Football Defenders more at risk of dementia in later life says new research

"I think footballs should be sold with a health warning saying repeated heading in football may lead to increased risks of dementia,"

Issued on: 02/08/2021 

Italy defender Giorgio Chiellini (R) vies for the header with England's Harry Kane 

JOHN SIBLEY POOL/AFP

London (AFP)

Defenders are more likely than their team-mates to suffer dementia caused by heading the ball, according to new research into neurological disease in former players.

The latest data from the University of Glasgow's study has been labelled the "missing link" between football and the risk of degenerative brain disorders.

Results show for goalkeepers neurodegenerative disease risk was similar to general population levels but almost four times higher for outfield players, with a five-fold increase for defenders, where head injuries and heading the ball are more prevalent.

Findings also show diagnoses grew with increasing career length, ranging from an approximately doubling of risk in those with shortest careers, to around a five-time increase in those with the longest careers.

"We are at a point in this current data to suggest that footballs should be sold with a health warning saying 'Repeated heading of a football may lead to an increased risk of dementia'," said consultant neuropathologist Professor Willie Stewart of the University of Glasgow.

"Unlike other dementia and other degenerative diseases, we know what the risk factor is here. It is entirely preventable. We can stop this now, potentially.

"To do that we need to reduce - if not eliminate - unnecessary head impacts in sport. Is heading absolutely necessary for football to continue?

"Or, to put it another way, is exposure to dementia absolutely required for the game of football or can some other form of the game be considered?

"If we make a change now it will take 30 to 40 years to actually see the effects of that."

Researchers looked at health records data for around 8,000 Scottish former professional footballers and 23,000 matched general population controls and explored whether risk of neurodegenerative disease varied by player position, length of career or playing era.

The results add to ground-breaking observations from the 2019 study, which found former players had an approximately three-and-a-half-fold higher rate of death due to neurodegenerative disease than expected.

"Maybe football needs to consider other different forms of football," Stewart said.

"Do we wait 30 to 40 years or do we say now the evidence is sufficiently strong that we should consider the sport with unnecessary head impact? I think we are well past that point."

Stewart added footballs sold in shops should now come with a warning about the risks of dementia.

"I think footballs should be sold with a health warning saying repeated heading in football may lead to increased risks of dementia," he said.

"I've yet to see any evidence that heading a ball is good for you. Football is great for you, there is less cancer and cardiovascular problems for players, but there are dreadful levels of dementia and I can't see the benefit of that."

© 2021 AFP

Israel's top court delays decision on Sheikh Jarrah evictions

Palestinian residents of Sheikh Jarrah attend the Israeli supreme court hearing on August 2, 2021 AHMAD GHARABLI AFP



Issued on: 02/08/2021 - 

Jerusalem (AFP)

Israel's supreme court delayed a decision Monday in the case of Palestinian families facing expulsion by Israeli settlers in annexed east Jerusalem, an issue that exploded into armed conflict in May.

Palestinians said they were offered the chance to remain in their properties in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood as "protected tenants" who would recognise Israeli ownership of the homes and pay a symbolic annual rent, but they refused.

"They placed a lot of pressure on us to reach an agreement with the Israeli settlers in which we would be renting from the settler organisations," said Muhammad el-Kurd, from one of four Palestinian families at the heart of the case.

"Of course this is rejected," he said.

- Years-long battle -

Monday's hearing was part of a years-long legal battle waged by Jewish Israeli organisations trying to reclaim property owned by Jews in east Jerusalem prior to Israel's founding in 1948.

Palestinian residents say Jordan granted them homes on the property after they were expelled from towns in what became Israel. On Monday they argued newly obtained Jordanian documents proved their case.

The four families had initially been ordered evicted, but the order was suspended as they pursued an appeal in the legal system.

The agreement proposed Monday would have Palestinian families pay 1,500 shekels ($465) a year to the settler organisation Nahalat Shimon. Lawyer Sami Irshid, representing the Palestinians, rejected the Israeli claims to the property.

"We are willing to be listed as protected tenants while retaining our rights," he said in court. "We will request recognition of the property rights the government of Jordan gave us."#photo1

Ilan Shemer, representing the Jewish Israelis, said that "this arrangement will be an empty arrangement".

Danny Seidemann, an attorney specialising in Jerusalem, told AFP the court delayed a decision in an effort to bridge those positions, with judges asking the Palestinians to present a list of potential protected tenants.

Seidemann said an agreement could defer evictions for decades.

"It also means evictions at some point would be inevitable," he said.

The case has become an international cause, with dozens of people demonstrating outside the court on Monday.

A general view shows the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of 

Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem on July 26, 2021. © Ahmad Gharabli, AFP

- 11-day Gaza war -

Clashes in May over possible Sheikh Jarrah evictions spread to Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa mosque compound, sparking an Israeli crackdown that escalated into an 11-day war between Israel and Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip.

The families in Monday's case appealed to the supreme court after two lower courts ruled that under Israeli property law, the homes in question belonged to the Jewish owners who purchased the plots before 1948.

In 1956, when east Jerusalem was under Jordanian control, Amman leased plots of land to families in Sheikh Jarrah, and the UN agency for Palestinian refugees built homes for them.

Jordan promised to register the properties in their names, but did not complete the process before Israel captured east Jerusalem in 1967 and annexed it in a move never recognised by the international community.

A 1970 Israeli law allows Jews to reclaim land in east Jerusalem that they lost in 1948, although no such option exists for Palestinians who lost property.

Jerusalem deputy mayor Arieh King, who supports the Jewish Israeli claims in the neighbourhood, decried the court's delay.

"As long as the court drags this on, there is more room for Arabs to make riots," King told AFP.

The Palestinian families said in a statement that they affirmed their rights to their homes "until the last breath".

Israeli anti-settlement group Ir Amim says that more than 1,000 Palestinians are at risk of losing their homes to Jewish settler groups in Sheikh Jarrah and the Silwan neighbourhood of east Jerusalem.

© 2021 AFP

Study confirms ancient Spanish cave art was made by Neanderthals

Issued on: 02/08/2021 -

This combination of pictures obtained on July 29, 2021, shows a general view and close-up of a partly coloured stalagmite tower in the Spanish cave of Ardales, southern Spain 

Joao Zilhao UNIVERSITY OF BARCELONA/AFP

Washington (AFP)

Neanderthals, long perceived to have been unsophisticated and brutish, really did paint stalagmites in a Spanish cave more than 60,000 years ago, according to a study published on Monday.

The issue had roiled the paleoarchaeology community ever since the publication of a 2018 paper attributing red ocher pigment found on the stalagmitic dome of Cueva de Ardales to our extinct "cousin" species.

The dating suggested the art was at least 64,800 years old, made at a time when modern humans did not inhabit the continent.

But the finding was contentious, and "a scientific article said that perhaps these pigments were a natural thing," a result of iron oxide flow, Francesco d'Errico, co-author of a new paper in the journal PNAS told AFP.

A new analysis revealed the composition and placement of the pigments were not consistent with natural processes -- instead, the pigments were applied through splattering and blowing.

What's more, their texture did not match natural samples taken from the caves, suggesting the pigments came from an external source.

More detailed dating showed that the pigments were applied at different points in time, separated by more than ten thousand years.

This "supports the hypothesis that the Neanderthals came on several occasions, over several thousand years, to mark the cave with pigments," said d'Errico, of the University of Bordeaux.

It is difficult to compare the Neanderthal "art" to wall paintings made by prehistoric modern humans, such as those found in the Chauvet-Pont d'Arc cave of France, more 30,000 years old.

But the new finding adds to increasing evidence that Neanderthals, whose lineage went extinct around 40,000 years ago, were not the boorish relatives of Homo sapiens they were long portrayed to be.

The team wrote that the pigments are not "art" in the narrow sense of the word "but rather the result of graphic behaviors intent on perpetuating the symbolic significance of a space."

The cave formations "played a fundamental role in the symbolic systems of some Neanderthal communities," though what those symbols meant remains a mystery for now.

ORTEGA WAS A GURELLIAISMO NEVER A SOCIALIST

Ortega and Murillo: Nicaragua's shrewd power couple



Issued on: 03/08/2021 - 

Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega (R) and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, still command a lot of support despite accusations of repression and a mounting death toll Inti OCON AFP/File

Managua (AFP)

Nicaragua's first couple, President Daniel Ortega and his wife Vice President Rosario Murillo, are both in their 70s but they show no signs of being willing to let go of power.

On Monday they announced their joint ticket to stand for reelection -- with Ortega bidding for a fourth successive mandate.

Former guerrilla leader Ortega, known as "el comandante" (the commander) for his iron-fisted rule, first held power for 11 years after the 1979 revolution.

But it is since his reelection in 2006 that he has gradually cemented his position and eliminated any serious rivals, leading to accusations of repressing dissent.

Ahead of November's presidential election, the power couple have had more than 30 opposition figures, including former guerrilla comrades and seven potential presidential candidates, detained on charges such as "undermining sovereignty."

Murillo, extravagant, with a penchant for poetry and art, is no less redoubtable and her husband's right-hand woman, although some believe she holds true power in the country.

Known as "Companera Rosario" (Comrade Rosario), she has risen through the party ranks since her husband's re-election to the point of joining him in an effective diarchy.

- Ortega: shrew, ruthless -

Ortega, 75, first seized control after his Sandinista guerrillas ousted the Somoza dynasty that had held power in Nicaragua from 1937 to 1979.

Now, critics accuse him of authoritarianism, corruption and of again turning Nicaraguan politics into a family affair.

"In the end we have a dictator in Ortega, a caudillo (strongman) ... he hasn't allowed any other candidates in his party and now, it seems, he won't allow a president in Nicaragua that isn't him," journalist Fabian Medina, the author of a biography on Ortega, told AFP.

Ortega headed a leftwing Sandinista junta with the support of Cuba and the Soviet Union after the revolution, and was elected president in 1985.

But, with the economy in ruins, he lost the following election in 1990.

With his Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) party in opposition, he spent the next 17 years "ruling from below" -- fomenting violent protests and negotiating reforms with the government.

In 2006, he managed a presidential comeback, maneuvering to gradually take control over all state bodies, the police and the army.

Backed by the deep oil funds of Venezuela, under his ideological ally Hugo Chavez, he started social programs for the poor, many of whom continue to support him.

But he was also careful to nurture ties with Nicaragua's powerful business families, promising stability.

In 2014, his party in congress engineered a constitutional amendment scrapping presidential term limits, opening the way for him to remain president for life.

Ortega's shrewd politics, combined with his skill at ruthlessly cornering opponents, made him the leader of the FSLN, which he joined in 1963.

Born in the mining village of La Libertad, Ortega ditched his law studies to join the guerrillas.

He spent seven years behind bars, at times tortured, at the hands of the Somoza regime.

- Murillo: fiery, eccentric -

Being merely a first lady was never enough for the ruthlessly ambitious Murillo, 70.

Known for her fiery speeches laced with biblical and esoteric references she preaches "love and reconciliation" while in the same breath branding the opposition "blood-thirsty vampires."

As Ortega has retreated from the spotlight, his "loyal companion" and wife, Murillo -- with whom he has six children, one of them adopted -- has taken his place.

A ceaseless worker, a poet who speaks fluent English and French, and given to wearing colorful clothes and jewelry reminiscent of the hippie 1960s, Murillo always acted outside the confines of a traditional first lady.

Her first government role was as a self-appointed communicator-in-chief, making sure no other ministers spoke or acted without her permission.

She has imposed her eccentric taste on the capital by ordering the erection of several tall metal "trees of life" painted different colors and lit up at night.

Murillo met Ortega in 1977, when she was a revolutionary fighting the Somoza dictatorship. They soon started a relationship, marrying 11 years ago.

When Murillo's daughter from a previous marriage, Zoilamerica Narvaez, accused Ortega in 1998 of having sexually abused her since age 11, Murillo sided with her man. The charges were eventually rejected by a Sandinista judge.

Today, Zoilamerica lives in Costa Rica, where she speaks disparagingly of her mother, whom she says chose power over their relationship.

"Ortega found in Murillo what he lacked, and Murillo found in Ortega the vehicle she needed," said journalist Fabian Medina in his book.

Gioconda Belli, a writer and former guerrilla comrade who now opposes the government, said both Ortega and Murillo are "Machiavellian in the sense that the end justifies the means."

"They are playing for their lives because they cannot survive without political power," said Narvaez.

© 2021 AFP

PATRIARCHY IS FEMICIDE
Nearly 5 mn fewer girls to be born worldwide over next 10 years: study

Issued on: 03/08/2021 -

Researchers are concerned that a rise in sex-selective methods could skew demographics and hold development back Ezequiel BECERRA AFP/File

Paris (AFP)

An estimated 4.7 million fewer girls are expected to be born globally in the next 10 years because of sex-selective practices in countries with a cultural preference for male offspring, a trend that could undermine social cohesion in the long term, research showed on Tuesday.

The research suggested that the projected shortfall in the number of girls being born will lead to a surplus of young men in around a third of the global population by 2030, which could lead to increased anti-social behaviour and violence.

Sex-selective abortions have been on the rise for the past 40 years in countries throughout southeast Europe along with south and east Asia, with as-yet undetermined demographic impacts.

To model what short- and long-term effect sex selection will have on societies, an international team of researchers analysed data from more than three billion births over the last 50 years.

Focusing on 12 countries where the male-to-female ratio had increased since 1970 and another 17 where that ratio was at risk of increasing due to social or cultural trends, they simulated two scenarios.

The first assumed an increase in the rate of sex selection, based on statistical evidence.

The second scenario assumed increased sex selection in certain countries, based on observed trends and decreased fertility, but for which specific data were lacking.

In scenario 1, countries saw a shortfall of 4.7 million in the number of girls being born by 2030. For scenario 2, the figure jumped to more than 22 million globally by 2100.

Authors of the research, published in the BMJ medical journal, said the bias towards male offspring could lead to a "marriage squeeze" in affected countries.

"Fewer-than-expected females in a population could result in elevated levels of anti-social behaviour and violence, and may ultimately affect long-term stability and social sustainable development," they wrote.

The United Nations defines sex-selective practices alongside child marriage and female genital mutilation as harmful practices targeted under the Millennium Development Goals.

The authors of the new study called for better data collection of such practices in order to stamp them out, as well as wider education initiatives.

"A broader objective relates to the need to influence gender norms which lie at the core of harmful practices such as prenatal sex selection," they wrote.

"This calls for broader legal frameworks to ensure gender equality."

© 2021 AFP

Abortion, race, gender: State Republicans wage culture wars
2021/8/2 
©Stateline.org

PEW RESEARCH

In this photo from May 29, 2021, protesters hold up signs at a demonstration outside the Texas state capitol in Austin, Texas. - Sergio Flores/Getty Images North America/TNS

Not since the Supreme Court legalized abortion nationwide in 1973 has there been a year in which states approved so many abortion restrictions.

Since January, there have been a record 97 new laws limiting abortion enacted in 19 states, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research and policy organization that supports abortion rights. While a handful of states also enacted laws designed to protect and expand access to abortion and other health care for pregnant women, the state restrictions far outnumbered them.

As a result, the gap between women’s access to abortion in some states as opposed to others has never been wider.

In addition to abortion, legislatures waded into other social issues during this year’s sessions. Republicans in many states pushed bills restricting transgender youth’s access to school sports and medical treatment for gender transition. They also sought to place limits on classroom discussions of systemic racism, vilifying a decades-old body of scholarship known as critical race theory.

Politics drove that rush of legislation, even as lawmakers faced pressing COVID-19 health and budget issues.

Republicans were emboldened in the 23 states where they control the governorship and both houses of the legislature. Other factors include a newly conservative U.S. Supreme Court, GOP backlash over former President Donald Trump’s reelection loss and a tidal wave of social media campaigns and commentary aimed at galvanizing conservatives by playing up divisive cultural issues.

James Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, said the cultural issues play not only to Republican voters generally, but especially to the GOP conservative base, a much smaller subset who have outsized power in primaries. Lawmakers are aware that these voters hold the key to their elections, he said.

“If talking about cultural issues turns their key, [Republican lawmakers] are going to want to vote on those issues … and claim credit for fighting the fights on issues that are important to those voters,” he said in a phone interview. “Abortions, guns, sexualized issues.

“They are very big overarching issues, critical to these voters,” he said. “Not that they generate overall majority support in the electorate, or that they gin up so-called culture wars — it’s a function of the political,” he said, pointing out that while he is most familiar with Texas politics, the trends apply in other states as well.

There are currently 23 statehouses where Republicans hold the governorship and both houses in the legislature, a “trifecta,” according to Ballotpedia. These are where most of the conservative social issue legislation, including abortion, transgender and critical race theory laws, have been written this year.

There are 15 Democratic trifectas. A few of those states, including Colorado, Hawaii and New Mexico, have enacted laws designed to protect abortion rights if the Supreme Court overturns or significantly weakens Roe v. Wade.
Abortion laws

In June, the Supreme Court agreed to take a case on the constitutionality of a Mississippi law passed in 2018 that largely bars abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. With a new 6-3 conservative majority on the high court, anti-abortion advocates see a chance to change federal law. Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch in a July court filing urged the justices to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Recent Montana measures typify the variety of abortion limits enacted nationwide.

Montana this year enacted a ban on abortions after 20 weeks past a woman’s last menstrual period; a requirement that pregnant women be offered the chance to see the fetus via ultrasound before they are allowed to have an abortion; a mandate for clinics to report extra data to the state, including history on prior pregnancies; prescribed procedures in the unlikely event of a failed abortion; and a ban on medical personnel using telemedicine to prescribe a medication abortion — the use of two drugs to terminate pregnancies up to the 10th week.

Elizabeth Nash, state issues expert at the Guttmacher Institute, said the 2020 elections shifted state legislatures more to the right, “and that opened the door for more abortion restrictions and bans. The other piece is that the Supreme Court is now solidly anti-abortion and that signaled to state legislators that the court would be more open to more restrictions on abortion.”

The COVID-19 health emergency led to a new twist on abortion restrictions — laws making it harder to prescribe medication abortions remotely. With the pandemic came a turn toward telemedicine instead of in-person visits that risked spread of the coronavirus. But some legislators, including those in Montana, sought to curb access to medication abortions by banning telehealth prescriptions and mailing of the drugs.

“Medication abortion can be provided safely and easily through teleheath,” Nash said. “There’s always some new twist on abortion restrictions. And this year the new twist is medication abortions.”

Montana lawmakers argued that prescribing abortion pills remotely could harm women if there were complications and they needed to seek emergency treatment. Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte signed the various bills, ending a string of vetoes in past years by former Democratic governors.

The biggest factor in the bills’ success?

“Gianforte won,” said Katie Glenn, counsel at the anti-abortion rights group Americans United for Life. “Montana had divided government for 16 years. In 2020, it got unified government.”

Montana state Rep. John Fuller, a Republican, said in a phone interview that he was pleased at the result.

“I made the argument on the floor regarding abortion,” he said, adding that he considers a fetus a “person” entitled to constitutional protections. “I have a belief that no unborn person can be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.”

Republicans in New Hampshire, too, secured a trifecta in 2020, leading to GOP Gov. Chris Sununu’s signing of a bill into law to prohibit abortions after 24 weeks beyond a woman’s last menstrual period.

New Hampshire also enacted a law mandating ultrasound of the uterus before a woman can have an abortion.
Transgender laws

Montana’s Fuller also took the lead in that state on a law requiring high school athletes to play on teams corresponding to the gender they were assigned at birth.

Fuller, a former high school teacher and wrestling, soccer and cross-country coach, argued that allowing transgender girls to compete on girls teams gives them an unfair advantage. But LGBTQ advocates say barring transgender kids from school sports would jeopardize their mental and physical health and increase their isolation.

Nationwide, eight bills prohibiting trans athletes from competing on teams with their chosen gender have been enacted, said Cathryn M. Oakley, state legislative director and senior counsel at the Human Rights Campaign, a group championing gay and lesbian rights. Those bills were in Arkansas, Montana, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee and North Dakota.

Oakley said one of the most sweeping laws was in Arkansas, which enacted a statute that prohibits trans youth from accessing surgery or hormonal treatment for gender transition. The bill was vetoed by Gov. Asa Hutchinson, a Republican, but the veto was overridden by the GOP-led legislature. A court injunction has prevented the law from taking effect, and the legal wrangling has just begun.

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, a Republican, at first vetoed a bill that would have banned transgender women and girls from female high school sports. But under pressure from the right, Noem, who may be considering a presidential run, backtracked and issued an executive order to impose the ban.

Oakley suggested that as gay, lesbian and transgender people become more accepted by Americans, and same-sex marriage is legal across the country, anti-gay lawmakers are looking for other sexual identity-based issues to confront.

“It’s harder to get people swept up in anti-LGBT rhetoric,” she said in a phone interview.

“Opinion is favoring not only LGBT folks but also trans folks as well.” Therefore, she said, the attention has turned to trans kids.

“The problem is the rhetoric: ‘Every trans girl who wants to play sports is taking an opportunity away from a cis girl who wants to play sports.’” Not true, she said.

But that is exactly Fuller’s argument. He pointed to a formerly male runner, now a trans female, who won the women’s mile race at the 2020 NCAA’s Division I Collegiate Conference Championship. “That took a championship away from a female,” he said. NCAA rules allow trans people to compete in competitions corresponding to their gender identity if they have been taking hormones to alter their gender for at least a year.
Critical race theory

Another flashpoint in the culture wars this year in state legislatures has been critical race theory, a vein of scholarship that studies racism at the systemic level, examining how policies, laws and court decisions can perpetuate racism even if they are ostensibly neutral or fair. Opponents argue that discussing race’s impact on society perpetuates racial divisions.

Eight states — Arizona, Idaho, Iowa, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas — this year enacted bans on teaching the topic in public schools despite no evidence that it is being taught in any public school.

Rashawn Ray, a David M. Rubenstein Fellow at the Brookings Institution think tank, who conducted a survey of the state actions, says the laws are designed as a “rebuke to changing American culture.”

According to Ray’s research, the laws mostly ban discussion, training or course orientation that portray the United States as inherently racist, as well as discussions about bias, privilege, discrimination and oppression. “Critical race theory wants us to take a social historical viewpoint on racism, and how it impacts our institutions,” he said.

Ray, who is also a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, said those concepts are generally too complex for most public school students and are more likely to be broached at the college level. Nonetheless, the debate is likely to have a chilling effect on teachers, he said.

He said teachers may be reluctant to try to explain the concept to students “because they could lose their jobs. Those are the problems.”

In New Hampshire, a conservative group called1776 Action launched a multimedia campaign calling for passage of an anti-critical race theory bill. Among its supporters, 1776 Action lists former HUD Secretary Ben Carson and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. The bill was batted around in the legislature and eventually folded into the state’s budget.

After first saying he wouldn’t ban the teaching of critical race theory, Sununu signed the budget into law in late June, with the provision. His public statements put him on both sides of the issue. He said he didn’t necessarily believe in the tenets of critical race theory and was worried about raising free speech issues but would sign the bill anyway.

Shortly thereafter, more than half the members of his Council on Diversity and Inclusion quit.

“You signed into law a provision that aims to censor conversations essential to advancing equity and inclusion in our state, specifically for those within our public education systems, and all state employees,” the Council members wrote in their resignation letter. “Given your willingness to sign this damaging provision and make it law, we are no longer able to serve as your advisors.”

Reasons for Vaccine Optimism

People are complicated.



Charlie Warzel

Mr Lordi of the Finnish hard rock band Lordi gets the second jab of his Covid-19 vaccination. 

(JOUNI PORSANGER/Getty)

Welcome to Galaxy Brain — a newsletter from Charlie Warzel about technology and culture. You can read what this is all about here. If you like what you see, consider forwarding it to a friend or two. You can also click the button below to subscribe. And if you’ve been reading, consider going to the paid version.

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The vaccine hesitancy conversation has (understandably) intensified in the last two weeks, and the undertone of many articles about the Delta variant is some version of: What the hell are we going to do to get this extremely effective vaccine in more people?

One of the first tasks: acknowledge that the unvaccinated are not a monolith.

The Times ran a piece last week that interviewed people all over the country who were vaccine-reluctant but finally got the jab. Their stories provide a helpful look at the variety of reasons — some very understandable (can’t take time off work to go), some very flimsy (afraid of needles, figures others will get it and that’ll be enough) — why people don’t get vaccinated. Then, on Sunday, the paper published a longer profile of unvaccinated Americans, suggesting they fall into two categories: the adamant refusers and those “willing to be swayed.”

In the Atlantic, Ed Yong interviewed Rhea Boyd, a pediatrician and public-health advocate about vaccine hesitancy and how, as a culture, we’re mostly misunderstanding the issue. The interview offers one of the clearest pictures of how our cultural conversations and the language we use don’t capture the nuance of many peoples’ views, especially on something like vaccines. For example, Boyd notes that, in her experience, she’s seeing quite a bit of vaccine hesitancy…among vaccinated people. They took the vaccine, but they’re concerned about the long term effects and aren’t acting as advocates for others in their community to get the shot.

Boyd also suggests that the rampant disinformation from a small but vocal group of anti-vaxxers has created a boomerang effect of sorts. Basically: we (understandably) pay a lot of attention and media lip service to the conspiracy theorists int he anti-vaxx discussion. This creates more vitriol toward the unvaccinated. Boyd argues that plenty of the unvaccinated aren’t even traditional anti-vaxxers to begin with but when they get lumped in, they feel alienated and become less receptive. Yong summed this up succinctly in the piece:


We’re used to thinking of anti-vaxxers as sowing distrust about vaccines. But you’re arguing that they’ve also successfully sown distrust about unvaccinated people, many of whom are now harder to reach because they’ve been broadly demonized.

Boyd is, for the most part, optimistic about vaccine uptake. There is still so much work to be done, she argues, reaching out and creating policy for Americans — especially those who don’t have adequate access to the vaccine (access to the vaccine and vaccine availability are not the same thing, Boyd notes in the interview). There are still so many structural barriers to vaccine adoption that include rural populations, minority communities, the underinsured, issues of child care and time off for people who work inflexible or multiple jobs and don’t want to risk being sidelined by mild (but very real) shot side effects. In other words, there’s plenty of ways to reach and help people get the shots, provided organizations, governments, and interested parties want to put in the work.

Reading Boyd’s interview, I found myself thinking that our very human cultural desire to lump people together into big, binary groups — the pro- and anti-vax — has probably hurt our nationwide vaccination campaign, though it’s unclear just how much. It makes sense that we’re bad at parsing the shades of vaccine hesitancy, simply because vaccination is an emotionally charged topic; I get frustrated very quickly, for example, thinking about those who are pure refusers, needlessly helping prolong the pandemic and potentially helping to create additional variants. And I can’t imagine how frustrated and enraged I’d be if I had kids, whose health and in-person school years are now at risk. (I also want to note that I, too, get uncomfortable reading long profiles, complete with professional portraits of proud vaccine refusers. It feels like another attempt to show empathy toward a group of people who, sometimes gleefully, show a lack of disregard for others.)

But as Boyd notes, it’s also possible that cultural disdain for vaccine refusers is trickling down to some people we can and desperately need to reach. Shaming isn’t working. But vaccine mandates for cultural or work participation might. Google, Disney, and other companies are experimenting with mandating the vaccine (including providing time off for recovery). Airlines could also play an outsized motivating role:

Ken Klippenstein @kenklippensteinPeople who say they would be more likely to get vaccinated if they got $100 cash: 14% People who say they would be more likely to get vaccinated if it was required to fly: 41%

August 1st 2021838 Retweets5,914 Likes

But it’s easy, at this point, to feel defeated. This tweet from political scientist Seth Masket feels representative of a viewpoint I hear from the understandably frustrated: many people are just spinning their wheels and putting forth justifications they might not even really believe in. They just straight up don’t want to get the shot.

Seth Masket @smotus

While it’s interesting to note what arguments people give for vaccine refusal, we shouldn’t place too much stock in what are effectively rationalizations. If it hadn’t been the side effects many would have found another reason to justify staying unvaccinated.

Summer Brennan is finishing her book this summer @summerbrennan

Reading in the NY Times that 53% of people who have refused the vaccine have done so because of the "side effects," makes me feel like it was a bad idea for so many to breathlessly share every minor twinge or possibly imagined symptom after getting the jab.

August 1st 2021

26 Retweets196 Likes

Last week, Ezra Klein wrote a slightly different version of this argument. Klein asked readers to grapple with the possibility that a solid portion of the unvaccinated may be completely unpersuadable by any rational arguments. “For all the exhortations to respect their concerns,” he wrote, “there is a deep condescension in believing that we’re smart enough to discover or invent some appeal they haven’t yet heard.”

There’s inherent condescension in almost any conversation about the unvaccinated by the vaccinated. The groups think about risk differently and likely have diverging views and levels of trust about science, the media, politicians, etc. Or, in some cases, they don’t! This is the annoying thing about humans — we’re all different in ways that are endlessly frustrating. I’m not trying to give anyone a pass here: I think it’s incredibly dangerous not to get the tremendously effective Covid vaccine and, for those with the means and immune systems to get the shot, I think it’s incredibly selfish and I don’t think being excessively kind to assholes is the way to see change. And yet: it doesn’t matter to those people what I think and conversations plotting how to persuade (like this very newsletter!!) probably sound condescending. Everyone loses!

That said, I’m still convinced that vaccine persuasion is possible, even for some of the deeply resistant groups, given the proper messenger. Last week, Dartmouth professor Brooke Harrington wrote a long, viral Twitter thread arguing that sociological research on fraud victims is incredibly useful for thinking through Covid vaccine resistance.

Harrington argues that resisters are a classic example of a mark — and legitimate victims of a con. But their victimhood becomes a moral failure when, after realizing they’ve been conned, they double down and act as if they’ve been in on the scheme from the beginning. Doing so, she argues, citing research from Erving Goffman, is a way to save face and avoid the “social death” and the humiliation that would accompany confronting the ways in which their belief system had failed them.

But not all hope is lost. Harrington argues that “coolers” — aka, “high-status members of the marks' own communities” — are uniquely capable of “help[ing] reconcile [the marks] to their humiliation & enabl[ing] them to rejoin society without putting the rest of us in danger.”

Brooke Harrington @EBHarrington

Since they've chosen moral failure, & now endanger us all with their face-saving maneuvers, the pragmatic question is: How do we keep them from killing the rest of us? Goffman's work implies 2 parallel strategies: 1) Let them experience social death. 2) Employ coolers. 20/x

July 22nd 2021

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I called up Harrington to ask her to explain the theory further. She believes that no New York Times columnist or member of the mainstream media would successfully convince an adamant, politically motivated vaccine resistor, no matter what those people say. “Often you’ll hear that these resistors are looking for more information,” she told me. “But they aren’t looking for more information, they’re looking for a new messenger.”

Harrington suggests that many in this group are aware of the facts and smart enough to see that, indeed, the vaccines are quite effective. “The problem,” she said, “is that they have too much to lose from publicly backing off this stance now.”

Which is why some people in highly unvaccinated communities are getting vaccinated in secret or wearing disguises to get vaccinated — vaccination status is deeply baked into their group’s identity and cutting across it could result in a loss of one’s status in that group. Plus, it’s quite painful for anyone to reckon with the ways that their ideology has failed them.

But the right messenger and the right message could move meaningful numbers of politically-motivated vaccine refusers. Harrington suggested that if pro-Trump politicians and news outlets changed their messaging to equate vaccination with ‘owning the libs,’ it could begin to change some minds.

“That message would align vaccination with the overarching norm of their current politics: that conservatives exist to oppose and humiliate liberals,” she told me. “If I were designing the most effective message for somebody like Tucker Carlson, it would be something like, ‘liberals are furious that conservatives are getting vaccinated now because they were hoping we’d all die.’ I’d couch vaccine as act of opposition to liberals.”

I told Harrington I was a bit skeptical. Wouldn’t a massive right-wing reversal feel contrived to the politically-motivated vaccine refusers? Wouldn’t they see through it?

Her short answer: no.

“They’re looking for an out,” Harrington said. “They are smart, they know what’s true and not true. They know ‘Trump vaccine’ is just a word game. But who cares? The function of something like ‘Trump vaccine’ isn’t truth. It’s to act as a plausible face-saving device. So it doesn’t matter.”

Indeed, we might be seeing the first signs of that messaging from the right. Friday’s Murdoch-owned New York Post cover tried something a bit less intense than Harrington’s suggestion, but trying to tie a pro-vaccine message with popular, politically polarized anti-mask message.

Tom Gara @tomgaraTowards a Murdochian pro-vaccine populism

And, when it comes to the politically-motivated vaccine refusers, the rest of us might want to stay out of the discussion if right-wing messaging shifts pro-vaccine. If mainstream media, Joe Biden, or anyone who is an oppositional force chimes in to signal approval, that will taint the message.

We saw a version of this phenomenon in July, when Fox News’ Sean Hannity briefly urged viewers to “take Covid seriously.” The remark drew a fair amount of praise (however tepid) from mainstream journalists as well as mainstream coverage that Fox was perhaps changing its tune on vaccines. The mini news cycle created enough right wing outrage that Hannity backtracked and denied he was trying to get his viewers to take the vaccine.

When it comes to vaccine hesitancy, there’s no tidy conclusion to draw. The substantial pool of Americans who haven’t been vaccinated may share plenty of overlapping characteristics, but they aren’t a monolith, and our strategies have to reflect that. It seems every single American interested in increasing the percentage of fully-vaxxed people in the country has some role to play. Some of us probably need to subsume our (quite understandable rage) and learn new ways to attempt to communicate with people who aren’t completely shut off from persuasion. Those in leadership positions need to channel that frustration into mandate-style policies in workplaces or other services that increase the costs (social, cultural, otherwise) of remaining unvaccinated. And in areas like the mainstream media, what publications and networks say will matter — but maybe not in the ways those organizations think. Persuasion from this group might be impossible and so the best thing for the media to do might be to stay out of that game (when it comes to politically-motivated resistors) and not jeopardize outside efforts.

This might seem counterintuitive, but the lack of tidy conclusions also gives me hope. Don’t get me wrong, the overall climate of disinformation and polarization around a miraculous, quickly produced, life-saving vaccine makes feel great despair. Vaccine resistance highlights some of the ways that trust, shared reality and consensus are almost impossible in this country, even on seemingly open-shut issues of life and death. I’m not wildly optimistic and I’m also anxious even writing a lot of this for fear it’ll be misconstrued as some kind of excusing of vaccine refusers.

But I do think that the broad vaccine conversation has a bigger lesson that we can all learn: people are complicated, and no identity or affinity group is a monolith. When it comes to communication — political or health or otherwise — parsing these groups into finer, more manageable subgroups is crucial. So is learning how to listen and speak to those who are even a tiny bit receptive. Knowing when to give up, shut up, and leave the messaging to someone else — also key. The same can be said for knowing when to increase social costs for those who willfully endanger others.

I don’t believe we’re all going to live in harmony. But I refuse to weather this god awful pandemic without at least trying to learn something useful for the myriad existential battles to come.

'Nobody's ever seen a number like this!' New data reveals just how bad the Trump economy actually was

John Wright
August 02, 2021


President Donald Trump threatens Mexico/CNN screen shot

Former president Donald Trump was obsessed with the gross domestic product.

"Nobody's ever seen a number like this!" Trump declared at a rally last October, referring to the GDP.

As it turns out, Trump was right — but not in a good way.

Across Trump's four years in office, the nation recorded its lowest overall rate of GDP growth — at 1.6 percent — since President Herbert Hoover's administration during the Great Depression, according to a new report from Bloomberg.


Annual GPD numbers go back to 1929, and growth was negative-7.4 percent until Hoover left office in 1933. GDP growth reached a record high of 5.5. percent under John F. Kennedy, and prior to Trump the next-lowest rate was 1.8 percent under George W. Bush. The GDP grew by a rate of 2.1 percent under Trump's predecessor, Barack Obama.

"This is, let's be clear from the start, not a perfect way of measuring presidential economic performance," Bloomberg's Justin Fox reports. "There are lots of things that determine economic growth rates other than who is in the White House, and when a president does make a difference the results may be felt long after he's left Washington. Still, it's a widely used metric and Trump was downright obsessed with it."

Noting that the comparison may seem unfair due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Fox tried adjusting the GDP numbers backward and forward by one quarter. He also averaged them with another key indicator — gross domestic income — and corrected them for population growth, but things didn't get much better for Trump, who remained at or near the bottom of the pack.

Trump's historically low number continues a trend of the last 75 years in which both the GDP and job numbers have grown faster under Democratic presidents than Republican ones, with the notable exception of Ronald Reagan's administration. While some have suggested that Democratic presidents have simply been luckier, others say it's due to the fact that they tend to focus on broad-based economic growth policies, rather than just tax cuts.

"Trump offered hints of a different economic approach, but the signature legislative accomplishment of his term was another big tax cut and his growth numbers will drag the Republican averages down even further," Fox notes. "Maybe it's mostly bad luck. This is getting to be an awfully long run of it, though."

Slowdown of Earth's spin caused an oxygen surge


By Mindy Weisberger - Senior Writer 

More daylight helped oxygen escape from microbial mats.

A burbot fish rests on rocks covered in purple and white microbial mats, inside the Middle Island Sinkhole in Lake Huron. (Image credit: Phil Hartmeyer, NOAA Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary)

Here's a new spin on how Earth became an oxygen-rich planet: As our planet's rotation slowed, microbes were bathed in longer stints of sunlight that revved up their release of oxygen into the atmosphere.

Every breath you take is possible because billions of years ago, dense mats of cyanobacteria — the first life on Earth — began churning out oxygen as a byproduct from photosynthesis. But scientists still didn't know for sure what triggered two transformative oxygenation events that turned Earth from a low-oxygen planet into an oxygen-rich world where complex organisms could evolve and diversify.

Now, researchers have identified an important factor that could have spurred the release of microbial-generated oxygen: slowdowns in Earth's rotation beginning about 2.4 billion years ago. Earth spun more quickly when it was a newborn planet, completing a turn in just a handful of hours, but it gradually decelerated over hundreds of millions of years. Once the length of a day reached a certain threshold — possibly during those key oxygenation periods — longer stretches of sunlight may have enabled more oxygen molecules to hop from areas of high concentration (inside the bacteria mats) to areas of lower concentration (the atmosphere), according to a new study.

Scientists recently found clues to this link in a sinkhole at the bottom of Lake Huron. Bordered by Michigan in the United States and by Ontario in Canada, Lake Huron is one of the biggest freshwater lakes in the world. The lake's Middle Island Sinkhole measures 300 feet (91 meters) in diameter and lies about 80 feet (24 m) below the surface. There, sulfur-rich water nourishes colorful microbes that thrive in a low-oxygen environment, much like Earth's earliest forms of bacteria did.

In the sinkhole's chilly depths live two types of microbes: sunlight-seeking purple cyanobacteria, which produce oxygen through photosynthesis, and white bacteria, which consume sulfur and instead release sulfate. The microbes jockey for position throughout the day, with the sulfur-eating bacteria covering their purple neighbors in the morning and evening hours, blocking the purple microbes' access to the sun. However, when daylight is strongest, the white microbes shun the light and migrate deeper into the sinkhole, leaving the purple cyanobacteria uncovered and thereby able to photosynthesize and release oxygen.

There might have been similar competitions between communities of microbes billions of years ago, with oxygen-producing bacteria's sunlight exposure hampered by their microbial neighbors, the researchers wrote in the study. Then, as days on Earth became longer, the oxygen-makers gained more time in the sunlight — and released more oxygen into the atmosphere.

"We realized that there is a fundamental link between light dynamics and release of oxygen, and that link is grounded in the physics of molecular diffusion," when thermal changes cause molecules to migrate from areas of higher concentration to lower ones, said study lead author Judith Klatt, a research scientist with the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Germany.

"A shorter day would allow less oxygen to escape a mat, even if the same amount of oxygen is produced per hour," Klatt told Live Science in an email.




Purple microbial mats in the Middle Island Sinkhole in Lake Huron, June 2019. Small hills and "fingers" like this one in the mats are caused by gases like methane and hydrogen sulfide bubbling up beneath them. (Image credit: Phil Hartmeyer, NOAA Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary)

Spin cycle


Now, Earth completes a full rotation on its axis once every 24 hours, but more than 4 billion years ago, a day lasted only about six hours, the researchers reported. Over billions of years, Earth's ongoing dance with the moon has slowed the planet's rotation through a process known as tidal friction. As Earth rotates, the pull of the moon (and the sun, to a lesser extent) attracts Earth's oceans. This stretches the seas so that they bulge away from Earth's center, siphoning energy away from the spin and slowing it down, said study co-author Brian Arbic, a professor in the Earth and Environmental Sciences department at the University of Michigan's College of Literature, Science and the Arts.


This deceleration is small, but it added up to hours of additional daylight over hundreds of millions of years; and the slowdown is still going on today, Arbic told Live Science in an email.

"Tidal friction continues to slow down the rotation rate — the days will continue to lengthen over geological time," Arbic said.




A scuba diver observes the purple, white and green microbes covering rocks in Lake Huron's Middle Island Sinkhole. (Image credit: Phil Hartmeyer, NOAA Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary)

Breath of fresh air

The researchers modeled scenarios that varied day length and oxygen escape from microbial mats. When they compared their models with an analysis of the competing microbial mats sampled from the Middle Island Sinkhole, they found confirmation of their predictions: Photosynthesizing bacteria released more oxygen when days were longer.

This wasn't because the microbes photosynthesized more; rather, it was because longer periods of sunlight meant that more oxygen escaped from the mats in a single day, said study co-author Arjun Chennu, a research scientist at the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research in Bremen.

"This subtle uncoupling of oxygen release from sunlight is at the heart of the mechanism," Chennu said in a statement.


Earth's atmosphere took shape after the planet formed and cooled, around 4.6 billion years ago, and was mostly made of hydrogen sulfide, methane and carbon dioxide (CO2) — as much as 200 times the amount of CO2 as there is in the atmosphere today, according to the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center.

That all changed following the Great Oxidation Event (GOE) about 2.4 billion years ago, followed by the Neoproterozoic Oxygenation Event about 2 billion years later, bringing atmospheric oxygen up to the present-day level of about 21%. Those two oxygenation events have previously been linked to the activity of photosynthesizing cyanobacteria, and this new evidence suggests that another factor could have been daytime on Earth — "a previously largely unconsidered factor" — becoming long enough to trigger the release of even more oxygen from microbial mats, working "in parallel with the other previously suggested drivers of oxygenation," Klatt said.

The findings were published on Aug. 2 in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Originally published on Live Science.

USA

Bipartisan Deal Creates Special Hiring, Pay Authorities for New Agency to Launch Infrastructure Projects

Agency would mirror organizations within the departments of Defense and Energy.

AUGUST 2, 2021 



ERIC KATZ
Senior Correspondent


The bipartisan infrastructure package agreed to over the weekend would create a new agency in the Transportation Department to fund innovative projects, with lawmakers providing the organization free reign to hire without restrictions and to pay higher salaries than those of most civil service jobs.

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, negotiated in recent months by a bipartisan group of 10 senators and the White House, would launch the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Infrastructure to provide grants to universities, companies and research foundations working on early-stage projects. The funds would go toward projects the private sector would be unlikely to take on without assistance due to “technical and financial uncertainty.” Research conducted with the grants would be aimed at reducing costs of the construction and maintenance of roads, bridges and mass transit, lowering the environmental impacts of related projects and boosting their resiliency to physical and cyber threats.

ARPA-I would be headed up by a Senate-confirmed director, who would then be granted wide latitude to build a workforce for the agency. The measure would allow the agency to staff up as necessary to carry out its obligations and "without regard to the civil service laws." The director would set pay rates as he or she saw fit but capped at level two of the Executive Schedule, which in 2021 is $199,300. Employees could also earn annual bonuses of up to $25,000 or 25% of their salaries. Lawmakers proposed authorizing the agency to contract with private recruiting firms to help with staffing.

The civil service rules for ARPA-I would largely mirror those established for ARPA-Energy, which was stood up in 2009. ARPA-E, like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, seeks to fund high-risk projects and research unlikely to be pursued otherwise. ARPA-I’s clerical and administrative staff would be hired under regular civil service procedures.

The language was included in the infrastructure plan after tense negotiations over the package and how to fund the roughly $1 trillion in spending. The Senate is expected to take up the measure this week before it goes to the House.

The ARPA-I idea was first pitched as part of President Biden’s budget, which sought $2 billion for the initiative.

“ARPA-I would focus its efforts on accelerating novel, early-stage research projects with potential for transformational advances in areas that industry is unlikely to undertake,” the Transportation Department said of the proposal.

The lawmakers authorized funding for ARPA-I “such sums as are necessary” to carry out the agency’s mission. Its appropriations will be separate and in addition to the funding lawmakers provide to Transportation writ large. In 2024, the National Academy of Sciences would launch an evaluation of ARPA-I to determine its effectiveness and whether it should continue to exist.

Senate Democrats are expected to soon move forward with another package to authorize additional infrastructure spending and other legislative priorities through a process that would not require any Republican support. That measure is expected to contain sweeping operational reforms for agencies across government, including a major boost to funding and hiring at the Internal Revenue Service.