives stood in the background as flawless house partners. It feels like that bland brand of feminism that’s like, “Women can do anything! And that includes compensating for their male partner’s shortcomings!” 

Covid Insensitivities  

Back in March, we were all different people! We thought we saw a light at the end of the tunnel. We were watching TikToks and staying home and supporting essential workers. But things got very much worse. As an American, I’m terrified of what’s going to happen in my country alone. Much of the world has been hit hard, and government leaders all over are proving to be incompetent. 

But early summer/late spring was a different time. And when they filmed Staged, they had a Covid subplot with Michael’s neighbor. At the time, it felt fine. But now it feels icky, in my opinion. It feels wrong for rich people, safe in their homes, to craft a storyline where a fictional woman has Covid, and “It really affects me, Michael Sheen. I’m worried about this.” 

At the time, I felt like, “Is this really the angle they should have taken with such a serious global issue?” And now I feel like, “This is definitely not a subplot they should have gone with. Oh my God, I physically cannot watch Michael Sheen fake crying while on the phone with a doctor.” 

Their hearts were probably in the right place, but it aged terribly. I really hope that they don’t return to subplots like that in series two.

Which brings me to my next point: 

The Oh So Relatable Lives of Celebrities

The Covid-neighbor subplot felt wrong for another reason: it felt like a misguided attempt to look relatable to an audience who is probably a bit more exposed to the virus than these people sitting in their massive homes. 

I won’t go into this much because I don’t see it as a major issue. Again, at the time it felt fine. We thought we were all in this together, and these rich people really did get the common struggles: dealing with childcare, being cooped inside all day, etc. 

But again, things changed. 

I’m honestly tired (and a bit bitter) of seeing rich people trying to pose as having the same set of problems the rest of us do right now. Sure, it must be hard to raise five kids right now. But when this is over, the Tennants get their nanny back irl. Yes, it’s hard to stay inside all day with little outlets. But Michael Sheen irl 1) has actually been acting quite a bit during this, as we’ve seen now, with plenty of press and 2) has a huge garden and a magical little park he could always walk to. 

I can’t help but feel bitter as I sit in debt, unemployed, watching very well-off actors get irritable over lockdown. 

In General 

In general, Staged was fun at the time. It was cute, and I enjoyed watching it when it came out. It was during the “hopeful” stage of the pandemic, as I like to call it. Loans payments and rent payments were paused. Eviction was illegal. People who could, stayed home and watched TikToks. But now we’re in a different stage. 

A lot has happened, and a lot of places are refusing to shut down states/countries again for the sake of the economy. People are starting to realize how little their individual livelihoods matter to our governments. There are tense elections all over the world. There’s no relief being provided for people who desperately need it. 

I think that the sort of quirky Covid stories like Staged aren’t going to be necessarily enjoyable right now. Really, the last thing I want to see is rich people pretending like they’re struggling in their huge homes and with their presumably unlimited resources. 

I’m really holding my breath with series two. I hope that they go in a different direction than they did last time, or it’ll be a completely tone-deaf show to me. 

Like I said, there is so much you can do with a setup like Staged, but I think that they dropped the ball so many times that it just feels like someone else should take over this format. 

I’d completely understand if people disagree with me. These are just my criticisms of the show.

[cardiorespiratorymonitoring]

Why Buy a Breathing Price Display Throughout a Pandemic

While we are in the center of a pandemic, you can not truly take your eyes on what is happening around the globe. The COVID cases just keeps on boosting along with the death toll. The good news is, individuals staying at home end up making lots of babies in order to enhance the populace even more. Today, it is all about making sure you do not have it because you can be a carrier even if you do not have the symptoms. If there are old people in your home then you need to really ensure that you have a core temperature display so that you would have the ability to gauging your breathing price when the time comes that you assume you are losing it in terms of breathing. That would certainly take place more than normal for elders that are the risk for this particularly if they have other conditions that they are experiencing. For them, it is everything about controlling your diet in even more methods than one. After all, you recognize it won't be long before you would intend to just relax and see where you will certainly go to a few years from now. It will certainly be all about placing the operate in to make sure that you can complete your temporary goals. Now, you will be believing to yourself if you have the essential medical insurance to care for any type of expenses that would be connected with this. If you haven't then now is the moment to get one as you might pay for them yet you recognize they will be worth it because medicine and also medical professional's fees are recognized to be costly.

Most of us know just how trouble of breathing is the huge symptom of the infection so it is usually difficult to look past it even if you are immunized. Much better obtain a breathing price monitor in order to make certain because not every person in the nation is immunized. While we are still waiting on the resources, there is instantly a brand-new Delta version hitting the market and also it mosts likely to demonstrate how big this problem is. You can never really predict when this is mosting likely to finish as well as no one even saw this coming. The very best point to do would be to prevent social gatherings and just use group video calls for now. It is apparent you would intend to overtake them but going online is the method to do it for now. We all recognize how skin temperature displays ought to be kept somewhere secure even if you are not dealing with any type of covid signs and symptoms right now. you never truly know when you might need these points so much better just make certain that you have one. Much better find out how to utilize them way in advance. Obviously, you would certainly not intend to do that when you require to utilize them as there could be no time at all for it. Those cities that have actually lifted the mask required are considered fortunate. It isn't truly suggested in various other nations however.

[feministfocus]

How Entertainment Media has Fueled the “Perpetual Foreigner Syndrome”, and Its Implications.

by Netra Shetty

He was every single stereotype of South Asians encapsulated into one seemingly-innocent character. 

If you asked me at 9 years old if there was anything wrong with the depiction of Baljeet in the popular cartoon TV Show Phineas & Ferb, I would have looked at you with confusion. 

But now, I look back on episodes of the smart but socially inept Baljeet being bullied for his “nerdy” ways and complete physical weakness, watching as the racial stereotypes of my own culture are used purely for comedic relief. Unfortunately, these token ethnic characters like Baljeet rarely stay within the realms of their movie or TV show worlds. Instead the stereotypes they perpetuate are stamped into the minds of every single child watching as Ravi from Jessie speaks in an overly excessive Indian accent and struggles in nearly every sports-related activity, and the Unbreakable Kimmy Schimdt’s Dong choppily pieces together his English and flounders in social situations. 

“Contemporary ideologies, including the post-9/11 rhetoric in America and the global West, have contributed to a racialization of … Asians that portray them in popular media as foreigners and ‘others.’ These dynamics are further intersected by overt racialized perceptions that use obvious differences in skin color, religion, and ethnicity as markers of difference..”

Born and raised in the United States, I have been reminded on more than one occasion that my brown skin has been a mark to others that I am apparently “not from here”.  A white woman coming up to me in the park asked me how long I have been in America. Her slow enunciation of words and the frequency in which she mentioned how much she loved people from Delhi (even though I neither mentioned or am from Delhi) made it clear that she assumed I was not American.  Even now, on the popular social media app Tiktok, I’ve seen the comment sections of Indian-American teenagers flooded with jokes about Ravi and Baljeet, most often about how these brown boys have “made it” if they are with white girls. The hundreds of comments mentioning stereotypes like “tech support” make it clear that we are not looked at as more than the racial stereotypes forced upon us. To be an ethnic minority in America means constantly dealing with the racial baggage of being immediately stereotyped by the initial part of your hyphenated identity and to be a “perpetual foreigner” in your own country.

“Comments and behaviors that subtly alienate ethnic minorities may perpetuate the commonly held belief (implicit and explicit) that Americanness is Whiteness.” Studies have shown that the micro aggressions that exclude ethnic minorities have led to negative psychological implications. Individuals feeling identity conflict have been found to have “more depressive symptoms, and have lower life satisfaction.” Along with these often hidden psychological consequences, the creation of perpetual foreigners has caused serious and harmful problems, especially during the pandemic. COVID-19 racism and xenophobia has fueled violence and discrimination against Asian immigrants and people from Asian descent. People have been told to “go back to China” or are being called the “China virus” even though they aren’t even of Chinese descent. Attacks in Minnesota, Texas, California, and more have been targeted towards Asians or people from East Asian descent, most of whom are Americans and have lived in America their entire lives. 

The creation of ethnic out groups and perpetual foreigners has deepened racial divisions in America. Our first steps to combating these problems is to address the media that fuels harmful stereotyping. 

References:

Huynh, Que-Lam, et al. “PERPETUAL FOREIGNER IN ONE'S OWN LAND: POTENTIAL IMPLICATIONS FOR IDENTITY AND PSYCHOLOGICAL ADJUSTMENT.” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 2011, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3092701/#R7. 

Contributors, Et. “View: One of the Main Reasons Why Indian-Americans Are Subjected to Racial Abuse in US.” The Economic Times, Economic Times, 7 May 2017, economictimes.indiatimes.com/nri/nris-in-news/indian-americans-in-us-find-themselves-in-an-increasingly-strange-situation/articleshow/58554714.cms. 

Fatima, Sahar. “Let's Talk About Disney's Portrayal of Indians.” Arts + Culture, 9 Dec. 2017, culture.affinitymagazine.us/lets-talk-about-disneys-portrayal-of-indians/. 

“Covid-19 Fueling Anti-Asian Racism and Xenophobia Worldwide.” Human Rights Watch, 28 Oct. 2020, www.hrw.org/news/2020/05/12/covid-19-fueling-anti-asian-racism-and-xenophobia-worldwide#. 

“(PDF) The Model Minority and Perpetual Foreigner: Stereotypes of Asian Americans.” ResearchGate, www.researchgate.net/publication/233912258_The_model_minority_and_perpetual_foreigner_Stereotypes_of_Asian_Americans. 

Nguyen, Viet Thanh, and The Sympathizer. “How the Model Minority Myth of Asian Americans Hurts Us All.” Time, Time, 26 June 2020, time.com/5859206/anti-asian-racism-america/. 

Armenta BE;Lee RM;Pituc ST;Jung KR;Park IJK;Soto JA;Kim SY;Schwartz SJ; “Where Are You from? A Validation of the Foreigner Objectification Scale and the Psychological Correlates of Foreigner Objectification among Asian Americans and Latinos.” Cultural Diversity & Ethnic Minority Psychology, U.S. National Library of Medicine, pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23647327/.

[humwrites]

THERAPY

It’s ironic - I try to advocate for uncomfortable topics, things that would have been considered taboo. When it comes to talking about my own experiences, I struggle. A lot. It’s hypocritical in a lot of ways, but I’m also aware I’m being too harsh on myself for saying that. I’ve tried to get better with talking about it in the last couple of years, but I feel palpitations whenever I mention it in front of a new group of people. 

I’ve been in therapy, on and off, since I was 13. I was diagnosed with anxiety when I was 18. I’ll openly admit that I’ve done a lot of self-work over the years, and have been so proud of my own progress. But, there’s always more work I could do. My therapist and I talk about that often. 

With lockdown, and I’m sure I’m not alone in this, I worried about losing everything that I’ve built to be ‘mine.’ I couldn’t do the things that would help me feel better after an episode. I couldn’t reach out to my confidants, or be with them, in the same way as I would normally have done if I needed it. I’ve found myself cycle backwards into old habits, feeling ‘trapped’ again. I was obsessively finding and reading everything I possibly could about COVID-19. Comparing countries and trying to figure out statistics, predicting the next move. I knew it wasn’t healthy for it to be consuming my every thought, and yet it remained. A disconnect was slowly starting to build - I knew logically that it was okay for me to feel whatever I was experiencing, but I’ve found it harder than ever to practise that.

And then the world listened. And heard. Black lives matter. They always have. This time, we weren’t going to let it slide and we were not going to lose the movement to a 24 hour news cycle. As a result, the discussion surrounding racism - covert and overt - came into light. Personally, there was a necessity to stand and be an ally to the black community. History shows us that if it had not been for them, then South Asians would not have been allowed the opportunities we have now. It was not enough for us to stand with them, for them. We had to be using our privilege. 

However, it became more and more apparent of one thing. The discussion of racism meant unpacking and revisiting trauma that all BIPOC people have experienced. I watched President Trump address the nation, calling the protests “acts of domestic terror” (Trump, 2020) My anxiety caved in and caused me to have a panic attack, remembering comments and threats directed at my family and I whilst I was growing up - following 9/11. Whilst I tried to stay afloat, it’s hard for me to admit that the trauma I thought I had learnt from began to resurface. 

I found myself desperately trying to do what I could for the movement. If I wasn’t able to join a protest, I would help in other ways. Donating, reading, sharing, talking. A handful of the many ways we know now that we can help. But with nothing else, it became easy to sink into a cycle. One that’s stayed. One that’s drained me. Finding myself disassociating and having trouble staying in the present. 

But, I was a voice that had to be involved in the conversation, right? I don’t shy away from knowing I am usually a minority in the company I keep, so I simultaneously believe it to be an obligation and a duty to have to discuss these issues. (see also: sexism and homophobia, and how those intersect with issues of race and culture)

This happened to roll into Pride month, and the internet so rightfully redirected attention to Stonewall being led by Latinx and Black trans women. An intersection I’ve struggled to find - a cross-road between experiences of racism and homophobia. The acknowledgement of, once again, needing to unpack trauma. Trauma which was enforced by the belief that these could not co-exist. To be raised Muslim, to be raised as a Pakistani, a Bengali - I couldn’t be bisexual and vice-versa. Coming to terms with your sexuality will always have it’s own struggles, but couple that with wondering if you’d have to choose one over the other - the damage can be detrimental. 

I’ll remind you again. I’ve been in therapy since I was 13. I’m 20 now. Seven years in therapy. This was the first in which I started talking about the trauma I’ve experienced with racism. My therapist is a white woman. If I, or my family, had acknowledged the need for representation, I would like to hope we would’ve found a South Asian therapist. But the truth of the matter, is that I’ve felt comfortable with my therapist. Enough so, that we were able to have an open dialogue about the ways in which things would probably be different, if that was the case. The reason I hadn’t brought it up before wasn’t because she’s white, it was because I had become so deeply uncomfortable with my own trauma that I wasn’t able to verbalise it. I had been taught to keep it to myself. To be ‘stronger.’ It somehow seemed easier to address my journey with my sexuality, if it didn’t coincide with my experience as a woman of colour. To hide amongst ‘bisexual/gay culture,’ which was dominated by white figures in the community - not knowing how that could translate into my own. 

It always felt untimely, inappropriate to be discussing the affect the current political landscape was having on my own mental health. That leads me to have to remind myself - that’s what I’ve always my identity was perceived. 

Untimely. Inappropriate. Impossible. 

I am not any of those things.

“I am inimitable. I am an original” - Hamilton (2015)*

So if not now, then when would I be able to express my experiences, and all the ways in which they interconnect with one another? BIPOC mental health month is now floating around on the internet. In the surfacing of this era, it remains crucial that we remain inclusive of all BIPOC stories - and that means looking at those in the LGBTQ+ community, those who were already impacted by class issues/pay disparities and how that becomes even harder during the pandemic.

Most importantly, the humane problems we all internally battle with on a daily basis.

It is very human of all of us to be going through what we consider to be universal problems - family, friendships, relationships. The truth of the matter is that we’re all working through those in our own ways, and there’s no one way to do that. Interactions during the pandemic are strained enough, so if you’re anything like me, you might be getting impatient with how long it’s taking you to overcome those. You might even be feeling as if they are insignificant in the grand scheme of things. I wish I had answers. I wish I had some wisdom to share. All I can say is that none of that is true. It’s what it is to be human. Taking care of yourself is just as important as it is to stand up for what you believe in. So many of us are right there with you, and maybe there’s some comfort in that. 

Do something you enjoy today. Remember that you’re loved and appreciated for everything you’re doing.

Take care of yourself x

https://issuesintheworld.carrd.co/

* = As someone who hopes to be able to return to the theatre landscape, as soon as it’s safe to do so, I found comfort in the release of ‘Hamilton’ on Disney+. Hope remains in the persistence and dedication of those in the arts. That we can come back stronger than ever. The hunger of those communal experiences, as seen through the eagerness of its release, helps reignite passion. I am aware that the show is far from perfect, and in fact remains to not be an accurate representation of Alexander Hamilton’s story - but I remain forever grateful as the show proved that parts for BIPOC individuals can exist, outside of supporting or stereotypical roles. 

[brandjchilds]

2020 👉🏾 2021

I spent the last two weeks doing some introspection and writing about my 2020 experience (I paid Justin Timberlake to say that.)

From the jump, I felt like the 2020 tagline “a year of clarity” was so corny, but I bet you’re a little more clear on some important things after this year. I had no choice but to be.

Loss figured out how to affect everyone this year, in abstract ways, and in very visceral, tangible, sobering ways.

Pain was available to all who were alive long enough to experience more than a month of 2020.

Most of us would say 2020 gave us that work.

Let’s not get it twisted though, 2019 wasn’t nothing to write home about, but this year made me feel like I wish I could go back to sleep to finish that dream.

The very nature of having to stay home, being stripped of so many distractions that created false senses of comfort and security showed me that there’s a lot of character that has been built up in me, and that there’s still a lot of building to do.

I was more in my head this year than any other year that I can remember. Which coincided pretty spectacularly with the uptick in my dating activity this year. Somehow, I was both more bold, and more in my own head.

I talked to some girls AND got dates with some girls that a previous version of me would’ve thought I had no business being looked at by. Truly intimidatingly attractive, extraordinarily brilliant and kindhearted women that pre-2020 me wouldn’t have even headfaked at (yeah, I’m patting myself on the back for that).

Something I noticed about one of the lovely young women that I talked to early this year is that she had this sense that she had grown to the place where she was putting the majority of the weight of her trust in God and leaving it there. Trusting the provider and not the provisions. And that seemed to cause this overwhelmingly serene self security to radiate out of her. I’m still figuring that out, for sure.

This was also another year where I struggled with hiding many of the most passionate parts of myself in public spaces, in an effort to move closer to appropriate transparency and away from codependent vulnerability. In some ways, I think this worked well to keep myself from getting hurt as much, along with creating healthier connections with people (the goal), but there’s still some attenuation to be done, because in some instances, I definitely over corrected and felt myself becoming less interesting, and less available for any kind of connection at all.

In my closest relationships, I felt myself leveling up my inquisitive nature, showing my love in bigger ways to the people I’ve stated my love for, and intentionally finding more ways to show up for my people.

In addition, I’ve had more “in-game” experience with the difference between hurt versus harm as it relates to boundaries and communication in relationships. Learning to love myself well by taking up space in that way.

I learned that I can actually tolerate conflict that feels even remotely productive.

Oh! Also, I’ve discovered something pretty major about myself: The greatest gift someone could give me is an environment of peace, joy and conversational fluidity. That’s all I want ever in all of life.

I was met with more of the realities of “both-and”, as opposed to objective extremism one way or another.

The relativity of words and time became that much more apparent to me. I was telling my sister that there were so many dope things I experienced in January and February of 2020 that somehow felt closer to the present than, say, George Floyd, or my first official relationship, Tiger King or my therapy breakthroughs. Speaking of...

Some breakthroughs in therapy and meditation have allowed me to put more space between external stimuli and the choice of my response. (And the role of distraction in this whole continuum, which is the enemy of mindfulness - part of why I’m taking this social media break.)

Closely related to the above thought, I heard this quote that said something like, “if you think of every thought as a package, the packages might come to your door, but if the package isn’t for you, don’t sign for it!” I’ve also chosen to apply this to thoughts that illicit even the strongest emotional responses. Very subversive, I know.

This time last year, I was with my family in Atlanta, talking about the things I wanted to achieve, character wise, in 2020, and now looking back at that list, I realize I can’t really check anything off. But I also realize that that was never the point. My sights were set on the wrong thing. The point of the journey is to keep becoming. Pay attention to how what you’re doing now is facilitating or detracting from what you hope to be. And then, if you find you’re on track, make peace with the process. This is one of many spiritual practices I want to reconnect with in 2021.

In addition to that, I’ve dropped the expectation for anyone, including myself, to fully be anything, really. However, I do need the people in my closest circle/prime seats of influence to be at least growing in their awareness as active participants in who they’re becoming. How they might be able to continue functionally evolving. Consistently considering what the desired outcome of their life might be.

Something else that learnt me: It is possible to apologize too much, and it is probable that I have lol. The reason, so I have discovered, is that it can cause you to behave apologetically for who you are, which has been quite the lifelong problem for your boy 😁.

By the way, I still have doubts in my faith (I guess that’s inherent in the word “faith”, right?), but they’re not (currently) overwhelming questions about God’s goodness or about why so many religious people have been allowed to make it their business to commandeer and distort the foundational ethic of love. Admittedly, the questions I have are much simpler, but I believe they’re valid, and worth inquisition.

I found a way to finish 3 pilots this past year, despite going through the biggest heartbreak of my life, seismic family turmoil and the existential stress of this pandemic. Idk how “good” those scripts are, but that’s really not the point. Shooters shoot and writers write.

I was recently reminded that, while living a creative life comes inherently with a level of fear, I don’t have to allow that fear to ever be the reason I don’t do or try things.

I pushed through my ADD, and reclaimed the discipline of sitting down and reading physical books.

I also listened to a bunch of audiobooks and even more podcasts. Favorite genres are pop-psychology/human behavior, dating, and of course, basketball.

I got help from some friends moving into a newly renovated, beautiful house in Glendale. No lie, I was a little shook to be in Simi Valley after Trump lost, and thankfully, we ended up moving like a week before the results came in (the first time).

I’ve been blessed to be bolstered by a new accountability group of Black men that are always available for support, and fully bought in on my progression in life, sometimes even more than I am.

I also witnessed just how truly down for me my circle of people are, on the heels of... some really tough stuff. So many people made it a point to show up for me, at the drop of a hat, with calls of encouragement, texts to reinstill confidence in me, and COVID-safe hangs to just physically be present with me through it all. I got some top shelf individuals in my life...

And at the end of a year like this, the most sobering things that have made their way back to front and center for me have been: how much relationships matter and the true brevity of life. Having faced that brevity fairly closely due to COVID’s effects on loved ones, and personally, with my own past health scare, I’m re-upping on the conscious decision to be an illuminative presence in my relationships. To be better about being consistently involved in my people’s lives, which as an introvert can sometimes cost me the very last morsels of my energy. To be more curious and open hearted when relating to people who think and believe differently than me. To continue to build myself up so that I can become someone who both healthily processes emotions and difficulty while safeguarding against rumination and wallowing, so I can be more emotionally available for the people in my life (my fellow Enneagram 4s know all about that struggle). Life’s much too brief for me to be any other way.

Anywho, there are some big things on the horizon, known and unknown, and I need space to be ready. So, social media homies, I’ll see you in 45 days (or, you know, hit me up if you want to see me before then).

#HappyNewYear

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

September 25, 2020

Heather Cox Richardson

Trump’s refusal Wednesday to commit to accepting a loss in the November election with a peaceful transfer of power continues to make waves. Today the New York Times reported that military officers are worried that Trump will try to drag them into a contested election. But while people are rightly frightened about Trump’s increasing authoritarianism, it’s important to understand that he is deploying these particular threats about the election to create an impression that he has the option to control the outcome in November. He does not have that option.

Trump and his cronies are trying to create their own reality. They are trying to make people believe that the coronavirus is not real, that it has not killed more than 200,000 of our neighbors, that the economy is fine, that our cities are in flames, that Black Lives Matter protesters are anarchists, and that putting Democrats in office will usher in radical socialism. None of these things is true. Similarly, Trump is trying to convince people that he can deploy the power of the government to remain in power even if we want him to leave, creating uncertainly and fear. By talking about it, he is willing that situation into existence. It is a lie, and we do not have to accept it.

For his part, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden recognizes that Trump’s repeated threats not to leave office are both letting him convince us that leaving is his choice, rather than ours, and keeping the media focused on him when we should, in fact, be talking about real issues. Biden is refusing to give the idea oxygen, reminding reporters that it is a “typical Trump distraction.” “I just think the people in the country are going to be heard on November 3,” he told them. “Every vote in this country is going to be heard and they will not be stopped. I'm confident that all of the irresponsible, outrageous attacks on voting, we’ll have an election in this country as we always have had, and he'll leave.” He said: “I don’t think he’s going to get the FBI to follow him or get anybody else to enforce something that’s not real.”

While the Senate voted unanimously yesterday to commit to the peaceful transfer of power in January, it was actually Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker, a Republican, who gave Trump’s refusal to commit to a peaceful transfer of power the dripping disdain it deserved. Speaking to reporters, Baker defended the mail-in ballots that Trump is saying will invalidate the election, and called Trump’s suggestion that he wouldn’t leave office peacefully “appalling and outrageous.” Baker said he would to do everything in his power to defend the results of the election.

“A huge part of this nation’s glory, to the extent it exists as a beacon to others, is the peaceful transfer of power based on the vote of the people of this country,” he said.

Trump responded with an insulting tweet, but one that suggested he was deliberately stoking the story to try to get free media coverage.

This makes sense, because there are signs that Trump and the Republicans have a real money problem. We know that the Trump campaign has run through close to a billion dollars, leaving him and other Republican candidates short of cash for the last weeks of the campaign. At the same time, Democratic fundraising in the wake of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death has been unprecedented. The squeeze showed clearly in three highly unusual appearances by Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) on the Fox News Channel begging for donations.

Two new ploys to advance Trump’s reelection, one claiming to address healthcare concerns and one claiming to address coronavirus concerns, reveal both the campaign’s attempts to construct their own reality and to do it on someone else’s dime.

The president has repeatedly promised his own healthcare bill to replace the Affordable Care Act that his administration is currently trying to kill. Under criticism for trying to end the law that protects people with preexisting health conditions from discrimination in buying insurance—the ACA will come before the Supreme Court a week after the November 3 election-- Trump on Thursday abruptly signed an Executive Order affirming that “it is the official policy of the United States government to protect patients with preexisting conditions.” The Executive Order is toothless; if the Supreme Court overturns the ACA, the Executive Order will mean nothing.

But Trump also suggested that he might be willing simply to keep the law and call it his own. “Obamacare is no longer Obamacare, as we worked on it and managed it very well,” Trump said of the law that continues to provide coverage for more than 20 million Americans. “What we have now is a much better plan. It is no longer Obamacare because we got rid of the worse part of it — the individual mandate.” “We’ve really become the health-care party — the Republican Party,” he said.

Trump also announced he would give $200 toward the cost of their medicines to 33 million older Americans. That’s $6.6 billion dollars that he will be putting in the pockets of key voters just before the election. Apparently, his plan is to take money from Medicare under a rule that allows the Medicare to test out new programs. Authorization for such a shift in funding usually requires a lengthy approval process, and the new program needs to be cost neutral. Ameet Sarpatwari, assistant director of Harvard Medical School's Program on Regulation, Therapeutics and Law told NPR’s Sydney Lupkin: I think the administration is pushing the envelope in terms of classifying this as a demonstration."

The Trump campaign is also planning a taxpayer-funded advertising blitz, costing at least $300 million, to “defeat despair and inspire hope” about the coronavirus pandemic. According to Politico’s Dan Diamond, the ads will feature interviews between administration officials and celebrities. The ad campaign was conceived and begun by Michael Caputo, the top spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services before he stepped down last week for medical leave after an infamous Facebook rant.

Caputo claimed in his video that Trump has personally demanded the advertising campaign. "The Democrats — and, by the way, their conjugal media and the leftist scientists that are working for the government — are dead set against it," Caputo said. "They cannot afford for us to have any good news before November because they're already losing. … They're going to come after me because I'm going to be putting $250 million worth of ads on the air." The White House says it is not accurate that Trump “demanded” the campaign.

To pay for the ads, Caputo requisitioned $300 million from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and $15 million from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). But he sidelined the Ad Council, which is a nonprofit consortium of advertising companies that since World War Two has worked on a nonpartisan basis with the government on public health or social issue campaigns. Instead, Caputo hired his own business partner to make the videos.

Josh Peck, the former HHS official who oversaw the Obama administration’s advertising campaign for HealthCare.gov, told Diamond that officials in the Obama administration were never featured in videos, and that the Trump administrations Covid videos sound like they are about more than Americans’ health. He said: "CDC hasn’t yet done an awareness campaign about Covid guidelines — but they are going to pay for a campaign about how to get rid of our despair? Run by political appointees in the press shop? Right before an election? It’s like every red flag I could dream of.”

Trump’s challenge to the outcome of the election is a sign of his desperation, but it is no less dangerous for all that: as they say, a cornered rat will bite the cat. While Democrats and a remarkable number of Republicans are speaking out against Trump, and while teams of lawyers are fighting his lawyers in court, ordinary Americans also have a crucial role to play in this moment. It is up to us to reject Trump's fictions and reclaim the national conversation from the anger and hatred and fear Trump is stoking.

It is time to reassert our core American values so they dominate the public realm, demanding of our representatives a free and fair vote for everyone, a free and fair vote count, and a government of our own choosing.

—-

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

Heather Cox Richardson

[sciencespies]

How Viruses Evolve

https://sciencespies.com/nature/how-viruses-evolve/

How Viruses Evolve

The unusual cases of pneumonia began to appear in midwinter, in China. The cause, researchers would later learn, was a coronavirus new to science. By March, the infection began to spread to other Asian countries and overseas. People were dying, and the World Health Organization issued a global health alert.

But this was 2003, not 2020, and the disease was SARS, not Covid-19. By June, the outbreak was almost gone, with just 8,098 confirmed infections and 774 deaths worldwide. No cases of SARS have been reported since 2004.

Contrast that with the closely related coronavirus that causes Covid-19 today: more than 13,600,000 confirmed cases as of July 16, and more than 585,000 deaths.

Why did SARS go away while today’s coronavirus just keeps on spreading? Why, for that matter, did both these coronaviruses spill over into people at all, from their original bat hosts?

And just as vital as those questions is another: What happens next?

As we face the current pandemic, it will be important to understand how SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, is likely to evolve in the months and years ahead. It’s possible the virus could lose its lethal character and settle into an evolutionary détente with humanity. It might end up as just another cold virus, as may have happened to another coronavirus in the past. But it could also remain a serious threat or perhaps even evolve to become more lethal. The outcome depends on the complex and sometimes subtle interplay of ecological and evolutionary forces that shape how viruses and their hosts respond to one another.

“One thing you learn about evolution is never to generalize,” says Edward Holmes, an evolutionary virologist at the University of Sydney, Australia, and author of an article on the evolution of emerging viruses in the Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics. “It depends entirely on the biological nuance of the situation.”

Steps to viral success

Many of the scariest viruses that have caused past or current epidemics originated in other animals and then jumped to people: HIV from other primates, influenza from birds and pigs, and Ebola probably from bats. So, too, for coronaviruses: The ones behind SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome) and Covid-19 all probably originated in bats and arrived in people via another, stepping-stone species, likely palm civets, camels and possibly pangolins, respectively.

But making the jump from one species to another isn’t easy, because successful viruses have to be tightly adapted to their hosts. To get into a host cell, a molecule on the virus’s surface has to match a receptor on the outside of the cell, like a key fitting into a lock. Once inside the cell, the virus has to evade the cell’s immune defenses and then commandeer the appropriate parts of the host’s biochemistry to churn out new viruses. Any or all of these factors are likely to differ from one host species to another, so viruses will need to change genetically — that is, evolve — in order to set up shop in a new animal.

Pandemics — disease outbreaks of global reach — have visited humanity many times. Here are examples.

A recent mutation alters the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein to make it less fragile (the altered bits are shown as colored blobs). This added robustness appears to make the virus more infectious. Three sites are shown because the spike protein is composed of three identical subunits that bind together.

(DOE/Los Alamos National Laboratory)

Host switching actually involves two steps, though these can overlap. First, the virus has to be able to invade the new host’s cells: That’s a minimum requirement for making the host sick. But to become capable of causing epidemics, the virus also has to become infectious — that is, transmissible between individuals — in its new host. That’s what elevates a virus from an occasional nuisance to one capable of causing widespread harm.

SARS-CoV-2 shows these two stages clearly. Compared with the virus in bats, both the virus that infects people and a close relative in pangolins carry a mutation that changes the shape of the surface “ spike protein.” The alteration is right at the spot that binds to host cell receptors to let the virus in. This suggests that the mutation first arose either in pangolins or an as yet unidentified species and happened to allow the virus to jump over to people, too.

But SARS-CoV-2 carries other changes in the spike protein that appear to have arisen after it jumped to people, since they don’t occur in the bat or pangolin viruses. One is in a region called the polybasic cleavage site, which is known to make other coronaviruses and flu viruses more infectious. Another appears to make the spike protein less fragile, and in lab experiments with cell cultures, it makes the virus more infectious. The mutation has become more common as the Covid-19 pandemic goes on, which suggests — but does not prove — that it makes the virus more infectious in the real world, too. (Fortunately, though it may increase spread, it doesn’t seem to make people sicker.)

This evolutionary two-step — first spillover, then adaptation to the new host — is probably characteristic of most viruses as they shift hosts, says Daniel Streicker, a viral ecologist at the University of Glasgow. If so, emerging viruses probably pass through a “silent period” immediately after a host shift, in which the virus barely scrapes by, teetering on the brink of extinction until it acquires the mutations needed for an epidemic to bloom.

Streicker sees this in studies of rabies in bats — which is a good model for studying the evolution of emerging viruses, he says, since the rabies virus has jumped between different bat species many times. He and his colleagues looked at decades’ worth of genetic sequence data for rabies viruses that had undergone such host shifts. Since larger populations contain more genetic variants than smaller populations do, measuring genetic diversity in their samples enabled the scientists to estimate how widespread the virus was at any given time.

The team found that almost none of the 13 viral strains they studied took off immediately after switching to a new bat species. Instead, the viruses eked out a marginal existence for years to decades before they acquired the mutations — of as yet unknown function — that allowed them to burst out to epidemic levels. Not surprisingly, the viruses that emerged the fastest were those that needed the fewest genetic changes to blossom.

SARS-CoV-2 probably passed through a similar tenuous phase before it acquired the key adaptations that allowed it to flourish, perhaps the mutation to the polybasic cleavage site, perhaps others not yet identified. In any case, says Colin Parrish, a virologist at Cornell University who studies host shifts, “by the time the first person in Wuhan had been identified with coronavirus, it had probably been in people for a while.”

It was our bad luck that SARS-CoV-2 adapted successfully. Many viruses that spill over to humans never do. About 220 to 250 viruses are known to infect people, but only about half are transmissible — many only weakly — from one person to another, says Jemma Geoghegan, an evolutionary virologist at the University of Otago, New Zealand. The rest are dead-end infections. Half is a generous estimate, she adds, since many other spillover events probably fizzle out before they can even be counted.

Getting nicer — or nastier

SARS-CoV-2, of course, is well past the teetering stage. The big question now is: What happens next? One popular theory, endorsed by some experts, is that viruses often start off harming their hosts, but evolve toward a more benign coexistence. After all, many of the viruses we know of that trigger severe problems in a new host species cause mild or no disease in the host they originally came from. And from the virus’s perspective, this theory asserts, hosts that are less sick are more likely to be moving around, meeting others and spreading the infection onward.

“I believe that viruses tend to become less pathogenic,” says Burtram Fielding, a coronavirologist at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. “The ultimate aim of a pathogen is to reproduce, to make more of itself. Any pathogen that kills the host too fast will not give itself enough time to reproduce.” If SARS-CoV-2 can spread faster and further by killing or severely harming fewer of the people it infects, we might expect that over time, it will become less harmful — or, as virologists term it, less virulent.

This kind of evolutionary gentling may be exactly what happened more than a century ago to one of the other human coronaviruses, known as OC43, Fielding suggests. Today, OC43 is one of four coronaviruses that account for up to a third of cases of the common cold (and perhaps occasionally more severe illness). But Fielding and a few others think it could also have been the virus behind a worldwide pandemic, usually ascribed to influenza, that began in 1890 and killed more than a million people worldwide, including Queen Victoria’s grandson and heir.

After rabbits were introduced to Australia, their population exploded. “They are very plentiful here,” says the handwritten inscription on the back of this postcard from around 1930. Scientists eventually introduced the myxoma virus to control the rabbit plague.

(Photographer Paul C. Nomchong / National Museum of Australia)

Scientists can’t prove that, because no virus samples survive from that pandemic, but some circumstantial evidence makes the case plausible, Fielding says. For one thing, people who were infected in the 1890 pandemic apparently experienced nervous-system symptoms we now see as more typical of coronaviruses than of influenza. And when Belgian researchers sequenced OC43’s genome in 2005 and compared it to other known coronaviruses, they concluded that it likely originated as a cattle virus and may have jumped to people right around 1890. They speculated that it may have caused the 1890 pandemic and then settled down to a less nasty coexistence as an ordinary cold virus.

Other evolutionary biologists disagree. The pandemic certainly faded as more people became immune, but there’s no solid evidence that OC43 itself evolved from highly virulent to mostly benign over the last century, they say. Even if it did, that does not mean SARS-CoV-2 will follow the same trajectory. “You can’t just say it’s going to become nicer, that somehow a well-adapted pathogen doesn’t harm its host. Modern evolutionary biology, and a lot of data, shows that doesn’t have to be true. It can get nicer, and it can get nastier,” says Andrew Read, an evolutionary microbiologist at Penn State University. (Holmes is blunter: “Trying to predict virulence evolution is a mug’s game,” he says.)

To understand why it’s so hard to predict changes in virulence, Read says it’s important to recognize the difference between virulence — that is, how sick a virus makes its host — and its transmissibility, or how easily it passes from one host individual to another. Evolution always favors increased transmissibility, because viruses that spread more easily are evolutionarily fitter — that is, they leave more descendants. But transmissibility and virulence aren’t linked in any dependable way, Read says. Some germs do just fine even if they make you very sick. The bacteria that cause cholera spread through diarrhea, so severe disease is good for them. Malaria and yellow fever, which are transmitted by mosquitos, can spread just fine even from a person at death’s door.

Funeral for a U.S. soldier who died of influenza in Russia in 1919. The 1918-1920 pandemic killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide.

(U.S. National Archives)

Respiratory viruses, like influenza and the human coronaviruses, need hosts that move around enough to breathe on one another, so extremely high virulence might be detrimental in some cases. But there’s no obvious evolutionary advantage for SARS-CoV-2 to reduce its virulence, because it pays little price for occasionally killing people: It spreads readily from infected people who are not yet feeling sick, and even from those who may never show symptoms of illness. “To be honest, the novel coronavirus is pretty fit already,” Geoghegan says.

Nor are there many documented instances of viruses whose virulence has abated over time. The rare, classic example is the myxoma virus, which was deliberately introduced to Australia in the 1950s from South America to control invasive European rabbits. Within a few decades, the virus evolved to reduce its virulence, albeit only down to 70 to 95 percent lethality from a whopping 99.8 percent. (It has since ticked up again.)

But myxoma stands nearly alone, Parrish says. For instance, he notes, there is no evidence that recent human pathogens such as Ebola, Zika or chikungunya viruses have shown any signs of becoming less pathogenic in the relatively short time since jumping to humans.

“Everyone has influenza,” reads a headline in a French publication from January 1890.

(Wellcome Collection via CC by 4.0)

The ones that went away

The faded nightmares of our past — pandemics that terrorized, then receded, such as SARS in 2003 and flu in 1918-20 and again in 1957, 1968 and 2009 — went away not because the viruses evolved to cause milder disease, but for other reasons. In the case of SARS, the virus made people sick enough that health workers were able to contain the disease before it got out of hand. “People who got SARS got very sick, very fast and were easily identified, easily tracked and readily quarantined — and their contacts were also readily identified and quarantined,” says Mark Cameron, an immunologist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, who worked in a Toronto hospital during the height of the SARS outbreak there. That was never going to be as easy to do for Covid-19 because people who don’t show symptoms can spread the virus.

Flu pandemics, meanwhile, have tended to recede for another reason, one that offers more hope in our present moment: Enough of the population eventually becomes immune to slow the virus down. The H1N1 influenza virus that caused the 1918 pandemic continued as the main influenza virus until the 1950s, and its descendants still circulate in the human population. What made the virus such a threat in 1918-20 is that it was novel and people had little immunity. Once much of the population had been exposed to the virus and had developed immunity, the pandemic waned, although the virus persisted at a lower level of infections — as it does to this day. It appears less lethal now largely because older people, who are at greatest risk of dying from influenza, have usually encountered H1N1 influenza or something like it at some point in their lives and retain some degree of immunity, Read says.

With the new coronavirus, Parrish says, “we’re sort of in that 1918 period where the virus is spreading fast in a naive population.” But that will change as more people either catch Covid-19 or are vaccinated (if and when that becomes possible) and develop some level of immunity. “There’s no question that once the population is largely immune, the virus will die down,” Parrish says.

The question is how long that immunity will last: for a lifetime, like smallpox, or just a few years, like flu? In part, that will depend on whether the vaccine induces a permanent antibody response or just a temporary one. But it also depends on whether the virus can change to evade the antibodies generated by the vaccine. Although coronaviruses don’t accumulate mutations as fast as flu viruses, they do still change. And at least one, which causes bronchitis in chickens, has evolved new variants that aren’t covered by previous vaccines. But at this point, no one knows what to expect from SARS-CoV-2.

There is, at least, one encouraging aspect to all this. Even if we can’t predict how the virus will evolve or how it will respond to the coming vaccine, there is something all of us can do to reduce the risk of the virus evolving in dangerous ways. And it doesn’t involve any complicated new behaviors. “Viruses can only evolve if they’re replicating and transmitting,” Streicker says. “Anything that reduces the replication of a virus will in consequence reduce the amount of evolution that happens.” In other words, we can do our part to slow down the evolution of the Covid-19 virus by behaving exactly as we’ve been told to already to avoid catching it: Minimize contact with others, wash your hands and wear a mask.

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews. Sign up for the newsletter.

#Nature

[alexsmitposts]

The Geopolitical Consequences of COVID-19: Over the Cliff On the evening of Saturday, April 18, 2020, the forty thousandth (40,000) “presumed COVID 19 death,” according to new CDC guidelines occurred. Where death only affects the few, the misinformation, withheld or suppressed data, the lies, the propaganda and censorship are making things worse. Thus, we turn to the format of a loose intelligence briefing as the infectious nature of propaganda has to be resisted and it is so very hard to resist. On the morning of Sunday, April 19, 2020 a propaganda blitzkrieg began, using Trump administration surrogates, claiming the deaths are really “fake people” and “empty hospitals.” We might call this “pandemic denial,” made dangerous as the pandemic, as of mid-late April 2020 is clearly in control and those claiming otherwise are knowingly lying for reasons we will make clear. Major medical centers across the US are at an average of 80% of capacity. Some are higher, much higher. In some areas temporary hospitals are being used but more often non-COVID patients are being “turfed” to rural medical centers where their needs may not be properly addressed. As with any emergency, the first victim is truth. Social media lends itself toward sensationalism and can attract those with victimization fantasies. Thus, only information from known sources is accepted and nothing from mainstream or social media can be trusted. The situation in American hospitals, not all but more than the public would imagine, is grave. Currently, PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) is in good supply with the exception of N95 masks and that situation is rapidly improving. Availability of ventilators in the US is currently very good, thanks to individuals like Elon Musk, the governments of Russia and China and many charitable organizations that have gone to great efforts. By “very good” we are speaking of supplies as predictive modeling indicates. One of the problems, however, is that the predictive models are predicated on assumptions not in evidence and are failing. This critical failure, and the cloak of secrecy around it, has given rise to the lunacy and subterfuge we are seeing in Washington. Part of that failure is at hospital level. To clarify, the issue is getting patents off ventilators. Nearly half of those on ventilators now are at or above 10 days and face a poor outcome. Claims that half may die are low. Most or all will die unless a late stage treatment protocol is developed in time. This is a life and death race and we are losing. Moreover, many patients who are never intubated but stay on cannula for oxygen, as we are told was the case with Boris Johnson, seem to recover then quickly succumb for no apparent reason. Johnson likely received Remdesivir, which has been denied other NHS patients. If so, the political fallout for Johnson, whose policies left the NHS grossly unprepared for the COVID 19 pandemic, will and should be catastrophic. The biggest morbidity factors are the following: Age (60 plus) Obesity Smoking Diabetes Any other cardiopulmonary issues The glaring question of irregular morbidity figures must be addressed. This is what we have learned: The healthcare systems of Italy and Spain were very much “not as represented.” Claims that the hospitals of Northern Italy, in particular, are among the “best in the world” is patently false. Were it not for Russian and Chinese aid, both Italy and Spain would have collapsed. Standards of care considered “normal” in Britain, France, Belgium, Spain and Italy rate at or below the worst in the US. That said, with massive medical infrastructure, the US was blindsided as well. Twenty percent of COVID 19 victims are healthcare professionals. Past that, vital support personnel for health care are primarily African American or Hispanic. This has given rise to issues of specific genetic vulnerabilities which are likely at this point overemphasized. Households with healthcare and support workers most often have one or more adults working away from home, often in areas of very high exposure. Past this we look at Iran, hard hit early on. If figures are to be believed, Iran peaked on March 29, 2020 and is showing a steady decline in new patients barring a second wave. Iran’s testing program has been more aggressive than most and if these figures are reliable, they offer some hope to nations, unlike the United States, that took the threat seriously. The material offered here is an intelligence briefing on a vital situation. The US government is keeping secret, even from state governors, the real situation with the COVID 19 pandemic, as a first wave, ending many lockdowns, by May 1, 2020 is planned. There is nothing worse than an election year in the United States, nothing worse except, maybe, an election year with a nation fully engaged in not just a pandemic but economic collapse as well. Never has the very real threat of extremism and totalitarianism been this close for the United States. We will be addressing this issue, the failure of governance but also the “elephant in the room,” how the lockdowns themselves are a panacea. Our models are failing, based on mixed data on acquired immunity. We have had several reports this week that reinfection rates are high, particularly from South Korea. By the first week of February, the US had reached one of two scenarios, that could have only been mitigated by a quick vaccine, not possible, and assumptions on immunity that were not evidence based: Where a 10 lockdown would have applied on February 1, a two-month lockdown from mid-March to mid-May is likely to lead to waves of reinfection, through September. Lockdown beyond that would do nothing and economic factors dictate opening up, taking the extinction level hit, to an unimaged level. This scenario advocates a May 1 end to lockdown, if continued reliable reinfection reports come in, which is likely to give us a “wash through” lasting until February 2021. Option 2 is most likely and may well be inexorable, a “wash through” combined with waves of reinfection. New treatment protocols, and there few showing promise, would be the priority. Generally, Hydroxychloroquine/Chloroquine is facing a dim future. Side effects are devastating, and effectiveness has, thus far, been in only moderate cases and anecdotal. Convalescent serum is at an experimental stage and weeks from deployment. Initial tests show it to be useful in a percentage of cases with the following caveat, patients thus far either improve quickly or die of a reaction to the serum. This information is being withheld. We have promising antivirals, but these have only been used in non-defining test situations that, out of humanitarian concerns, do not have a double-blind. We are hopeful. Saying we have reached an ‘end of the world as we know it’ has both good and bad connotations. Large military forces are no longer in the cards for the major powers. It has been proven how easy it is to take a ship at sea down. There are so many ways to target infections to diminish military capability, there is now a weapon that makes any state a major player again, and the US is entirely to blame with their massive biological weapon research program. You see, the US allowed the program to filter into the universities for ‘cover” as numerous treaties are being violated. Every president since and including Clinton has a hand in this. Bush 41 tried to stop this and this and other reasons were why his presidency was ended, a story that will never be told. Bush learned early about the planning of 9/11 and watched Clinton increasingly lose control of the reins as right wing extremist elements in Washington partnered with rogue elements in the Pentagon, CIA and the criminal elites of the former Soviet Union, soon to make up the core of the Kosher Nostra crime syndicate. Trump’s handling of this issue, if one is to assume his blunder was unintended, is the single biggest failure of governance in American history. While covering his tracks, working with organized crime to foster internal rebellion, wrongly targeting China and continually diminishing the presidency, a wave of damage that may eventually be more costly than the pandemic itself has been fomented. Oil will never be the same. Fracking will never be profitable, current pipelines and refineries under construction are now useless as are those built in recent years, many at incredible cost to the environment. Russia’s moves into the Arctic are now likely to be curtailed. A good example will be Norway. Their GDP for the next 48 months, even without a permanent market contraction, will be down by 15% with exports down 40% or a bit more. They will move from a social welfare state with a very high standard of living to a debtor nation in less than 5 years. This is a best-case scenario for the wealthiest of nations. Saudi Arabia is entering uncharted waters. Clearly, Saudi Arabia and the UAE will end their issues with Iran. From Press TV: “A Saudi whistleblower has said that the number of Saudi royals infected with the coronavirus (COVID-19) has “exceedingly surpassed” figures previously revealed by a New York Times report. The Saudi al-Ahd al-Jadid Twitter account made the revelations on Friday, more than a week after the NYT report said as many as 150 Saudi royals had contracted the virus. The report at the time said that over 500 beds were being prepared at the elite King Faisal Specialist Hospital that treats members of the Saudi family. On Friday, however, al-Ahd al-Jadid, which is known for whistleblowing on high-profile cases within the Saudi court, revealed that the Saudi hospital reserved for the royals in the Red Sea port city of Jeddah had been overwhelmed with coronavirus cases. “The Jeddah specialist hospital, which is reserved for Saudi royals, is no longer capable of accepting new cases,” the Twitter account said. “Therefore, two hotels have been reserved to be fully used for accommodating and curing infected royals,” it added, naming one of the hotels as being the “Movenpick Hotel”. As of 1400 GMT on Friday, more than 7,142 confirmed coronavirus cases were reported in the kingdom, with 87 deaths, according to a Reuters tally. Another Saudi whistleblower, Mujtahid, however, has cast doubt on official figures, arguing that the situation throughout the kingdom is much more critical. The reports of the COVID-19 disease spreading among royals come as the Saudi family is embroiled in a bitter power struggle between Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and his potential rivals, according to reports.” Nations like Iraq have been, thus far, exceptionally effective in limiting the spread of the pandemic. Their last case was on April 16, 2020 and thus far register only 82 deaths with over 500 active patients. Turkey is reporting a possible downturn, as of April 14, with new cases peaking a few days earlier at around 4500 new cases a day. Turkey, however, has nearly 80,000 active patients and has been accused of significant underreporting. Russia’s COVID 19 surge began in April but cases are a small fraction of what the US is seeing with a mortality rate, based on official reports, half of that in the US. Conclusion COVID 19, a disease that many experts weren’t expecting for a hundred thousand years, is a highly modified version of the Wuhan Horseshoe Bat Virus. It is not plausible that COVID 19 developed without a gene-splicing laboratory. The odds against such a disease developing naturally are astronomical yet we are continually informed of the opposite. In order to prepare this, front line medical personnel were interviewed, even interrogated to an extent, within parameters of required tenets of patient privacy laws. The truth, the horror of the truth, is worse than the dramatic twitter video. We are asking too much of far too few and this should never be allowed to happen again. We have turned medical personnel/first responders into “cannon fodder.”

[tcsparky-blog]

A few thoughts on Biden’s first year

Just over a year ago, many people in this country were celebrating the results of the 2020 presidential election when Joe Biden picked up a very controversial victory over President Trump. People were seen dancing in the streets and pictures were shown on social media of folks partying all because their hated President lost. It was widely believed by many that Biden's controversial win would return America and Washington to some type of normalcy. But one year later, has it? Are we better off under Joe Biden than Donald Trump? In my opinion, absolutely no! The Biden regime has really been a complete failure so far on so many levels. What exactly has he accomplish in the past year? Let me discuss some of his many failures.

1. The Pandemic.  Biden campaigned and promised that he had a better plan to fight the pandemic than Trump and many people bought into it. Now one year later, there have been more deaths and cases in one year under Biden than Trump. How does that happen? I thought Joe had a plan.? Well Joe's plan apparently isn't working! His plan and many of his fellow Democrats plans involve mandates. Like vaccine and mask mandates. It is their belief that these mandates will help stop the spread. Many individuals and businesses have been greatly affected by these mandates. People have lost jobs due to these harsh mandates. The lack of flexibility or other ideas of combating the spread has really disappointed me in their handling of this virus. What about the concept of "natural immunity" which has been proven to be just as effective as any vaccine? Why should someone have to get a shot when they have already had Covid? What proof is there that becoming fully vaccinated helps stop the spread? This administration continues to rigidly stick to the same old scientific theories that have been proven questionable in the past few months. Meanwhile the cases and deaths continue to mount across the nation with no end in sight. Many of these cases are in the most vaccinated areas of the country.

2. Inflation.  Inflation has risen to levels we have not seen in nearly 40 years. Most of these jumps have occurred during Biden's first year. Biden stands in front of a camera and brags about all the jobs his administration has created and how wages have increased. Is he even aware of the steep cost of living increases that many Americans are suffering from? What good is my 3 percent raise if I have to pay 7 percent more this year for groceries and other products? Gas prices have gone up dramatically as well. Biden decided to cut a pipeline that would have dramatically decreased our reliance on foreign oil. Biden has this genius plan called "Build Back Better" which will create the biggest tax increase in United States history and further increase inflation. Biden and his cronies have absolutely no idea how to generate a booming economy. They only know how to tear one down!

3. The southern border. Every day, thousands of undocumented people try to enter the United States at the southern border. It is among the highest during any presidency. The Biden administration seems to be turning a blind eye to this increasing problem. While we try to be as compassionate as possible, it is impossible to help every single person trying to enter this country. Our resources simply cannot allow that to happen. My biggest worry is how many foreign terrorists are entering as well. Another 9/11 is bound to happen if we continue on this lack of border security that Biden seems to be okay with.

4. Afghanistan. The debacle in Afghanistan in late Augustis a huge foreign policy blunder. While many Afghans were evacuated, we left many Americans still there. People were begging for help. The next time, maybe it might help to keep the military there until citizens are evacuated, just a thought! Biden has a long history of foreign policy disasters. And now we have the Ukraine crisis. I have absolutely no faith in this administration effectively dealing with foreign policy affairs. Imagine what Putin is thinking now? Do you think he is remotely afraid of Biden?

5. Divisiveness and leadership. A good and effective leader is able to bring people together and not point fingers. Biden has not demonstrated either during the past year. First, he quickly blamed Trump for leaving the cupboards bare in his pandemic fight, what a bunch of bull! Trump left him numerous vaccines that Biden was originally afraid of taking. Then he pointed fingers at the unvaccinated for causing the pandemic to continue. By the way Joe, many vaccinated people are also spreading the disease. Forgotten as well is his lack of transparency and work ethic. While all these problems are mounting, he is off to his home state of Delaware. And last week, he gave his first press conference in how many weeks. A good president will keep the American public in the know on his plans. Biden doesn't seem willing to do that.

Biden and his team still have time to time to turn things around, but will they? His approval numbers are dropping every day and people are getting deeply frustrated. 2024 cannot come soon enough. About 81 million voted for this guy. I often wonder why? What have we gained as a country having him lead? I really doubt things will really change anytime soon.

[drawingconclusions]

BRIEF COMMENTARY ON CURRENT EVENTS

(I'm sorry this is taking so long. Apparently my firewall sees fit to suddenly block my access to this site, and my antivirus is also engaging in uncalled-for system restarts. It's clear I have to write a future post detailing some of these things. Not out of vindictiveness, but in order for people to recognize some of the things to look out for...)

TECH I read a tech article recently stating that cyber-criminals have a practice now of attempting to steal your log-in cookies from an active account session. Does that render two-factor authentication almost useless?

CORONAVIRUS VACCINES Again we have another coronavirus variant in the wild and vaccine mandates & lockdowns are already being instituted in countries around the world as a result. This is despite the fact that some scientists are stating that although this omicron variant appears to be highly transmissible, it doesn't appear to be as deadly as feared. And again, we're finding that even people who have been vaccinated are contracting covid-19. I heard a report that Pfizer's two-dose vaccine efficacy is reduced to as low as 33% with this new strain. And yet the powers that be continue to push mRNA vaccines & booster shots with an unusual fervency. Yes, our current vaccines may prevent death & hospitalization (though not in all cases) if you're infected with coronavirus. But as I mentioned last year, we're likely going to continue to run into these questions of whether mRNA jabs can protect us every time there's a new coronavirus variant. My 2020 post on this is here: https://drawingconclusions.tumblr.com/post/637425583968616448/the-coronavirus-vaccines-late-last-week-it-was I heard omicron has more than two-dozen mutations in the S or spike protein, which is exactly what the mRNA vaccines target. So I'm wondering why we aren't putting more funding towards vaccines that target the more stable inner N-protein of the coronavirus. Perhaps those types of vaccines take longer to develop, but according to those brilliant scientists (who will remain unnamed in light of the violent threats such dissidents receive), those vaccines would need less modification even if the S-proteins mutate in the wild. So what is this really about if it isn't about finding & implementing the best methods & medicines to protect the lives of the people?

INCREASE IN SUCIDES & VIOLENT BEHAVIOR It's unsettling how reports tell of a considerable increase in depression & suicides, especially among youth. I don't have a quick turn-key solution to this, but I still continue to implore communities and families alike to address all aspects of an individual, which especially includes the spiritual component. Youth are being told what to do, especially in regards to the pandemic, some are having their in-person classes reverted back to online sessions, many are dealing with incredible financial difficulties resulting from high gas prices and record-breaking inflation, and others are devastated by the break-up of their divorced families in 2020 and 2021. While I will never condone violence or threats of violence, you'd think some people would realize that the recent spate of copycat threats against schools is a reaction by young people grasping for some sense of control in their lives, however misguided that is. I'll tell you right now, wielding a gun doesn't make you more of a man or woman, and killing people in a violent spree will never be the solution to your hurt and problems. Only Jesus Christ can cure what ails you inside.

ON CLIMATE CHANGE Of course it's still in vogue to rally for mother earth, and despite the fact that some late night hosts think I can trash the planet because I view the afterlife as an "out" or "escape", as a Christian I'm called to be a good steward of what I'm entrusted with, and that includes the environment. Nevertheless, I was slightly horrified when I heard the Biden administration was considering closing a gas line that supplies America, simply out of environmental concerns. And this despite the fact that many lower and middle-class families already face huge spikes in heating costs this winter! Look, when I was back in school, I built a solar car for a science fair project. In retrospect, I knew very little about designing a low-weight & aerodynamic vehicle to reduce drag, or maximimizing the effectiveness of the solar panels, or choosing the most appropriate motors to power the model-size car. In the end, the project worked, but most days it required a little push to overcome the friction of the concrete surface I was testing it on. In other words, I wasn't there yet in terms of scientific know-how or skill. Most modern-day companies are light years ahead of where I was back then (or even where I'm at now, LOL!), but what I'm trying to say is this: Yes, most of us want more efficient cars, lighting, homes, and energy sources, but in most cases, we're not there yet. By all means, let's keep forging ahead, but please don't place the lives or livelihoods of innocent people on the line out of the desire for instant results.

THE JANUARY 6TH COMMISSION I've only kept up with portions of the January 6th Commission's findings, so I'll only say this: If this is to be a true and unbiased investigation, the American people deserve to know why riot gear was locked up in a bus somewhere on the day of, why the military refused to send any troops to help the Capitol police, why one FBI office only posted an online memo warning about the potential threat, and why apparently other members of the FBI were among the crowd encouraging people to storm the Capitol.

[sayedhusaini]

Why is there no debate about ‘leaky’ vaccines?

18 September 2021

Do you know what “leaky vaccines” are? There’s a good chance you don’t because discussion about them has been mostly shunted to the fringes of the web, with videos on the subject even excised from Youtube. The subject is treated as though it is something only tinfoil hat-wearing loons would take seriously.But leaky vaccines have been an established concern in the medical community for years. A paper discussing the potential problems with them was published in a reputable medical journal by experts well before anyone had heard of Covid.

In brief, leaky vaccines don’t offer full protection against the virus they are designed to deal with. Such vaccines don’t stop you from catching the virus. They work in the sense that they are likely to reduce your symptoms and lessen the chance of transmission to others.That’s a good thing, but researchers have worried that leaky vaccines can have potential drawbacks, possibly very serious ones. If a vaccine erects an imperfect barrier against a virus, one the virus can sometimes breach even if weakly, the virus persists and has every incentive and opportunity to adapt. That is, it is encouraged to grow stronger.Over time, variants of the virus are likely to find a way past the immune system’s defences mounted by the vaccine. Because the new variant has an evolutionary advantage over the original strain of virus, it comes to dominate – until a new variant supplants it in turn.

Endless arms race

In short, a leaky vaccine is at risk of becoming less effective over time. New vaccines may be needed in an endless arms race against the virus that encourages it to keep adapting and evolving to become ever more potent.Most of us should be able to understand this problem because we have heard about it in a closely related medical context: so-called “superbugs“.Antibiotics were invented nearly a century ago to put an end to deadly bacterial infections. They proved highly effective and saved many lives. They were so effective that doctors were encouraged by profit-seeking pharmaceutical companies – as well as the public’s desire for a pain-free life – to prescribe antibiotics for every tickly throat.Making things worse, farmers looking to maximise profits had every incentive to routinely use antibiotics on livestock – to prevent illness and deaths among animals they packed into warehouses in unnatural and unsanitary conditions.This abuse of antibiotics led to the current situation where some strains of bacteria have adapted so effectively they can resist every antibiotic on the market. These superbugs put hundreds of thousands of Americans in hospital every year and are reported to kill 35,000 of them annually.‘Waning immunity’

So what does this have to do with Covid?As you may have already guessed, the Covid vaccines are all leaky vaccines. In fact, it appears they were known to be leaky before the first person was vaccinated with them. It’s just no one thought to highlight it to us – not our politicians, the vaccine-makers or the corporate media.We can see quite how leaky they are in the current obsession with “booster” shots to deal with what are being called “breakthrough” cases – only months after most people received what they assumed would be their one and only round of vaccination.The justification for these boosters is framed as dealing with “waning immunity” and the fact that the delta variant is more “transmissable”.

But this medical jargon, though reassuring, may in fact be concealing something significant about the direction the virus is heading in – something that was evident in earlier vaccine research.‘Nastier’ viral strains۔ Until Covid, the only way to research how leaky vaccines worked in the midst of a major epidemic was by studying their use in animals. These studies were carried out in part because of concerns about what the effects of leaky vaccines might be if used during a human pandemic.We now have that pandemic.In 2015, four years before anyone had ever heard of Covid, the scientific journal PLOS Biology published a paper titled “Imperfect Vaccination Can Enhance the Transmission of Highly Virulent Pathogens”.

It examined what happened in the treatment of chickens for a virus called Marek’s disease, caused by a strain of herpes more virulent – if you’re a chicken – than Ebola.As one of the researchers concluded: “Our research demonstrates that the use of leaky vaccines can promote the evolution of nastier ‘hot’ viral strains that put unvaccinated individuals at greater risk.”Uncharted territory۔

In other words, once you start routinely using a leaky vaccine, the very leakiness of the virus in the vaccinated population risks putting the unvaccinated in greater danger by exposing them to turbo-charged variants of the virus their immune systems struggle to overcome.Because the vaccinated are less aware of being ill – they don’t take to their beds – they can become the equivalent of super-spreaders.So the solution is simple, no? Just ensure everyone gets vaccinated. (We’ll draw a veil over the issue of what to do with those who can’t get vaccinated for medical reasons.)But there is a potential problem here too. Because if the leaky vaccines simply allow the virus to adapt and evolve, never putting out the fire, the virus keeps spreading and could get more deadly over time. As with those superbugs, we could reach a point where much nastier strains of the virus become resistant to all the vaccines we have. Delta may be an early indication of how this might happen.

That’s the theory anyway. No one can be sure whether that is what will happen with the Covid pandemic for two reasons.First, because – from what I can tell – a leaky vaccine has never before been used in the midst of a global pandemic. This is uncharted territory.And second, because in the case of those chickens, the spread of the disease could be halted, in addition to vaccination, through the culling of infected animals. That – I should hope – is not a solution anyone is contemplating for dealing with Covid.

No debate

Now for the disclaimer. I am not a doctor. I don’t know what the most likely outcome of using leaky vaccines against Covid is, and I don’t claim to. In any case, I doubt most readers care what I think on the subject.What I am concerned about – and I would hope most other people are too – is that experts in this field be allowed to have a medical debate about these issues in public.Which is exactly what isn’t happening at the moment. Corporate media companies, from the New York Times and BBC to Facebook and Youtube – many of them invested in pharmaceuticals themselves – are deciding that you shouldn’t even know that the Covid vaccines are leaky, let alone the potential pitfalls.

Maybe that wouldn’t be so serious if we could trust the medical establishment and regulatory authorities to be doing that job for us. But it seems clear we can’t.The truth is that most doctors, even eminent ones, are little better placed than you or me to judge the dangers of leaky vaccines. This is a very specialist field of research. Those qualified to have an expert opinion on the matter are mostly those doing advanced and very costly research for vaccine companies, especially those working on mRNA technology which has been so central to the Covid vaccination programme.

Difficult to whistleblow۔

But if there were really a problem with the leaky Covid vaccines, why isn’t this small group of experts not speaking up to warn us? Isn’t their silence proof that this is pure hyperbole?Here we get to the rub.Let’s take a comparable case. The first scientists to predict the current trajectory of climate change – to an extremely high degree of accuracy – did so back in the 1970s and 1980s and they worked for the oil companies. They kept their findings secret, as we now know many decades later. Exxon, BP, Shell and the others invested huge sums in modelling climate change so they would be the first to understand the risks to their industry. They needed to know how long they could get away with destroying the planet before the damage became so apparent they would be required to reinvent themselves as pioneers of green technologies.The crunch moment those scientists predicted was reached a few years back – about the time the oil companies indeed did start reinventing themselves as pioneers of green technologies.Similarly, the scientists who best understand the risks of leaky vaccines are those employed by the vaccine companies.There is no more reason to believe that they will whistleblow on the pharmaceuticals industry than the scientists who worked for the fossil fuel industry, or the tobacco industry, or the car industry.

Any scientist who does have concerns about leaky Covid vaccines knows that by speaking out they will make themselves unemployable, they will be labelled a crazy conspiracy theorist by the media, and in any case they will be unable to reach large audiences because social media companies will censor them either directly or through changes to the search engine algorithms.

Captured by the elite

So what is needed if we are to learn about scientific concerns relating to leaky vaccines in general and leaky Covid vaccines specifically, and not simply the talking points of Big Pharma, is for the odd expert to step forward as an industry whistleblower. Any who do are almost certain to be mavericks – those who have little to lose, those who have retired, those who already hold grievances with the way public health policy is made.And these are precisely the people who have been raising their voices.A few disgruntled, former insiders are speaking up – while most of their colleagues keep their heads down. Is that because their colleagues think that they are wrong? Or is it because their colleagues have more to lose – like all those scientists who worked for Exxon and BP and never got round to telling us about the evidence for climate change they had unearthed.The problem is we just don’t know. And we don’t know because our system of information dissemination is entirely captured by corporate interests. The wealth-elite that profits from rapacious, conscience-less, profit-driven, consumption-led capitalism is also the elite that buys our political class, owns our media, funds our regulatory authorities.

Playing with fire

One expert whistleblower is Dr Robert Malone, who was given a platform this week by Jimmy Dore to express his fears that what happened to the chicken virus may also happen to Covid.His view is that we are playing with fire by trying to enforce a mass vaccination programme through a mix of mandates, incentives and social pressure . He believes only the most vulnerable to Covid should be vaccinated. Meanwhile, doctors should be working on developing an armoury of repurposed drugs for the small numbers of younger and healthier people who suffer serious ill-effects from Covid.This, in his view, would have been the wisest and safest strategy.I don’t know whether he’s right, but I sure would like to hear his and other experts’ concerns being addressed in public – and ideally refuted – instead of what is happening: their concerns are being brushed under the carpet.I don’t know whether these concerns have been ignored because they are fanciful nonsense, or because the medical establishment has no good arguments to counter them and doesn’t want to frighten us, the children.

Gutter journalism

My worries have only been heightened – and yours should be too – by the fact that no one appears willing to engage in any kind of debate about the potential problems with leaky Covid vaccines.There should be no doubt that Dr Malone qualifies as an expert. He describes himself as the inventor of the very mRNA technology that is the basis of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.But in practice, that authority to speak on the subject is being used against him. Which should set off alarm bells.

Here is one execrable attempt to discredit Dr Malone rather than address his concerns – this one from the supposedly prestigious Atlantic magazine. The article’s headline, “The Vaccine Scientist Spreading Vaccine Misinformation”, is designed to make us assume – as the author and editors doubtless hope we will assume without reading on – that the piece proves Dr Malone is peddling conspiracy theories.

That headline suggests that the doubts Dr Malone has raised about the safety of leaky Covid vaccines will be discredited in the article with countervailing scientific evidence, presumably from other experts.The article, however, does nothing of the sort.It is dedicated instead to painting Dr Malone as an embittered fantasist. It does so not with evidence but by quibbling over whether he can in fact be credited with inventing mRNA technology, as he says, or whether he was simply one of its leading pioneers.

Is Dr Malone the most knowledgeable person on mRNA technology or just one of a handful of them? Unless the first is true, the Atlantic implies, everything he has to say about the potential dangers of leaky Covid vaccines based on mRNA technology is worthless and can be safely discounted.The Atlantic’s article is what we journalists call a hatchet job. It’s what journalists do when they have no evidence to make a stronger case. You play the man, not the ball. It is the very worst kind of gutter journalism.

Treated like child

I don’t know about you but that simply isn’t good enough for me. I want to hear what Dr Malone is saying and I want to hear experts who are as eminently qualified as him address his concerns. I’m not interested in having corporate journalists and editors no more qualified than me declare me a gullible fool for listening to him or for wanting to hear a scientific rejoinder to his arguments.I also don’t want politicians and social media corporations deciding whether Dr Malone gets to speak, or the medical establishment pretending that he and the research literature he draws on don’t exist.And I don’t want Pfizer and Moderna deciding for themselves – and without a proper discussion – whether I and my children should be made to take vaccines for the rest of our lives and whether that is a safe or wise strategy.I can’t understand why anyone would not feel the same, unless they would prefer to be treated like a child, cocooned from taking any responsibility for their own and their family’s health, safe in the illusion that the establishment has never made a mistake or ever told a self-interested lie.I want to be treated like a grown-up. I want Dr Malone treated like the expert he undoubtedly is. I want a conversation – before it’s too late to have a conversation.