It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Wednesday, December 22, 2021
Celebrations in Damascus and Aleppo on UNESCO’s inscription of Qudud al-Halabiya on World Heritage list- Video
16 December، 2021
Celebrations in Damascus and Aleppo on UNESCO’s inscription of Qudud al-Halabiya on World Heritage list
The Qudūd Ḥalabīya literally “musical measures of Aleppo” are traditional Syrian songs combining lyrics in Classical Arabic based on the poetry of Al-Andalus.
Nature-Based Solutions Should Play Increased Role in Tackling Climate Change
Working with nature and enhancing the role of ecosystems can help reduce the impacts of climate change and increase climate change resilience according to a European Environment Agency (EEA) report.
The EEA report provides up-to-date information for policymakers on the how to apply nature-based solutions for climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction and at the same time making use of multiple societal benefits that these solutions can bring. Drawing on selected examples across Europe, the report shows how impacts of extreme weather and climate-related events are already tackled in this way. It also assesses global and European policies and how nature-based solutions are increasingly being integrated in the efforts to shift towards sustainable development.
The EU’s 2030 biodiversity strategy, a key pillar of the European Green Deal, includes a nature restoration plan that can boost the uptake of nature-based solutions. Nature-based solutions are also highlighted in the EU strategy on adaptation to climate change that was recently adopted by the European Commission.
How nature can protect us
Many countries are already restoring nature in river valleys and uplands to reduce downstream flooding risks. In coastal regions, natural vegetation helps to stabilise coastlines, while re-forestation is increasingly used for storing carbon. Nature is also brought back into cities by greening urban spaces or reopening old canals or rivers, which increases resilience to heatwaves and brings additional health and wellbeing benefits. Despite their increasing prominence, nature-based solutions could be mainstreamed further, the report notes.
Other key findings of the report
An EU-wide mapping of existing and potential nature-based solutions can help to identify priority areas for enhancing ecosystem services and addressing climate change and biodiversity loss concerns.
Agreed standards, quantitative targets, measurable indicators and evaluation tools for nature-based solutions at EU level can help to assess progress, effectiveness and multiple benefits.
As nature-based solutions depend on healthy ecosystems, which are themselves vulnerable to climate change, their potential for climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction may decline in the future.
Stakeholder involvement, dialogue and co-design of tools and measures are key to increase awareness, to resolve potential stakeholders’ conflicts and to create social acceptance and demand for nature-based solutions.
Further implementation of nature-based solutions to climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction in Europe requires development of technical standards, increased knowledge of potential trade-offs, collaborative governance, capacity building and sufficient funding.
Mark Zuckerberg Is TNR’s 2021 Scoundrel of the Year
The nitwit founder of Facebook has created the worst, most damaging website in the world. And we’re just supposed to accept it. CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES Mark Zuckerberg
It does not augur well when a culture’s richest and most powerful men begin musing in public about whether a better life might await them on some otherworld colony. If you’ve spent all or even some of this last year living here on earth, it’s easy enough to understand the temptation, but when the lords of this particular realm are indulging these fantasies—think of Elon Musk’s aspiration to build a city on Mars over which he might preside like a more epic and meme-forward version of Total Recall’s Cohaagen—it gives the impression that they are more or less done with this used-up planet and everyone on it. Imagine Watchmen’s Dr. Manhattan in high isolation on the moon, a god grown tired of his rude and ravening and hungry lessers, except now he’s also really into NFTs and tax avoidance. It’s all ominous, almost poignantly oafish, and sociopathic in the deeply corny ways that we have come to expect from our superclass of tech billionaires. But there is an even worse escape than all of this.
In October, Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that his company would not just be changing its name to Meta—I will continue to call it Facebook here, as I assume will everyone else—but broadening its ambitions to encompass becoming a virtual reality community in which people might work, play, spend, and live. “I believe the metaverse is the next chapter for the internet,” Zuckerberg said in announcing this news. “And it’s the next chapter for our company, too.”
To a certain extent this is just how Silicon Valley’s apex-predator types talk about things now. Because the Web3 fripperies that intrigue them—think of the speculative-unto-grifty froth at the confluence of cryptocurrencies and NFTs and virtual reality and other such ostensibly decentralized, ostensibly liberative online aspirations—are intriguing to them, they believe that those fripperies must therefore be the future of something or other. And, to a certain extent, the outsize power and wealth afforded them by their success in this version of the internet guarantees that they’re at least a little bit right, if only because anything with that much influence and raw money behind it is unlikely to go away simply because normal people do not find it very appealing. In matters like this a little bit of brute force, when exerted by a class of sufficiently forceful brutes, can go a very long way. Introductory offer: 50% off fearless reporting.1 year for $10.Subscribe
But it is worth mentioning that the metaverse as Mark Zuckerberg envisions it is just not a very appealing idea, and only partially because it is Zuckerberg himself explaining it. The concept that Zuckerberg laid out in a protracted and pyrotechnically cringy presentation seems so thoroughly innocent of any idea of what people actually want to do in their nonvirtual lives, let alone in their virtual ones. “This is the Facebook ‘metaverse,’” Max Read wrote in his newsletter. “Using goggles made by Facebook subsidiary Oculus, you enter the Facebook-hosted V.R. metaverse, where you can meet your friends at a V.R. bar, play V.R. board games, go to V.R. meetings for your V.R. job, get summoned into a V.R. conference room to get V.R. furloughed by your V.R. boss and a V.R. human-resources representative.” To be fair, Zuckerberg makes clear in his presentation that metaverse users will also be able to look like a cartoon bear while doing all of these things, if they so choose.
As John Herrman noted in The New York Times, the reason to be skeptical about this endeavor is not that people don’t want to do some or all of the stuff that Zuckerberg talks about in strained tones of wonder and whimsy. Whether in terms of speculating on cryptocurrencies or gaming with a V.R. headset or just clocking into a virtual workplace, people are absolutely already doing all those things, albeit sometimes more happily than others. It is not even the question of why anyone would entrust the design and implementation of the future to Facebook, which has made the world infinitely dumber, uglier, and worse in a number of obvious and inescapable ways, and is a miserable website to use to boot. That is a really good question, though, if only because it is just extremely difficult to imagine someone choosing to work and live inside the website that convinced their grandparents that the germ theory of disease was a hoax. But what really rankles is that it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that this vision of the future is extractive, joyless, and dull; that the smug cretins who got rich off the platforms that this new decentralized movement is supposedly leaving behind are also leading the supposed successor movement doesn’t matter either. This push to transcend the world that Facebook has befouled and create a new, virtual one can be read in a sense as a response to the 10,000-page Facebook Papers leak, which demonstrated both the extent to which Zuckerberg’s own criminal indifference and Facebook’s inability to police its own sprawl have made the site a malignant metastatic force in countries around the world. Again, it doesn’t matter.
There are many things to abhor about Mark Zuckerberg and his works, but the fundamental mediocrity of it all is what feels both most egregious and most of this moment.
This is the taunt implicit in everything Zuckerberg does at this point in his reign. Here is a man who got unconscionably rich off the worst website that has ever existed, a website that has broken brains on a scale previously unimaginable in human history, and here is his stupendously wack vision for the future—and everyone is just going to have to deal with it. There are many things to abhor about Mark Zuckerberg and his works, but the fundamental mediocrity of it all—the lack of vision, the absence of any moral sense or shame, the inability and unwillingness not just to fix but even reckon with the dangerous and ungovernable thing he’s made—is what feels both most egregious and most of this moment. It is embarrassing and not a little enraging to realize that you are subject to the whims of an amoral and incurious capitalist posing as a visionary optimist. It is especially humiliating when the all-bestriding and inevitable figure in question is such a dim, dull nullity.
It seems important to mention that Facebook is not just a bad website, but a company that has shown itself willing to do the wrong thing whenever and wherever given a choice. Facebook was not the first and is not the only company to tell wild lies to advance its own ends, but few companies have done it bigger or suffered less for it. Facebook also did not invent a politics grounded in unreasoning spite and toddler-grade oppositional defiance and relentless resentful signaling; Americans did that all on their own, with some crucial late help from one family of reactionary Australian media types. But Facebook did create an algorithm that valued that style of grievance above all others, which pulled users along behind in turn. In the United States, the culture wanders, hunted and lost, through the virtual and nonvirtual wreckage those decisions made, without even the armor afforded by a V.R. bear costume. Abroad, where Facebook has been criminally indifferent at best and actively complicit at worst in abetting the spread of dangerous medical misinformation and genocidal rhetoric, the damage has been infinitely worse.
Americans represent only about 10 percent of Facebook’s users, but nearly 85 percent of the efforts that the company has put toward stemming the spread of misinformation has been focused on the U.S. In early December, NBC News’ Brandy Zadrozny reported that the specious pseudo-documentary Plandemic, which Facebook more or less succeeded in banning in the U.S. after it spread widely on the platform in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, was not only still easy to find on Facebook in Romania, but had been viewed on the platform more than 800,000 times in a country that, with a 40 percent vaccination rate, significantly lags behind the rest of Europe. Massive class action lawsuits filed against Facebook in California and the United Kingdom in December on behalf of Rohingya refugees living in the U.S. and the rest of the world, respectively, claimed that Facebook’s presence in Myanmar after 2011 was a “substantial cause, and perpetuation of, the eventual Rohingya genocide” that began in that country in 2013, and which Facebook effectively ignored despite multiple warnings from inside and outside of the company.
“In the face of this knowledge, and possessing the tools to stop it, it simply kept marching forward,” the California complaint reads. “The undeniable reality is that Facebook’s growth, fueled by hate, division, and misinformation, has left hundreds of thousands of devastated Rohingya lives in its wake.” It is all bad, but the common denominator is that Facebook, which is obsessed with its own internal data and metrics, always knew what was happening and why and always blithely didn’t care. Despite the ongoing human rights crisis in Myanmar and the attendant international outcry, Facebook didn’t even hire content moderators fluent in local languages until 2018.
Facebook, as a company that is hyperfixated on growth and its own bespoke engagement standards, makes the decisions it makes because those decisions make important numbers go up. When it allows Vietnam’s government to censor dissidents on the site, it is because doing business in Vietnam makes revenues go up. When it permits incitation-oriented hate speech to exist on the site, whether in relatively minor markets like Myanmar or enormous ones like India, it is because it has noticed that keeping readers enraged also keeps them engaged, and because that engagement (Facebook’s current internal term of art for this, coined by Zuckerberg himself, is the suitably dystopian “meaningful social interaction”) is what the company values. When Facebook gooses its algorithm such that it favors and promotes that kind of speech, it is for the same reason. These are all profoundly vile, but none could remotely be described as a mistake. Every one of them is a choice, and the person who makes the choices at Facebook is Mark Zuckerberg.
So when Zuckerberg tells weird lies about all this in front of the U.S. Senate—when he claims that 94 percent of hate speech was scrubbed from the site before anyone ever saw it, for instance, despite internal metrics that show only 5 percent was removed at all—it is because he believes he can get away with it. There is no one who could meaningfully tell him no, both because he owns 58 percent of the company’s voting shares and is also the chairman of its board, but also because Facebook is organized such that he effectively has the final say on every decision the company makes; no other company this size invests so much formal or informal power in one person. It’s a terrible thing to say about someone, but Mark Zuckerberg really is Facebook. It shows.
The most fundamental problem with Facebook is that it does not have, and never really has had, any idea how to do any of this. It certainly has no real sense of how to be the kind of unimaginably vast global institution—the site claims 3.51 billion monthly users—that it very quickly became, and is in fact absolutely terrible at every aspect of being that site beyond the crucial Making Money Doing It element. All those monthly users interacting with all the ads that choke Facebook’s timeline and clutter its margins and blunder unbidden into every available space generate a lot of money for the company. This presumably helps soothe the realization that the core product itself is both absolutely loathsome and widely loathed—confusing and unpleasant to use, governed by an algorithm that seems to have been designed to make the experience of being on the site as unpleasant as possible, and increasingly the province of the shut-ins, kooks, quacks, grifters, and the dreaded Gun Uncle. Facebook has been pretty much exactly that bad for many years, in fact. It is, in every sense, the website that exists at the exact midpoint of Everyone Can Share Anything With Anyone and “doing the logistical and marketing scutwork for genocidaires and authoritarians and local sociopaths.” It’s awful.
More than that, it could only be awful. Facebook, which talks about itself as The Sharing Place but is driven by the incentives of the cheesy surveillance and value-neutral click-chasing and overwhelming economic leverage and relentlessly cynical avarice that make it profitable, could never and would never become anything but this, and could never and would never care about any of the damage it does. It will respond to a certain level of opprobrium or shame, albeit in qualified ways and at the last possible moment; if there were any sense that the regulatory or governmental arms of the U.S. government might be able or just willing to hold it to account, Facebook might theoretically respond to that. What that has looked like, for years, is Zuckerberg putting on a neat suit and sitting in front of various plump Senate grandees who take turns asking him to help them unlock their phones and accusing him of being very unfair to Diamond and Silk. The senators change, but Zuckerberg and his answers stay the same.
It is fraudulent and irresponsible and quite probably criminal in ways that reflect its co-founder and ruling lord, but what Facebook most has in common with Zuckerberg is that it sucks.
It is fraudulent and irresponsible and quite probably criminal in ways that reflect its co-founder and ruling lord, but what Facebook most has in common with Zuckerberg is that it sucks—not just in the sense that it is lame and bad. Even if you leave aside its authentic crimes against humanity, Facebook is still a machine built to turn lonely elderly relatives into blood and soil fascists; a haunted satellite that intermittently farts out the dispiriting opinions of random former high school classmates; a relentlessly tweaked, irredeemably borked newsfeed that shoves variously viral idiocies and advertisements at users with the horny and unlovable insistence of a frotteur moving through a crowded subway car.
The funny part is that Facebook isn’t even good at being that. Sure, the numbers go up, but the people that Facebook and Zuckerberg are trying to court with their metaverse initiative—younger people in general, but primarily the elusive creator who has little use for Facebook’s towering and overbearing uncoolness—know what Facebook is. They know that Zuckerberg’s metaverse is just a mall-shaped prison through which all of humanity would wander while being pelted with advertisements, slurs, and dumb, garish lies. In a nation functioning as poorly and unaccountably as ours, even petty and fraudulent titans like Zuckerberg can come to seem permanent; it is part of the citizenry’s broader terms of service that every now and then the accumulated consequences of their failures simply come rushing downhill at us like an unpleasantly fragrant mudslide. From that vantage point, after all this, it is impossible to perceive Mark Zuckerberg’s invitation to join him in a second universe as anything but a taunt. Look what he’s done to this one.
David Roth is a co-founder and co-owner of Defector Media.
Omicron Has Arrived. Many Prisons and Jails Are Not Ready.
Experts fear “another potential tinderbox scenario” akin to the early days of the pandemic. An incarcerated person received a COVID-19 vaccination at the Bolivar County Regional Correctional Facility in Cleveland, Miss., in April.
In the Philadelphia jail, the number of COVID-19 cases has tripled in the last two months. In Chicago’s lockup, infections have increased 11-fold in the same period. And in New York, city jails are struggling with a mushrooming 13-fold increase in less than a month.
From local lockups in California to prisons in Wisconsin to jails in Pennsylvania, COVID-19 is once again surging behind bars, posing a renewed threat to a high-risk population with spotty access to healthcare and little ability to distance.
At this point it’s unclear whether the surge in infections is due to the highly contagious omicron variant. Still, as caseloads across the country skyrocket and omicron becomes the dominant variant, experts worry the coronavirus is once again poised to sweep through jails and prisons. As in the world outside prison bars, many incarcerated people are struggling with pandemic fatigue. They’re also facing uncertain access to booster shots, widespread vaccine hesitancy and pandemic-driven staffing shortfalls that have created even harsher conditions.
As with previous iterations of the virus, everything about prisons and jails makes them a setup to magnify the harms of omicron. “The overcrowding. The poor sanitary conditions. The lack of access to health care,” said Monik Jimenez, an epidemiologist at Harvard’s School of Public Health. “Masking is only going to do so much when you have people on top of you.”
Though scientists warn that the new variant is far more contagious than previous ones, a half dozen prisoners who spoke with The Marshall Project for this story said they hadn’t noticed any widespread concern about it at this point and that prison officials had given them little information.
“They're not telling us anything about omicron or anything else for that matter,” wrote Rachel Padgett, a federal prisoner in Florida. Many pandemic-weary prisoners said they were less concerned about catching the virus than about being locked down because of it, once again facing months confined to their cells and bunks with no way to call home, see their families or go outside.
“That’s the only part people are worried about these days — taking away our rec,” said a man incarcerated in a federal prison in Mississippi who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation from prison officials.
For some, it’s hard to get worried again considering how bad things got in some prisons before. John J. Lennon recalled the end of last year when the virus seemed particularly relentless, making the people incarcerated with him in upstate New York fearful and anxious. All that’s changed. “There is no sense of urgency about it,” he said.
“I haven’t seen watery eyes coming off the phones anymore. There aren’t ambulances coming in and out,” said Lennon, a journalist who is a contributing writer to the Marshall Project and Esquire. “There was a time when that’s what I saw every day.”
Though some early reports suggested that omicron may cause less severe disease, there are also indications that the new variant is better able to evade vaccines – which means that access to booster shots is even more important. But there is little good public information about how widely boosters are available to incarcerated people or how widespread booster uptake is among correctional staff, many of whom resisted vaccination in the first place.
Though officials in more than half a dozen prison systems – including New York, Texas and Arkansas – said they’d offered booster shots to prisoners, not all were able to specify how many received them so far. In Nebraska, inspector general Doug Koebernick said prisoners have only been offered access to the Johnson & Johnson booster shot, which early research suggests is the least effective against the new variant.
The CDC recently said the 2-dose Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are preferred over the Johnson & Johnson. Homer Venters, a former New York City jail medical director and correctional healthcare consultant, said that makes the coming months “a lot trickier for the people who are trying to engage with people behind bars and promote vaccination, which is crucial to prevent omicron.”
Aside from the lack of data about booster availability, many states that routinely released real-time data about infections and vaccinations in the first year of the pandemic are now releasing information monthly or not at all, said Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein, an associate professor and co-founder of the COVID Prison Project at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. “We basically know nothing, and it’s really disheartening in that we have less and less data every day,” she said.
Even so, the ripple effects of the mutating virus could soon become clear.
“If the slope of the curve with omicron is as steep as we fear it is, we may have some really devastating staff shortages,” said Venters, who has been performing court-ordered COVID-19 prison inspections since the beginning of the pandemic. “With large numbers of staff unavailable to work very quickly, you can’t actually do any of the jobs of running the facilities.” Venters said to expect large scale lockdowns or “very serious security consequences.”
For several prison systems, the dwindling number of guards has already been a problem. In Texas, longstanding staff shortages exacerbated by the pandemic have created unsafe conditions for prisoners and workers alike. For the first time in recent memory, the Texas agency that runs state prisons is down more than 7,200 officers, leaving several facilities at less than half-staff and relying on overtime. Jeff Ormsby, executive director for the state’s biggest union representing corrections employees, said officers are “more likely to die from a car wreck going home from a 24-hour shift than to die from omicron.”
Meanwhile, populations of people in prison and jail have crept back toward pre-pandemic levels in many places, after early efforts to keep as many people out of jail as possible and to release people from prisons en masse as a tactic to stem the spread of coronavirus. By the middle of last year, the number of people in jails nationwide was down by roughly one-quarter — its lowest point in more than two decades. And, from 2019 to 2020, the number of new prisoners admitted to state and federal prisons went down by 40%.
So with omicron poised to sweep through the nation’s lockups, they are increasingly crowded — a dangerous setup for the virus’s spread, said Jaimie Meyer, an epidemiologist and infectious disease doctor at Yale medical school. “We’re looking at another potential tinderbox scenario.”
Staff writers Weihua Li and Katie Park contributed to this story.
EPA OFFICIAL PREVENTED STAFF FROM WARNING PUBLIC ABOUT WIDELY USED CARCINOGEN
PCBTF is on a list of “green” compounds preferred by the EPA, even though there is ample evidence that it causes cancer.
EPA Exposed Part 7 Whistleblowers speak out about the Environmental Protection Agency’s practice of routinely approving dangerous chemicals.
LONG READ
IN DECEMBER 2019, a toxicologist at the Environmental Protection Agency was tasked with assessing a product that was about to be introduced to the market. As is often the case, the single product — a paint — contained several individual chemicals. One of them, a solvent known as parachlorobenzotrifluoride, or PCBTF, made up half of the product’s weight. There was ample evidence that PCBTF causes cancer. But after the toxicologist included the information in his report, a senior leader in the division removed it, according to documents EPA whistleblowers shared with The Intercept and submitted to the EPA inspector general. The deletion left the public with no way to know this widely used chemical was a carcinogen.
While the assessor worked in the EPA’s New Chemicals division, and the particular paint he was assessing was new, PCBTF is not. The most widely used solvent in the coatings and adhesives industry, PCBTF has been added to products since the 1960s and can be found in ink, caulk, cleaners, stain removal products, polyurethane finishes, primer, graffiti remover, paint for cars, steel and concrete, and garage floors. The chemical has also been used to make other chemicals, including dyes, pharmaceuticals, and pesticides. Each year, between 10 and 50 million pounds of PCBTF are used in the U.S., according to the most recent data from the EPA, and countless workers are exposed at both paint and car manufacturing plants.
PCBTF is on a list of “green” compounds preferred by the EPA because, when used instead of some other solvents, it can help reduce ozone levels. However, while that designation boosts the use of PCBTF, it doesn’t take into account its health effects. Nor has the EPA assessed PCBTF under the updated Toxic Substances Control Act, as is the case for the vast majority of chemicals now in use. In fact, because it was introduced before the Toxic Substances Control Act was passed in 1976, the safety of the compound had not been reviewed at all. Rather, PCBTF was grandfathered in, along with more than 60,000 chemicals that were on the market before the law took effect.
While the EPA had not assessed the safety of PCBTF, other scientists had done so. From a quick search, the toxicologist was able to find concerning evidence of its harms dating back decades. In a 1983 study of 4,000 workers exposed to PCBTF at an Occidental Chemical Corporation plant in Niagara, New York, researchers documented elevated rates of stomach and respiratory cancers. A 2009 report from the National Toxicology Program cited those findings as well as studies showing that mice exposed to the chemical developed liver cancer. The report also noted experiments that had shown the chemical to cause tremors and hyperactivity in rats, as well as lung problems in pups who had been exposed in the womb.
Six months before the case of the new paint landed on the toxicologist’s desk, California had listed PCBTF under Proposition 65, a law that requires public warnings for carcinogenic chemicals. The state’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment had made the decision based on evidence that the chemical had caused liver tumors in both male and female mice. And just one month before he began considering the new paint, the International Agency for Cancer Research had deemed PCBTF a likely human carcinogen.
In an emailed response to questions for this story, EPA spokesperson Lindsay Hamilton wrote, “While one can accurately state that many of the chemicals that were grandfathered into the 1976 law may pose risks and remain unrestricted under TSCA [Toxic Substances Control Act], the PMN [premanufacture notification] substance subject to this inquiry was not handled inappropriately or inconsistently with TSCA.” Just a Solvent
The toxicologist found himself in a bind. He felt he should incorporate the information about PCBTF into his assessment. After all, the law requires the agency to determine whether each new chemical substance presents an unreasonable risk to human health or the environment. His job as a human health assessor was to flag chemicals and products that posed an unreasonable risk; surely workers and consumers who breathed in the paint — and thus PCBTF — were facing a risk. When he asked his colleagues, they agreed that the assessment should include the dangers of the solvent.
Yet one official, who holds a senior leadership role in the agency, felt that the dangers of PCBTF should not be mentioned in the assessment. In a December 18, 2019, email she described the chemical as “just a solvent there as a part of making it,” according to screenshots of the email that the whistleblowers shared with The Intercept. (In the hopes of minimizing retaliation against them, the whistleblowers are choosing not to disclose the official’s name.)
Although consumers and workers would be exposed to the chemical regardless of the manufacturers’ intentions, she argued that because PCBTF was not intended to be an ingredient in the final product, its health effects should not be considered in the assessment.
At a meeting that same day, the official, who holds a higher rank within the agency than all the others engaged in the discussion, pointed the scientists to a memo — or rather, she threw it at them, as several of the whistleblowers recently recalled. The 1985 memo addressed when the EPA should assess the risk from a new chemical substance. The official saw it as evidence that PCBTF should not be considered when assessing the paint and told the toxicologists assembled at the meeting to “Read it. Follow it.”
In response to questions from The Intercept, the EPA’s Hamilton referred The Intercept to the same memo and said that it supported the idea that the substance fell under the polymer exemption, which allows manufacturers to avoid submitting certain chemicals for assessment. In this case, however, the company had not opted to submit the product for an exemption but rather for a review.
Most of the scientists who do assessments interpreted the memo differently, pointing out in discussions with the official that some sections seemed to support the inclusion of PCBTF in the assessment and noting that others laid out the possibility of referring the compound to the Existing Chemicals program for assessment. The memo also specified other actions to be taken if the New Chemicals division did not assess the product.
“There’s a final paragraph stating that if there is nothing done, if we’re not going to do the review ourselves, at a bare minimum, the risk managers should be communicating what we found to the chemical company so that they know that they have to take some sort of action,” said Sarah Gallagher, a human health assessor in the Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics and one of five agency scientists who expressed their support for including the dangers of PCBTF in the assessment of the new paint.
“It does seem that we need to be concerned about the risk of the new chemical plus existing chemicals that pose risk,” one of the toxicologists on the EPA staff wrote in an email to her colleagues. “I think the human health assessors need to feel comfortable that we are doing our best to protect public health.”
Another concurred, noting that “several of us spoke to [New Chemicals Management Branch] in mid-October about this and they supported assessing residuals, impurities” for risk assessments.
By the time they were debating how to handle the assessment of the product that contains PCBTF, tensions between staff who assess the safety of new chemicals and their managers had already reached a point of divisionwide discomfort, with those responsible for writing chemical assessments routinely feeling pressured to dismiss or downplay health hazards they found. They had previously come into conflict with this particular agency leader, who had discouraged them on multiple occasions from noting evidence of the dangers of chemicals in assessments and even, in a few cases, deleted the information they had included in documents without asking or informing them.
In the case of PCBTF, the scientists found themselves once again trying to convince their superior to allow them to do their jobs. They did not succeed. Screenshot: The Intercept
Delete All References
In a version of the document entered into the division’s computer system on December 17, the toxicologist had included the information about PCBTF, noting that the chemical can be absorbed through the lungs, gastrointestinal tract, and skin. He also identified cancer as one of its hazards, along with liver, kidney, lung, and adrenal gland effects, and calculated the cancer risk associated with precise amounts of the paint. But the next day, hours after the contentious meeting in which the official had tossed the memo, she inserted a note into the assessment, asking the assessor to delete all references to PCBTF.
The toxicologist did not delete the information, so the official did so herself. On December 18, she posted an updated version of the assessment that crossed out the list of PCBTF’s effects and the exposure levels above which it could be expected to cause cancer. In its place, the official inserted a new sentence: “For the new chemical substance (polymer), EPA did not identify a hazard.” The next day, she signed off on the document she had changed, publicly declaring that the agency had found that it did not pose a hazard.
The removal of the scientifically accurate warning that could have prevented people from getting cancer left the scientists who do chemical assessments feeling powerless to do their jobs — and unable to win an argument at the agency on its scientific merits. “You’ve got multiple people saying, hey, this deserves more careful consideration. But she made a call, overrode everybody, shut it down, and we never talked about it again,” said Martin Phillips, a chemist and human health assessor who was involved in the debate over PCBTF.
“Their question is, ‘How little can we get away with? What can we get off our plate?’”
The EPA is both underfunded and subject to specific laws about how assess chemicals, yet Phillips said it could have taken several possible actions to alert the public about the paint. “But the conversation is not, ‘What can we do within these limitations?’” he said. “Instead their question is, ‘How little can we get away with? What can we get off our plate?’”
According to Phillips, the resistance to incorporating the information about the carcinogen into the assessment is in keeping with a larger ethos within the agency of downplaying the harms of chemicals. “When new information comes in that shows that something is less toxic than what we thought, that gets used right away,” he said. “But if it shows that there are new concerns that we weren’t aware of before, suddenly the level of scrutiny goes way up.” Failure to Follow the Law
Had the original assessment been finalized, the company that made the paint would have been required to include the cancer information in its safety data sheet. That document can guide factory policy, encouraging the use of masks, gloves, and other protective gear, although many consumers and workers are exposed to dangerous chemicals despite the warnings.
The failure to protect workers from exposure to this carcinogen shows that an update to the Toxic Substances Control Act, which passed in 2016, is not working as intended, according to David Michaels, who headed the Occupational Safety and Health Administration during the Obama administration. “The EPA is supposed to be considering whether workers’ exposures could be toxic,” said Michaels. “This is a failure of EPA to follow the law.”
In its statement, the EPA’s Hamilton emphasized the agency’s commitment to following the science in environmental regulation. “Restoring scientific integrity has been a top priority across the Agency since the beginning of the Biden-Harris Administration. Significant efforts are underway to understand and address concerns that have been raised. We are continuing to make improvements to the program and are cooperating fully with the ongoing IG investigation,” she wrote. “EPA’s new chemicals program has been engaging in targeted, all-hands-on deck efforts to catalogue, prioritize and improve its procedures, recordkeeping and decision-making practices related to review and management of new chemicals under TSCA.”
Hamilton noted several steps the agency has already taken to improve scientific integrity, including implementing new processes for scientists to elevate their concerns and get a review wherever there’s disagreement; providing a series of scientific integrity trainings for the entire Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention; and hiring an independent contractor to identify potential workplace barriers and opportunities for organizational improvement within the office.
If they had the knowledge that the new paint causes cancer, auto body and detailing shops, car manufacturers, as well as other companies and consumers might choose to use another one in its place. But the product is now commercially available without the warning that would give the public at least a chance to make that informed choice.
The whistleblowers are not allowed to disclose its name or anything else about the paint.
Meanwhile, the whistleblowers are not allowed to disclose its name or anything else about the paint because, as is almost always the case, the manufacturers submitted those details to the agency as confidential business information. The EPA staffers could face disciplinary action, including losing their jobs, if they disclosed those details. They can identify PCBTF without penalty because the science showing its carcinogenicity is public.
The case of the mysterious paint points to even bigger problems in the EPA’s chemical regulation. The paint is not the only product that contains PCBTF, yet none of the safety data sheets reviewed by The Intercept for several products that contain it identified the risk of cancer. And PCBTF is hardly the only chemical for which the EPA has failed to update regulations based on the most recent science.
“We never go back and review these cases and put on new restrictions for their use,” said Gallagher, the human health assessor at the Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics.
A division of the agency’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention is tasked with updating the assessment of existing chemicals. But so far it has only begun reviewing a tiny fraction of the chemicals in use. In December 2019, as the paint case was moving its way through the agency, the EPA was choosing 20 dangerous substances to be evaluated under the updated chemicals law, but those “high priority” assessments are still not finalized. According to Hamilton, those assessments are expected to take three and a half years to be completed. At that rate, it will take the agency more than 7,000 years to review the more than 40,000 chemicals now in use.
Meanwhile, there is no clear way to ensure that the agency updates its assessments — or even informs anyone — when it learns about the harms of a chemical. Even when manufacturers provide the EPA with clear evidence that their products present a serious threat to health and the environment, the agency almost never makes the public aware of that information. In the case of 2,104 chemicals that were the subject of “substantial risk reports” that manufacturers sent to the EPA since January 2019, the agency has failed to update its public database and has not even made the reports available through the computer systems most frequently used by chemical assessors. According to Hamilton, the single person who had been responsible for posting the reports to the EPA’s public database retired in December 2018, and the agency has not had the funds to replace them. “The Biden-Harris Administration has asked for significantly more resources for this program in the 2022 budget,” she wrote.
For the EPA assessors who brought the case of the paint to the attention of The Intercept and filed a report about it with the EPA’s inspector general, the overarching difficulty of protecting people from toxic chemicals makes this particular failure all the more galling. The vast majority of substances never come before EPA toxicologists for review, so the public has no opportunity to learn if they cause cancer and other health problems.
Yet in this case, the agency scientists were being asked to weigh in on a product that poses a clear danger, and they weren’t allowed to inform the public. A high-ranking official in an agency that is supposed to protect human health and the environment stood in their way, an experience they found familiar, frustrating — and baffling.
“Why would someone hear that there’s a cancer risk for workers and not even let people know about it?” asked Gallagher. “Why would they think that that’s something that can just be ignored?”
The year conspiracy theories yielded deadly consequences
It started with a riot and ended with people believing vaccines don't work.
In 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic dragged on. Along with health and economic hardships, it also appears to have brought a growing interest in conspiracy theories.
"The COVID-19 pandemic has seen an explosion of disinformation online, around vaccinations, lockdowns and other health measures," said Simon Copland, a Ph.D. candidate at the Australian National University who studies misinformation on social media. "Much of this disinformation stems from other conspiracy theories, and there are now many more people being brought into the fold of these ideas after two years of frustration."
Those conspiracy theories flourished on social media and across the internet. While companies such as Facebook and Twitter put in place new policies meant to combat misinformation, it doesn't look like the problem will be going away.
Conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and COVID-19 vaccines stood out among the sea of crazy ideas this year for their real-world impact. While not all fringe-y ideas on their own are dangerous, conspiracy theories, fueled by misinformation on social media, contributed to the deadly Jan. 6 Capital riot and to hesitancy and outrage over COVID-19 vaccines and health policies meant to combat the pandemic. A riot to ring in the new year
This year started with what both media members and former President Donald Trump have referred to as "The Big Lie," though for different reasons. Trump lost the 2020 election, but falsely claimed that the loss resulted from voting fraud. Social media platforms played whack-a-mole trying to curb the volume of election fraud posts but had a hard time keeping up.
Then-President Trump speaking at the "Stop the Steal" rally on Jan. 6. It was shortly after his speech that the rally-goers stormed the Capitol. Getty Images
On Jan. 6, the day Joe Biden was to be sworn in as president, thousands of Trump fans stormed the US Capitol after gathering for a "Stop the Steal" rally. Along with hundreds of injuries sustained by rioters and police, four attendees died: two from heart attacks, one from an accidental overdose and another from a fatal shot. All four were Trump supporters who believed the conspiracy theory that the former president didn't lose the election. There were also five Capitol police officers who have died since the riot: one from a stroke the day after, and four by suicide in the following months.
Some of the people at the riot were also confirmed supporters of QAnon, the far-right conspiracy theory purporting that Trump was engaged in a secret war against a cabal of Satanist Democrats and Hollywood celebrities. The QAnon movement continued on even when Biden took office, with some declaring multiple times that Trump was the secret president of the US. Some Q believers also spent part of November waiting for the return of John F. Kennedy Jr., the son of the assassinated president, who has been dead since 1999. In August, a man alleged that the QAnon conspiracy led him to kill his own children.
The pandemic some didn't believe was happening
But the conspiracy theories weren't just political. Even as COVID-19 vaccines started becoming more widely available in the US early in the year, public health officials worried they wouldn't have enough shots for everyone. Instead, they came across another problem: people spreading anti-vaccine misinformation that the shots were ineffective or even dangerous.
Factually incorrect memes and videos about vaccines spread on social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and TikTok, which has surged in popularity during the pandemic. Both medical professionals and frauds spreading misinformation shot up in popularity, finding an audience of people seeking voices that opposed the mountain of evidence showing vaccines are effective at preventing hospitalization and death from COVID-19.
The anti-vax conspiracy theories started off somewhat inane, with some claiming the vaccines contained magnets that caused metal to stick to their arms where they received the shot. This was debunked fairly easily. An anti-vax rally in New York City on Dec. 5.Getty Images
Conspiracy theorists ramped up the misinformation, claiming falsely that the vaccines were killing more people than they were saving. As "proof," some pointed to reports from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, a public health surveillance program to "detect unusual or unexpected reporting patterns of adverse events for vaccines." While VAERS does list cases of individuals experiencing side effects after vaccination, including death, the system doesn't confirm the vaccine was at fault.
Make no mistake, there can be side effects to the vaccines. The vast majority consist of flu-like symptoms, but some reactions do require a trip to the hospital. Still, the benefits of the vaccines far outweigh the risks of being unvaccinated and contracting COVID.
Misinformation about COVID-19 treatments also spread on social media, with the most popular concerning the antiparasitic drug ivermectin. There were some studies suggesting the drug could help those infected with the recovery process, but many of those were found to have inaccurate info, leading them to be redacted. More studies have shown ivermectin has no effect on COVID.
It's not possible to draw a clear line of causation between misinformation about COVID-19 and deaths from the virus. One board on Reddit purports to offer some insight on people who consumed these conspiracy theories. Called r/HermanCainAward -- a reference to the former Republican presidential candidate who died from COVID after attending a Trump rally -- the subreddit is filled with posts about people who shared misinformation about COVID-19 and later died from the virus, often told through screenshots of social media posts. They tend to follow a pattern: multiple screenshots of a person sharing misinformation about COVID, followed by posts where the individual says they've tested positive. The final image is usually of a family member or friends confirming the person died from the virus.
Will things be different in 2022?
It's apparent that conspiracy theories aren't going anywhere. Even if they get debunked, like those about the 2020 election and COVID vaccines, these theories have already spread too far, and it appears there's no stopping them.
"It would be really difficult to predict whether disinformation on social media platforms will get better or worse in the next year or so, but the indications are not good," Copland said, "These groups are becoming more intense. There is a good chance this will continue to grow."
When will Democrats do their job and protect Black people’s right to vote?
Basic civil rights do not take a holiday, so neither should those entrusted to safeguard those rights
‘Voting rights is not just about election day; it’s a 365-day mission.’
Photograph: Nathan Posner/REX/Shutterstock
Wed 22 Dec 2021
Voting rights are under assault by Republican state lawmakers, clearly afraid of the power of the Black electorate and empowered by the gutting of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act. The federal response, or lack thereof, will affect not only Black voters but the power of all Americans to shape our government with our votes. Endemic racism obscures the obvious: an attack on Black voters is an attack on the foundation of our democracy.
With two voting rights bills held hostage in the US Senate by threat of a Republican filibuster, Democrats are not fighting back with the same vigor that Republicans have used to trample on the rights of voters. A failure of US Senate Democrats to move on the passage of voting rights will ultimately be a self-fulfilling prophecy. If they fail to secure rights for the voters who put them into office, their base for the midterm elections will shrink and open a path for a Republican takeover in 2022.
However, Senator Raphael Warnock, a Democrat from Georgia, recently pointed out in a speech on the Senate floor that when the will is there, Congress changes its rules to allow legislation to pass. He noted that the Senate recently enabled a vote on raising the national debt ceiling to prevent a default on government financial obligations and uphold the full faith and credit of the US government.
Warnock shone a light on the hypocrisy of changing Senate procedure for financial legislation but not to combat the suppression of Black voters. “We’ve decided we must do it for the economy, but not for the democracy,” he said, pointing out that Democrats are hiding behind technicalities to avoid an ugly confrontation. But racism cloaked in the relic of the filibuster cannot prevail over our hard-won right to shape our democracy.
Since Black voters showed up in record numbers in the 2020 election, trying to save a democracy that has not always protected us, the political backlash from Republican state houses has echoed throughout 2021. The result is that Black voters have less protection today than we had at this time last year.
Yet Joe Biden and a Democratic Congress have not used the power that Black voters secured for them to protect our rights. They have expended their political capital on the infrastructure and Build Back Better bills, when the basis of democracy should be their most urgent priority.
The failure of the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act to pass in a Democratic Congress shows the lengths to which Republicans will go to keep Black voters away from the polls. Yet even without federal voting protection, in the 2021 “off-year” elections, Black people came out in strong numbers to prevail in local elections throughout the south. Black Voters Matter (BVM) has been in the streets, on the phones and connecting with our partners to mobilize for elections, showing that there is no off-year when it comes to voting.
The basis of democracy should be their most urgent priority
In the recent November races for city council, mayor and the statehouse of representatives throughout Georgia, where new state laws have taken direct aim at the Black electorate, we mobilized Black voters to make our voices heard. With on-the-ground canvassing and voter outreach caravans, we turned out Black voters in Warner Robins, Georgia, for a crucial city council race. Our texting and phone banking campaigns in Hinds County, Mississippi, helped to secure a major victory in a local judge’s race. And this summer, on our Freedom Ride for Voting Rights, we started mobilizing Black voters from New Orleans to Washington DC months before important local elections took shape.
And our movement is still gaining momentum. Last week, as the president convened leaders from around the world for his Global Democracy Summit, BVM partnered with local and national advocacy organizations on coordinated voting rights actions across the country to point out the administration’s hypocrisy.
Holding a global summit on democracy is a slap in the face to the millions of citizens in Biden’s own backyard who still face significant obstacles to the polls. In response, we held nearly a dozen events nationwide, including a student hunger strike led by Un-Pac Arizona, calling on Biden and the Senate to pass voting rights legislation before Congress goes into holiday recess. Actions also took place in California, Delaware, Georgia, Maine, New Hampshire, New York, Virginia and Washington DC.
Basic civil rights do not take a holiday, so neither should those entrusted to safeguard those rights. We will continue to push and build a movement to demand #RightsBeforeRecess.
Voting rights is not just about election day; it’s a 365-day mission. We have responded to attempts to block us from the ballot with more community organizing, more education, more outreach and even more energy. And it’s now time for congressional Democrats to respond by clearing the way to pass laws that protect not only Black voters but the rights and freedoms of all of us.
Cliff Albright and LaTosha Brown are co-founders of Black Voters Matter
We Mobilized Young People to Support Biden. He’s Failing Us.
Sunrise and United We Dream youth organizers trusted Biden and the Democrats to really get things done. They are failing to follow through on campaign promises.
By Varshini Prakash and Greisa Martínez Rosas President Joe Biden speaks on November 17 at General Motors' Factory ZERO electric vehicle assembly plant in Detroit, Mich., about the Infrastructure and Jobs Act.
(Photo by Nic Antaya / Getty Images)
Most days it feels like the deck is stacked against young people—rising rent and evictions, a worsening climate crisis, loved ones being deported and denied citizenship, and insurmountable student debt. And while young people are trying to survive in a system that has neglected them for decades, President Joe Biden and Democratic leadership are caving to Senator Joe Manchin, a coal baron from West Virginia who profits off poisoning our communities, and racist, undemocratic Senate rules—all at the expense of young people and our futures. The time for bold, progressive change is now, and if Democrats don’t deliver, young people will elect new leaders in 2022 and 2024 who will.
When we mobilized young people to the polls last year, we handed Democrats everything they needed: a governing majority and a popular mandate. We risked our lives to knock on doors through a pandemic. We agitated, organized, and convinced our communities, who were skeptical because they have been let down time and time again by the Democratic Party, to vote for Biden and Democrats across the country. Young people trusted Democrats to really get things done. Yet, not even a full year into his presidency, Biden and congressional Democrats are failing to follow through on their campaign promises because of the Jim Crow filibuster, an unelected parliamentarian, and corporate Democrats like Joe Manchin.
This reconciliation package, the Build Back Better plan, symbolizes more than the legislative prowess of the Democratic Party. A reconciliation package that includes a pathway to citizenship and bold investments to communities on the frontline of the climate crisis symbolizes that the Democratic Party actually gives a damn about our communities and our futures. Futures where we don’t have to fear that our loved ones will be taken from us in the middle of the night by a brutal deportation force. Futures where we don’t have to flee our homes due to deadly storms or other natural disasters. Futures where we don’t have to take it day by day, but can thrive and prosper.
This past November’s off-year elections should be a warning to Democrats in office: Young people won’t mobilize for politicians that uphold a broken status quo. They’ll mobilize instead for bold leaders who aren’t afraid to challenge institutional power structures to deliver real, material change. Democrats cannot ignore our demands in office and then ask us for our votes come Election Day. We are not a bottomless well of support that can be siphoned for votes every two to four years.
The urgency of now cannot be understated: the shrinking window of a full Democratic majority, the code red from climate scientists around the world, a seemingly never-ending pandemic, and the rise of deportations and detentions with reports of inhumane conditions at detention centers across the country. It’s because of this that our generations feel the urgency to fight for the changes that we need to secure a future where we can all live and thrive. From protests to bird-dogging, to hunger strikes, we’re mobilizing and agitating because the stakes couldn’t be higher for our generation and future generations to come.
The legislative decisions that Democrats make in the coming weeks will galvanize our generations. The outcomes of those decisions, however, will determine whether we’re galvanized for or against them. Will Biden cater to the interests of Joe Manchin, Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema, and other corporate Democrats who refuse to listen to their constituents and obstruct his popular agenda, the very same one that young people have fought and starved for? Or will he stand up for young and marginalized communities, and fight for an agenda that saves lives?
Let’s be clear: No one will remember who Joe Manchin is, or what the Senate procedures are, but they will remember that Democrats were in power when student loan payments restarted, aid for working families stopped, and the party failed to pass robust legislation that would help millions of people.
Democrats cannot deny young people’s impact in voting, base building, and advocacy. Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer must bring the legislation up for a vote and if it fails to pass the Senate, if the Democrats cannot deliver, President Biden must take immediate executive action that meets the moment of the crises we are in. If they fail to act, they will face a young, powerful electoral block that will mobilize for politicians who will fight for them.
It is time for President Biden and Democrats to play hard ball within their caucus and deliver for the young people that took a chance on them.
Varshini PrakashVarshini Prakash (@VarshPrakash) is the executive director and cofounder of the Sunrise Movement, a member of the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force on Climate Change, and coauthor of Winning a Green New Deal: Why We Must, How We Can.
Greisa Martínez RosasGreisa Martínez Rosas is the executive director of United We Dream Action, the leading national network fighting for dignity and justice led by immigrant youth and allies.
STUDENT LOAN DEBT
Millennial Voters Are Most Likely to Back Total Federal Student Loan Forgiveness for All Americans
Nearly half of baby boomers and half of Republicans say the U.S. government shouldn’t forgive student loan debt at all Activists gather at the White House on Dec. 15, 2021, to call on President Joe Biden to not resume student loan payments in February and to cancel student debt. A Morning Consult/Politico poll found that 19 percent of voters think the federal government should forgive all student loan debt for all Americans. (Paul Morigi/Getty Images)
After a nearly two-year break from paying student loans, borrowers could be required to resume payments on Feb. 1, when President Joe Biden was planning to lift the pause.
But student loan borrowers could get an early holiday surprise. Politico reported Tuesday that the Biden administration could extend the relief.
Among registered voters, a new Morning Consult/Politico poll shows dramatic generational and partisan splits over whether the federal government should enact some sort of student loan relief.
What the numbers say
Generationally, millennials are the most likely cohort to believe that student loans should be forgiven entirely among all Americans (34 percent).
Gen Z adults – many of whom haven’t had to make a student loan payment due to COVID-19 forbearance – are the group most likely to be undecided: More than a quarter of the generation said they don’t know or have no opinion on student loan forgiveness. Baby boomers were by far the generation most opposed to student loan forgiveness: 45 percent said no debt should be forgiven at all.
Partisan differences broke down predictably: 85 percent of Democrats support some kind of student loan forgiveness, while among Republicans, nearly half said no student loan debt should be forgiven.
The survey was conducted Dec. 18-20, 2021, among 1,998 registered voters, with a margin of error of 2 percentage points.
“Do You Hear What I Hear” was actually about the Cuban Missile Crisis
A star dancing in the night, with a tail as big as a kite: An unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile launched during a test at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on February 5, 2020. US Air Force photo by Senior Airman Clayton Wear
We often take Christmas carols at face value. But at least one holiday favorite, “Do You Hear What I Hear,” contains more than what first meets the ear.
Written during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the song contains references to the fear of a nuclear attack. Many of the phrases it contains, such as “a star, dancing in the night, with a tail as big as a kite” can be interpreted in two ways: as the bright star of Bethlehem that leads the Magi to the baby Jesus—or as the sight of a nuclear missile in flight. “The star was meant to be a bomb,” the composers’ daughter, Gabrielle Regney, explained to GBH News, the magazine of the Boston public radio station, in 2019.
October 16 to November 20, 1962 was a tense month. Americans had discovered a store of Soviet missiles housed in Cuba, leading to the nuclear standoff known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. The world was on edge, unsure if the Soviet Union would attack the United States. On October 22, 1962, President John F. Kennedy addressed the nation, apprising them of the situation and letting them know how much danger they would be in should the missiles, with their advanced capabilities, be launched. Many people frequently listened to their radios to hear whether or not an attack had begun.
Partial lyrics to “Do You Hear What I Hear” courtesy of WGBH
One of those people was Noël Regney and Gloria Shayne’s record producer, who had asked that the songwriting pair compose a Christmas carol as the B-side to a single they had coming out, according to an interview Regney later gave to the Connecticut newspaper The Ridgefield Press.
Such a request was tempered by the current political climate. Regney, a composer, had fought in his native France during World War II and seen the horrors of war firsthand. He braced himself for what could come next should the Soviet Union attack the United States and a third world war begin. On his way home from the record studio in New York City, Regney pondered the request, considering the pervasive threat of nuclear war and his disdain for the recent commercialization of Christmas. As Regney traveled, he passed women wheeling strollers on the street. He saw that the innocent children were looking at each other and smiling—which inspired the song’s first line: “Said the night wind to the little lamb,” reported The Atlantic in 2015.
But he also considered what would happen to those same children should the United States be attacked. By the time Regney arrived home, he had written the song in his head. But Regney was dissatisfied with the melody he had composed. (He usually did the melodies while his wife, lyricist Gloria Shayne, wrote the words.) As a result, they swapped their normal duties and Regney wrote the words while Shayne wrote the music, Regney explained in a 1985 interview with the New York Times.
In the way I read the song—I’m a musicologist at a university, with an emphasis on popular culture—almost everything in it has a double meaning or serves as an allegory for something else: the lamb a call for peace and the children Regney passed on the street, the child shivering in the cold referring to the children who would most certainly be killed in a nuclear attack, silver and gold as the human cost of war. The song contains many of the same elements found in traditional Christmas songs—strophic form (every stanza of text is set to the same music), call and response elements, and shifts in volume and pitch in each stanza—making its hidden meaning all the more indistinguishable.
Long-exposure photo of the first atomic bomb test, taken at 5:29:45 a.m. on July 16, 1945 in Alamogordo, New Mexico. The test was code-named “Trinity.”
Each line begins with a question that is pitched low and the answer is found in the notes that are higher in the scale later in the stanza. Each stanza sees the story pass from person, thing, or animal to someone else: the night wind to the little lamb in stanza one, the little lamb to the shepherd boy in stanza two, the shepherd boy to the king in stanza three, and the king to the people—us—in stanza four. Important contextual and symbolic words—lamb, see, star, kite, boy, king, hear, know, song, child, sea, say, (every)where, light—fall on long sustained notes, a technique used as far back as medieval Catholic chants. The word “everywhere” is the only one that has its final syllable sustained and the rest of the word broken among three notes (a possible symbol for the Trinity) but also draws attention to the pair’s call for universal peace sung at its highest volume and called for by the king in the song.
Regney and Shayne penned the song as a call for peace during a time of uncertainty, said Regney’s 2002 obituary in the New York Times—would there even be a world after the Cuban Missile Crisis? The song’s message was so poignant that the pair had difficulty singing through it without crying. Regney and Shayne’s favorite version of the song, in fact, was performed by Robert Goulet because he nearly shouted the line “pray for peace,” which was the real message of the song, Regney told the Times.
The song’s first recording was by the Harry Simeone Chorale, the same group that popularized another Christmas favorite, “The Little Drummer Boy,” shortly before Thanksgiving 1962. “Do You Hear What I Hear” had an initial pressing of 250,000 copies that sold out within the first week of its release. Luckily, only a few days before the song was released, the Cuban Missile Crisis ended, though fear of nuclear war was still in the air.
Most people do not know how recent the song is or what its message really entails. In a 1985 interview, Regney made a remark that still holds true today: “I am amazed that people can think they know the song and not know it is a prayer for peace. But we are so bombarded by sound and our attention spans are so short that we now listen only to catchy beginnings.”
Since its 1962 release, there have been over 151 versions of the song released in multiple languages, the most recent performed by The Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan in a live coffee house show on December 19, 2021. However, probably the most famous version was recorded by Bing Crosby one year after its initial release; it remains a staple of the holiday season, selling over a million copies upon release. (And Regney became the first Noël to have a Christmas hit in the United States.)
The circumstances behind the song are still as relevant today as they were in 1962—only now, the Doomsday Clock sits at 100 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been to nuclear apocalypse. And that, certainly, is not a thought full of Christmas cheer.
