Friday, December 25, 2020

Sunlight, ventilation and relative humidity all affect the microbiome of indoor spaces.


Buildings have their own microbiomes – we’re striving to make them healthy places


Architects and building engineers strive to create safe, productive places where humans can live and work. We have developed complex codes, regulations and guidelines to achieve goals such as structural safety, fire safety, adequate ventilation and energy efficiency, and to anticipate extreme scenarios such as 100-year floods. The question for our profession now is whether and how the 100-year viral pandemic will change architectural design and building operations.

How can societies safeguard buildings or homes from a viral pathogen during an epidemic? What would it take to redesign public and institutional buildings so they could help “flatten the curve,” instead of simply evacuating occupants? What if people could shape and modify the microbial communities present inside buildings to minimize exposure to harmful pathogens?

At the University of Oregon’s Biology and the Built Environment (BioBE) Center, we study interactions between humans, buildings and microorganisms. We believe that architecture needs to adapt and evolve in ways that help people manage indoor microbiomes to support health. In a new paper, we combine research on how microbes function indoors with knowledge about the novel coronavirus to outline ways of minimizing COVID-19 transmission in buildings.

Cultivating or murdering microbes

Even in good times, and certainly during pandemics, the main thing people typically want to know about microbes is how to kill them. But in fact, the vast majority of microbes help humans more than they hurt us. The idea that microbes around us play an important role in our lives is known as the Old Friends Hypothesis or the Hygiene Hypothesis.

Each of us has our own microbiome – a collection of bacteria, fungi, viruses and protozoa that inhabit our skin and body, and may be as unique as our fingerprints. Some of these microbes help keep us healthy, while others may cause us to become ill.

These organisms help regulate our digestion and impact our mood and our weight. Skin microbes can have immunoprotective effects.

There are also surprisingly complex microbial ecosystems within indoor spaces. Removing all microbial life from these settings can create problems. For example, irritable bowel disease, asthma and some mood disorders have been linked to overall decreases in our microbial exposure. Lack of exposure during childhood is thought to spark overreactive immune function later in life, potentially leading to increased inflammation and contributing to these afflictions.

Focusing solely on murdering microbes can have unintended consequences. For example, our lab recently discovered a correlation between concentrations of antimicrobial compounds and abundance of antibiotic-resistant bacteria indoors. This finding has led our team to reexamine indoor cleaning practices more broadly.


Designing indoor microbiomes

Architects can use many design features to shape and modify microbial communities within homes and office buildings. They include space configuration and occupant density; interior material selection; window location, size and glass type; electric lighting spectrum and intensity; and air movement and ventilation strategies.

Building managers also play a role. They can adjust the amount of outside air that is admitted and the frequency at which it is exchanged with indoor air. Other levers include humidification and dehumidification, and of course, cleaning products and practices.

Our recent research suggests that many natural systems, such as daylight and natural ventilation, don’t just reduce energy consumption and support human health – they also support more diverse indoor microbial ecosystems and reduce the abundance of potential pathogens. Similarly, natural unfinished wood surfaces have been shown to reduce the abundance of some viruses more quickly than other common indoor surfaces, such as stainless steel or plastic.

Humidification is an important influence in indoor settings. Most indoor environments are very dry in the heating season. Dampness can produce mold, but very dry air is also a problem. It dehydrates our mucus membranes and skin and carries particles deeper into our respiratory tract, leaving us more susceptible to infection.


How the novel coronavirus might spread indoors: (a) Viral particles accumulate in an infected person’s lungs and upper respiratory tract. (b) Droplets and aerosolized viral particles are expelled from the body through activities such as coughing, sneezing and talking, and can spread to nearby surroundings and individuals. (c and d) Viral particles, excreted from the mouth and nose, are often found on the hands (c) and can be spread to commonly touched items (d) such as computers, glasses, faucets and countertops. Dietz et al., 2020, http://dx.doi.org/10.1128/mSystems.00245-20, CC BY-SA

Dry air also decreases particle deposition, allowing ultra-fine particles to remain aerosolized longer. This increases the risk of airborne transmission of microbes.

Indoor air with a relative humidity of 40%-60% avoids these harmful impacts. It has also been shown to decrease viral infectivity, likely by disrupting viruses’ outer membrane

Based upon our past research, we have developed some basic guidelines for enhanced building operations during the COVID-19 pandemic. They aim to reduce the risk of indoor viral transmission in settings including homes, medical buildings and other critical infrastructure.

These strategies can be applied in nearly every building. Examples include introducing more outside air, increasing air exchange, maintaining relative humidity of 40%-60%, opening windows to provide natural ventilation and flush out indoor spaces, increasing access to daylight, and implementing targeted disinfection techniques, such as UV-C light in health care settings.

People can use similar strategies to reduce risks at home. If someone in the house has been infected or is symptomatic, we recommend having them self-isolate in a space next to a bathroom with an exhaust fan that can operate continuously. This will pull air from the rest of the home through the infected space and out the bathroom exhaust.
Letting in sunlight and fresh air and maintaining healthy humidity levels can help create a healthy indoor environment at home during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Better living through microbiology

Our team’s next goal is to define what makes up a community of beneficial microbes. We are partnering with industry, institutions and government organizations to develop real-time indoor microbial monitoring technologies that can support better operating practices and improve contact tracing strategies. With this knowledge, we can monitor for pathogens and use data science to improve our understanding of healthy indoor microbiomes.

How might people cultivate an indoor community of benign and favorable microbes? Several cleaning product manufacturers are already exploring the idea of adding specific microbes to indoor environments to outcompete or attack harmful microbes and curate others. These products avert many traditional cleaners’ “scorched Earth” approach, which relies on caustic and volatile ingredients.

We believe this concept is worth exploring but should be based on robust research with effective oversight. The key agency in this area is the Environmental Protection Agency, which regulates antimicrobial products designed as pesticides, including cleaning products.

For several decades, the architectural design and construction industry has been developing standards to guide building performance, including aspects related to human health. In our view, it is time to focus on shaping healthy indoor microbiomes so that they can shape us.

Authors
Kevin Van den Wymelenberg

Associate Professor of Architecture and Director, Biology and the Built Environment Center, University of Oregon

Kevin Van Den Wymelenberg receives funding from The Alfred P Sloan Foundation, US Department of Agriculture, US Department of Energy, The Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance, and several industry members participating in the Institute for Health in the Built Environment Industry Research Consortium

Leslie Dietz

Wet Lab Manager, University of Oregon

Leslie Dietz receives funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the US Department of Agriculture. Leslie Dietz is affiliated with 500WomenScientists.
Mark Fretz

Research Assistant Professor of Architecture, University of Oregon
Disclosure statement


Mark Fretz receives funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance and participating industry members in the Institute for Health in the Built Environment Industry Research Consortium. He consults with industry members in the Institute for Health in the Built Environment Industry Research Consortium.
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Improving building ventilation can help us control the spread of COVID-19 during the winter months

Gabriel Wainer, Professor, Systems and Computer Engineering, Carleton University 2 days ago

As predicted,we are in the middle of second wave of COVID-19. As of Dec. 23, the world has seen over 78 million confirmed cases and 1.7 million deaths.
© (Shutterstock) The risk of transmitting COVID-19 is much higher indoors due to proximity to other people and building ventilation systems.

One of the few successes to emerge has been the creation of COVID-19 vaccines in record time. But vaccination will not provide immediate relief.

There are many unanswered questions about the efficacy of the vaccines. For instance, vaccine studies mostly tracked how many of the individuals that were vaccinated became sick. It is not known if the vaccinated individuals can still carry the virus asymptomatically; vaccinated people don’t show symptoms, but some may continue to have virus in the nose and throat that can replicate and spread. We also do not know about the chances of reinfection or long-term immunity.

Infection with COVID-19 comes with a risk of death and puts strain on our health-care system, but there is also a risk of long-term health effects. The bottom line is that we cannot let our guard down: we need to continue wearing masks, keep our physical distance, wash our hands, and avoid crowds and indoor events in poor ventilated areas.

As the vaccine is distributed, we might find ourselves relaxing our guard before it is safe to do so. And as the weather grows increasingly colder, reducing our options for outdoor activities and gatherings, we need to consider how the disease spreads indoors and the importance of ventilation.

Avoiding crowded indoors

The evidence for aerosol transmission is overwhelming. Three of the most important factors that determine the risk of exposure are proximity to people, duration of the exposure and the quality of the air. When the three are combined, the risk is higher, as seen in numerous superspreader events.

Read more: A few superspreaders transmit the majority of coronavirus cases

COVID-19 spreads through inhalation of the virus. An infected person breathes out aerosols that can remain suspended in the air for up to three hours. Transmission indoors can be around 20 times higher than outdoors.

We have to think about SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 spreading like cigarette second-hand smoking in a closed space. Imagine being indoors where smoking is permitted: the exhaled smoke can spread in poorly ventilated spaces. The amount of particles inhaled close to the source is higher, but, with time, the smoke will fill the whole room and everybody will breathe the contaminated air.

Indoor transmission by aerosols has been recognized by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Public Health Agency of Canada. The World Health Organization recommends avoiding indoor spaces whenever possible and ensuring proper ventilation in the fight against COVID-19.

We need to take these recommendations seriously during the holiday season: we need to reduce the number of close contacts, in particular in indoor settings, wear masks and ventilate the rooms.

Modelling ventilation indoors

At present, my research team is interested in different aspects of indoor ventilation. We are combining building information modelling and indoor viral spread models to study different strategies to return to indoor gatherings and address potential future outbreaks.

One example we used was the site of a COVID-19 outbreak associated with the use of air conditioning in a restaurant in Guangzhou, China. We showed how the airflow produced by the ventilation system affected 10 different individuals. Our team used the floor plans of the restaurant and built a model that can easily be adapted for different factors, such as different positioning of the ventilation sources.

Modelling and simulating indoor ventilation is important: we need to find out which factors — like circulating fresh air or using high-quality air filters — are likely to reduce transmission risk. Simulated virtual environments can be quite informative, as it’s not possible to run experiments with people and COVID-19.

In addition, there is limited information about how infectious SARS-CoV-2 is. Although we know that people shed different amounts of the virus, we don’t know how much virus someone has to inhale to become sick. Using a simulated virtual environment can be useful to conduct different experiments.

The models we constructed allow us to study different scenarios. For instance, we include different types of fabric used for the masks by different individuals as well as the different fitting positions of the masks, which can influence the amount of virus transmitted or inhaled.

The building models can easily adjust different factors for analysis, such as different physical arrangements of people (and their relative physical distance), various ventilation methods, a range of air qualities and even the use of portable HEPA filters to reduce the probability of being infected.

And now that there are vaccines, we’ll need to factor in how the vaccination process will affect disease transmission.

In the meantime, we need to remain vigilant, and focus on the social aspects of the pandemic: online misinformation, social behaviours and public health communication strategies. These are important for all air-transmitted diseases (seasonal flu, colds), including any future pandemics.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Gabriel Wainer receives funding from NSERC and collaborates with DRDC (DND).



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REST IN POWER COMRADE
Leo Panitch and the Socialist Project

BY STEPHEN MAHER

Leo Panitch will live on in the democratic socialism he espoused and the lives he touched.


Leo Panitch (1945–2020).


The death of Leo Panitch has made the world a darker place. His writings have carried us through some of the most difficult periods in the history of the socialist left, as wave after wave of the neoliberal onslaught broke workers’ organizations, serving up one defeat after the next. Leo’s work sustained so many of us during these years, pushing us on and pointing the way through the storm.

This was not because he sowed illusions about just how bad things have been. Rather it was because, even as other erstwhile New Leftists lamented the “God That Failed,” he devoted himself to demonstrating the necessity of a democratic-socialist society that would neither fall prey to the shortcomings of social democracy nor those of Soviet-style Communism.

Over the decade I knew Leo, he was my teacher, supervisor, and comrade. He was also a close friend. Aside from completing what ended up being the final doctoral dissertation under his supervision, I worked with him to build the Toronto-based Socialist Project, and collaborated on the past eight volumes of the Socialist Register he coedited with Greg Albo. Leo saw the latter as a sacred covenant, the living link to the politics of the New Left and to his own mentor, Ralph Miliband, who founded the journal with John Saville in 1964.

It was in the pages of the Register that Miliband developed his groundbreaking theory of the capitalist state. It was also where Leo later sharpened his — still utterly essential — critique of social democracy, as well as, with his coauthor Sam Gindin, the theory of American empire that would ultimately culminate in their magnum opus, The Making of Global Capitalism. The three of us also published a revised edition of The Socialist Challenge Today this year.

Leo was fond of quoting Ralph’s adage that the Register “should be hard to write for, as well as hard to read” — by which he meant that while the essays (not articles) should reward focused study and attention on the part of the reader, authors also had a responsibility to make them as readable as possible. This also meant it was hard to edit. He was constantly on the lookout for potential essays, topics, and angles to be covered; devising volume themes along five-year plans; and identifying specific authors to cover particular issues years in advance.

Each year, Leo devoted immense effort to working with authors to develop drafts — providing extensive feedback and striving always to make sure that “the style of writing was clear and accessible at a time when the opacity and clumsiness of much intellectual discourse affected the Left like a plague.”

In this vein, it has often been said that, like Ralph’s, Leo’s writing is “accessible.” This requires some clarification. Though he certainly sought to write clearly, and valued such efforts by others, he was constantly and outspokenly against any attempt to condescendingly “dumb down” ideas for popular consumption. This applied whether he was considering a Register essay or a pamphlet to be handed out on a city bus.

It is a testament to Leo’s socialist orientation that he was adamant that average working people be treated as thinking human beings capable of grappling with difficult ideas. Leo showed his respect for others through his willingness to engage with them as equals. And he did so honestly: if he disagreed, he would say so and challenge people to think harder. This, too, attests to his socialist convictions.

In a world of polite but superficial niceties and sugarcoated small talk, Leo always gave it to you straight. Whether you agreed or disagreed, you always knew what he thought. His sharp wit, charisma, and forceful personality were disarming. Those who spent time with Leo couldn’t help but feel the impact of his presence on their ideas about the world. But he left this mark on people not simply by telling them what to think, but rather by pushing them to develop their own thoughts and arguments. As a result, many of the people for whom Leo was a teacher or mentor were changed forever by the experience — as has been reflected in the many touching tributes that have circulated on social media since his passing. Even people who simply shared a meal, a drink, or a discussion at a conference often found the exchange deeply memorable and formative.

These socialist values were at the heart of his critique of social democracy, which was one of the central animating threads of his work. As Leo argued, social-democratic parties were transformed into top-down institutions controlled by party bureaucrats, who seek to limit the political engagement of working-class people to voting or knocking on doors. Once elected, party “experts” would secure for the workers better living conditions within capitalism. What most bothered Leo about this was that it was entirely predicated on the assumed passivity of workers, rather than geared toward developing their democratic capacities to think, debate, and formulate political strategies and programs — the fundamental tasks of a socialist party.

Moreover, that this was based on a politics of class compromise meant disciplining workers and limiting their horizons to what is possible within capitalism. Once capitalism is unable to accommodate such reforms, as happened following the crisis of the 1970s, they must be rolled back — and social-democratic parties often proved particularly effective at doing so. This was especially the case as socialists, who certainly remained in these parties, were driven to the margins after their ideas had been deemed “unserious” for generations. Even if they had wanted to, these parties had no way of mobilizing workers to the degree that would have been necessary to halt or reverse the neoliberal onslaught.

The collapse of the legitimacy of social-democratic parties all across Europe is precisely the result of this dynamic. These parties became major forces institutionalizing neoliberalism, particularly in advancing market-based reforms under the rubric of the Third Way from the 1990s on.

To Leo, this proved that the fundamental task for socialists is to construct a party of a different kind — one based on empowering, educating, and mobilizing workers. This party, as he put it, was to be the “fulcrum” of working-class formation and state transformation. Far from simply seeking to win elections, it should aim to transform the state to create new forms of participatory democracy and economic planning, so that production was geared toward social need and not private profit. And rather than passivity, a socialist party must be able to cultivate the capacities of workers to mobilize for a new society — such that once the democratic reforms pursued by the party generate a capitalist crisis, rather than rolling them back, workers are prepared to push onward.

Most importantly, Leo’s socialism was one of sobriety and realism — two words of which he was very fond. His unwavering dedication to socialism was mirrored in his uncompromising refusal to retreat into empty slogans, tired dogmas, or comfortable illusions. He was deeply committed to living as if a better, postcapitalist society was possible. But at the same time, he refused to entertain shortcuts or proffer false hope.

In fact, Leo saw the fundamental role of a socialist intellectual as being to identify the limits, as well as the possibilities, of current left political strategies. Rather than seeing socialism as just around the corner, for him, intellectual leadership was about understanding why the efforts of the Left had not resulted in a socialist society, and why the various shortcuts proposed as end runs around the weakness of the working class were likely to fall short.

Above all, this demanded thinking historically. Abstract “concept-spinning,” as he called it, could be helpful for developing a framework through which to decode the immense complexity of history. But socialism is always a matter of actual concrete strategic questions in the here and now — and requires locating oneself at a point in history, uncovering its fault lines and trends, and sketching a way forward from there. This means understanding how politics is shaped by our historical moment, and how change arises from contradictions within that moment — and on this basis, attempting to seriously think through what would actually be required for us to get to a point where a socialist transition was a serious possibility. As his analyses always showed, the herculean nature of this task did not make it any less necessary.

All this gave Leo’s scholarly and political work a seriousness that is all too often lacking on the Left. Faced with the distant prospect of a socialist society, it is easy to resort to a politics of waiting for the systemic breakdown that will lead inexorably to socialism, or simply cheering on ephemeral protest movements whose political vision betrays a lack of careful, long-term, strategic analysis — or which in some cases lack clear objectives at all. The art of the conjunctural analysis — a careful reading of the balance of forces, of the contradictions within capital and the state which sustain the status quo and create openings to change it — is largely a lost one. But it was to this task that Leo devoted himself in seeking to understand the nature of the contemporary capitalist state, the limits of social democracy, and the logic of the American empire.

It is hard to communicate today just how anathema Leo’s assertion, along with his co-thinker Sam Gindin, that the state had not been supplanted by the ethereal forces of “globalization” was during the 1990s and 2000s. In these years, the dominant strains of left theory asserted that multinational corporations, global “networks,” and transnational institutions had bypassed the nation-state as the main locus of political power. Leo, on the other hand, asserted that states were the primary authors of globalization and had taken responsibility for facilitating the internationalization of capital — the American state above all, which uniquely superintended “the making of global capitalism.”

Rather than interimperial rivalry between major capitalist powers, as had existed previously, the postwar world was characterized by a condominium of capitalist states organized within an informal American empire. Nor were nationalist revolutions on the global periphery sufficient to undermine this imperial system. In fact, the “development” of the global periphery only led to demands from these bourgeoisies for greater integration within US-led global capitalism. Anti-imperial struggle therefore entailed not nationalist alliances with bourgeoisies, but class struggle against them — especially in the heart of the empire itself.

Leo was also a committed socialist activist. He was both a regular panelist and constant attendee at the many public talks the Socialist Project organized over the years, which featured scholars and activists from all around the world — often at his invitation. When we took on a campaign to organize bus riders in an overwhelmingly working-class, immigrant, and racialized neighborhood, he was among the most enthusiastic participants. Closest to his heart, however, was the SP’s Cultural Committee, which he chaired. Leo believed deeply that socialist politics must not merely be a matter of economics. Rather, it had to incorporate a focus on developing the aptitudes, stunted and disfigured by capitalism, to participate in and appreciate the arts — as well as creating spaces for the formation of solidaristic communities and bonds of friendship.

Leo continued to read voraciously, and to debate his views and ideas, until the last days of his life. The last time I saw him in person, not long before he was hospitalized, we sat for hours in his garden and discussed the limits of the New Left. While the refreshing and nondogmatic approach to Marxism his generation had developed had been positive, he lamented that it had not produced a “new politics.” And he was quite pessimistic about the future. The United States, he thought, was teetering dangerously close to right-wing authoritarianism, a frightening reality that a Joe Biden presidency would most likely do little to alleviate. While he was relieved that Trump had been defeated in the presidential election, he had no illusions that right populism would simply go away.

And yet at the same time, he was deeply inspired by the energy, organizing, and creative thinking that had emerged around Momentum in Britain and the Democratic Socialists of America in the United States. He was full of hope for these projects, which at their best were animated by the same commitment to democratic socialism that the Register had been since the days of Ralph Miliband. He knew that the process of developing these organizations would be messy and uneven, full of conflict, setbacks, and heartache. But he was deeply encouraged to see a new generation taking up the banner of socialism, returning to class struggle, and seeking to find the organizational forms that could give expression to the principles of democratic socialism.

Leo didn’t just wave the banner of socialist revolution. He actually meant it. It was this that most impressed me upon first meeting him a decade ago. Above all else, the utter earnestness of his commitment to socialism — to really building toward the possibility of achieving a new society — blew me away and reshaped my understanding of what it means to be a socialist. And in changing the lives of the many people with whom he came into contact, he did transform the world. His commitment to socialist values, his honesty and integrity, his generosity and warmth and bigheartedness, should serve as an example for all of us.

Though larger than life in so many ways, Leo was after all a human being, and human beings die. His passing has been unspeakably difficult for me, as for so many others who were close to him. But insofar as he was dedicated to the socialist mission, something that is larger than his — or anyone else’s — life, he cannot die. He will live on in the ideas he espoused and the lives he touched.


 





  



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Millennials Confront True Meaning of ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ (A Parable)


Joe Hoover, S.J.December 23, 2020

George Michael, Band Aid's "Do They Know It's Christmas?" (YouTube)


The last choral notes drifted away like the snow that fell reluctantly outside on Blondo Street. Oh the poor starving Africans! The six of us looking at each other like, are you kidding me? And the glorious European pop stars to the rescue! They really wrote songs like that. No matter how many times you hear it: unbelievable.

“We sang that song in eighth grade,” a voice said. We whirled around. All of us, at once, whirled.

Stepping out from the shadows, an old Irishman with a creased face and a dark black peacoat, in about his late 40’s. “We had to bring a record player into the church,” he said. “It was a breakthrough moment in the history of Christmas concerts at St. Pete-bogs , and no one ever forgot it.”

An Irishman. A novelty act. We let him go on.

“But you’ve got issues with the song. It’s always issues with your lot. For instance himself Mr. Bono’s Well tonight thank God it’s them instead of you. How terrible! Thanking the Lord for other people’s suffering!”

Well...

“And then Band-Aid’s mourning there won’t be snow in Africa. Very problematic. Everything’s problematic with you all, too. Because maybe Africans wouldn’t even want snow over there, right?”


“Mr. Bono’s Well tonight thank God it’s them instead of you. How terrible! Thanking the Lord for other people’s suffering!” 

Before we could respond: “And the very title of the song, ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas.’ We thinking these poor Africans just because they’re all hungry and dwelling in sand are unable to read a calendar let alone count to 25 and thus are totally in the dark about it being Christmas. It’s othering the Africans to think that. Everything’s othering with you all, isn’t it?

It was a legitimately disheartening bar we were in. Hands plunged into thin leather coats, we went there to feel better about ourselves, to have one up on something. Even if it was just a bar. Our late twenties had not exactly turned out to be the promised land.

Before we could respond: “But perhaps my lads and lassies, we consider that Mr. Bono himself is being sarcastic about ‘thanking God’ other people are starving and not us. Sarcasm. Are ye unable to catch it when it’s happening?”

We were all silent, unsure if he was being sarcastic. Outside it had stopped snowing, as if the sky itself had quit what it was doing to listen in.

“As for the song title and the grievous lack of snow in Africa,” he said, “consider your standard socialist take on these issues. And you lot are all devout socialists, I assume?”

We considered this for a moment and then nods all around.

“So you know that ye olde Christmas cheer is owned by the bourgeois propertied class whose finely tuned economy dispenses from a colander with holes too small for a mouse to pee in Christmas gifts and generosity and not starvingness. So indeed it is an open question within bridle-free capitalism, wherein Christmas is essentially a collateralized debt obligation and snow a glinty metaphor for the material wealth December 25th supposedly bestows upon the 99 percent but doesn’t, it is an open question whether in fact the people of the Sub-Sahara do not know it’s Christmastime at all and indeed are completely flackered they have no snow.”

We stared at him with reluctant awe. He took off his Irishman’s brown driving cap and slapped it on his knee to get the dust off, and there was no dust.

“So given all of this and other lyrics whose supposedly troubling nature we could readily defuse, consider, do, the somber clangs at the outset of this crushing holiday ode and Mr. Young, Paul, quietly telling us It’s Christmas time, there’s no need to be afraid and then throwing to Mr. George, Boy, who declaims with a ghostly precious voice rising like purple mascara fog into the half sunlight And in our world of plenty, we can spread a smile of joy, throw your arms around the world...at Christmas time.”

“And Mr. Collins, Phil, starting on the drums for Mr. Michael, George, who alongside a thrumming bass, gently but firmly transitions us into the shaming part of the whole thing, But say a prayer, pray for the other ones, at Christmas time, when you’re having fun. And then handing off the lyric to some other fellow who looks like Mr. George, but not as drop-dead you know, Because there’s a world outside your window, and it’s a world of dread and fear."

“Consider all of this and then imagine”—a sharp gust of wind blew outside, like a fierce assent to all that had been said—”imagine them Band-Aid fellas not only singing in 1984 for all guilty Nordic types around the world but also floating above, stay with me here, floating above the wretched stable of 2,000 years ago where the wee spitting image of the Lord is taking rest in a disgusting mound of wet hay looking at all these beasts hanging over him and rank shepherds and vagrant kings and one tatty unrhythmic little drum cutting through it all and wondering, what the deuce did I come down here for?”


“The wee spitting image of the Lord is taking rest in a disgusting mound of wet hay...wondering, what the deuce did I come down here for?”

“And then maybe thinking ahead a bit, because he can do that you know, to what’s in store for him.”

We all grew quiet. What’s in store for him. Yes. Only one of us believed anymore, but who of us didn’t know what was in store for him


“But hearing nevertheless these shimmery voices, the Lord, and perhaps seeing even a shadow of the tufted layers of Mr. Michael’s golden locks as he’s up there singing about prayers for the other ones and too the sound of Mr. Boy re-entering the song a few moments later with an unearthly Ohhhh and the Lord thinking, maybe I’m the other one they’re praying for, maybe that heart-wrenching Ohhhh is for me.”

“So but this song whenever it’s played and no matter your unwavering magisterial judgment on it is helping our tiny Lord just plunked down into the brutish world make it through another and another and yet again one more miserable second of life in his cow-infested maternity ward.”

The wet glaze on our plastic cups, the bar’s faint chill, the old man’s voice and nothing else.

“And maybe it’s not only that he’s being born there in that manger but the Lord’s being born over and over, in, I don’t know, whoever’s starving today or glad or twined up in Human Studies-major debt or hopeful or lonely or sheer just wondering what’s the point of it all and why even go on.

“He’s bursting up right there, and ‘Do They Know’ is always playing, and him nestled into that unearthly Ohhhh, one precious note covering Christ for all eternity wherever he is, and Christ himself repaying the favor, sheltering forever all of us.”

He stopped. The bar had grown deathly still. A few candles flickered, a few snowflakes held in the trees. We stood there, unsure what to do next, pondering these things, wanting him maybe to say more.
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SPIRITUALIST PENTACOSTALS
WHITE PEOPLES HOODOO 


Tom Boggioni
Conservative slams evangelicals descending on DC for last gasp march to 'pray' for God to intercede on Trump's behalf
Alex Henderson December 18, 2020

The Christian Right is in mourning over President Donald Trump being voted out of office. Pat Robertson, the far-right evangelical who founded the Christian Broadcasting Network, has declared that the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden on January 20, 2021 must be prevented, saying, "We will not give up this great country. And Satan, you cannot have it." But the irony is that the incoming president is much more religious than Trump, who has demonstrated how little he knows about Christianity and the Bible.

Although Trump was raised Presbyterian, religion was never a high priority in his life. But when he ran for president in 2016, Trump realized that the Christian Right was a prominent voting bloc in the GOP and went out of his way to pander to the far-right White evangelicals he had no connection to in the past. The Trump of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s was more of a Blue Dog Democrat than a GOP culture warrior, and he spent a lot more time in casinos than in churches.

Journalist Ed Kilgore, in an article published by New York Magazine on December 17, notes Trump's history of butchering Biblical references during his speeches.

Kilgore explains, "Before Donald Trump became the very favorite politician of White conservative evangelicals, he was regularly a figure of sport for displaying exceptional ignorance in all matters religious. A particularly rich example of his clumsiness occurred when he was campaigning at evangelical stronghold Liberty University early in 2016 and tried to quote a Bible verse that was very familiar to the audience, since it's etched on several buildings there."

Kilgore adds that there were many other "religious gaffes Trump committed while stumping for votes" in 2016.

"On another occasion along the campaign trail," Kilgore recalls, "Trump was asked about his favorite line of scripture. He delivered a word salad for a while and finally tried to recall 'an eye for an eye,' not the sort of thing Christians of any variety consider normative for the faith of the Prince of Peace…... Just prior to the Iowa caucuses, Trump was in a Council Bluffs church when a plate came down the pews with communion bread on it. The billionaire misidentified it as a collection plate and put a couple of bills on it."

Kilgore also notes that in 2017, Trump met with two Presbyterian minsters and was surprised to learn that they didn't consider themselves evangelicals but rather, described themselves as "Mainline Protestants."

Of course, anyone with even a basic knowledge of Christianity realizes that Presbyterians aren't evangelicals any more than Episcopalians or Lutherans — two other examples of Mainline Protestants — are evangelicals. And there's no way that either Biden, a devout Catholic, or former President Barack Obama, a Mainline Protestant, would have made that mistake or confused a communion plate with a collection plate. Unlike Trump, Biden and Obama both have a long history of being churchgoing Christians and obviously have an extensive knowledge of the Bible.



If Pat Robertson were to sit down with Biden or Obama, they could have an in-depth conversation about scripture. Yet Robertson, like much of the Christian Right, adores Trump while hating Biden and Obama — which underscores the deeply tribalist nature of the Christian Right.


The Christian Right has long been a hate movement, and it is as much about White nationalism and far-right identity politics as it is about Protestant fundamentalism. The late Rev. Jerry Falwell, Sr., founder of Liberty University and co-founder of the Moral Majority, was a notorious segregationist during the 1950s and 1960s, when he vigorously defended Jim Crow laws in the pulpit and argued that the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a not a true Christian because of his anti-segregation views. During the 1980s, Falwell defended the racist apartheid regime in South African and encouraged Christians to buy krugerrands to support it.

The late Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater, known for being an arch-conservative in his day, was vehemently critical of Falwell and the Christian Right during the 1980s — describing them as dangerous fanatics and warning that the GOP was making a huge mistake by allying itself with that movement. But many Republicans ignored Goldwater, much to the GOP's detriment.

To the Christian Right and far-right White evangelicals, the fact that Biden and Obama are more religious than Trump is irrelevant. Robertson, the Family Research Council's Tony Perkins, James Dobson (founder of Focus on the Family) and other evangelical Trump supporters are extreme tribalists, and they view Trump as part of their tribe — which is why Trump got a pass when, according to his former personal attorney Michael Cohen, he had extramarital affairs with a porn star (Stormy Daniels) and a Playboy model (Karen McDougal) and paid them hush money to keep quiet.

Trump repeatedly attacked Biden as anti-Christian during his 2020 presidential campaign. But in 2017, Trump didn't even know the difference between Presbyterians and evangelicals.

The Christian Right will miss Trump dearly when he leaves off on January 20, 2021. And no matter how much Biden goes to church or accurately quotes the Bible, it won't matter to the far-right evangelical extremists who value White identity politics above all else.
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Why the Virgin of Guadalupe is more than a religious icon to Catholics in Mexico
AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell
A statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe, at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, in Mexico City.

The Conversation December 14, 2020

Each year, as many as 10 million people travel to the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City, in what is believed to be the largest Catholic pilgrimage in the Americas. Due to COVID-19 concerns, the pilgrimage, which is due to take place on Dec. 12, will instead be held online this year.

Normally, multiple pilgrimages take place around this time of the year throughout the country that end at the basilica – a church building specially recognized by the Catholic pope – of Our Lady of Guadalupe, an apparition of the Virgin Mary in Mexico.

In fact, images and statues of her are everywhere in Mexico. She is on altars in people's homes, altars on street corners, posters in mechanic shops and restaurants. Even in the U.S., many Catholic churches with parishioners who have ties to Mexico include a small chapel to her.

The first time I went to Mexico City in 2011 as a Ph.D. student, I visited the shrine to the Virgin. Later, I wrote about her importance in novels, short stories and movies – beyond a religious icon.

This pilgrimage is only one part of Mexican people's connection to the Virgin of Guadalupe

Apparition of the Virgin

During the pilgrimage in Mexico, people visit the shrine on a hill near where Virgin Mary is said to have appeared to an Aztec man named Juan Diego who had converted to Christianity in 1531.

The legend goes that when Juan Diego told the bishop about it, he demanded proof. Juan Diego then went back to the shrine and the Virgin told him about a place he could pick some roses.

Juan Diego went back to the bishop, with his cloak full of roses. But when the bishop looked at the roses, it is said that an image of the Virgin appeared. In the belief that this was a miraculous occurrence, a shrine to the Virgin was built in Tepeyac in the northern part of Mexico City.

Today, this shrine is part of a large complex which includes several church buildings, a larger-than-life group of statues that portray the Virgin's apparition to Juan Diego and a large space for outdoor Mass, a Catholic worship service.

Over the years, the shrine has undergone changes. A new basilica constructed in 1974 is now used for most services, although the older church constructed in 1709 still stands.


The most important object in the shrine is the miraculous image of the Virgin that appeared on Juan Diego's cloak, which is displayed in front of a moving sidewalk in the new construction.

Combining faith

The story about how the Virgin appeared in Mexico has resemblance to reports of her apparitions in Spain. In the 14th century, the Virgin Mary was said to have appeared to a peasant near the river of Guadalupe in western Spain. The Virgin is believed to have told him to dig up an image of her that had allegedly been buried for several centuries.

Some of those involved in the Spanish conquest, such as Christopher Columbus and Hernán Cortés, reportedly prayed at her shrine in Spain before setting off for the Americas.

When Spaniards colonized the Americas, which included the Aztec empire in central Mexico, in the early 16th century, they brought the image and story of Our Lady of Guadalupe with them.

What is noteworthy is that she is said to have appeared to Juan Diego in the same place where the Nahuatl-speaking Aztecs had worshiped the goddess Tonantzin.

The Spanish colonial administration, together with church officials, encouraged people to replace worshiping Tonantzin in Tepeyac with worshiping the Virgin of Guadalupe in Tepeyac. In this way, they could appear to replace Indigenous beliefs with Catholic ones.

While a church was built on the site in 1556, the Virgin of Guadalupe did not attract a large following until the mid-17th century, when church leaders collected sworn statements regarding miracles she is said to have performed. Her feast day was moved at the time from September to December.

Larger pilgrimages to Tepeyac began in the late 17th century, one of many such pilgrimages in the larger Catholic tradition of thanking a saint or apparition of the Virgin for answering their prayers.


The image of the Virgin of Guadalupe has been used in various ways to create a sense of community.
Ricardo Castelan Cruz / Eyepix Group/Barcroft Media via Getty Images

Over the centuries, her image has been used in various ways to create a sense of community or to advance specific political goals. For example, during Mexico's 19th-century independence movement, Catholic priest Miguel Hidalgo used her image on his banners. In this way, he successfully united many Mexicans in their fight against Spain. Mexicans commemorate this in their Independence Day celebrations each September.

About 40 years later, Catholic Church leaders would use her image to attract Mexican people to their cause, as they fought against the 1857 liberal reforms that encouraged increasing separation of church and state.

[You're smart and curious about the world. So are The Conversation's authors and editors. You can read us daily by subscribing to our newsletter.]

Similarly, in the early 20th century, Mexico's government enacted such strict secularism laws that Catholic bishops suspended Mass for three years. Catholic leaders again used images of the Virgin of Guadalupe on their banners to encourage the soldiers fighting against the anti-Catholic laws.

Today, her image is as varied as the Mexican experience. One of these is the light-skinned child-like “Virgencita plis" on everything from small statues to face masks. It was designed in 2003 by a gift and toy company, Distroller corporation. In this image, the Virgin does not look Mexican and plays to very traditional and often outdated ideas of femininity: innocent, nonthreatening, almost like children. The statue of the Virgin at the basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe is dark-skinned, physically imposing and has Mexican features.

For each, she has her own meaning and a way of worship. And even if many people are not able to travel to her sanctuary, they will find other ways to honor the Lady of Guadalupe this year.

Rebecca Janzen, Assistant Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature, University of South Carolina

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Outrage as police training materials label Black Lives Matter a terrorist organization

PDBVerlag / Pixabay
Meaghan Ellis December 05, 2020

One law enforcement training group is facing backlash after circulating guidance that included false claims and conspiracy theories about Black Lives Matter (BLM).

According to KOLD, the guidance, titled "Understanding Antifa and Urban Guerrilla Warfare," has been distributed by the Indiana-based law enforcement training organization, International Law Enforcement Educators and Trainers Association (ILEETA)). Its verbiage has come under fire as it contains various falsehoods about the Black Lives Matter movement while labeling its activists as terrorists.

One of the conspiracy theories suggests that the activist organization is "supposedly funded by China and that money is then donated to the Democratic Party."

"Antifa and Black Lives Matter have no intentions to negotiate," the document reads. "These are revolutionary movements whose aims are to overthrow the U.S. government."

The document also includes more demeaning remarks about BLM activists describing those who participated in the nationwide protests for civil rights over the summer as "useful idiots" who were working for "hard-core, terrorist trained troops," according to The Hill.00:0201:34

Phillip Atiba Goff, a Yale University professor and expert on racial bias in law enforcement, has described the dangerous document being used as training guidance for law enforcement as "stunning" and "distressing."

"It's stunning. It's distressing in many ways. It's untethered to reality," said Goff, CEO of the Center for Policing Equity. "I worry that it leads to people dying unnecessarily."

Harvey Hedden, ILEETA's executive director, defended the document as he dismissed the concerns as "differences of opinion."

"There will always be differences of opinion on training issues but so long as the disagreements remain professional and not personal we do not censor these ideas," Hedden said. "I am willing to allow the trainer to evaluate the information themselves."

He added, "Just like law enforcement, I am afraid BLM has earned some of these criticisms and others might be overgeneralizations."

But criminal justice activists argue otherwise. Despite Hedden's defense, Scott Roberts, senior director of criminal justice campaigns for the racial justice advocacy organization Color of Change expressed concerns about how this type of guidance could intensify an already-troubling police culture.

Sherice Nelson, assistant professor of political science at Southern University and A&M College, also expressed concern about the robust amount of "wildly outlandish" misinformation in the document. Nelson said, "This document is below the belt because of how much misinformation there is, how many conspiracy theories there are, how much violence it promotes and how many reasons it gives to justify dehumanizing people."
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Trump plan to revive the gallows, electric chair, gas chamber and firing squad recalls a troubled history



The way the federal government can kill death row prisoners will soon be expanded to ghoulish methods that include hanging, the electric chair, gas chamber and the firing squad.

Set to take effect on Christmas Eve, the new regulations authorizing an alternative to lethal injections – the method currently used in federal executions – were announced by the Justice Department on Nov. 27.

The federal move follows the example of several states, including Oklahoma and Tennessee, that have revived alternative methods in the face of challenges to their lethal injection protocols and problems in the supply of drugs needed in the process.

It is not clear whether the administration actually intends to employ the newly announced methods. It may only want to have them in reserve if any of the individuals scheduled for execution before January’s inauguration – five, according to the Department of Justice – should succeed in challenging the current execution protocol.

What is clear is that these new regulations send a message about the lengths the administration will go to kill as many death row inmates as possible before Joe Biden takes office and, as expected, halts the federal death penalty.

If the president and Department of Justice succeed in their plan, the period from July 14, 2020, the date of the first of Trump’s federal executions, through January 20, 2021 will be the deadliest in the history of federal capital punishment in nearly a century.

As someone who has studied execution methods in the U.S., I see in the new regulations echoes of a troubled history of less-than-perfect execution methods.

To grasp their full significance, it is necessary to look at the record of hanging, the electric chair, the gas chamber and firing squads. Each of them has been touted as humane only to be sidelined because its use was found to be gruesome and offensive. Given that history, there are questions over whether the administration’s plans serve any purpose other than continuing a death penalty system deemed to be a cruel outlier among modern societies.
The noose and the chair

Let’s start with hanging.

Hanging was the execution method of choice throughout most of American history, and it was used in America’s last public execution in 1936, when Rainey Bethea was put to death in Owensboro, Kentucky. When done correctly, the noose killed by severing the spinal column, causing near instantaneous death
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Crowds watch as attendants adjust a black hood over Rainey Bethea. AP File Photo

But, all too often, hanging resulted in a slow death by strangulation and sometimes even a beheading. Given this gruesome record and hanging’s association with the lynching of mainly Black men, by the end of the 19th century the search for other execution methods began in earnest.

The first of those alternatives was the electric chair. At the time it was adopted, it was regarded as a truly modern instrument of death, a technological marvel in the business of state killing. Hailed by penal reformers as a humane alternative to hanging, the electric chair was first authorized in 1888 by New York state following the report of a commission that concluded, “The most potent agent known for the destruction of human life is electricity…The velocity of the electric current is so great that the brain is paralyzed; it is indeed dead before the nerves can communicate a sense of shock.”

Yet, right from the start, electrocution’s potency was a problem. Its first use in the 1890 execution of convicted murderer William Kemmler was horribly botched. Reports of the execution say that “After 2 minutes the execution chamber filled with the smell of burning flesh.” Newspapers called the execution a “historic bungle” and “disgusting, sickening and inhuman.”

In spite of the Kemmler debacle, the electric chair quickly became popular, being seen as more efficient and less brutal than hanging. From the start of the 20th century until the 1980s, the number of death sentences carried out by this method far outstripped those of any other method.

But electrocutions continued to go wrong, and eventually several dramatic botched executions in Florida helped turn the tide. Included were two executions, one in 1990, the other in 1997, in which the condemned inmates caught fire.

The gas chamber

By the start of the 21st century, states all over the country were abandoning the electric chair. As Justice Carol W. Hunstein of the Supreme Court of Georgia explained, “Death by electrocution, with its specter of excruciating pain and its certainty of cooked brains and blistered bodies,” was no longer compatible with contemporary standards of decency.
A gas chamber at San Quentin prison from 1959. AP Photo/Clarence Hamm

One alternative to electrocution was the gas chamber, but it too has its own history of problems. First adopted in Nevada in 1922, executions using lethal gas were to take place while the condemned slept. Death row inmates were supposed to be housed in airtight, leak-proof prison cells, separate from other prisoners. On the day of the execution, valves would be opened that would fill the chamber with gas, killing the prisoner painlessly.

This plan was soon abandoned because officials decided it would be impractical to implement it, and states constructed special gas chambers fitted with pipes, exhaust fans and glass windows on the front and back walls for witness viewing. But deaths by lethal gas were never pretty or easy to watch.

Inmates regularly fought against breathing the gas as it entered the chamber. They convulsed, jerked, coughed, twisted and turned blue for several minutes before they died.

Far from solving the problems associated with hangings or electrocutions, lethal gas introduced its own set of horrors to the institution of capital punishment. In fact, by the end of the 20th century, 5% of executions by lethal gas had been botched.

As a result, states used gas as the sole method of execution only from 1924 to 1977, and it was last used in 1999. By then, the gas chamber had become a relic of the past because of its inability to deliver on its promise to be “swift and painless” and its association with the Nazi use of gas to kill millions during the Holocaust.

The firing sqaud

Finally, the firing squad. Of all of America’s methods of execution, it has been least often used. From 1900 to 2010, only 35 of America’s 8,776 executions were carried out using this method, and since 1976 just three people have faced a firing squad, with the last one carried out in Utah in 2010
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The execution chamber at Utah State Prison used in the U.S.‘s last firing squad execution. AP Photo/Trent Nelson, Pool, File

Critics point out that because death by guns evokes images of raw, frontier justice in a society awash in gun violence, this method mimicked something that the law wished to discourage. Nonetheless, Utah revived the firing squad in 2015 due to challenges to the state’s lethal injection protocol.

While it has some contemporary proponents who claim it is the least cruel of all execution methods, the history of the firing squad is marked by gruesome mistakes when marksmen missed their target. In the 1951 execution of Eliseo Mares, for example, four executioners all shot into the wrong side of his chest, and he died slowly from blood loss.

A cruel history, revived

While Trump’s Department of Justice is now holding out the prospect of using these previously discredited methods of execution, it cannot erase the cruelty that marks their history. That history stands as a reminder of America’s failed quest to find a method of execution that is safe, reliable and humane.















December 3, 2020 
Author
Austin Sarat
Associate Provost and Associate Dean of the Faculty and Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, Amherst College
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