#study in south africa cost

[reasonsforhope]

"With Donald Trump set to take office after a fear-mongering campaign that reignited concerns about his desire to become a dictator, a reasonable question comes up: Can nonviolent struggle defeat a tyrant?

There are many great resources that answer this question, but the one that’s been on my mind lately is the Global Nonviolent Action Database, or GNAD, built by the Peace Studies department at Swarthmore College. Freely accessible to the public, this database — which launched under my direction in 2011 — contains over 1,400 cases of nonviolent struggle from over a hundred countries, with more cases continually being added by student researchers.  

At quick glance, the database details at least 40 cases of dictators who were overthrown by the use of nonviolent struggle, dating back to 1920. These cases — which include some of the largest nations in the world, spanning Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America — contradict the widespread assumption that a dictator can only be overcome by violence. What’s more, in each of these cases, the dictator had the desire to stay, and possessed violent means for defense. Ultimately, though, they just couldn’t overcome the power of mass nonviolent struggle.  

In a number of countries, the dictator had been embedded for years at the time they were pushed out. Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, for example, had ruled for over 29 years. In the 1990s, citizens usually whispered his name for fear of reprisal. Mubarak legalized a “state of emergency,” which meant censorship, expanded police powers and limits on the news media. Later, he “loosened” his rule, putting only 10 times as many police as the number of protesters at each demonstration.  

The GNAD case study describes how Egyptians grew their democracy movement despite repression, and finally won in 2011. However, gaining a measure of freedom doesn’t guarantee keeping it. As Egypt has shown in the years since, continued vigilance is needed, as is pro-active campaigning to deepen the degree of freedom won.  

Some countries repeated the feat of nonviolently deposing a ruler: In Chile, the people nonviolently threw out a dictator in 1931 and then deposed a new dictator in 1988. South Koreans also did it twice, once in 1960 and again in 1987. (They also just stopped their current president from seizing dictatorial powers, but that’s not yet in the database.)  

In each case people had to act without knowing what the reprisals would be...

It’s striking that in many of the cases I looked at, the movement avoided merely symbolic marches and rallies and instead focused on tactics that impose a cost on the regime. As Donald Trump wrestles to bring the armed forces under his control, for example, I can imagine picketing army recruiting offices with signs, “Don’t join a dictator’s army.”  

Another important takeaway: Occasional actions that simply protest a particular policy or egregious action aren’t enough. They may relieve an individual’s conscience for a moment, but, ultimately, episodic actions, even large ones, don’t assert enough power. Over and over, the Global Nonviolent Action Database shows that positive results come from a series of escalating, connected actions called a campaign...

-via Waging Nonviolence, January 8, 2025. Article continues below.

East Germany’s peaceful revolution

When East Germans began their revolt against the German Democratic Republic in 1988, they knew that their dictatorship of 43 years was backed by the Soviet Union, which might stage a deadly invasion. They nevertheless acted for freedom, which they gained and kept.

Researcher Hanna King tells us that East Germans began their successful campaign in January 1988 by taking a traditional annual memorial march and turning it into a full-scale demonstration for human rights and democracy. They followed up by taking advantage of a weekly prayer for peace at a church in Leipzig to organize rallies and protests. Lutheran pastors helped protect the organizers from retaliation and groups in other cities began to stage their own “Monday night demonstrations.”  

The few hundred initial protesters quickly became 70,000, then 120,000, then 320,000, all participating in the weekly demonstrations. Organizers published a pamphlet outlining their vision for a unified German democracy and turned it into a petition. Prisoners of conscience began hunger strikes in solidarity.

By November 1988, a million people gathered in East Berlin, chanting, singing and waving banners calling for the dictatorship’s end. The government, hoping to ease the pressure, announced the opening of the border to West Germany. Citizens took sledgehammers to the hated Berlin Wall and broke it down. Political officials resigned to protest the continued rigidity of the ruling party and the party itself disintegrated. By March 1990 — a bit over two years after the campaign was launched — the first multi-party, democratic elections were held.

Students lead the way in Pakistan

In Pakistan, it was university students (rather than religious clerics) who launched the 1968-69 uprising that forced Ayub Khan out of office after his decade as a dictator. Case researcher Aileen Eisenberg tells us that the campaign later required multiple sectors of society to join together to achieve critical mass, especially workers. 

It was the students, though, who took the initiative — and the initial risks. In 1968, they declared that the government’s declaration of a “decade of development” was a fraud, protesting nonviolently in major cities. They sang and marched to their own song called “The Decade of Sadness.” 

Police opened fire on one of the demonstrations, killing several students. In reaction the movement expanded, in numbers and demands. Boycotts grew, with masses of people refusing to pay the bus and railway fares on the government-run transportation system. Industrial workers joined the movement and practiced encirclement of factories and mills. An escalation of government repression followed, including more killings. 

As the campaign expanded from urban to rural parts of Pakistan, the movement’s songs and political theater thrived. Khan responded with more violence, which intensified the determination among a critical mass of Pakistanis that it was time for him to go.

After months of growing direct action met by repressive violence, the army decided its own reputation was being degraded by their orders from the president, and they demanded his resignation. He complied and an election was scheduled for 1970 — the first since Pakistan’s independence in 1947.

Why use nonviolent struggle?

The campaigns in East Germany and Pakistan are typical of all 40 cases in their lack of a pacifist ideology, although some individuals active in the movements had that foundation. What the cases do seem to have in common is that the organizers saw the strategic value of nonviolent action, since they were up against an opponent likely to use violent repression. Their commitment to nonviolence would then rally the masses to their side. 

That encourages me. There’s hardly time in the U.S. during Trump’s regime to convert enough people to an ideological commitment to nonviolence, but there is time to persuade people of the strategic value of a nonviolent discipline. 

It’s striking that in many of the cases I looked at, the movement avoided merely symbolic marches and rallies and instead focused on tactics that impose a cost on the regime. As Donald Trump wrestles to bring the armed forces under his control, for example, I can imagine picketing army recruiting offices with signs, “Don’t join a dictator’s army.”  

Another important takeaway: Occasional actions that simply protest a particular policy or egregious action aren’t enough. They may relieve an individual’s conscience for a moment, but, ultimately, episodic actions, even large ones, don’t assert enough power. Over and over, the Global Nonviolent Action Database shows that positive results come from a series of escalating, connected actions called a campaign — the importance of which is also outlined in my book “How We Win.”  

As research seminar students at Swarthmore continue to wade through history finding new cases, they are digging up details on struggles that go beyond democracy. The 1,400 already-published cases include campaigns for furthering environmental justice, racial and economic justice, and more. They are a resource for tactical ideas and strategy considerations, encouraging us to remember that even long-established dictators have been stopped by the power of nonviolent campaigns.

-via Waging Nonviolence, January 8, 2025.

[andmaybegayer]

Rambling: So much of this is just like. It's all the money, you can't get around the money. Engineering is primarily a cost optimisation problem, so is business, where do you buy your parts, how much do you pay your labour. The companies can make equal quality goods cheaper in China because of the industrial base. Western workers don't want to work in manufacturing because it doesn't pay as much or as reliably as other jobs.

I like reading articles and watching videos about factories and a thing you find with a lot of American factories is they're often highly specific niche industries where they don't have much competition or they're really low volume where less intensive manufacturing processes still work or they have big military contracts that give them their base income. Really it's wild how every little engineering shop in the US requires base level security clearance because they make the cable harness for the Hornet or whatever. And crucially, crucially: they employ 100 people. Planning to work for one of these companies is like planning to be a pro baseball player but you make $35/hr.

I studied in South Africa, and I studied electrical engineering, but like. That was my fifth or sixth choice from a personal interest perspective? As a teenager I was really into biochem. I really wanted to work on like. Bioreactor stuff. South Africa has okay industrial chemistry but not that much biochem. So why would I go spend five years getting a biochem Masters and hope I could find a job at one of like six companies. It's a bad move! Once again, baseball player odds! Mostly if you're lucky you'll get to fuck around in a half-related field for a few years and then you'll wind up with some office job that you found because it turns out running tests on paint shearing isn't personally fulfilling enough to make you stay in a lab job.

Hell, even taking the Good Hiring Engineering Job market, it's a goddamn pain in the ass to find any actual engineering work. I applied to dozens of internship positions every semester at engineering firms and workshops and never so much as heard back, whereas I could go to the software job fairs and get two offers and several interviews for a vacation job in a couple weeks. You can swim upstream to get in there but even if you're willing to take the pay cut, engineering jobs are slow moving and slow hiring, and in small departments your professional progression is often gated behind someone retiring or dying.

A while ago someone (was this Reggie? sounds like him EDIT: YEP) was talking about how part of the reason why no one in the US for the past 20 years can do like, epitaxial growth optimisation isn't because there's some philosophical or educational divison, but because anyone committed and driven enough to spend months optimizing that would just put that energy and commitment into going into software or becoming a quant or some other higher yield option. Meanwhile if you're a driven and focussed ladder climber in China there's dozens of factories looking for someone to do exactly this. The people in the West who are so into this that they still do it are often in academia, not industry, and that's an even more competitive and impenetrable sector to get into. Getting a PhD grad job in academic chip manufacturing is miserable, it's basically a six year long interview process that costs you hundreds of thousands of dollars that has a 0.1% chance of panning out.

Actually, I did once do a factory internship, it was my only nepotism internship, at a construction materials factory where my dad was a manager, and it was really interesting work! I had a lot of freedom in a small engineering team and I spent a while understanding a bag filling machine and reading manuals and tuning the control process and talking to floor workers and designing sheet metal parts to improve their jobs. And when I talked to the engineer supervising me I found out he was on a six month contract that wasn't getting renewed and he would be leaving the company basically the same time my internship ended. That company hadn't hired a full-time process engineer in ages, and probably never would if they could avoid it. Not encouraging!

People often say you should get into the trades because they pay well and are material fulfilling work. This is like. It's an elision. Successful tradespeople are in very high demand, but becoming a successful tradesperson is very, very finicky. I worked with a lot of electricians and millwrights and technicians, and for every tech who was successful and running a roaring business there were five guys stuck in eternal apprenticeships or struggling to make a name for themselves in the industry on their own. Some trades are great for this, other trades are 90% training scams where you spend nine months and five thousand dollars on a course that gives you a certificate almost no one cares about.

Every now and then I talk to an installation tech I used to work with who has a bunch of CCTV and security certs he got in the DRC, and he is just absolutely struggling to get by. There's already enough successful companies to serve the demand, why would you take a risk on this fly-by-night? He could find a technical job, and he does, but it's a dead end, everyone wants a base technician forever, they don't want you to upskill and move on. They hire in an external electrician to come in for an hour sign off on your work, and that's all you need.

You can't develop an industrial base unless it's appealing to work in the industrial base. If you're an industrialising nation, the appeal is "It's not farm work and you might get some real money instead of a sack of barley" but in a modern society you need to pay at least as well as the office jobs. If your industrial sector is small it can afford to only hire the most qualified people because it's a labour buyer's market, and that's how you produce a massive knowledge gap.

[probablyasocialecologist]

A new study details how, as wealthy countries rewild farmland, they are driving the destruction of forests in poorer countries that are more abundant in wildlife. When industrialized nations in Europe and North America reclaim farmland, “the resulting shortfalls in food and wood production will have to be made up somewhere,” said Andrew Balmford of the University of Cambridge. Typically, countries in Africa and South America are picking up the slack, at great cost to wildlife. Balmford is the lead author of a new paper, published in Science, that finds that rewilding cropland in the U.K. may ultimately incur five times more damage to wildlife than it avoids, a phenomenon authors refer to as the “biodiversity leak.” Conversely, the paper found, rewilding Brazilian soybean farms would push production to Argentina and the U.S., but because Brazil possesses a greater diversity of wildlife, the gains for nature would be five times greater than the harms. Authors call for confronting “leakage” when setting conservation goals, noting that a U.N. agreement to protect 30 percent of land and sea makes no mention of this issue. “The first thing we need to do is collectively acknowledge that these leaks exist,” said coauthor Brendan Fisher, of the University of Vermont. “If protesting a logging concession in the U.S.A. increases demand for pulp from the tropics, then we are unlikely to be helping biodiversity.”

21 February 2025

[fatehbaz]

hi i love your blog and the stuff you've shared has been really invaluable for me writing my dissertation right now! i was wondering if you've ever read anything interesting about police horses, or perhaps horses working for the state more generally? apologies if you've already made a post about this and i've missed it.

Nice. Don't know if your dissertation is specifically about horse histories; if so, then I'd imagine you already know much more than I do. So I don't know how much help I can be.

I've posted about the history of police horses in Australia before, which is just excerpts from Stephen Gapps and Mina Murray, in their "From colonial cavalry to mounted police: a short history of the Australian police horse" (The Conversation, 28 July 2021; "Horse Patrol" aka "Mounted Police" formally established 1825 after Wiradjuri war, used to round-up escaped laborers and attack Aboriginal communities as crucial force in colonial admin in 1830s culminating in Waterloo Creek Massacre.)

I've made some references to US participation in British campaigns of Boer War. (Apparently there was a micro-industry of the New Orleans port shipping 110,000 horses and 81,000 mules on 166 voyages via 65 British steamships for a cost of like hundreds of thousands USD per month for three years to help Britain.)

Similarly, Steve Hewitt and others write about Canadian mounted police and their role in national power in the Great Plains; twentieth-century counter-subversion; monitoring labor strikes and Indigenous/student dissent, etc.

"The Masculine Mountie: The Royal Canadian Mounted Police as a Male Institution, 1914-1939" (Hewitt, Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, 1996)

Riding to the Rescue: The Transformation of the RCMP in Alberta and Saskatchewan, 1914-1939 (Hewitt, 2006)

"Fashioning farmers: ideology, agricultural knowledge and the Manitoba farm movement, 1890-1925" (Hewitt, Journal of Canadian Studies, 1997)

"Canadianizing the West: The North-West Mounted Police as Agents of the National Policy, 1873-1905" (Mcleod, The Prairie West: Historical Readings, edited by Francis and Palmer, 1992)

---

Guessing you've already considered this, but a relevant thing I've read might be Breeds of Empire: The 'Invention' of the Horse in Southeast Asia and Southern Africa 1500-1950 (Greg Bankoff and Sandra Swart, 2007), about "the 'invention' of specific breeds of horse in the context of imperial design and colonial trade routes" and "the historiographical and methodological problems with writing a more species or horse-centric history." There was an earlier influential paper about imperial use of horses by Swart, ""The World the Horses Made": A South African Case Study of Writing Animals into Social History" (International Review of Social History 55:2, 2010).

Last year I read Bellweather Histories: Animals, Humans, and US Environments in Crisis (edited by Susan Nance and Jennifer Marks, 2023), and there was an interesting chapter on horses by Marks: "Chicago's 1872 Equine Influenza Epizootic and the Evolution of Urban Transit Technology."

---

Have you seen Jagjeet Lally's "Empires and Equines: The Horse in Art and Exchange in South Asia, ca. 1600-1850" (Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 35:1, 2015)? It covers Mughal state power and aristocratic prestige as tied to horses, but also refers to the later utility of horseback mobility in East India Company and British power consolidation.

I used to be in a Central Asia-specific program-type thing and there was a long list of academic writing, most if it not in English, about horses as essential for statecraft in Mongol, Persian, Mughal, Chinese, and Ottoman contexts. So I know that there's a huge amount of writing on the subject, but I did not retain much of it. Jagjeet Lally's bibliography here is helpful. This also brings to mind Alan Mikhail's work The Animal in Ottoman Egypt (2013) and Under Osman's Tree: The Ottoman Empire, Egypt, and Environmental History (2017). Though horses aren't the main focus, they're essentially about "animal labor/capital."

---

I think I've seen that you've interacted with my old posts about Sujit Sivasundaram, Rohan Deb Roy, and Jonathan Saha on "interspecies empire"? Saha's most recent stuff includes writing in:

Biocultural Empire: New Histories of Imperial Lifeworlds (2024); Colonial Dimensions of the Global Wildlife Trade (2024); "A Historiography of Great Animal Massacres" (2024); "whiteness, masculinity, and ambivalent British Justice"; imperial use of elephants and "animal agency, undead capital, and imperial science" (2017); Subverting Empire: Deviance and Disorder in the British Colonial World (2015); imperial use of cattle and other livestock in "animals and the politics of colonial sensitibilites" (2015). Sivasundaram covers a lot of that (animality, criminality, imperial imaginaries) but also oceanic thinking.

---

Also thinking of:

The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarr, 2011)

And The Herds Shot Round the World: Native Breeds and the British Empire, 1800-1900 (Rebecca JH Woods, 2017). Though its not really about horses (mostly about sheep and cattle for dairy/meat).

---

But I know there are little niches:

(1) British frontier policing in Australia ("mounted patrols" in campaigns against Aboriginal peoples and keeping them on rangeland labor sites). (2) British metropolitan and urban settings (police horses in industrializing London, patrolling rural periphery during enclosure law era). (3) The settlement of the Great Plains of the US (especially origins of Rangers, the Fence Wars, and policing West Texas). (4) The Spanish colonization of Mexico and especially the Rio Grande Valley (horses in maintaining state power on the northern/desert frontiers; Spanish/Mexican states and Comanche/Apache mobility in southern Great Plains). (5) Argentina's state-building in the Chaco. (6) And then all of that material about Mughal, Mongol, Ottoman horses.

(Also, most recently, I did that annoying silly satirical retelling of horse-drawn sleighs as progenitor of vehicle and pedestrian laws in industrializing Amsterdam, and it alludes to how horse-drawn carriages were important affordances to wealthy aristocrats which shaped industrial urban space in Europe; I don't know much about it, but I know there's a fair amount of lit about both horses-as-vehicles and mounted police in early nineteenth-century Europe.)

Though I'm not really familiar with most of that. In trying to formulate thoughts about "carceral archipelagoes" and "frontiers," I've previously seen titles about the utility of telegraphs, railyards, and police for US power consolidation. But when horses/cattle get involved, I've been scared/disturbed by just how much of that literature seems to be directly produced by "police department museums," "police science" journals, or former police-superintendents-turned-pseudo-historians in their retirement years who study their own noble profession as a novel curiosity.

But I imagine you know better than me if this is true. So please put me back in my place if I've got the wrong impression!

It's my impression that, more recently, the advent of critical animal studies, multispecies ethnography, and critical geography has meant there's a lot of new stuff to check out.

[dandelionsresilience]

Dandelion News - May 15-21

Like these weekly compilations? Tip me at $kaybarr1735 or check out my Dandelion Doodles! (EDIT: this was originally accidentally posted with only 3 articles, ig my internet farted, please rb this version with all 5 instead!)

1. Solar apprenticeships give Virginia students a head start on clean energy

“A regional partnership working to add solar panels to commercial buildings in the region aims to train young people as they go, developing workforce skills in anticipation of increasing demand for renewable energy-focused jobs in the heart of coal country, where skill sets and energy options are both changing. […] On top of hourly pay, apprentices get free equipment and a transportation subsidy, along with nine community college credits at Mountain Empire Community College, which provides classroom training before students step onto the job site.”

2. Generic drugs can be reliably supplied at big savings, study finds

“A new study finds that CivicaScript, a not-for-profit drug manufacturer in the US, can reliably supply essential generic medicines at a price that saves patients over 60%, and public and private insurers over 90%[….] The researchers say that CivicaScript's success proves that prioritizing patient access over investor profit in the generic pharmaceutical industry is not only possible, but also could be highly productive and cost efficient.”

3. This flat-bodied South African gecko was a 'lost' species. It's been found again after 34 years

“[The species was discovered] in northeastern South Africa in 1991 only to not be seen again. [In April 2025, scientists] saw 20-30 specimens and captured and photographed seven, [… and] the data they collected, including tissue samples, should allow them to confirm it is a distinct species. […] A mole that lives in sand dunes was found in 2021 after having not been seen for more than 80 years, and a butterfly, a lizard and a frog species have also been found again in the last four years after being lost to conservationists for decades.”

4. Australian researchers to trial flat-packed, lower-cost concentrated solar technology

““Industrial process heat accounts for a staggering 25% of global energy use and 20% of CO2 emissions,” explained [one of the researchers]. [… This new technology can] generate temperatures between 100-400 degrees celsius, highlighting its potential for reducing several industries’ reliance on fossil fuels. With these sorts of temperatures, the proprietary CST modules would be ideal for several processes such as grain & pulse drying, sterilising and wastewater treatment.”

5. Morocco unveils policies it hopes bolster the care and management of stray dogs

“[…] Morocco’s updated approach balanced public safety, health and animal well-being [… by ensuring that stray dogs] are examined, treated [(vaccinated and neutered)] and ultimately released with tags that make clear they pose no danger. […] It’s designed to gradually reduce the stray dog population while minimizing the need for euthanasia.”

May 8-14 news here | (all credit for images and written material can be found at the source linked; I don’t claim credit for anything but curating.)

[wumblr]

A study published last month in the New England Journal of Medicine found a 100% effectiveness rate for the drug in a study of 2,134 women in South Africa and Uganda. However, Gilead at present charges $42,250 for an annual two-shot regimen — a price obviously far out of reach for working and oppressed people. Producing the drug costs Gilead just $28, meaning the company is collecting a 1,500% profit on each treatment!

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from EcoWatch:

Fulfilling current land restoration pledges in 115 countries would require only a small amount of the global annual GDP, a recent analysis has found. Successful implementation would require about 0.04% to 0.27% of global annual GDP, totaling about $311 billion to $2.1 trillion.

The researchers analyzed costs of 243 land restoration projects happening globally and found that the median cost ranged from $185 per hectare to $3,012 per hectare, with an overall median cost of $1,691 per hectare. Lower-cost opportunities include forest management for $185 per hectare, passive regeneration ($513 per hectare), grazing management ($631 per hectare) and assisted natural regeneration ($804 per hectare).

“Passive regeneration is basically just fencing off an area and leaving it alone,” Dewy Verhoeven, lead author of the study and Ph.D. candidate at Wageningen University & Research, told Mongabay News. “Those costs are very low, maybe you have to install a fence and that’s it. But the opportunity costs are very large because you cannot use the land anymore.”

Projects with the highest median costs include agroforestry ($2,390 per hectare), cross-slope barriers ($2,562 per hectare), irrigation ($2,886 per hectare) and silvopasture ($3,012 per hectare), which integrates trees and pasture for grazing livestock on the same land.

In total, land degradation projects would add up to about 0.38% to 2.65% of global GDP for one year; however, the authors noted that spreading the cost out over a decade would lower the annual cost to just 0.04% to 0.27% of global GDP. The authors published these findings in the journal Land Degradation & Development.

While the total percentage is small, an even distribution of costs or distributing costs by project location would place a higher burden on lower income countries. The report authors found that most projects are concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa as well as South and Southeast Asia, with sub-Saharan Africa accounting for almost half of all global land restoration pledges.

[brf-rumortrackinganon]

It’s interesting that he’s gone back to sustainable tourism, not invictius. I mean we know he was going to stay as far away from Sentebal and Africa as possible, but these china and susntainable travel doesn’t seem to be something that goes together.

It just seems to be that he’s likely run out of support from Europe, and now North America. He can’t touch South Africa due to other issues, so now he’s trying to get money out of Asia.

Harry’s been working in Asia for several years. This isn’t new.

Someone looked into Travalyst the other day (I think I read about it on SMM) and what Travalyst is is a search engine of all the big airlines that helps you find sustainable *air* travel options only - don’t be fooled into thinking it helps you find trains or buses or other forms of local public transit.

Except the problem with sustainable air travel is that studies have proven that the most sustainable option is direct nonstop flights. Which in and of itself is a huge problem because direct nonstop flights are $$$$$. Especially for international travel, which a lot of people in China, Japan, Singapore, etc. do if they want to travel. So that’s why Harry is taking Travalyst to Asia: they’re one of the biggest groups of international travelers, which means he can make bank selling them his company’s travel coordinating services.

I do think Travalyst is a grift but I can’t object to them working with or lobbying the airline industry to lower the costs of direct nonstop flights worldwide. Everyone benefits when the airlines are forced to be accountable themselves instead of passing all costs and all responsibilities onto their customers.

[lostinhistory]

Heritage News of the Week

Discoveries!

Archaeologists in Egypt have discovered the 3,200-year-old tomb of a possible military commander who may have served during the reign of Ramesses III. Inside the man's tomb, archaeologists found a gold ring containing the name of Ramesses III, along with bronze arrowheads.

2,200-year-old shackles discovered at ancient Egyptian gold mine

Two sets of iron ankle shackles found at an archaeological site in Egypt are revealing the "significant human cost" of gold mining undertaken to fund Ptolemy I's military campaigns, according to new research.

Rare Viking-era bracelet uncovered on Öland

The bracelet is extremely well-preserved due to the oxygen-poor environment of the wetland which helped prevent corrosion. Both ends of the bracelet depict animal heads and the length is decorated with intricate rows of dots.

Ancient sculptures didn’t just look good—they also smelled heavenly, study finds

New research suggests statues were scented with perfumes, oils, and flower arrangements.

Roman water conduit exposed beneath Slovak castle

Archaeologists from Trnava University were baffled by a discovery they made while working at Rusovce Manor House outside of Bratislava.

Archaeologists unearth burials from the Schmalkaldic War

Archaeologists from the Bavarian State Office for Monument Preservation have unearthed burials from the Schmalkaldic War that correspond to details in a 1551 historical painting.

Archaeologists make several major discoveries in ancient Liternum

Recent excavations under the Superintendency for the Metropolitan Area of Naples have been focusing a study on the city’s necropolis, located a short distance from the Forum and Amphitheatre.

Ancient well dating back to 7th century AD discovered on Failaka Island

An ancient well, dating back to the pre-Islamic and early Islamic periods, has been discovered on Failaka Island, providing valuable insights into the region’s past.

Smallest human relative ever found may have been devoured by a leopard 2 million years ago

The left hip and leg bones from a young female Paranthropus robustus discovered in South Africa show she was extremely short — and ended up as a leopard's lunch.

Large mammoth bone discovery in Lower Austria

Archaeologists from the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) have uncovered the remains of at least five mammoths during excavations in Langmannersdorf an der Perschling, located in the Austrian state of Lower Austria.

Researchers define the borders of El Argar, the first state-society in the Iberian Peninsula

Recent research conducted by scholars from the Autonomous University of Barcelona and the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology has identified the economic and political boundaries that delineated El Argar, the first state structure in the Iberian Peninsula, approximately 4,000 years ago.

Bulgar-Golden Horde period complex discovered in Alekseevsky

Excavations in preparation for the construction of a highway project has revealed two burial grounds and a settlement dating from the 10th–14th centuries AD.

European hunter-gatherers boated to North Africa during Stone Age, ancient DNA suggests

DNA recovered from archaeological remains of ancient humans who lived in what is now Tunisia and northeastern Algeria reveals that European hunter-gatherers may have visited North Africa by boat around 8,500 years ago.

Rare Roman-era columbariums discovered in Şanlıurfa

Rare Roman-era columbariums were discovered in Senem Caves in the Haliliye district and in the garden of a citizen in Bozova.

“Structurally sound” historic vessels discovered beneath fishpond

Preliminary studies indicate that both vessels remain structurally sound. However, archaeologists are still analysing the construction materials to determine the age and type of wood used.

5,000-year-old fortress discovered in Romania using LiDAR technology

The fortress, obscured by centuries of dense vegetation, was mapped with precision using drones equipped with LiDAR, which emits laser pulses to create high-resolution terrain models.

“Pompeian Gray” discovered in Pompeii excavations: a unique color in the Roman world

A recent study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science has revealed the discovery of a new color in the chromatic repertoire of the Roman world: Pompeian Gray.

Museums

The gift from Bloomberg Philanthropies is the largest private donation and largest archive of archaeological material given to the museum to date. The artefacts were discovered during construction of Bloomberg's European headquarters in the City of London between 2012 and 2014.

Anti-plague amulets and IOUs: the excavation that brings Roman London thundering back to life

With sandals that look fresher than last year’s Birkenstocks, gossipy messages recovered from writing tablets and 73,000 shards of pottery, London Museum’s new collection is like falling head-first into the first century

Victorian museum opens 'calm space' for visitors

The Sunflower Room at Blists Hill Victorian Town in Telford has been created for people with special educational needs and disabilities, health conditions, and parents who need to breastfeed or bottle-feed children in a quiet place.

National Trust freezes recruitment after £10m jump in costs

The National Trust has frozen all but essential recruitment and is pausing some projects as it faces a £10m jump in labour costs this year as a result of higher employment costs stemming from last autumn’s budget.

The secret life of LA’s small museums

With a fair dose of whimsy, Also on View draws attention to museums off the beaten track, centering the region’s rich diasporic fabric and cultural niches.

British Museum tops UK attractions list, but the effects of the pandemic still linger on

Official figures have revealed that the British Museum was – for the second year in a row – the UK’s most-visited attraction in 2024. While visitor numbers for cultural attractions are rising, however, the sector remains fragile.

In the Trump era, the UK sector’s commitments to equity and inclusion risk being quietly eroded

Museums must not allow the wider political context to undo progress, say Suzanne MacLeod and Richard Sandell

Which of your possessions belongs in a trans museum?

It’s time for major museums to stand up for trans and queer people in the public and among their employees — instead the National Gallery of Art and Smithsonian have shuttered their diversity offices. That’s why community members are shifting focus back to small grassroots LGBTQ+ museums, archives, and galleries that have done this historical labor for their communities for decades.

Repatriation

The 350-year-old artifact is one of seven objects returned to the Ysleta Del Sur Pueblo Native American tribe

Antiquities looted by notorious smuggling ring returned to Nepal

Works linked to the disgraced art dealer Subhash Kapoor are among the 20 objects seized by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit.

University scholar solves portrait theft mystery

An Exeter University art historian has solved the 70-year mystery over the theft of an original oil sketch, by Flemish painter Anthony van Dyck, from a stately home in Northamptonshire.

Heritage at risk

Palestinian experts and British archaeologists say more than two-thirds of heritage, cultural and archaeological sites in Gaza have been damaged

Trump administration seeks to starve libraries and museums of funding by shuttering this little-known agency

On March 14, 2025, the Trump administration issued an executive order that called for the dismantling of seven federal agencies “to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.” They ranged from the United States Agency for Global Media, which oversees Voice of America, to the Minority Business Development Agency. The Institute of Museum and Library Services was also on the list.

Act Now to Save IMLS

Trump names new director of museum agency he moved to dismantle

Last Friday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order calling for the dismantling of seven federal agencies. Chief among them was the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which provides critical funding to museums, libraries, and archives. Now, less than a week later, Trump appointed a new head of the agency, Keith E. Sonderling. “It is an honor to be appointed by President Trump to lead this important organization in its mission to advance, support and empower America’s museums and libraries, which stand as cornerstones of learning and culture in our society,” Sonderling said in a statement. “I am committed to steering this organization in lockstep with this administration to enhance efficiency and foster innovation. We will revitalize IMLS and restore focus on patriotism, ensuring we preserve our country’s core values, promote American exceptionalism and cultivate love of country in future generations.”

😬😬😬

Pentagon restores histories of Navajo Code Talkers, other Native veterans after public outcry

The Pentagon restored some webpages highlighting the crucial wartime contributions of Navajo Code Talkers and other Native American veterans on Wednesday, days after tribes condemned the action.

In Winnipeg, land defenders fight to save a sacred forest

The Lemay Forest — housing unmarked graves, protected birds and old trees. Now, it’s being threatened by a housing development

Alien fever dreams fuel Peruvian grave robbings

Leandro Rivera says he chanced upon the cave in Peru's remote Nazca region that contained hundreds of pre-Hispanic artifacts – including human bodies with elongated heads and what appeared to be only three fingers on each hand. The plateau is famous for the Nazca lines, incisions on the desert floor forming birds and other animals visible from the air. The ancient geoglyphs have long intrigued anthropologists and exert a powerful fascination over some believers in extraterrestrials. Nazca is also known for salt flats that dehydrate and preserve human and animal remains, making it the site of important archeological finds that have deepened modern understanding of ancient cultures – and attracted grave robbers.

Odds and ends

Kathryn Yusoff sparked a culture war with her latest book, suggesting slavery and white supremacy informed the work of geology’s founding fathers. Here, she and other experts suggest that attitudes have changed little since

A scholar and a hater: new podcast focuses on historical figures that suck

When the historian Claire Aubin gets together with her colleagues for drinks after a conference or academic meetup, the conversation always ends up one way. “We’re all sitting around a table, talking about our most hated historical figure,” she said. For Aubin, it’s Henry Ford, an ardent antisemite whom Hitler called “an inspiration”. She believes being a hater can aid in scholarship: “Disliking someone or having a problem with their historical legacy is worth talking about, and brings more people into learning about history.” That’s why Aubin, who spent last year lecturing in the history department at UC Davis and San Francisco State University and is about to begin a full-time postdoctoral fellowship at Yale, started This Guy Sucked, a history podcast about terrible men. In each episode, Aubin speaks to a historian about their biggest villain, from Ford and Voltaire to Plato and Jerry Lee Lewis.

More medieval texts were scribed by women than previously believed

A new study “provides statistical support for the often-overlooked contributions of female scribes over time,” said researcher Åslaug Ommundsen.

Did Michelangelo pull off art history’s greatest hoax With ‘Laocoön’?

The monumental sculpture stands as an exemplar of Hellenistic artistry—but not to everyone.

These are delightful

The 30,000 year old vulture that reveals a completely new type of fossilisation

A surprising discovery in the feathers of a fossil vulture from central Italy has revealed that volcanic deposits can preserve delicate tissue structures in unprecedented detail, offering new insights into the fossilisation process.

American History Lessons Edited to Comply with Anti-DEI Standards (McSweeney's)

Jackie Robinson Overcomes [NO SPECIFIC OBSTACLE IN PARTICULAR] in Professional Baseball Baseball hall of famer Jackie Robinson is best known for [NOTHING IN PARTICULAR, OTHER THAN BEING A GREAT BASEBALL PLAYER]. Though most major league baseball teams at the time refused to sign Robinson because [THEY JUST DIDN’T LIKE THE CUT OF HIS JIB], Robinson finally became the first [PERSON NAMED JACKIE ROBINSON] to play Major League Baseball in 1947. Jackie Robinson paved the way for [OTHER PEOPLE WHO WERE DISLIKED FOR NO REASON] to play professional sports.

McSweeney's hitting a bit to close to home

[covid-safer-hotties]

Reference archived on our website (Daily updates! Thousands of articles, studies, and resources at your fingertips!)

Abstract Though scientific consensus regarding HIV causation of AIDS was reached decades ago, denial of this conclusion remains. The popularity of such denial has waxed and waned over the years, ebbing as evidence supporting HIV causation mounted, building again as the internet facilitated connection between denial groups and the general public, and waning following media attention to the death of a prominent denier and her child and data showing the cost of human life in South Africa. Decades removed from these phenomena, HIV denial is experiencing another resurgence, coupled to mounting distrust of public health, pharmaceutical companies, and mainstream medicine. This paper examines the history and current state of HIV denial in the context of the COVID pandemic and its consequences. An understanding of the effect of this phenomenon and evidence-based ways to counter it are lacking. Community-based interventions and motivational interviewing may serve to contain such misinformation in high-risk communities.

[mariacallous]

It is hard to disagree with the stated maxim behind Elon Musk’s newly established U.S. Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE): to “maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.”

In this fable of “good” vs. “evil,” the “good” forces of efficiency must chainsaw their way through the administrative state and the rules and processes that its “evil” bureaucrats hide behind. Even the political voices opposing Musk’s efficiency drive explicitly accept the goal, arguing that DOGE’s actions (for instance, firing inspectors general) are the wrong way to improve efficiency. On the centrality of “efficiency,” there is bipartisan support, even in these polarized times.

But could it be that the problem lies in our collective acceptance of “efficiency” as the core value proposition of the state, to be unquestioningly maximized at every turn? The state is far more than a public goods cousin of Amazon.com, and the quest for efficiency above all else constitutes a collective forgetting of what government is or can be.

To say that efficiency is not everything is not to suggest that it is undesirable.

From endless paperwork queues to demands for bribes and shoddy quality of basic services, state inefficiency imposes great costs to citizens, with the most vulnerable paying the greatest price. Greater efficiency saves collective time and money. But the singular focus on an “efficient state” is not just potentially counterproductive—it is also a dangerous and slippery slope toward authoritarianism.

To make efficiency the overarching goal of government in fact undermines its performance. For more than two decades, we have studied the administrative state in contexts as diverse as India, Thailand, Liberia, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Our scholarship highlights that when efficiency becomes the primary goal, performance generally falls. The state works best when its actors—the “unelected” bureaucrats that have become DOGE’s primary target—are empowered with discretion and autonomy, and when they are held accountable by a shared sense of mission. Successful delivery of state services requires judgment from humans who are capable of balancing the multiple competing needs of service delivery.

This is not a challenge just in the United States; across the globe, efficiency is often the ruse used to pursue a much deeper project of democratic erosion. Only by allowing ourselves to question the efficacy of efficiency can we possibly have means to interrogate what we are sacrificing on its altar. Perhaps one critical way to defend democracy is to question this assumption and to reframe our debates on the state and its mode of delivery.

The value that we place on efficiency as the goal of the modern administrative state traces its history to at least the 1960s, as documented by sociologist Elizabeth Popp Berman’s 2022 book Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy.

The policy approach of an “economic style of reasoning,” as Berman terms it, is anchored in market principles: choice, competition, cost effectiveness, incentive compatibility. Under this logic,  efficiency is presented as a politically neutral holy grail that governments ought to pursue.

But governments did so to a fault. Berman traces the evolution of this the economic style of reasoning to the 1960s and show how over the decades, efficiency became fetishized as the only goal of government, often displacing considerations of equity and democracy.

Berman focuses her inquiry on the United States, but this mode of reasoning about and within the state has a much wider resonance. It certainly characterized India’s approach as the policy elite embraced globalization and liberalized from the early 1990s onwards. The policy logic was—as it is in so many countries—that adopting the tools of “scientific management,” or in public administration terms “new public management,” we will control our way to success.

By monitoring and measuring everything that we can, the thinking went, we will improve the state, driving toward key performance indicators (KPIs) and realizing efficiencies. This manifests in different forms, such as the consequences of “teaching to the test” in response to the United States’ 2002 No Child Left Behind Act, or in biometric attendance systems introduced in India designed to ensure public servants show up but which do little to control what happens once they do.

In the contemporary moment, these ideas have converged with the possibilities offered by technology to create a new hypercharged, technology-infused vision of utopia that has shaped the DOGE view of the world. Musk and his ilk seem to imagine that the holy grail of efficiency can be reached even more effectively through the algorithms that automate processes. Just as Google serves search results, the government can deliver to citizens what they want and need, with no troubling humans slowing things down and leaving a trail of fraud and waste. One cannot make the wrong decision if there is no decision at all.

The fable is not without its logic; however, it has two serious problems. First, it is an approach that can very rarely work for government. It doesn’t work because—and this is the second critical problem—efficiency is the wrong goal.

It would be wonderful if we could monitor and measure all the important things that states do, turning all services into garbage collection or vaccine administration—relatively rare cases where what can be observed and KPI’d is, in fact, a pretty good summary of what we want the workers to do. Perhaps in these cases, we do need fewer supervisors, and data systems may be able to substitute for traditional levels of hierarchy. Perhaps there are other functions of the state—for instance, tax administration—where technology can drive automation.

Unfortunately, much of what the administrative state does falls outside these two categories, and it requires empowered humans exercising judgment to do well.

DOGE-catalyzed cuts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Nuclear Security Administration, Federal Emergency Management Agency, and Department of Veterans’ Affairs are penny-wise and pound-foolish.

Like the European reliance on natural gas from Russia in the 2010s, these supposed “efficiencies” in fact mask deepening vulnerability via decreased ability to exercise informed judgment in responding to the unexpected—be it a nuclear disaster or simply the needs of a veteran whose issues do not fit neatly into an online form. (Jennifer Pahlka documents cases of this sort under the purview of the Department Veterans’ Affairs in her book Recoding America: Why Government is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better.)

In addition to being ineffective at improving performance, the singular reification of “efficiency” also fundamentally misrepresents what the state is and how it relates to the citizenry.

The state is not a private firm. Citizens engage the state not as transactional “clients,” but in emotive, affective terms. No one would volunteer to fight in Amazon.com’s army. Firms deliver. States do more than that. In other words, the state is an identity, not just a service provider.

“The state” is all of us—all of its citizens and residents. Society delegates significant coercive power to the state so that the state can regulate societal demands via an autonomous bureaucracy. In a democracy, institutions of checks and balances, laws, rules, and processes are built in to enable the state to negotiate competing claims as it navigates the citizenry.

The administrative state’s tasks are an outcome of a political bargain that may necessitate “inefficiency” in some situations as the state makes trade-offs: between redistribution and growth, environmental protection and business, or tax cuts and expenditures on welfare.

These are outcomes of democratic bargaining, which is necessary to preserve freedoms and a stable society. When we seek efficiency, we fail to engage this fundamental reason for the state’s existence. We also run the risk of short-term efficiency gains at the cost of social instability and disaffection.

Inevitably, efficiency also becomes the ruse for a much deeper centralization and personalization of politics. While efficiency framings have accompanied a creep toward authoritarianism in many countries, in the United States we are seeing not a creep but rather a veritable sprint.  Musk links efficiency with the strategy of making everything “subject to the will of the President,” as he put it in a post on X in late February. Dictatorship is efficient in comparison to processes that give power to many people, and thus force the slow work of consensus-building and accommodation. However, without the prerequisites of decision-making, it leads to bad, efficient decisions.

Moreover, it is this very work of democracy that ensures that the decisions of government serve the interests of the many, and that encourages diverse groups in society to feel like part of the collective. As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, democracy’s strength is not to “give the people the most skillful” (or efficient) government, but rather to produce “an all-pervading and restless activity, a superabundant force, and an energy which never exists without” democracy.

Efficiency as a totalizing framing allows would-be authoritarians to argue that it is not the system of government—but rather they personally—who have provided services to citizens. In the United States, this returns us to the age of machine politics and personalistic rule; more generally, this is what political scientists term “patrimonialism,” a style of governing in which all state functions flow from the personal authority of the leader.

In India, patrimonialism has been effected by using technology for welfare services and branding them as gifts and “guarantees” from the ruling party leader. Technology removes traditional intermediation by local politicians and bureaucrats, enabling in its place a direct, emotive connection with the national political party leaders who can present themselves as the benefactor.

Implicit in this process is a subtle shift in the social contract that positions welfare as the largesse of the benevolent leader rather than a moral obligation of the state to rights-bearing citizens. Democracy is practiced when citizens seek accountability and claim their rights through local state actors. Centralization of power within party leaders upends this. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and today all political leaders from across party lines have adopted this basic playbook.

As Berman reminds us, efficiency itself is a choice—one that sometimes competes with democracy. Many societies are rightly frustrated with the status quo at present. But efficiency as a singular focus is not the solution to this frustration; it is, rather, a big part of the problem. We have come to the inevitable dead end of trying to deliver state services using a mindset and technology that is well suited to packages, and poorly suited to the state—whose primary purpose is to bind society together.

Rather than destroy the administrative state, we need to nurture connections between state and citizens. Rather than tighten oversight and compliance for state officials, we need to build a system that allows them to pursue the goals that bring so many to public service: serving the public.

The state is not a Silicon Valley start-up; its demise is not a cost of doing business or a failure to be learned from in the next funding round. We must interrogate the value propositions that brought us here; we must develop alternative pathways to renew and rejuvenate state institutions by forming relationships of trust with citizens that restores citizen faith in the democratic project.

There is much to learn from democracies around the world on how to improve the state through democracy-enabling instruments: Taiwan’s experiments in digital democracy, the United Kingdom’s “mission-led” government, Brazil’s participatory budgeting, and even in India, the use of social audits and right to grievance redressal laws are all examples of improving state performance without compromising democracy for efficiency.

Efficiency is a good thing, but it is not the only good thing. The first step toward better answers is asking what else we care about (such as values of equity, responsiveness, and accountability), and how we can build a state that serves those goals, too.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Elon Musk’s Legacy Is Disease, Starvation and Death

By Michelle Goldberg

Opinion Columnist

There is an Elon Musk post on X, his social media platform, that should define his legacy. “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” he wrote on Feb. 3. He could have “gone to some great parties. Did that instead.”

Musk’s absurd scheme to save the government a trillion dollars by slashing “waste, fraud and abuse” has been a failure. The Department of Government Efficiency claims it’s saved $175 billion, but experts believe the real number is significantly lower. Meanwhile, according to the Partnership for Public Service, which studies the federal work force, DOGE’s attacks on government personnel — its firings, rehirings, use of paid administrative leave and all the associated lack of productivity — could cost the government upwards of $135 billion this fiscal year, even before the price of defending DOGE’s actions in court. Musk’s rampage through the bureaucracy might not have created any savings at all, and if it did, they were negligible.

Now Musk’s Washington adventure is coming to an end, with the disillusioned billionaire announcing that he’s leaving government behind. “It sure is an uphill battle trying to improve things in D.C., to say the least,” he told The Washington Post.

There is one place, however, where Musk, with the help of his minions, achieved his goals. He did indeed shred the United States Agency for International Development. Though a rump operation is operating inside the State Department, the administration says that it has terminated more than 80 percent of U.S.A.I.D. grants. Brooke Nichols, an associate professor of global health at Boston University, has estimated that these cuts have already resulted in about 300,000 deaths, most of them of children, and will most likely lead to significantly more by the end of the year. That is what Musk’s foray into politics accomplished.

White House officials deny that their decimation of U.S.A.I.D. has had fatal consequences. At a hearing in the House last week, Democrats confronted Secretary of State Marco Rubio with my colleague Nicholas Kristof’s reporting from East Africa, documenting suffering and death caused by the withdrawal of aid. Rubio insisted no such deaths have happened, but people who’ve been in the field say he’s either lying or misinformed.

Atul Gawande, an assistant administrator for global health at U.S.A.I.D. in Joe Biden’s administration, told me that during a trip to Kenya last week, he visited the national referral hospital. There’s been a major increase in the number of patients with advanced H.I.V. symptoms, a result of losing access to antiretroviral medication. At refugee camps on the border of South Sudan, food aid has been cut so severely that people are getting less than 30 percent of the calories they need. “It is not enough to survive on, and that has caused skyrocketing levels of severe malnutrition and deaths associated with it,” said Gawande.

Musk apparently did not anticipate that it would be bad P.R. for the world’s richest man to take food and medicine from the world’s poorest children. The Post reported that he hadn’t foreseen “the intensity of the blowback to his role in politics over the past year.” He’s been doing a series of interviews that Axios called an “image rehab tour.”

Know someone who would want to read this? Share the column.

If there were justice in the world, Musk would never be able to repair his reputation, at least not without devoting the bulk of his fortune to easing the misery he’s engendered. Musk’s sojourn in government has revealed severe flaws in his character — a blithe, dehumanizing cruelty and a deadly incuriosity. This should shape how he’s seen for the rest of his public life.

Musk sometimes refers to people he holds in contempt as “NPCs,” videogame-speak for characters who aren’t controlled by players and thus have no agency. More than just an insult, the term, I think, reveals something about his worldview. He either doesn’t view most other people as entirely real or doesn’t see the point of treating them as such. As he told Joe Rogan this year, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy,” referring to the emotion as a “bug” in our system.

Yet even as he prides himself on dispassionate rigor, Musk has proved remarkably uninterested in figuring out how the government that he sought to transform really works. Samantha Power, head of U.S.A.I.D. under Biden, told me she tried to speak with members of the new administration, hoping to convince them there were elements of U.S.A.I.D.’s work that they could leverage for their own agenda. But aside from one meeting with transition officials, her outreach was ignored.

Instead, Musk seemed to derive his view of the agency from conspiracy theorists on X. There, he called U.S.A.I.D. a “radical-left political psy op” and amplified a post from the right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos smearing it as “the most gigantic global terror organization in history.”

It would have been easy for Musk to take his private plane to a country like Uganda to see for himself the work U.S.A.I.D. has done providing medicine to people with H.I.V. or feeding refugees from South Sudan. Instead, he drew on the counsel of internet trolls and staffed DOGE with lackeys who were similarly ignorant. “If you heard the conversations U.S.A.I.D. staff had with the DOGE people, there is no word in any language that captures the level of obliviousness about what U.S.A.I.D. actually did,” said Power.

This kind of intellectual carelessness should make people re-evaluate their faith in Musk’s brilliance. “Being president doesn’t change who you are; it reveals who you are,” Michelle Obama has said. The same is true, apparently, of being the president’s best friend, even fleetingly.

[NYTimes]

[strictlyfavorites]

Earth’s population is approximately 7.8 billion people. For most people, that’s a large number, that’s all.

However, if you count the world’s 7.8 billion people as 100% human, these percentages become clearer.

From 100% of people:

11% are in Europe

5% is in North America

9% - in South America

15% - in Africa

60% are in Asia

49% live in villages.

51% - In cities

12% speak Chinese

5% in Spanish

5% in English

3% speak Arabic

3% in hindi

3% in bengali

3% in Portuguese

2% in Russian

2% in Japanese

62% in their own language

77% have housing

23% have nowhere to live.

21% of people eat in excess

63% can eat as much as they want

15% of the people are malnourished

The daily cost of living for 48% of people is less than $2.

87% of people have clean drinking water

13% either do not have clean drinking water or have access to a contaminated water source.

75% on the mobile phones

25% nu.

30% have internet access

70% do not have internet access

7% received higher studies

93% of people never went to college or university.

83% can read

17% of people are illiterate.

33% are Christians

22% are Muslims.

14% are Hindus

7% are Buddhists

12% - Other Religions

12% have no religious beliefs.

26% live for less than 14 years

66% have died between the ages of 15 and 64.

8% of people over 65 years of age.

If you have a place to stay, eat healthy food and drink clean water, have a mobile phone,

you can travel on the internet and you graduated from a college or university, you’re in a small privileged group.

(In the category of less than 7%)

OUT OF 100% OF THE WORLD’S PEOPLE, ONLY 8% CAN LIVE TO 65 YEARS OLD.

If you are over 65 years old, be content and grateful. Seize life, seize the moment. You didn’t leave this world before you turned 65, like 92% of people who have died because of health. Cherish every moment you have left!

[marta-bee]

News of the Day 2/27/25: Disease

I've been focusing on war and military issues lately, so let's shift gears to a different Horseman of the Apocalypse: disease. Yes, yes, Good Omens fans, I know they're supposed to be retired, but apparently they're making a comeback.

First, RFK Jr. was successfully confirmed as the Secretary of Health.

Epidemiologist Greg Gonsalves talks about his HIV denialism and how a similar "just asking questions" movement in South Africa led to over 300,000 AIDS deaths. (RV)

How Kennedy's ascension could impact abortion access. (12ft.io)

He pledged to re-examine the childhood exam schedule after promising not to change it in his confirmation hearings.

How Kennedy could change a CDC panel that helps set vaccine policy, and not in a good way.

Measles, once eliminated in the U.S., now was found in 99 cases in Texas and New Mexico. (RP) One child has died.

"Unknown disease" that kills within days, kills over 50 in Congo. (RP)

Bird Flu is also on the rise:

The Trump administration had temporarily prevented CDC, FDA and other science organizations from sharing scientific data with each other or the public, and to stop working with the WHO. Sen. Peters argued this is masking the spread of bird flu in both humans and animals, and hindering our response. (12ft.io)

Trump promised to stop killing animals to stop the disease's spread, and will use other approaches to fight the disease.

Sec. Agriculture Rollins discusses hiss plan to lower egg prices. (RP)

Staff reductions at NIH, CDC and other government health agencies have scientists concerned U.S. will be less able to respond to disease outbreaks, bird flu and more generally. (12ft.io)

USDA warns egg prices may jump up to 41% this year.

Are egg suppliers jacking their prices up, beyond what's caused by bird flu-linked shortages? (RP)

Some consumers consider buying or renting hens. Experts warn this may not actually cut costs. (12ft.io)

Relatedly, NIH changed their policies about how much grant funding could be used for so-called "indirect costs" - building rents and utilities costs, support staff, even equipment shared between different research projects. It's thrown quite a lot of disease research projects into a real tail-spin.

In response to slashed funding, many scientists consider leaving the U.S.

The funding slash threatens to wipe out entire specialized fields of study, and other far-reaching impacts to the scientific community. (12ft.io)

How the cut is affecting academic researchers as well as those employed by the federal government. (12ft.io) Not being able to hire grad student researchers was honestly an aspect I didn't think of.

Scientific American on the impact of DEI and funding cuts, especially on how the US risks losing its reputation as the best place to do scientific research. (12ft.io)

How cutting research impacts the wider US economy, US technological competitiveness.

The impact of "NIH's Mindless War on Wokeness and DEI" (12ft.io)

[ivankahasbeentreatedsounfairly]

[haggishlyhagging]

The Circular Flow diagram depicted labour appearing—hey presto!—fresh and ready for work each day at the office or factory door. So who cooked, cleaned up, and cleared away to make that possible? When Adam Smith, extolling the power of the market, noted that it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, he forgot to mention the benevolence of his mother, Margaret Douglas, who had raised her boy alone from birth. Smith never married, so had no wife to rely upon (nor children of his own to raise). At the age of 43, as he began to write his opus, The Wealth of Nations, he moved back in with his cherished old mum, from whom he could expect his dinner every day. But her role in it all never got a mention in his economic theory, and it subsequently remained invisible for centuries.

As a result, mainstream economic theory is obsessed with the productivity of waged labour while skipping right over the unpaid work that makes it all possible, as feminist economists have made clear for decades. That work is known by many names: unpaid caring work, the reproductive economy, the love economy, the second economy. However, as economist Neva Goodwin has pointed out, far from being secondary, it is actually the ‘core economy,’ and it comes first every day, sustaining the essentials of family and social life with the universal human resources of time, knowledge, skill, care, empathy, teaching and reciprocity. And if you have never really thought of it before, then it's time you met your inner housewife (because we all have one). She lives in the daily dealings of making breakfast, washing the dishes, tidying the house, shopping for groceries, teaching the children to walk and to share, washing clothes, caring for elderly parents, emptying the rubbish bins, collecting kids from school, helping the neighbours, making the dinner, sweeping the floor and lending an ear. She carries out all those tasks—some with open arms, others through gritted teeth—that underpin personal and family well-being and sustain social life.

We all have a hand in this core economy, but some people (like Adam Smiths mum) spend far more time in it than others. Time may be a universal human resource, but it varies hugely in terms of how we each get to experience and use it, how far we control it, and how it is valued. In sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, time spent in the core economy is particularly visible because, when the state fails to deliver and the market is out of reach, householders have to make provision for many more of their needs directly. Millions of women and girls spend hours walking miles each day, carrying their body weight in water, food or firewood on their heads, often with a baby strapped to their back—and all for no pay. But this gendered division of paid and unpaid work is prevalent in every society, albeit sometimes less visibly so. And since work in the core economy is unpaid, it is routinely undervalued and exploited, generating lifelong inequalities in social standing, job opportunities, income and power between women and men.

By largely ignoring the core economy, mainstream economics has also overlooked just how much the paid economy depends upon it. Without all that cooking, washing, nursing and sweeping, there would be no workers—today or in the future—who were healthy, well-fed and ready for work each morning. As the futurist Alvin Toffler liked to ask at smart gatherings of business executives, ‘How productive would your workforce be if it hadn't been toilet trained?’ The scale of the core economy's contribution is not to be dismissed lightly, either. In a 2002 study of Basle, a wealthy Swiss city, the estimated value of unpaid care being provided in the city's households exceeded the total cost of salaries paid in all of Basle's hospitals, day care centers and schools, from the directors to the janitors. Likewise, a 2014 survey of 15,000 mothers in the United States calculated that, if women were paid the going hourly rate for each of their roles—switching between housekeeper and daycare teacher to van driver and cleaner—then stay-at-home mums would earn around $120,000 each year. Even mothers who do head out to work each day would earn an extra $70,000 on top of the actual wages, given all the unpaid care they also provide at home.

Why does it matter that this core economy should be visible in economics? Because the household provision of care is essential for human well-being, and producivity in the paid economy depends directly upon it. It matters because when—in the name of austerty and public sector savings—governments cut budgets for children's daycare centres, community services, parental leave and youth clubs, the need for care-giving doesn't disappear: it just gets pushed back into the home. The pressure, particularly on women's time, can force them out of work and increase social stress and vulnerability. That undermines both well-being and women's empowerment, with multiple knock-on effects for society and the economy alike. In short, including the household economy in the new diagram of the macroeconomy is the first step in recognising its centrality, and in reducing and redistributing women's unpaid work.

-Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist