UK bans any use of mobile phones while driving

Government updates law to ban drivers from using phone in any way, not just calling and texting


Gwyn Topham Transport correspondent
Sat 17 Oct 2020 

 

The government will close the legal loophole which currently only defines the offence as “interactive communication”. Photograph: Alex Segre/Alamy

Drivers who use hand-held phones in any way behind the wheel will face £200 fines and possible bans when changes in the law take account of smartphones.

While making calls or texting on a hand-held mobile while driving is already illegal, taking photos, scrolling through a playlist or even playing games on phones has not been outlawed until now – allowing drivers to escape charges when spotted with a phone.

The government will update the law to close the legal loophole, which currently defines the offence as only “interactive communication”.

Ban hands-free phones in cars after rise in road deaths, MPs suggest

Roads minister Baroness Vere said: “Our roads are some of the safest in the world, but we want to make sure they’re safer still by bringing the law into 21st century.

“That’s why we’re looking to strengthen the law to make using a hand-held phone while driving illegal in a wider range of circumstances. It’s distracting and dangerous, and for too long risky drivers have been able to escape punishment, but this update will mean those doing the wrong thing will face the full force of the law.”

The government said the change, due to come into law after a 12-week public consultation, would allow police to take immediate action if they saw a driver holding and using a phone at the wheel. The offence will incur a £200 fine and six points on the driver’s licence. An automatic ban is normally triggered when drivers accrue 12 points through offences.
Advertisement

Motorists will still be able to use phones as devices to pay for goods or services at drive-through businesses such as takeaways.

A government spokeswoman said that motorists could still also use phones as satnavs, if not physically holding them. Drivers could still be prosecuted for driving without due care and attention if they try to type in directions at the wheel.

Chief constable Anthony Bangham, the lead for roads policing on the National Police Chiefs’ Council, said: “Using a mobile phone while driving is incredibly dangerous and being distracted at the wheel can change lives for ever. Police will take robust action against those using a hand-held mobile phone illegally, and proposals to make the law clearer are welcome.”

Motoring organisation the AA welcomed the tighter legislation. Jack Cousens, head of roads policy, said: “Drivers should be focused on the road ahead and not the tweet or email that has just pinged to their phone.”

But he added: “Closing the loopholes are one thing; getting more cops in cars to actually catch people in the act will help deter drivers further.”

The move may disappoint campaigners who called for ministers to go further and ban the use of hands-free functions while driving. Last year the Commons transport select committee recommended that the government consider outlawing the use of hands-free phones at the wheel, saying that they too posed a risk.

James Bond filmmakers receive millions in UK tax credits, report finds

Thinktank questions why studio allowed to save millions despite tiny profits

Jamie Doward

Sun 18 Oct 2020 

 

Daniel Craig as James Bond in the yet-to-be-released No Time to Die. Photograph: YouTube

From Miss Moneypenny to Q, James Bond has long relied upon a series of government officials. Now it has emerged that Her Majesty’s most famous secret agent has also enjoyed the support of another British civil servant: the taxman.

A new report by the investigative thinktank, TaxWatch, suggests EON Productions, the London-based studio that makes the James Bond films, makes very little profit in the UK but has received tens of millions of pounds in tax credits.

Publicly available accounts reveal that Spectre, which came out in 2015, received £30m in tax credits, while the latest film, No Time To Die, whose release has been put back until next year because of the global pandemic, was handed £47m.

The total amount of UK tax credits EON received since the credits were introduced in 2007 is likely to be closer to the £120m mark. Leaked emails revealed that 2012’s Skyfall received £24m in tax credits, while TaxWatch calculates that Quantum of Solace (2008) would have received around £21m.

The postponement of No Time To Die – the 25th 007 blockbuster – was cited by the Cineworld chain as the major reason it recently decided to temporarily close its UK cinemas.

“With cinemas and theatres around the country closing, and cultural sector workers facing real hardship, you have to wonder whether handing over tens of millions of pounds to such a profitable franchise is the best use of public money,” said George Turner, director of TaxWatch.

For a film to receive tax credits it must be certified as “culturally British” by the British Film Institute.

But, then, few brands are as British as the 007 franchise which has generated some $16bn in revenues since it began. Daniel Craig memorably featured alongside the Queen in the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics.

While many parts of the films are shot abroad, production is centred at Pinewood Studios, near London. Editing and post-production work on Spectre was split between Pinewood and Soho in central London

.
Cineworld in Stevenage, Hertfordshire: the company cited the delayed release of No Time to Die as a major reason for its decision to temporarily close its cinemas earlier this month. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian

EON does not fund the Bond films, takes no financial risk, and has never held any rights to make the films since producers Harry Saltzman and Albert R “Cubby” Broccoli acquired the rights to Ian Fleming’s Bond novels and established the company in 1961. The following year, Broccoli and Saltzman’s wives, Dana and Jacqueline, created a company called Danjaq – an elision of their names – incorporated in Switzerland

Under the structure set up by the two men, EON would make the films in the UK and sell them to Danjaq. In the 1990s, Danjaq was incorporated in Delaware.

Bond’s political masters would prefer the spy was very much an exclusively British asset. In February 2016, Tory MP Mark Spencer said tax on the profits from the Bond movies “should be paid in this country, not all over the world”. Danjaq said in a statement: “All the income from the James Bond films received by EON and Danjaq is subject to tax in either the UK or the USA. None of the income is sheltered in a tax haven.”

EON states in its 2015 accounts that once the production of a film has been completed, “the film is sold for a price equal to the total cost of production less the amount received in respect of UK Film Tax Credits”.

Such an arrangement is legal and common in the film industry. TaxWatch suggests it means that little profit will be made in the UK – reducing the tax liability that will accrue. How much tax Bond pays abroad is unclear due to the structure of the franchise’s finances.

But it is clear that it is hugely profitable. In 2014, leaked emails, believed to have been obtained by North Korean agents who hacked Sony Pictures Entertainment, revealed that Skyfall, which grossed $1.1bn worldwide, made $232m in profit for distributors MGM and Sony. Danjaq earned $109m.

Spectre grossed $880m worldwide, excluding revenues generated from DVD and VOD sales.

Danjaq said: “Since the 1960s Danjaq has chosen to make the James Bond films in the UK through EON Productions, resulting in the investment of more than a billion dollars in the UK film industry, the employment of tens of thousands of people, and showcasing the talents of British people to the world.

“EON has utilised the tax credits to help fund the making of Bond films in the manner intended by the government. This has enabled the Bond films to be continued to be made in the UK to the benefit of the UK film industry.”

“Every company in receipt of subsidy argues that the public money they receive is necessary to keep jobs in the UK,” TaxWatch’s Turner said.

“The reality is that Bond has been produced in the UK for decades and many years before the film tax credit system was introduced. Is it really credible that Commander Bond would defect to the CIA?”

Alaska's new climate threat: tsunamis linked to melting permafrost

Scientists are warning of a link between rapid warming and landslides that could threaten towns and tourist attractions

Erin McKittrick
Sun 18 Oct 2020 
 

Research has found that over the last 30 years landslides in Alaska’s Glacier Bay correspond with the warmest years. Photograph: Nasa/Operation Icebridge handout/EPA

In Alaska and other high, cold places around the world, new research shows that mountains are collapsing as the permafrost that holds them together melts, threatening tsunamis if they fall into the sea.

Scientists are warning that populated areas and major tourist attractions are at risk.

One area of concern is a slope of the Barry Arm fjord in Alaska that overlooks a popular cruise ship route.

The Barry Arm slide began creeping early last century, sped up a decade ago, and was discovered this year using satellite photos. If it lets loose, the wave could hit any ships in the area and reach hundreds of meters up nearby mountains, swamping the popular tourist destination and crashing as high as 10 meters over the town of Whittier. Earlier this year, 14 geologists warned that a major slide was “possible” within a year, and “likely” within 20 years.

In 2015, a similar landslide, on a slope that had also crept for decades, created a tsunami that sheared off forests 193 meters up the slopes of Alaska’s Taan Fiord.

“When the climate changes,” said geologist Bretwood Higman, who has worked on Taan Fiord and Barry Arm, “the landscape takes time to adjust. If a glacier retreats really quickly it can catch the surrounding slopes by surprise – they might fail catastrophically instead of gradually adjusting.”

After examining 30 years of satellite photos, for instance, geologist Erin Bessette-Kirton has found that landslides in Alaska’s St Elias mountains and Glacier Bay correspond with the warmest years.

The great thaw: global heating upends life on Arctic permafrost – photo essay


Warming clearly leads to slides, but knowing just when those slides will release is a much harder problem. “We don’t have a good handle on the mechanism,” Bessette-Kirkton said. “We have correlations, but we don’t know the driving force. What conditions the landslide, and what triggers it?”

Adding to the problem, global heating has opened up water for landslides to fall in. A recent paper by Dan Shugar, a geomorphologist at the University of Calgary, shows that as glaciers have shrunk, glacial lakes have grown, ballooning 50% in both number and size in 18 years. In the ocean, fjords lengthen as ice retreats. Slopes that used to hang over ice now hang over water.

Over the past century, 10 of the 14 tallest tsunamis recorded happened in glaciated mountain areas. In 1958, a landslide into Alaska’s Lituya Bay created a 524-meter wave – the tallest ever recorded. In Alaska’s 1964 earthquake, most deaths were from tsunamis set off by underwater landslides.

To deal with the hazard, experts hope to predict when a slope is more likely to fail by installing sensors on the most dangerous slopes to measure the barely perceptible acceleration of creeping that may presage a slide.

‘Guns are a way to exercise power’: how the idea of overthrowing the government became mainstream
POLITICAL POWER GROWS 

FROM THE BARREL OF THE GUN 
MAO TZE TUNG

Josh Horwitz says the concept of a violent insurrection is at the heart of American gun culture; and that guns will be used to settle political disputes

Lois Beckett Sun 18 Oct 2020 US gun control
 

An armed protester stands at the Michigan capitol building in Lansing, Michigan, on 30 April. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

Josh Horwitz has been an American gun control activist for nearly 30 years. In 2009, he co-wrote a book warning that the idea of armed revolt against the government was at the center of the US gun rights movement.

Now, after a year that has seen heavily armed men show up at state capitols in Virginia, Michigan, Idaho and elsewhere to confront Democratic lawmakers over gun control and coronavirus restrictions, more Americans are taking gun owners’ rhetoric about “tyrants” seriously. Some of the same armed protesters who showed up at Michigan’s state house and at a pro-gun rally this summer were charged last week with conspiring to kidnap Michigan’s governor and put her on trial for tyranny.

Other members of the “boogaloo” movement have allegedly murdered law enforcement officers in California and plotted acts of violence across the country in hopes of sparking a civil war.

Horowitz spoke to the Guardian about how mainstream the idea of insurrection has become in American politics, and why lawmakers have failed to challenge it for decades.

The conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

You argue in your book that the idea of violent insurrection against the American government is at the heart of American gun culture. What do you mean by that?

There’s a belief among some American gun owners that the second amendment is highly individualized and was placed in the constitution as an individual right to fight government tyranny. Therefore, each individual has the right to own whatever and however many weapons they want, free from any government interference. A licensing law or a universal background check law would mean the government knows who’s got a gun. If you believe there’s an individual right to insurrection, you can’t have any gun laws.

The drive to purchase semi-automatic assault weapons, like AR-15s, those weapons are often not purchased for self-defense, but for fear of government tyranny.
Advertisement


When the NRA says, “Vote Freedom First”, it’s not “Vote self-defense first”. They mean you get to decide when the government becomes tyrannical. The problem is that one person’s tyranny is another’s universal healthcare bill.

Is this concept of “insurrection” as the reason Americans should have unrestricted gun rights a very fringe idea?

It’s not every gun owner. But this movement is way larger than people think. And guns are now seen by a large portion of that community as a tool for political dissent.

When National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre says things like, “The guys with the guns make the rules”, or politicians and elected officials say, “We will rely on second amendment remedies”, what they mean is that people with guns will, in fact, set the political agenda and settle political disputes. That is a profoundly undemocratic idea. As Abe Lincoln famously said, “Any appeal from the ballot box to the bullet box must fail.” We are a country based on the rule of law. Guns don’t make you a super citizen with the ability to make special rules or have special political influence because you happen to be armed.


Guns don’t make you a super citizen with the ability to make special rules or have special political influence because you happen to be armed

Where does this “insurrectionary idea” come from? When did it take hold?
Advertisement


The idea that individuals have the right to fight against tyranny is as old as the republic. But you can trace the modern incarnation of this principle to the early 1990s, and the rise of the militia movement during Bill Clinton’s presidency, when national gun violence prevention laws, including the assault weapons ban and background checks, were instituted. There’s a path from Ruby Ridge and Waco [deadly standoffs between citizens and federal agents, both involving illegal gun charges] to the Oklahoma City bombing. The Michigan militia is where Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, got this start. He was making his living at gun shows. He bought fully into the gun rights agenda, and he ended up killing a lot of kids. I started to pick up the resurgence of this idea in the mid-2000s, at the end of Bush’s presidency and the beginning of Obama’s presidency.

How does racism play into this idea of “insurrection” and its place in US politics?

There is a big racial element to this. White men, especially, are feeling that the political reins of power are pulling away from them, and their grip on power is falling away. Guns are a way to exercise power, let’s face it. Power over policy. Power over people.

You first published Guns, Democracy and the Insurrectionist Idea in 2009. What kind of response did it get?

People didn’t react the way that I hoped, by saying: this is going to be a big deal unless we move forcefully to oppose it. Instead, a lot of elected officials, including a lot of Democratic elected officials, acquiesced to the idea of an insurrectionary second amendment. People running for president in 2004 and 2008 would use lines like, “The second amendment isn’t for hunting. It has to do with protecting ourselves, our homes, our families and our country from tyranny.” Nobody followed up with: “What do you mean? You think it’s OK to shoot politicians?”

This year, we saw the Michigan legislature taken over, the Idaho legislature taken over, and it’s like – there’s no opprobrium. There’s a sort of, “boys will be boys” response.

Why has politicians’ response to rhetoric about violent revolt been so muted?

I think there’s the idea that if this really happened, the US army would just mow these people down. “Oh, it’d be suicide if they did that.” But the US military should not be deployed in civilian places to begin with. What are we going to do, have tanks on our own soil? We’re not going to do that. The other thing is that this movement is really well armed. There’s a lot of firepower in civilian hands: .50 caliber sniper rifles, AR-15s, AK-47s.

If they really did it, it would be very, very complicated.
Advertisement


How significant are the numbers of US military members and police who personally believe in this insurrectionist idea themselves? This year, US military veterans and active duty service members have been charged in a number of violent plots, including some that were allegedly designed to spark a civil war.

There are some elements of law enforcement that are sympathetic to this. A lot are not, especially those in leadership. I have friends in the military, and, to many of them, this idea is complete anathema. But a lot of the demographics in the military are young white men who like guns. I do think the vast majority of law enforcement and the military will do their duty, but that doesn’t mean that everyone will.

What shifts have you seen since 2009 in how insurrectionism is playing out?

There’s been a huge change in the last four years, since Trump came to power. He doesn’t condemn violence. What he said about Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer was awful. When he’s asked about a peaceful transition of power and he hedges, I believe it’s because he thinks he has a private militia that will back him up.

The insurrectionist idea is about fighting government tyranny, but it would be especially dangerous if it became in service of particular officials, and that’s what you’re seeing now.

What’s also changed: the amount of weapons that the boys have these days is obscene. The number of AR-15s and high-capacity magazines and assault weapons they have should scare anybody.

Are you worried that there could be a major insurrection against the US government?

Yes.

My fear is that there will be violence if the election is contested, or if it looks like Trump’s losing. I worry that there will be efforts at intimidating election officials and voters.

I’ve always been concerned about the one-off person, the lone wolf who takes these ideas to the max. I am much more concerned now about organized efforts to subvert elections, democratic power, courts.


I am much more concerned now about organized efforts to subvert elections, democratic power, courts

You issued a report focused on how states can ban gun-carrying at polling places. Are you concerned about what could happen on election day itself?
Advertisement


I don’t think there’s going to be widespread violence at the polls. I think there will be places where people with guns will attempt to intimidate voters, but not by shooting or anything like that, and I think those places will be relatively rare. It’s really important that each polling place knows what their rights are, but I think there’s been enough time to get them up to speed. I don’t want people to be scared: the ultimate response to the insurrectionary second amendment is to go vote.

What do you think should be done now in response to all of this public conversation about insurrection?

Number one: there needs to be a clear public response, that people who exercise this “right” are not patriots, but traitors.

The second piece is a policy response. We need to limit access to assault weapons. As soon as legislatures open in 2021, they should ban guns at polling places. I would like to see them banning open carry everywhere. Peaceful protesters are now routinely intimidated by armed insurrectionists. The way they intimidate people is by openly carrying weapons. We have proved we can’t handle that as a society.

And people who have the bully pulpit need to be careful not to endorse the idea of an insurrectionary second amendment. Even if you believe in an individual right to own a firearm, the purpose of that right cannot be to kill government officials.

Have you seen any tipping point in how Democratic politicians are now responding to this kind of insurrectionist rhetoric?

Let me be completely clear: the biggest problem is Republican elected officials, and the Republican who consistently use the insurrectionary idea and cheer on this type of behavior. While I wish Democrats would stand up and not just acquiesce, the Republican party has bought into a “second amendment remedies” idea that is now a danger, a grave danger, to America.

The Republican elected officials in Virginia thought the gun rights march on the state capitol was the greatest thing since sliced bread. There are plenty of Republican officials who just think this is great.

Dying birds and the fires: scientists work to unravel a great mystery

A flock of birds in Oakland, California, where smoke from wildfires turned the sky blood orange this autumn. Photograph: MediaNews Group/The Mercury News/Getty Images

Nobody knowns precisely how wildfire smoke affects birds’ health and migratory patterns. Now, citizen birdwatchers are stepping in

by Kari Paul in Oakland Sun 18 Oct 2020 

The yellow Townsend Warbler lay lifeless on the gravel ground near Grant county, New Mexico, the eyes in its yellow-striped head closed, its black feathery underbelly exposed.

Just days before, the migrating bird – weighing 10 ounces, or the equivalent of two nickels – might have been as far north as Alaska. But it met an untimely demise in the American south-west, with thousands of miles still to go before reaching Central America, its destination for the winter.

The warbler is one of hundreds of thousands of birds that have recently turned up disoriented or dead across the region, where ornithologists have described birds “falling from the sky”.

The mass die-off has been tentatively attributed to the historic wildfires across California, Oregon and Washington in recent months, which may have forced birds to rush their migration. But scientists do not know for sure – in part because nobody knows precisely how wildfire smoke affects birds.

A photo of the dead warbler was uploaded to iNaturalist, a crowd-sourced app used to identify plants and animals, as part of the Southwest Avian Mortality Project, a collaboration between New Mexico State University and others that invited users to crowd-source information about the die-off. The project has now logged more than 1,000 observed dead birds, encompassing 194 species – data that is being shared with the researchers to better understand what led to such a major mortality event.

“For really solid science, it is good to have long-term data trends,” said Allison Salas, a researcher who helped establish the project. “But with increasing changes to climate and rising temperatures, we do not have enough time to collect the data – things are changing faster than we can keep up with.”
Advertisement


This sort of platform, and the citizen birdwatchers who populate them, have become a critical tool for scientists trying to unravel the mysteries at the intersection of birds, wildfires and climate change.

“There are many more citizen scientists distributed in diverse arrays than there are professional scientists or wildlife rehabilitators,” said Andrew Farnsworth, a senior research associate at Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the institute that runs eBird, a popular app for logging bird sightings.

“The power of eyes in many places is huge.”

A physiological mystery

Rodney Siegel is the executive director of the Institute for Bird Populations, a non-profit group that works with professional scientists and amateur naturalists to monitor bird populations for conservation. He said that while scientists believe that birds, like humans and other animals, are susceptible to the effects of smoke, “there is still a lot we don’t know”.

“We don’t have a ton of information on the immediate, direct effects of smoke and wildfire on individuals,” he said.

When it comes to the effect of wildfire smoke on birds, ‘there is still a lot we don’t know’, says scientist Rodney Siegel. Photograph: Mark Blinch/Reuters

It may seem unbelievable that this question about one of the most ancient creatures on Earth remains unanswered, but there are several good reasons, Siegel said. For one, it is difficult to properly survey the before and after effects of fire when we rarely know in advance where the next wildfire will emerge. And, of course, because birds can fly, they are not trapped in smoke-filled areas as often as other species.

“It probably hasn’t been addressed a whole lot by scientists yet because, unlike a lot of other wildlife, birds can escape fire and smoke relatively readily,” Siegel said.

The power of eyes in many places is huge Andrew Farnsworth, researcher

But the ability to escape is diminishing. In the case of the recent fires on the west coast, there were few places birds could have traveled without smoke. Hazardous air quality choked the majority of the west for weeks, with smoke rising thousands of feet into the atmosphere, turning the skies orange. In early September, the growing plume from historic wildfires could be seen from space and eventually made its way to the skies over the east coast.

“These enormous smoke plumes are harder to escape than those from smaller fires that have been more typical for the last century,” Siegel said. “This is a really unusual phenomenon without a lot of precedent – and it is unknown how that might affect birds.”

It’s important to note that not all fire is bad for birds, he added. California is home to more than 400 species of birds, making it one of the country’s most diverse states in terms of wildlife. Many ecological systems and the birds that inhabit them thrive in the aftermath of small fires. Some like the lazuli bunting, known as a “fire-following” species, have even evolved to thrive in the aftermath of fire events. This bolsters the theory that smaller, less severe fires could be good for wildlife long-term.
Some theories

A leading theory behind the south-west die-off is that widespread smoke pollution may have forced birds to start migration sooner than expected, said Roger J Lederer, who taught ornithology and ecology at the California State University, Chico, and has written several books about birds and their behavior.

“Most of the birds we saw dying were migratory; migration had just started and they were trying to flee the smoke-filled areas but couldn’t find any food,” he said. “It wasn’t the physiological effects of smoke necessarily, they just starved to death.”

Beyond the effects of smoke on migration patterns, the rise of megafires is also drawing unprecedented attention to the effects smoke may have on a bird’s delicate breathing.

They were trying to flee the smoke-filled areas but couldn’t find any food Roger J Lederer, ornithologist

Birds and their lungs are certainly affected by smoke, Lederer said, even if we don’t know exactly how. Most of us have heard the phrase “canary in a coalmine”, which comes from the fact that birds are particularly sensitive to toxins in the air. Lederer has also heard many reports of pet birds dying due to different kinds of fumes in the home.

The sensitivity could have something to do with birds’ unique respiratory system. While humans and other mammals use their diaphragm to inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide, birds possess a far more efficient system, essentially inhaling and exhaling at the same time. This allows them to get enough oxygen to fuel near-constant activity and to breathe at much higher altitudes than mammals.

To do this, birds have tube-like structures called parabronchi, similar to human alveoli in the lungs, which are covered with sacs and capillaries for gas exchange. And as in humans, smoke damage can burst those bubbles, creating less surface area to exchange oxygen and making it more difficult to breathe.

“This is unprecedented – there have been fires for years and years but this is the first year everyone is paying attention to the impact on birds,” Lederer said.

 

Scientists say that increasingly intense wildfires have put unprecedented attention on the impact to birds. Photograph: André Penner/AP

Community scientists fill in the gaps

As scientists at New Mexico State University began to recognize the size and scale of the mass bird die off this year, they invited members of the public to log bird deaths on iNaturalist.

The format is collaborative: one person can upload a photo of a flower or animal, and more experienced naturalists can comment to confirm what it is. The data is all geotagged when uploaded, giving scientists details about locations.

“There are limitations in science – we can’t be in every place all the time,” Salas said. “Being able to incorporate a standardized way of collecting data from everybody across the country or the world is extremely helpful.”

Researchers are increasingly relying on data collected by citizen scientists and birdwatchers to better understand the effects of climate change, including intensifying wildfires, on bird populations, Salas said.

“Citizen science or community projects are great because they are real time, they are happening in the moment, and it allows us to kind of keep up with everything that’s going on and still be able to document it over time,” she said.

One of the most popular tools for the average birder is eBird, an app created by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology alongside the National Audubon society, to crowdsource data on the locations and numbers of bird populations globally.

In recent years it has recorded as many as 100m bird observations per year. Citizen data is “invaluable” for tracking where, when, what, and how many birds are present in a particular area, said Andrew Farnsworth, who works there. “Leveraging many sources of information is critical.”


Birding is particularly amenable to new and amateur naturalists, said Lederer. Crowdsourced data from people of all skill levels is helpful to scientists who “just don’t have enough manpower”, he said, especially as climate change and its effects become more widespread.

“People are paying attention now more than ever, which is a good thing. Until we know what is happening, I’m not sure we can do anything about it.”

Is Bolivia poised to swing back towards socialism? 

Supporters take part in an offering to the Pachamama (Mother Earth) during a closing campaign rally of the Movement to Socialism party (Mas) ahead of the Bolivian presidential election, in El Alto, on Wednesday. Photograph: David Mercado/Reuters

A year after the country’s first indigenous president was controversially ousted,

 (CIA COUP BY INEPT RIGHTWINGERS)

 his party is well placed to win a rerun presidential election

by Tom Phillips and Cindy Jiménez Bercerra in La Paz
Sat 17 Oct 2020 

David Ticona Mamani felt despair and foreboding when Evo Morales was forced from his Andean homeland last November amid civil unrest, electoral meltdown and what supporters of Bolivia’s first indigenous president called a racist, rightwing coup.

“I wept,” remembered the 56-year-old lawyer, a fervent supporter of Morales and his Movimiento al Socialismo (Mas).

Silence reigns on the US-backed coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia
Mark Weisbrot

“Evo represents the rebirth of Bolivia’s indigenous people. He gave us back our self-esteem, our pride in being indigenous, of having indigenous surnames, of our food … Evo Morales was Bolivia’s best president ever.”

With Morales condemned to exile – first in Mexico, now Argentina - believers such as Mamani were left politically orphaned and the Mas in disarray.

Jeanine Áñez, a rightwing senator who once branded Bolivia’s indigenous people “satanic”, took power as caretaker president bringing a sudden and shocking end to nearly 14 years of leftwing rule during which the country’s long-excluded originarios (native peoples) finally took centre stage.

Activists have since accused Áñez’s government of using the justice system to wage a politically motivated witch-hunt against Morales and his allies.

But nearly 12 months after last year’s convulsion, Morales’ Movement Towards Socialism could be about to pull off a sensational political comeback in Sunday’s twice-postponed presidential election.

Luis Arce, the presidential candidate of Evo Morales’s Mas party, holds a ball during his closing rally in El Alto. Photograph: Gaston Brito Miserocchi/Getty Images

The vote is a rerun of the doomed October 2019 election which was voided after incendiary claims of electoral fraud from the Organization of American States (OAS) fuelled protests and saw Morales resign under pressure from security forces.

Polls suggest the Mas candidate, Morales’s UK-educated former finance minister Luis Arce, has the edge over his main challenger, a centrist journalist and former president called Carlos Mesa.

“They [Mas] are in the driver’s seat and if they can mobilize voters this weekend – and they are the only party with the capacity to do that – they could do very well,” said Eduardo Gamarra, a Bolivia expert at Florida International University.

Gamarra thought a second round – which 67-year-old Mesa would probably win – remained the more likely prospect. If no candidate secures an outright majority, or 40% of the votes with 10% breathing space, a run-off will be held on 29 November. The third major candidate is Luis Fernando Camacho of the new rightwing Creemos (“We believe”) alliance. Áñez withdrew her candidacy last month saying she did not want to split the conservative vote.

But because Morales’s rivals had “atomized” the anti-Mas vote, it was not far-fetched to imagine that Arce, a softly spoken career civil servant who boasts a master’s degree from the University of Warwick, might triumph at the first time of asking.

“There is quite possibly a scenario where the Mas essentially picks up where it left off, only with Luis Arce as president,” said Gamarra.
Advertisement


Arce talked up that possibility on Wednesday at his final campaign rally – a high-altitude celebration of flag waving and dance in El Alto, a bastion of Morales support above the de facto capital La Paz.

 

A graffiti of the former president Evo Morales in La Paz. The exiled Morales still overshadows Bolivian politics. Photograph: Juan Karita/AP

“They thought they were going to kill the Movement Towards Socialism. But we’re here in El Alto to tell them: ‘We’re here and we’re alive!’” the 57-year-old candidate told supporters clad in the group’s blue, white and black colours.

“The right robbed the people and have shown their inability to govern,” Arce added in reference to charges that Áñez and her cabinet took power illegitimately and botched the response to Covid-19, which has killed thousands of Bolivians.

Mamani was also hopeful of a first-round victory and believed Arce could “relaunch” Bolivia.

But, like many Mas voters, he feared “a monumental fraud” was being cooked up with the acquiescence of the United States and the OAS, whose disputed claims about vote rigging in last year’s election played a key role in forcing Morales overseas.

This week a senior US state department official maintained Morales’s claim to have won the 2019 election was “the product of massive fraud” and hinted support for an Arce presidency was not completely assured.

“We look forward to working with whomever the Bolivians freely and fairly choose to be their president,” the official told journalists vaguely, praising the protesters who rose up against Morales last year for having “defended their democracy”.
Advertisement


If the prospect of a socialist revival has Masistas overjoyed, it is the stuff of nightmares for Morales’s detractors, who regard him as a power-obsessed authoritarian bent on clinging to power and destroying Bolivian democracy.

Morales’s bid to secure an unprecedented fourth straight term last year came despite voters denying him that right in a 2016 referendum, the result of which he ignored. 

The presidential candidate Carlos Mesa delivers a speech during the closing rally of his campaign in the lowland city of Santa Cruz on Tuesday. Photograph: Enrique Canedo/AFP/Getty Images

Libertad Gabriela Vaca Poehlmann, the president of an opposition group called Unidos en Acción (United in Action), remembered her elation as the former president fled to Mexico City on 10 November last year.

“I felt relief. I felt hope. I felt freedom,” said Poehlmann, 45, one of thousands of citizens who took to Bolivia’s streets last year to pile pressure on Morales.

Twelve months later she fretted his movement might mount what had once seemed an unlikely comeback and urged voters to back whichever candidate they felt was best placed to prevent that. “If Mas came back … it would be terrible for the country. As the saying goes: ‘People get the governors they deserve’,” Poehlmann said.

Foreign diplomats and voters on both sides voice fear another disputed result could lead to a repeat of last year’s violence when at least 36 people, most of them Mas supporters, lost their lives. And tensions have been building in the lead-up to the vote with reports of paramilitary groups attacking Mas activists and some panicked citizens reportedly stockpiling food in anticipation of possible turmoil.
Advertisement

Observers are convinced Morales will seek to return to Bolivia, and possibly frontline politics, if Arce wins.

“He’s a political animal. His whole life is about politics. So he will try to come back and there might be some tensions,” said Diego von Vacano, a Bolivian political scientist at the Texas A&M University. “But for the good of the party … I think Evo might play a bit more of symbolic role as opposed to a more active, commander role,” he added.

 

Employees of the electoral court, guarded by the military police, load a truck with electoral material to be distributed for Sunday’s general election, in La Paz, on Firday. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

Vacano denied Arce was merely a proxy for Morales, who was placed under investigation for alleged acts of terrorism by Bolivia’s conservative caretaker governors and is barred from running himself.

“Arce is not a puppet,” insisted the academic who has been informally advising the candidate’s campaign. “He’s aware that Evo is the historic leader of the Mas. But this is a new period and it requires a different approach. He has been pretty clear that he wants to do it his own way.”

Mamani said he also hoped the former president would step back, despite his affection for Morales and the commodity-fuelled social and economic progress he oversaw after his historic 2005 election.

“We need to see the rotation of power. No matter how good a leader is they shouldn’t stay in power permanently. You need change.”

“He spent 14 years working. Saturdays, Sundays, bank holidays. From 5am to midnight,” Mamani said of Morales. “It’s time for him to rest.”

In Netflix’s The Trial of the Chicago 7, Aaron Sorkin tackles an all-too-relevant court case

The star-studded drama returns to the past with a purpose.

By Alissa Wilkinson@alissamariealissa@vox.com Oct 16, 2020

Eddie Redmayne in The Trial of the Chicago 7. Niko Tavernise/Netflix


Any time a story from history is retold for the big screen (or, these days, for the little screen), one fundamental question must be answered: Why now?

Filmmakers don’t (or shouldn’t) revisit the past just because they think it’s kind of a cool story that will make bank at the box office. Real people’s lives are being mined for material, after all. So if you’re going to retell a historical tale, you need a reason: parallels to the present, or inspiring heroism, or a lesson of some kind.

We can ask this question of Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 and find several obvious answers. Sorkin — one of the few screenwriters whose name is a household brand unto itself — originally wrote the script back in 2007, but the project got shelved during the 2007–’08 writers’ strike. He picked it up again in 2018 with a presidential election in the middle distance, and it’s easy to understand why: The film is a lightly fictionalized courtroom drama based on the six-month trial of seven men accused of conspiring to cross state lines and incite riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. And it rings all those “now more than ever” bells that Hollywood has loved to ring (and ring and ring) during the Trump era, albeit with a little more finesse than some.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Does The Trial of the Chicago 7 work as a film? Sometimes! From his TV series The West Wing to movies like The Social Network and Steve Jobs, Sorkin is indelibly associated with a few idiosyncrasies, two of which matter most here: a tight, wordy dialogue style (often fired off while speakers hurry from one place to another), and grandstanding characters with progressive but rarely radical notions of American politics. By those markers, The Trial of the Chicago 7 is identifiably Sorkin’s work, sometimes to its detriment, particularly as the movie rounds third base and heads for home plate.

But the movie is effective in spite of its foibles. It’s an ensemble piece that tells a complex story cleanly. And even its missteps hint as to why Sorkin chose to return to this historical moment now.
Sorkin puts a Hollywood gloss on the story of the Chicago 7. It’s mostly successful.

The Chicago 7, played in the movie by a uniformly outstanding cast, were Abbie Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen), Jerry Rubin (Jeremy Strong), David Dellinger (John Carroll Lynch), Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne), Rennie Davis (Alex Sharp), John Froines (Danny Flaherty), and Lee Weiner (Noah Robbins). All seven men were activists who used different tactics but shared the same goal: to end the war in Vietnam. (I don’t know if Cohen and Strong are the best of the bunch, but their performances suggest they’re having an immense amount of fun; Lynch is particularly good, as well, reminding me he’s one of the great unsung character actors of our time.)

Representing different organizations and not coordinating with one another, they all traveled to Chicago in 1968 to participate in protests outside the DNC that would grab the attention of not so much the delegates as the entire country. Denied permits by the city, their demonstrations ended with police beatings and bloodshed, which they contended were started by Chicago police. The federal government charged the men with conspiracy and crossing state lines with intent to start a riot, and the trial began in September 1968 under Judge Julius Hoffman (Frank Langella).

Kelvin Harrison Jr., Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Mark Rylance, Aaron Sorkin, and Eddie Redmayne on the set of The Trial of Chicago 7. Niko Tavernise/Netflix

An eighth man, Bobby Seale (a stunning Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), co-founder of the Black Panther Party, was also in Chicago to speak at a demonstration. He was swept into their case, and famously petitioned the court to delay the trial so the attorney of his choosing could have gallbladder surgery. After he was denied by Judge Hoffman, he petitioned to represent himself, which the judge also denied, and then continued to loudly protest this breach of his rights during the hearing. Eventually, he was bound and gagged in the courtroom; then he was severed from the trial altogether, leaving the other seven men as co-defendants.


The introductions of all of these men, and the first half of the film, are mainly devoted to showing their different styles of anti-war activism. Hoffman and Rubin are the disruptive hippies; Dellinger the peaceful grownup; Hayden the principled statesman; Davis the young radical; and Froines and Weiner are just happy to find themselves in such august company. What they all have in common is their intense hatred for the Vietnam War and the fact that they are white.

Seale, in clear contrast, is Black. And we’re meant to understand that the judge’s actions toward him — which differ from the way he treats the seven white defendants — are part of the long-running American tradition of justice lifting her blindfold.

At the center of the trial is the men’s attorney William Kunstler (Mark Rylance, tremendous as always) and the government prosecutor Richard Schultz (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). The latter is a character who, by all accounts, has been substantially altered for this film, presumably to transform him into an avatar for those in the audience inclined to cock an eyebrow at the defendants. The historical record suggests Schultz was more of a hard-driving idealogue than the even-handed attorney we meet in The Trial of the Chicago 7, who gets to play the part of, if not a hero, at least a Pretty Good Guy by the end.

Softening Schulz is one of a number of tweaks to the facts that Sorkin makes for the film, something he has done plenty of times in the past; The Social Network, which might be his best script, plays very fast and loose with characters and events alike. Sorkin’s aim is to tell a good story, and reality does not always comply. The fun of being a screenwriter is that you get to create reality.

Caitlin Fitzgerald, Alan Metoskie, Alex Sharp, Jeremy Strong, John Carroll Lynch, Sacha Baron Cohen, and Noah Robbins in The Trial of the Chicago 7. Niko Tavernise / Netflix

There’s a reason we need these reminders of the past

How you feel about Sorkin’s historical liberties will probably determine how you react to this film. Not because anyone thinks The Trial of the Chicago 7 should have been a documentary — there have already been several about the same sequence of events, and you can stream them if you like — but because Sorkin takes those liberties to fit this tale to the contours of the classic Hollywood courtroom drama. And classic Hollywood courtroom dramas have to end in triumph, the underdog winning out over those of whom society approves.

I was with the film right till the end, when it makes this heel turn, which I think is ineffective — or, at least, could have been more effective handled another way, one that would probably have involved hewing more closely to the facts. Sorkin doesn’t change the outcome of the trial, but the way he moves pieces of history around is clearly bent toward turning The Trial of the Chicago 7 into a Hollywood tale of underdog courtroom triumph. (I don’t want to spoil the movie’s beats, but I will say that Sorkin’s placement of events near its conclusion, combined with the requisite swelling triumphal music, shifts the tone of The Trial of the Chicago 7 into the kind of fairy tale that I’d hoped the movie would avoid.)


But the way he ends the film gives me the sense that Sorkin’s answer to the “why now?” question would be simple: Because very little has changed. The forces that tried to pin the Chicago 7, not to mention Bobby Seale, to the wall are still active and powerful. We hear a lot of the same rhetoric today. And retelling the story has an effect — especially when you put a bunch of movie stars in it and send it to Netflix, where it’s bound to be seen by a lot of people.

Maybe Sorkin’s idea is to stir people to action. But I think the movie answers the question of “why now” a little differently. For people like me — a 30-something whose parents were still in grade school when this monumental trial went down — a glossy Hollywood movie like The Trial of the Chicago 7, about things I can’t remember and that many people would like society to forget, can do something truly useful.

Here’s why: In my adult lifetime, I’ve lived through 9/11, various unending wars, a memorable uptick in blatant hate toward ethnic and religious minorities, mounting environmental insecurity, and multiple “once-in-a-lifetime” recessions. That’s without even mentioning Donald Trump’s disastrous, norms-obliterating administration, which has had the additional effect of destroying the trust many Americans below the age of 40 once had in governmental, social, and religious institutions. From my side of the age divide, more often than not, things seem pretty bleak.

Mark Rylance and Eddie Redmayne in The Trial of the Chicago 7. Niko Tavernise / Netflix

I’ve responded by dipping back into history — specifically, by going back a half-century, to right around the late 1960s. What I’ve found there is depressing, and a little comforting. Depressing because much of what we hear in public discourse today about law and order, radicals, riots, policing, voter suppression, and all the rest is just ripped out of the past and barely even repackaged. What we see on the news isn’t even a reboot; it feels like a lazy rerun, sped up by 50 percent.

But comforting because it destroys the fanciful notion peddled by too many leaders that things were better not all that long ago. Studying this history puts our current reality on a continuum with the past, rather than representing it as a uniquely terrible time in human history. We know the world we are inheriting is a wreck; it’s useful to understand exactly why, and to see which myths we hear from grandstanding politicians made it so.

And retellings like The Trial of the Chicago 7 are an invitation to imagine which threads of goodness we can hang onto. Sorkin’s fairy-tale ending is, I think, a bit of a misstep, shifting the tone away from sobriety toward something significantly more self-congratulatory.

But one theme his chosen ending underlines is that, at least in his rendering, the fight over Vietnam and the fight over policing and the fight over who matters to the law is, ultimately, a fight about who is worth honoring. Those who are lost in political fights are too often those who fell on battlefields or in parks or city streets, caught in a firestorm they didn’t start. Honoring them is an act of revolution — and The Trial of the Chicago 7 argues that the fight to keep them from being lost in the first place has been going on a long, long time.

The Trial of the Chicago 7 is streaming on Netflix.

2020’s marijuana legalization ballot measures, explained

If the measures win, more than one in three Americans will live in a state where marijuana is legal.

Zac Freeland/Vox

By German Lopez@germanrlopezgerman.lopez@vox.com Oct 16, 2020, 1:00pm EDT


Between the presidential election, governors’ races, and down-ballot contests, this year’s election features a lot of important choices. Among those, voters in five states will have a chance to legalize marijuana for recreational or medical uses.

In Arizona, Montana, New Jersey, and South Dakota, voters could legalize marijuana for recreational purposes. In Mississippi and South Dakota (in a ballot initiative separate from the full legalization measure), voters could also legalize medical marijuana.

If all these measures are approved, the United States would go from having 11 states in which marijuana is legal to 15. Counting by population, that would mean more than a third of Americans would live in a state with legalized marijuana, up from more than a quarter today.

The ballot initiatives represent a massive shift in drug policy. A decade ago, zero states had legalized marijuana. Then, in 2012, Colorado and Washington became the first two states to legalize cannabis for recreational use and sales.

Despite the success of state measures, marijuana remains illegal at the federal level. But since President Barack Obama’s administration, the federal government has generally taken a hands-off approach to states’ marijuana initiatives. There are still hurdles — banking is a challenge for marijuana businesses under federal prohibition — but for the most part the federal government has not interfered in states’ laws since 2013.

That policy may reflect a change in public opinion — one that would make a federal crackdown on marijuana legalization very unpopular: As it stands, public opinion surveys show that even a majority of Republicans, who tend to take more anti-marijuana views than their Democratic and independent peers, support legalization.


In that context, legalization advocates are optimistic about their prospects this year, even in historically red states like Arizona, Montana, and South Dakota.
Marijuana legalization in Arizona, Montana, New Jersey, and South Dakota

In November, four states will vote whether to legalize marijuana for recreational purposes. They would all allow sales, leading to the kind of tax-and-regulate, commercialized system that’s taken form in other legalization states.

Here are the 2020 ballot measures:
Arizona: Proposition 207 would legalize marijuana possession and use for adults 21 years or older, and would let individuals grow up to six cannabis plants. It would charge the Arizona Department of Health Services with licensing and regulating marijuana businesses, from retailers to growers, and impose a 16 percent tax on marijuana sales. Local governments could ban marijuana businesses within their borders. It would also let people with criminal records related to marijuana petition for expungement. It’s similar to a 2016 ballot measure that narrowly failed, but activists believe that support for legalization has grown since then.
Montana: A constitutional amendment, CI-118, would let the legislature or a ballot initiative set a legal age for marijuana. A statutory measure, I-190, would allow possession and use for adults 21 and older, letting them grow up to four marijuana plants and four seedlings for personal use. I-190 would task the Department of Revenue with setting up and regulating a commercial system for growing and selling cannabis, while imposing a 20 percent tax and letting local governments ban cannabis businesses within their borders. And I-190 would let people convicted for past marijuana crimes seek resentencing or expungement.
New Jersey: Public Question 1 would legalize the possession and use of marijuana for adults 21 and older, and task the state’s Cannabis Regulatory Commission with regulating the legal system for marijuana production and sales. The measure is open-ended on several fronts, including regulations, taxes, and home-growing, instead leaving it to the state legislature to work out the details. The legislature placed the measure on the ballot after it failed to pass its own legalization bill.
South Dakota: Constitutional Amendment A would legalize marijuana possession and use for adults 21 and older. It would let individuals grow up to three cannabis plants if they live in a jurisdiction with no licensed marijuana retailers. It would allow distribution and sales, with a 15 percent tax. Local governments could prohibit marijuana businesses within their borders.

All four states’ measures follow the same commercialized model for legalization, but that’s not the only model for legalization. Washington, DC, for example, allows possession, use, growing, and gifting but not sales (although the “gifting” provision has been used, in a legally dubious manner, to “gift” marijuana with purchases of overpriced juices and decals).

Some drug policy experts have pushed for a legalization model that doesn’t allow a big marijuana industry to take root, out of fears that such an industry would, similar to alcohol and tobacco companies, irresponsibly market its product and enable misuse or addiction. A 2015 RAND report listed a dozen alternatives to the standard prohibition of marijuana, from putting state agencies in charge of sales to allowing only personal possession and growing:

RAND Corporation

While marijuana is much safer than alcohol, tobacco, and other illegal drugs, it’s not totally safe. Misuse and addiction are genuine problems, with millions of Americans reporting that they want to quit but can’t despite negative consequences. A review of the research by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine linked cannabis use to other potential downsides, including respiratory issues (if smoked), schizophrenia and psychosis, car crashes, lagging academic and other social achievements, and lower birth weight (if smoked during pregnancy).

It’s these risks that have driven even some supporters of legalization to call for alternatives to the commercialized model. Opponents of legalization have also jumped on the concerns about Big Marijuana potentially marketing the drug irresponsibly, causing bad public health outcomes.


Legalization advocates, however, generally argue that marijuana’s potential downsides are so mild that the benefits of legalization greatly outweigh the problems with prohibition, including the hundreds of thousands of arrests around the US, the racial disparities behind those arrests, and the billions of dollars that flow from the black market for illicit marijuana to drug cartels that then use the money for violent operations around the world.

Supporters are winning the argument in more and more states, and typically doing so in a way that establishes a commercialized, tax-and-regulate system — setting up the US for a big marijuana industry in the coming years.

Medical marijuana in Mississippi and South Dakota

In two states, voters will have a chance to legalize medical marijuana, joining the 33 states that have already done so. The two states’ measures generally follow the same track as the other states’ laws, letting patients with certain conditions get a doctor’s recommendation for marijuana and obtain it at dispensaries.

Here are the 2020 ballot measures:
Mississippi: Ballot Measure 1 is actually broken into two alternative ballot initiatives. Initiative 65 details specifics for qualifying conditions (22, including cancer and PTSD), possession limits (up to 2.5 ounces), a sales tax (7 percent), the cost of a medical marijuana card (up to $50), and who would set up regulations for distribution (the Mississippi Department of Health). Initiative 65A offers no specifics on all these fronts; Mississippi’s legislature put it on the ballot as an alternative to Initiative 65 and will fill in the blanks later if voters approve the legislature’s initiative over the citizen initiative.
South Dakota: Initiated Measure 26 would set up a medical marijuana system for people with debilitating medical conditions. Patients would be able to possess up to three ounces of marijuana and grow three plants or more, depending on what a physician recommends. The Department of Health would set up rules and regulations for distribution.

A review of the evidence from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found little evidence for pot’s ability to treat health conditions outside chronic pain, chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting, and patient-reported multiple sclerosis spasticity symptoms. But most states, relying largely on anecdotal evidence, have allowed medical marijuana for many other conditions.

Supporters argue there’s no time to get approval for and run scientific studies, which can take years, to prove the benefits of a drug that isn’t very harmful anyway. And they point out that the federal government has stifled marijuana research for years, making it impossible to get good evidence. So they’d rather states let sick patients get access to marijuana now instead of wait for broader federal reform and research.

Opponents, however, point to the lack of rigorous evidence. They argue that it should be up to public health agencies, such as the Food and Drug Administration, to approve the use of medical marijuana, as is true for other medicines. They’ve been particularly critical of more lax approaches to medical marijuana — with states, like California, enacting laws that in the past amounted to total legalization in practice.
Marijuana legalization is very popular in the US

There’s very good reason to believe an increasing number of states will legalize marijuana in the coming years: Legalization is very popular, and support for it has been growing for decades.


According to surveys from Gallup, support for legalization rose from 12 percent in 1969 to 31 percent in 2000 to 66 percent in 2019. Surveys from Civic Science, the General Social Survey, and the Pew Research Center have found similar levels of support.

Gallup

Support for legalization is even bipartisan. Both Gallup and Pew have found that a slim majority of Republicans, with much bigger majorities of Democrats and independents, support legalization.

Gallup

Medical marijuana is even more popular, with support in polls typically hitting 80 percent, 90 percent, or more.

The positions of US political leaders, however, don’t align with public opinion. President Donald Trump opposes marijuana legalization at the federal level, previously suggesting the issue should be left up to the states. Former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee for president, has called for the decriminalization of cannabis — repealing criminal penalties, particularly prison, for possession but for not allowing sales — but has opposed legalization at the federal level.

Meanwhile, only Illinois and Vermont have legalized marijuana for recreational use through their legislatures. The other nine states that have legalized did so through ballot measures.

As lawmakers lag behind, voters will find another way to legalize marijuana for recreational or medical purposes — as five more states might demonstrate this year.

POSTMODERN EUGENICS

The Great Barrington Declaration is an ethical nightmare

THE 1% MASTER RACE PROMOTE IT

These scientists want more young, healthy people infected by the coronavirus. It’s a bad idea.

By Brian Resnick@B_resnickbrian@vox.com Oct 16, 2020

Society doesn’t neatly sort itself into different risk groups. 

Orbon Alija/Getty Creative Images


It’s been eight, long, devastating months in the United States since the pandemic began. A staggering number of people have been sickened and hospitalized, and hundreds of thousands have died. People are isolated from those they care about, businesses are hurting, education has suffered, and so has our mental health.

It’s understandable, then, why the concept of ending the pandemic through building up herd immunity continues to hold allure. The proponents of herd immunity, who want all schools and businesses to reopen and sports and cultural activities to resume, say they want to ease the burden of the pandemic: “Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal,” reads a document called The Great Barrington Declaration, the latest vessel for this hope that life can return to normal for some before community spread of the virus is contained.

The authors of the Declaration — a trio of scientists from Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford, whose views, we should say, are outside the mainstream — call their approach “focused prevention.” The big idea is that we could let the virus spread among younger, healthier people, all the while making sure we protect older, more vulnerable people.

The declaration website says it has attracted thousands of signatures (though the names of those who signed have not been made public) and has fans on the right and at the White House, where pandemic adviser Scott Atlas (who is a neuroradiologist, not an epidemiologist) has previously suggested this is a good thing to do. “When younger, healthier people get infected, that’s a good thing,” he said in a July interview with a San Diego local news station.


RELATED
What people get wrong about herd immunity, explained by epidemiologists

And yet there are ample reasons to fear that this “focused prevention” strategy of allowing the young and healthy to get sick to build population immunity to the virus would never work. And it could cause devastating unintended consequences.

“It just presumes this level of control that you can really wall off people who are at high risk,” Natalie Dean, a University of Florida biostatistician, told me earlier this year. Society doesn’t neatly separate itself into risk groups. We’ve seen outbreaks that have begun in younger populations move on to infect older ones.

The Barrington Declaration has been getting a lot of attention in the news and through viral social media posts. That’s caused alarm among scientists who see through its thin scientific reasoning. One group has written a counter piece in the Lancet.

“Prolonged isolation of large swathes of the population is practically impossible and highly unethical,” a group of scientists representing the mainstream thinking writes in a letter they are calling the John Snow Memorandum (named after the “father” of modern epidemiology).

It’s unethical for many, many reasons. Here’s why.
Herd immunity through natural infection is unethical because disadvantaged people are most at risk for getting very sick

There are multiple dimensions that put someone at risk for severe Covid-19. It’s not just age. Conditions like diabetes and hypertension exacerbate risk. So do societal factors like poverty, working conditions, and incarceration.

Severe Covid-19 and coronavirus deaths have disproportionately impacted minorities and the less advantaged in the United States. This herd immunity strategy risks either isolating these already marginalized communities even further from society since they may not feel safe in a more relaxed environment. Or even worse: We risk sacrificing their health in the name of building up a level of population immunity sufficient to control the virus.


Harvard epidemiologist Bill Hanage underscores a gross inequality here: Herd immunity achieved through natural infection would come at an undue cost to some of the most vulnerable groups in the country.

“Because of the fact that some groups are more at risk of becoming infected than others — and they are predominantly people from racial [and] ethnic minorities and predominantly poor people with less good housing — we are effectively forcing those people to have a higher risk of infection and bear the brunt of the pandemic,” Hanage says.

I think about my grandmother, who recently died at age 94, of her final years of life in a nursing home, where she spent most of her time confined to her room, due to Covid-19 precautions. “I’m so lonesome here,” she would say when I called. Older people don’t deserve to be written off, isolated further, and forgotten.

Or as the John Snow memorandum (which Hanage signed) states: “Such an approach also risks further exacerbating the socioeconomic inequities and structural discriminations already laid bare by the pandemic.”
Herd immunity through natural infection is also a scientifically bad idea

Typically, the term herd immunity is thought of in the context of vaccination campaigns against contagious viruses like measles. The concept helps public health officials think through the math of how many people in a population need to be vaccinated to prevent outbreaks.

“Never in the history of public health has herd immunity been used as a strategy for responding to an outbreak, let alone a pandemic,” World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus said this week. “It is scientifically and ethically problematic.”


Let’s count the reasons why.

1) Even if we could limit exposure to the people least likely to die of Covid-19, this group still can suffer immense consequences from the infection — like hospitalization, long-term symptoms, organ damage, missed work, and high medical bills. The long-term health consequences of the virus have barely been studied. When we expose younger, healthier people to the virus (on purpose!), we don’t know what the consequence of that will be down the road.

2) We have a lonnnnnngggggg way to go. There’s no one, perfect estimate of what percentage of the US population has already been infected by the virus. But, by all accounts, it’s nowhere near the figures needed for herd immunity to kick in. Overall, a new Lancet study — which drew its data from a sample of dialysis patients — suggests that fewer than 10 percent of people nationwide have been exposed to the virus. No one knows the exact threshold percentage for herd immunity to kick in for a meaningful way to help end the pandemic. But common estimates hover around 60 percent.

So far, there have been more than 200,000 deaths in the United States. There’s so much more potential for death if the virus spreads to true herd immunity levels. “The cost of herd immunity [through natural infection] is extraordinarily high,” Hanage says.

Look at what happened to Manaus, Brazil, an Amazonian city of around 2 million people, which experienced one of the most severe Covid-19 outbreaks in the world.

Researchers now estimate between 44 percent and 66 percent of the city’s population was infected with the virus, which means it’s possible herd immunity has been achieved there. (This research has yet to be peer-reviewed.) But during their epidemic period, there were four times as many deaths as normal for that point in the year.

3) Scientists don’t know how long naturally acquired immunity to the virus lasts or how common reinfections might be. If immunity wanes and reinfections are common, then it will be all the more difficult to build up herd immunity in the country. In the spring, epidemiologists at Harvard sketched out the scenarios. If immunity lasts a couple of years or more, Covid-19 could fade in a few years’ time, per their analysis published in Science (much too long a time to begin with, if you ask me). If immunity wanes within a year, Covid-19 could make fierce annual comebacks until an effective vaccine is widely available.

At the same time, we don’t know how long immunity delivered via a vaccine would last. But, at least a vaccine would come without the cost of increased illnesses, hospitalizations, and long-term complications.

If immunity doesn’t last, “such a [focused prevention] strategy would not end the COVID-19 pandemic but result in recurrent epidemics, as was the case with numerous infectious diseases before the advent of vaccination,” the John Snow Memorandum says.

4) By letting the pandemic rage, we risk overshooting the herd immunity threshold. Once you hit the herd immunity threshold, it doesn’t mean the pandemic is over. After the threshold is reached, “all it means is that, on average, each infection causes less than one ongoing infection,” Hanage says. “That’s of limited use if you’ve already got a million people infected.” If each infection causes, on average, 0.8 new infections, the epidemic will slow. But 0.8 isn’t zero. If a million people are infected at the time herd immunity is reached, per Hanage’s example, those already infected people may infect 800,000 more.

There are a lot of other unknowns here, too. One is the type of immunity conferred by natural infection. “Immunity” is a catchall term that means many different things. It could mean true protection from getting infected with the virus a second time. Or it could mean reinfections are possible but less severe. You could, potentially, get infected a second time, never feel sick at all (thanks to a quick immune response), and still pass on the virus to another person.
Scientists who favor some continued distancing have never argued for endless lockdowns

The mainstream scientific consensus on fighting the pandemic has never been calling for endless lockdowns and an endless choking of our economy.


Rather, health experts have argued that the first thing we need to do is manage community transmission of the virus, and then keep new huge outbreaks from forming with aggressive testing, contact tracing, and interventions like universal masking, better indoor ventilation, and social distancing.

But we never managed to get the virus down to containable levels. (It’s not impossible; other countries like South Korea and Japan have.) So here we are.

The last thing that strikes me as really cynical about the Great Barrington Declaration is it avoids discussing how the government could have done more to help people suffering the downstream economic impacts of the pandemic. Instead of forcing restaurants to choose between their livelihoods and putting their customers and staff at risk, they could have been paid by the government to remain closed. Instead of letting people face the stark psychological insecurity of a missing paycheck, Congress and the White House could have extended unemployment insurance benefits by now (they haven’t).

For so many reasons, the Great Barrington Declaration — like all herd immunity proposals — just feels like giving up, while sacrificing young people’s health and the health of the marginalized. Don’t give up. There’s no easy way out.