With bites rare, experts want sharks to shed scary reputation

Agence France-Presse
March 15, 2024 

SHARK SMILE

Great White Shark (Wikimedia Commons)

As the northern hemisphere edges toward spring and millions flock to the beach, headlines have dubbed the southeastern US state of Florida the world's most likely place to be bitten by a shark.

They're right, but, at the same time, shark bites are exceedingly rare overall -- a fact scientists wish more people knew, especially amid declining shark populations desperately in need of conservation.

"When the sharks in the water are targeting the fishes that they normally feed on, once in a while, people get in the way and the sharks make a mistake," said Gavin Naylor, coauthor of a recent report tallying last year's shark attacks.

According to data he gathered for the University of Florida's International Shark Attack File, Florida was home to a quarter of last year's shark attacks -- a scary statistic, if taken on its own.

And yet that only amounts to 16 unprovoked attacks, out of 69 total worldwide -- and millions of swimmers flocking to Florida's coast each year.

If sharks wanted to attack us, "people are very easy to target. They are a bit like floating sausages," Naylor told AFP.

"So we know that they must be avoiding them."

- Shark attack 'capital' -

Florida's subtropical latitude means many sharks move through the waters of its continental shelf, which are rich in nutrients and therefore in fish to feed them.

And miles of beaches attract huge numbers of tourists to the Sunshine State -- 135 million last year, according to Florida statistics.

Yet despite the long odds of a shark bite, the predators still carry an outsized reputation -- one probably not helped by their rows of razor sharp teeth, or fictional movies about killer sharks like "Jaws" and the decades-long US cable television phenomenon known as "Shark Week."

New Smyrna Beach, located in Volusia County -- home to half of Florida's shark bites last year -- is inauspiciously known as the "shark bite capital of the world."

Surfers often flock to its coast, where the murky waters reduce sharks' visibility, and increase the chance they will bite a human by mistake.

Bites are like an "airplane crash" -- shocking but rare, said New Smyrna Beach resident Bruce Adams, who remembers close encounters with sharks of his own during his surfing days.

"It's sensational, it sells a lot of T-shirts," he told AFP, lamenting the creatures' bad reputations.


- Swimming with sharks -

In fact, most of us have probably been in the water alongside sharks -- we just didn't know it, said report coauthor Joe Miguez.

"They don't really want anything to do with us," he told AFP.

Some humans meanwhile are seeking out sharks.

In Jupiter, some 90 miles (150 kilometers) north of Miami, Jonathan Campbell has done more than 500 dives with a coterie of enthusiasts, all there to swim with sharks.

"You see sharks in movies and they are scary monsters. But in the water, they are actually shy puppy dogs," he said.


In fact, amid crashing shark populations -- there has been a 70 percent worldwide decline since 1970, according to a recent study -- what the world might need is more sharks.

"We should be more focused on conserving these animals than just going out and saying that they're out to get us," said Miguez.

Whale menopause sheds light on human evolutionary mystery

Agence France-Presse
March 13, 2024 

A beluga whale, one of the very few other animals that experience menopause, which remains an evolutionary puzzle

 Olivier MORIN AFP


Why do humans experience menopause? It's a question that some women going through the symptoms might have asked themselves more than once.

Scientists are also baffled. From an evolutionary perspective, animals generally take every chance they can get to have as many offspring as possible to boost their odds of survival.

So why have some species evolved to have menopause, in which females live many years after they stop being able to reproduce?

That there are so few other examples in the animal kingdom only deepens the mystery.

Out of 5,000 mammals, just five species of whales with teeth -- including killer whales, beluga whales and narwhals -- are the only others known to have females that regularly live long after they stop reproducing.

However plenty of other toothed whales, such as dolphins, do not experience menopause.

By looking at the differences between these two groups, a UK-led team of researchers sought to discover why some whales evolved to get menopause -- and what this could tell us about ourselves.

Despite our many differences, humans share a "convergent life history" with these ocean giants that led to the independent evolution of menopause, the researchers concluded in a study published in Nature on Wednesday.

Their results tied together several existing hypotheses. The first piece of the puzzle involving lifespan.

The grandmother hypothesis

Females of the five species that have menopause live roughly 40 years longer than other similar-sized whales, the researchers found.

These female whales also easily outlive males of their own kind.

Female killer whales "regularly live into their 60s and 70s, but the males are all dead by 40," lead study author Samuel Ellis of the UK's University of Exeter told an online press conference.

This supports what is known as the "grandmother hypothesis" -- that older females care for their grandchildren, therefore helping their species survive in a different way.

Female killer whales regularly live into their 60s and 70s, but the males are all dead by 40, the researchers said

 © Olivier MORIN / AFP/File


But why would it be an evolutionary advantage for these grandmothers to stop having offspring?

"The second part of this story is about competition," study co-author Darren Croft said.

When killer whale "mothers and daughters try and breed at the same time, the calves of the older females" have a significantly lower survival rate as they compete for resources, he said.

"So they have evolved a longer lifespan while keeping a short reproductive lifespan," Croft added.

"This is just the same pattern of life history we see in humans."

Though we walk on land and they swim through the ocean, the similarities between human and whale social structures is "absolutely striking", Croft said.

The importance of matriarchy

"Older matriarchs" play an important role within both societies, he said.

For example, the experience older females have gathered over their lives helps the whale families get through hard times such as environmental challenges or a lack of food.

But just having a matriarchal society is not enough. Older female elephants, for example, look after their offspring but keep reproducing until the end of their lives.

Narwhals are technically a toothed whale but they only have one tooth -- a tusk that can be as long as three metres

 © Carsten Egevang / Groenlands Naturinstitut/AFP/File

The key difference could be that older whale mothers keep looking after their sons, Croft said. Young male elephants, however, leave the family group.

Both sons and daughters sticking around could even be a unique trait to the five whales -- and humans -- that get menopause, he speculated.

Rebecca Sear, an evolutionary demographer and anthropologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine not involved in the study, cautioned that this could not "provide definitive answers to the question of why menopause evolved".

Whales are incredibly difficult to study, and a lot of the data used for the research was from unnatural events such as mass strandings, she commented in Nature.

Meanwhile, there has been increasing criticism that menopause in human women remains badly under-researched due to a long-standing male-skewed bias in medical research.

"Human grandmothers, like whale grandmothers, are important in the lives of their adult children and grandchildren, but older women are too often ignored in policy circles and public health research," Sear said.

© 2024 AFP

Whale of a tail: Scientists track unique humpback 'fingerprint'

Agence France-Presse
March 15, 2024 

Humpback whale (Shutterstock)

In Antarctica, a scientist waits patiently for two frolicking humpback whales to poke their tails out of the icy waters so she can take a photographic "fingerprint" of the unique colors and patterns that allow researchers to identify individuals of the species.

Andrea Bonilla, a Colombian scientist at Cornell University in the United States, has been working with a team of researchers since 2014 to catalog humpback whales from a visual analysis of their tails -- or flukes.

"What we are doing is tracking the history of each individual," Bonilla told AFP onboard the ARC Simon Bolivar during a scientific expedition by the Colombian navy.

Over the years, the team has identified 70 whales, and hopes to see some of them again to record any physical changes that could provide clues to their migratory patterns, population sizes, health and sexual maturity.

On the tail, "the coloration and patterns that each whale has is unique, it is like a fingerprint, so what we do is look at the different marks they have, the different scars" to identify an individual, said Bonilla.

Global populations of humpbacks have bounced back after once being decimated by commercial whaling, but the ocean giants remain under threat from vessel strikes, illegal fishing, pollution and underwater noise.

Today there are about 84,000 adult specimens in the world, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

The importance of tail identification was highlighted in a study published last month in the Royal Society Open Science journal which showed the number of humpback whales in the North Pacific had plummeted 20 percent in less than a decade.

Tracking some 33,000 whales through photos of their flukes, scientists noted the steep decline which they speculate was due to starvation because of marine heat waves.

- 'Accumulating energy' -

Photo identification is common in the study of marine mammals, although the use of fluke identification is most used with humpbacks both because of their unique markings, and their habit of raising their tails out of the water while diving.

Different populations of humpback whales live across the world's oceans, carrying out mammoth migrations from warmer breeding spots to feeding grounds in polar waters.


"They take advantage of this great biomass of food that is here (in Antarctica) and for several months they are simply accumulating energy," said Bonilla.

Using photographs, the scientist draws reproductions of the details of the tails of the enormous marine mammals, which can reach up to 18 meters (59 feet) long and weigh about 40 tons.

On a computer, she zooms in on the details of the flukes, which can reveal attacks from other animals, "if there is some type of skin disease" or information about their diet.

The inventory allows scientists to track the movement of specific whales, which is crucial for conservation initiatives.

"If a whale always comes to the same area to reproduce, it is important to protect those areas. If they cease to exist or are disturbed, that whale will have nowhere to go," warned Bonilla.

Darwin's Galapagos island species, protected yet still at risk

Agence France-Presse
March 16, 2024 

A marine iguana, one of the more than 3,000 species found in the Galapagos Marine Reserve

(Ernesto BENAVIDES/AFP)

Industrial fishing boats hover menacingly on the edges of Ecuador's Galapagos Marine Reserve, where schools of multicolored fish and hammerhead sharks frolic in the protected Pacific waters.

The reserve is a haven for the flurry of creatures and plants living in the waters around the Galapagos Islands where naturalist Charles Darwin found the inspiration for his theory of natural selection.

But outside its boundaries, not delineated by any physical barrier, there is no protection on the high seas where these same species also venture.

The sharks, turtles, iguanas, sea lions and fish that thrive in the Galapagos "don't understand political boundaries," Stuart Banks, a senior marine scientist at the Charles Darwin Foundation, told AFP on board Greenpeace's Arctic Sunrise research vessel.

"So they're going to be moving between different territories and that's when they're most at risk, particularly to things like industrial fishing and bycatch."

The solution, according to Greenpeace, is to secure a much larger area of ocean by creating the first-ever marine protected area on the high seas bordering the Galapagos Marine Reserve.

But for this to happen, at least 60 countries must ratify the High Seas Treaty adopted by United Nations member states last June. Only two have done so to date.

- Like a jigsaw puzzle -

AFP accompanied an Arctic Sunrise scientific mission to the area this month to investigate the threats posed to the Galapagos Marine Reserve, which Greenpeace describes as "probably the best conservation project carried out in the oceans."

The reserve of nearly 200,000 square kilometers (some 77,000 square miles) is one of the world's largest and most biodiverse with more than 3,000 species, many of them found nowhere else.

Biologist Paola Sangolqui explained she was testing water samples to analyze "which marine species have been in this area and have left some kind of DNA trace."

For his part, Daniel Armijos was in charge of underwater video monitoring of fish numbers and prevalence.


"It is kind of like putting together a big jigsaw puzzle because everything is integrated in some way," explained Banks.

"And if you're looking to prioritize the most important regions to start working, to know where those corridors are (along which species migrate), you need to use genetics so you can start to look at how particular populations are connected from one region to another."

- Hammerhead haven -

From the Arctic Sunrise, scientists also descended a robot to explore the coral reefs that serve as key feeding and breeding grounds for many fish, said expedition leader Sophie Cooke, for whom "the abundance of marine life in this national park is simply staggering."

Marine reserve employee Eduardo Espinoza, in charge of day-to-day monitoring, told AFP the archipelago is a rare sanctuary for hammerhead sharks, whose fins are a delicacy in some Asian countries.

Hammerheads were at particular risk of "overfishing and illegal fishing," Espinoza said as he fixed an identifying label to a young specimen.


"In the Galapagos, hammerhead sharks are always abundant. They have a refuge here to reproduce, from where they move throughout the Pacific," he added.

- Free species worth more -

Cooke said the Galapagos was an important migratory stop for many species, which is "why we need to connect all these different marine protected areas and protect these reserves: so the migration routes of these species can be kept safe."

The Galapagos Islands are designated a UNESCO Natural World Heritage site.

Another reason to protect the area is its attraction for tens of thousands of visitors every year, like American diver Ryan Doyle, 24.

"In comparison to Florida, where I'd also dive recreationally, there's so much life here," Doyle told AFP. "There's so many sharks and everything looks so healthy. So you can kind of like see the conservation" at work.

Diving instructor Anthony Gavilanes, 30, said locals like himself nowadays "live off tourism" more than fishing, as before.

"For us, species swimming freely in the water are worth more than they are on a plate served at a table."

Study: Dogs don't only make us happy, they also help us concentrate

dpa
2024/03/15

It's no secret that dogs can bring us immense joy. Researchers from Seoul's Konkuk University have now found that interacting with a dog can also reduce stress and improve our ability to concentrate. Christin Klose/dpa

Dogs can make us happy, that's why many of us have one.

But besides being a source of companionship and joy, they can also help to reduce our stress levels and improve our ability to concentrate and be creative, a new study by researchers at Seoul's Konkuk University suggests.

Using electroencephalography (EEG), the researchers monitored the brain activity of 30 healthy adults while engaged in different activities with a dog, namely "meeting, playing, feeding, massaging, grooming, photographing, hugging, and walking."

They found that different types of interactions had different effects on the subjects.

Playing activites, dog massage and grooming resulted in significantly increased beta power spectra in the participants, "indicating improved concentration without stress," the researchers write in the study published in the PLOS One journal.

"Notably, playing with a dog positively affected both relaxation and concentration," they added.

Walking the dog also significantly improved relaxation, according to the alpha power spectra measured.

Meanwhile, feeding, massaging and hugging the animal was found to have an overall "positive effect on participants' moods."

The results show that "specific dog activities could activate stronger relaxation, emotional stability, attention, concentration, and creativity by facilitating increased brain activity," researchers Onyoo Yoo, YuTong Wu, Jin Soo Han and Sin-Ae Park write.

© Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH

GOP fears the 'number of Americans who identify as Republicans has never been lower'

David McAfee
March 16, 2024

The "number of Americans who identify as Republicans has never been lower," and Senate Republicans appear to be sounding alarms.

In an advertisement posted to social media this week, the Senate GOP promoted a survey that includes the question, "Have you left the Republican Party?"

The post also includes a caption under a banner that says "For your eyes only."

ALSO READ: Racism, arrests, extreme MAGA love: Meet Lauren Boebert’s primary opponents

"President Trump's sham trials are underway [and] we need the help of every Patriot possible," the ad says. "The number of Americans who identify as Republicans has never been lower in HISTORY."

The ad from the National Republican Senatorial Committee continues:

"Our Democracy is crumbling, [and] this is dire!" the post also says.

See the ad below.


Screenshot

EU to back Egypt with large loans aimed at curbing migration  REFUGEES AND ASYLUM SEEKERS

2024/03/17

Egypt's President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi (R) receives President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen. Dati Bendo/European Commission/dpa

The European Union is to provide Egypt with financial assistance in the form of loans and subsidies to the amount of €7.4 billion ($8.1 billion) up to the end of 2027, the EU Commission announced in Brussels on Sunday.

The new strategic partnership was announced as European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and other top EU officials were to meet Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sissi in Cairo. The partnership is to include further collaboration on stemming irregular migration, as well as economic and political cooperation.

Of the €7.4 billion, €5 billion will be in the form of loans and €1.8 billion in investment in food security and digitalization. The remaining €600 million will be in the form of subsidies, with €200 of it for managing migration.

Apart from von der Leyen, the EU delegation includes Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo.

Egypt's President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi (R) receives President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen. Dati Bendo/European Commission/dpa

MAGA’s Christian nationalism excludes a vast majority of Christianity

John Stoehr

March 16, 2024

Photo by Gracious Adebayo on Unsplash

You have probably heard a lot of scary things in the news lately about something called “Christian nationalism.” Without going into the weeds about what these people want in terms of policy, it’s important to understand who they are, and who they are is pretty simple: people who believe America was founded as a Christian nation for Christians.

That’s where the simplicity ends, but you might not know that if your understanding of “Christian” comes primarily from politics. In that case, your understanding is that “Christians” are aligned with the Republican Party, support Donald Trump unequivocally and seek to restore America to a kind of pre-Eden era in our history – before science, technology and liberalism triggered a fall from God’s grace.

Of course, there are many other Christianities, seemingly too many to count, and that’s what makes the “Christian nationalist” objective of restoring America to its “Christian roots” more complex than it seems. They say, as the country gets more diverse and more secular, that their faith is increasingly under assault. They say that whatever they do, it’s in the name of religious freedom. It isn’t, though. It’s in the name of religious suppression. That includes suppressing other Christianities.

Recently, I was watching a video clip of Fox host Laura Ingraham interviewing Steven Miller. He’s the architect of a plan, pending Donald Trump’s election, to deport 10 million “illegals.” It requires massive staging areas and as many as 200,000 law enforcement officers. As I watched, it occurred to me that these two people – a Roman Catholic (Ingraham) and a Jew (Miller) – were oblivious to the danger. They seemed to believe the urge to purge America wouldn’t ensnare them.

Most of us seem to understand antisemitism well enough, but few of us seem to understand anti-Catholic hatred among white conservative Protestants, who make up the core of “Christian nationalism.” Most of us don’t understand, because social and political forces, including white solidarity and the anti-abortion movement, have since the 19th century assimilated Catholics to the point where they seem like any other Christian. To the mainstream American, that’s true. White conservative Protestants, however, are not mainstream Americans.

I say this from personal experience. I was born into and raised up in a white conservative Protestant sect whose identity as the true religion worshiping the true God was predicated on not being a false religion worshiping false gods. Jews always got a pass, because they would have a chance to convert after the Apocalypse and Christ’s millennial reign. But Roman Catholic never did. They were idolaters, pagans and heretics, perhaps even unknowing minions of the Antichrist. The Roman Catholic God was not ours. It was something closer to Satan.

Anti-Catholic hatred among white conservative Protestants hasn’t gone away. It’s rooted in one of the greatest theoretical disagreements in human history. It only seems to have gone away, because political interests are at work to make it look that way. In part, they stem from the fact that “Christian nationalism” wouldn’t be as successful as it has been, to the point where it really does pose a threat to democracy, the Constitution and religious freedom, if Roman Catholic participants like Laura Ingraham understood, or stopped denying, how hated they are.

They won’t understand, or won’t stop denying, how much they are hated, because in their minds, they are immune to the outcomes of their own hatred. They can rah rah rah for the restoration of America’s “blood” to a time before its “poisoning” by 10 million migrants. They can rah rah rah safe in the knowledge that their apparent whiteness will protect them. And for a time, they’d be right. But only for a time.

Eventually – if Trump is elected and if 10 million immigrants are deported – the urge to purge wouldn’t stop because it can’t. It is too totalizing. Before that point, “Christian nationalists” said America was founded as a Christian nation for Christians. Afterward, they’d say America was founded as a “real Christian” nation for “real Christians” – a term that would exclude Christians seen after the Reformation by many conservative Protestants as idolaters, pagans and heretics.

We might see happen to Christians what’s currently happening to Republicans, as calls for group purity (namely, calls against the influence of RINOs, Republicans in Name Only) have gutted the GOP organizationally to the point of chaos. The ranks of “real Christians” would shrink, as the ranks of “real Republicans” has been shrinking. Roman Catholics, Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists, Church of Christ, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Unitarians – any Christian insufficiently recognized as “Christian nationalist” would be purged until God’s chosen people are an island surrounded by an ocean of heresy.

The outcome of the presidential election does not depend on making conservative Roman Catholics like Laura Ingraham (or for that matter, conservative Jews like Steven Miller) see the dangers they are in. As Rev. Dan Schulz wrote recently, “Christian nationalists” are a marginal bunch. There’s just not enough of them. Their views are unpopular.

But as long as they won’t understand, or won’t stop denying, how much they are hated, they will continue to give “Christian nationalism” a dangerous credibility that it doesn’t deserve and will only abuse. It claims to speak for all Christians but its vision of America excludes, or has the promise to exclude, a vast majority of Christianities. It might be too late for Laura Ingraham. But other Roman Catholics who cherish their religious freedom should speak for themselves.

Gemini's flawed AI racial images seen as warning of tech titans' power

A Google Gemini AI gaffe when it came to creating images on command spotlighted the challenge of eliminating cultural bias in such tech tools without ridiculous results

2024/03/16

Austin (AFP) - For people at the trend-setting tech festival here, the scandal that erupted after Google's Gemini chatbot cranked out images of Black and Asian Nazi soldiers was seen as a warning about the power artificial intelligence can give tech titans.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai last month slammed as "completely unacceptable" errors by his company's Gemini AI app, after gaffes such as the images of ethnically diverse Nazi troops forced it to temporarily stop users from creating pictures of people.

Social media users mocked and criticized Google for the historically inaccurate images, like those showing a female black US senator from the 1800s -- when the first such senator was not elected until 1992.

"We definitely messed up on the image generation," Google co-founder Sergey Brin said at a recent AI "hackathon," adding that the company should have tested Gemini more thoroughly.

Folks interviewed at the popular South by Southwest arts and tech festival in Austin said the Gemini stumble highlights the inordinate power a handful of companies have over the artificial intelligence platforms that are poised to change the way people live and work.

"Essentially, it was too 'woke,'" said Joshua Weaver, a lawyer and tech entrepreneur, meaning Google had gone overboard in its effort to project inclusion and diversity.

Google quickly corrected its errors, but the underlying problem remains, said Charlie Burgoyne, chief executive of the Valkyrie applied science lab in Texas.

He equated Google's fix of Gemini to putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound.

While Google long had the luxury of having time to refine its products, it is now scrambling in an AI race with Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic and others, Weaver noted, adding, "They are moving faster than they know how to move."

Mistakes made in an effort at cultural sensitivity are flashpoints, particularly given the tense political divisions in the United States, a situation exacerbated by Elon Musk's X platform, the former Twitter.

"People on Twitter are very gleeful to celebrate any embarrassing thing that happens in tech," Weaver said, adding that reaction to the Nazi gaffe was "overblown."

The mishap did, however, call into question the degree of control those using AI tools have over information, he maintained.

In the coming decade, the amount of information -- or misinformation -- created by AI could dwarf that generated by people, meaning those controlling AI safeguards will have huge influence on the world, Weaver said.
Bias-in, Bias-out

Karen Palmer, an award-winning mixed-reality creator with Interactive Films Ltd., said she could imagine a future in which someone gets into a robo-taxi and, "if the AI scans you and thinks that there are any outstanding violations against you... you'll be taken into the local police station," not your intended destination.

AI is trained on mountains of data and can be put to work on a growing range of tasks, from image or audio generation to determining who gets a loan or whether a medical scan detects cancer.

But that data comes from a world rife with cultural bias, disinformation and social inequity -- not to mention online content that can include casual chats between friends or intentionally exaggerated and provocative posts -- and AI models can echo those flaws.

With Gemini, Google engineers tried to rebalance the algorithms to provide results better reflecting human diversity.

The effort backfired.

"It can really be tricky, nuanced and subtle to figure out where bias is and how it's included," said technology lawyer Alex Shahrestani, a managing partner at Promise Legal law firm for tech companies.

Even well-intentioned engineers involved with training AI can't help but bring their own life experience and subconscious bias to the process, he and others believe.

Valkyrie's Burgoyne also castigated big tech for keeping the inner workings of generative AI hidden in "black boxes," so users are unable to detect any hidden biases.

"The capabilities of the outputs have far exceeded our understanding of the methodology," he said.

Experts and activists are calling for more diversity in teams creating AI and related tools, and greater transparency as to how they work -- particularly when algorithms rewrite users' requests to "improve" results.

A challenge is how to appropriately build in perspectives of the world's many and diverse communities, Jason Lewis of the Indigenous Futures Resource Center and related groups said here.

At Indigenous AI, Jason works with farflung indigenous communities to design algorithms that use their data ethically while reflecting their perspectives on the world, something he does not always see in the "arrogance" of big tech leaders.

His own work, he told a group, stands in "such a contrast from Silicon Valley rhetoric, where there's a top-down 'Oh, we're doing this because we're going to benefit all humanity' bullshit, right?"

His audience laughed.

© Agence France-Presse

AZ legislature hosts new COVID hearing full of misinformation

Jerod Macdonald-Evoy, Arizona Mirror
March 17, 2024

Coronavirus illustration. (Shutterstock.com)

For the third time in less than a year, Arizona Republican lawmakers listened intently and offered no pushback during a special hearing at the state Senate that was billed as examining the state’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic but was instead rife with conspiracy theories, misinformation and fear-mongering about vaccines and public health.

In May 2023, the Novel Coronavirus Southwestern Intergovernmental Committee featured testimony from a group of supposed health experts who spread misinformation about vaccines and the pandemic during the committee’s time. Then, in October 2023, the committee met again, bringing some of the same “experts.”

On Friday, the committee once again convened, bringing more of the same people to speak.

The committee had previously faced criticism for its awkward name, which has been promoted in abbreviated form by the QAnon-friendly political nonprofit The America Project. The abbreviated name, NCSWIC, is a commonly used abbreviation in the QAnon world, where it means “Nothing Can Stop What Is Coming,” alluding to predictions of arrests and executions of members of the “Deep State.”

The Republican elected officials on the panel were state Sens. Frank Carroll and Janae Shamp and state Rep. Steve Montenegro, who chairs the state House of Representatives’ Health and Human Services Committee. Sen. T.J. Shope was scheduled to be on the panel but Carroll said he filled in for the senator, who was not able to attend.

Shamp, who was present at the U.S. Capitol for Jan. 6, has spread a multitude of QAnon conspiracy theories online for years, including a post with “NCSWIC” in it.

Montenegro works for the America Project which has promoted QAnon and QAnon influencers.

U.S. Reps. Eli Crane and Paul Gosar were listed on the agenda as being a part of the committee but were nowhere to be seen and did not provide pre-recorded video messages, as they have done in the past two committees.

“As a frontline caregiver who worked in the ICU during the height of the pandemic, I was very disappointed today during the Novel COVID South Western Intergovernmental Committee that there was a palpable lack of celebration or even gratitude for the folks who comforted loved ones and held their hands during a frightening time of uncertainty,” Brandi Giles, a registered nurse and Director of Preventable Diseases for the Arizona Families for Vaccines, said in a statement to the Arizona Mirror.

“These attempts to undermine our health care heroes do a disservice to the people of Arizona, science and public health across the nation,” Giles said.
The Return of Misinformation

Dr. Peter McCoullough yet again boldly proclaimed that the COVID-19 virus came from a lab in Wuhan, China. There is no consensus on the origin of the virus.

“The spike protein was intentionally engineered in a Chinese security lab in Wuhan China,” McCoullough said, adding that the United States worked alongside China and claimed that Dr. Anthony Faucci, who led the federal government’s work to combat COVID-19, was part of it.

McCoullough is known for spreading unfounded claims, especially around the origins of the virus. He previously has stated that he believed the pandemic was “planned” and has promoted the QAnon conspiracy film “Plandemic.”

McCoullough has become a darling to those in both QAnon and the broader conspiracy world, appearing regularly on shows like the one hosted by antisemite Stew Peters, who said the COVID vaccine is a “bioweapon.” Peters also was behind multiple QAnon conspiracy documentaries that made dubious claims about the vaccine, including that it included snake venom.

McCoullough has also appeared on disgraced retired Gen. Michael Flynn’s “Reawaken America” tour, where he has denounced drag shows and gender identity issues.

And McCoullough has spread a false claim that millions of people have been killed by the vaccine. The notion comes from a highly flawed analysis of data claiming that mortality rates were spiking because of the vaccine. He also spread similar claims, such as saying that more than 500,000 people in the United States were killed by the vaccine, an idea based on a misrepresentation of United Kingdom data.

He has also alluded to a conspiracy theory widely adopted by QAnon adherents, which was featured in a discredited film, claiming that blood clots found in people’s bodies were caused by the COVID vaccine.

That film, “ Died Suddenly,” suggests the vaccine is all part of a shadowy plot to depopulate the world. But experts who have examined the film’s claims have said that many of the clots appear to be post-mortem clots. Cases of blood clots caused by the vaccine are “very rare,” according to one study that found only approximately 1,000 cases out of 2 million.

The movie also deceptively featured incidents that occurred before the pandemic in 2020, but presented them as consequences of vaccination.

The panel Friday also featured a presentation by Sedona-based Dr. Robert Apter, who prefaced his presentation with a slide stating that his opinions do not represent those of any organization he is associated with and none of the material presented should be construed as medical advice.

Apter rose to prominence among the anti-vaccination crowd for his use of the drug ivermectin. The drug became popular with conservatives and anti-vaccination advocates as a COVID-19 treatment, which led some people to seek out a version of the drug intended for horses instead of humans and poison control hotlines saw an increase in calls.

Ivermectin, which is primarily used for treating parasitic worms and is not an antiviral drug, has not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration to treat COVID-19. One form of the medication that is approved by the FDA is used for treating people with intestinal diseases and roundworms.

Apter and others claimed that the drug was effective in treating their COVID-19 patients, which they met digitally through the service “MyFreeDoctor.com.” The founder of the website has spread misinformation about COVID-19 and had told conspiracy theorist Alex Jones that the pandemic could be ended with bombings and assassinations.

Apter claimed Friday that India’s adoption of ivermectin led to the country’s reduction in cases, though there have been no conclusive reports connecting ivermectin and a decline in cases in India.

Apter and another panelist, Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, have been engaged in a legal battle with the FDA over statements the agency made about ivermectin during the pandemic. A federal appeals court recently reversed a lower court’s decision that their case could not move forward. Bowden said they are in the discovery phase currently.

Bowden has had her license suspended, resigned from a hospital she worked at and has faced multiple complaints.

Apter also claimed that there is a “worldwide coordinated agenda” that created the virus, vaccine and response.

Speakers also chose to rail against hospitals and pharmacies, claiming that hospitals should not have seen a “single death” during the pandemic and that pharmacies were beholden to “Big Pharma.”

The panel claimed that antiviral drug remdesivir was dangerous and was the cause behind deaths in hospitals. Studies have shown that the drug has increased positive outcomes for patients with long COVID and has helped in early treatment of the virus.

Bowden also spoke about how she filed up to 20 complaints against pharmacists for not prescribing medications such as ivermectin. All the complaints were dismissed.

“I would find other means to, you know, incentivize them to comply,” Bowden said.

Now Bowden runs a non-profit that she said aims to get politicians to pledge to “ban the jab.”

Banning the COVID-19 vaccines and remdesivir were talking points across the panel.

“Do not get a COVID-19 vaccine. And we eventually will come together and we will get it pulled from the market,” Shamp said, also repeating a widely debunked claim that patents were filed for COVID-19 in 2015. Later, Shamp falsely said that inserts for the vaccine were left blank and patients could not get any information on the vaccine.

The committee also heard from Prescott-area Dr. Stephen Hale, who, before speaking, said his employer, the Veterans Administration, were making him read a statement saying the views and opinions are his own and do not reflect the views of the VA.

“There is no reason for anyone at all to get a COVID vaccine,” Hale told the committee, adding that a paper published by The Lancet on the ineffectiveness of hydroxychloroquine at treating the virus was a “hit piece” and “totally bogus.”

McCoullough and others also advocated for a regimen that includes hydroxychloroquine and other drugs that have not been proven to adequately treat COVID. Those who say the protocol is effective often cite a study by McCoullough on its use.

However, later studies featuring much larger sample sizes have concluded that the “protocol” done by McCoullough, as well as hydroxychloroquine, were not effective and had no impact on treating COVID.

Friday’s meeting mostly touched again on claims that were said in the last two committees which have all largely been debunked.

Shamp, who came to Senate leadership with the idea for the committee, said she intends to hold another one later this year.


Arizona Mirror is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com. Follow Arizona Mirror on Facebook and Twitter.

A New Orleans neighborhood confronts the racist legacy of a toxic stretch of highway

Drew Hawkins, Gulf States Newsroom
March 17, 2024

Photo by Emmanuel Appiah on Unsplash

Aside from a few discarded hypodermic needles on the ground, the Hunter’s Field Playground in New Orleans looks almost untouched. It’s been open more than nine years, but the brightly painted red and yellow slides and monkey bars are still sleek and shiny, and the padded rubber tiles feel springy underfoot.



For people who live nearby, it’s no mystery why the equipment is in relatively pristine shape: Children don’t come here to play.

“Because kids are smart,” explained Amy Stelly, an artist and urban designer who lives about a block away on Dumaine Street. “It’s the adults who aren’t. It’s the adults who built the playground under the interstate.

Hunter’s Field is wedged directly beneath the elevated roadbeds of the Claiborne Expressway section of Interstate 10 in the city’s 7th Ward.

There are no sounds of laughter or children playing. The constant cuh-clunk, cuh-clunk of the traffic passing overhead makes it difficult to hold a conversation with someone standing next to you. An average of 115,000 vehicles a day use the overpass, according to a 2012 study.

“I have never seen a child play here,” Stelly said.

Stelly keeps a sharp eye on this area as part of her advocacy work with the Claiborne Avenue Alliance, a group of residents and business owners dedicated to revitalizing the predominantly African American community on either side of the looming expressway.

For as long as she can remember, Stelly has been fighting to dismantle that section of the highway. She’s lived in the neighborhood her entire life and said the noise is oftentimes unbearable. “You can sustain hearing damage,” she said. Now, she’s helping collect new noise and air pollution data to show it needs to be taken down.

The Claiborne Expressway was built in the 1960s, when the construction of interstates and highways was a symbol of progress and economic development in the U.S.

But that supposed progress often came at a great cost for marginalized communities — especially predominantly Black neighborhoods.

When it was built, the “Claiborne Corridor,” as it’s still sometimes known, tore through the heart of Tremé, one of the nation’s oldest Black neighborhoods.

For more than a century before the construction of the expressway, bustling Claiborne Avenue constituted the backbone of economic and cultural life for Black New Orleans. Back then, the oak-lined avenue was home to more than 120 businesses. Today, only a few dozen remain.

What happened to Claiborne Avenue isn’t unique. Federal planners often routed highways directly through low-income minority neighborhoods, dividing communities and polluting the air.

In Montgomery, Alabama, I-85 cut through the city’s only middle-class Black neighborhood and was “designed to displace and punish the organizers of the civil rights movement,” according to Rebecca Retzlaff, a community planning professor at Auburn University. In Nashville, planners intentionally looped I-40 around a white community, and sent it plowing through a prominent Black neighborhood, knocking down hundreds of homes and businesses. Examples like this exist in major cities across the country.

The federal government has started working on ways to confront the damage highway construction continues to do to low-income and minority communities. An initiative established in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act called the Reconnecting Communities Pilot seeks to do just that: reconnect neighborhoods and communities that were divided by infrastructure.

But there’s wide disagreement on the best way to do that, and some strategies are likely to do little to limit the health effects of living near these highways. What’s unfolding in New Orleans shows how challenging it is to pick and fund projects that will help.

Competing Visions for the Claiborne Expressway

Stelly’s group, the Claiborne Avenue Alliance, submitted a proposal for Reconnecting Communities Pilot money. It wanted $1.6 million in federal funds primarily for public engagement, data collection, and feasibility planning to work to assess whether it would be possible to remove the expressway altogether, with a plan to raise $400,000 more to cover costs.

And it seemed possible its grant proposal would succeed, since even the White House cited the Claiborne Expressway as a textbook example of the biased planning history in a published statement about the Reconnecting Communities Pilot. Ultimately, though, the federal Department of Transportation, the agency charged with allocating the program’s money, denied the Claiborne Avenue Alliance’s grant request.

Instead, the Department of Transportation offered a small fraction of the money requested in a competing joint proposal made by the city of New Orleans and the state of Louisiana. That plan called for a $47 million grant from Reconnecting Communities to do overpass improvements, remove some on- and off-ramps, and, most significantly, create the “Claiborne Innovation District” to promote public life and cultural activities under the highway. DOT granted just $500,000 for the project.

Stelly said she likes a few aspects of the city-state proposal, notably the plan to remove on- and off-ramps to improve pedestrian safety beneath the expressway and other public safety projects, like better lighting and dedicated pedestrian and bicycle lanes.

But, notably, Stelly called the idea of creating an entertainment space and market beneath the highway misguided and ridiculous. Would it be a waste of scarce government funds?

“It’s a foolish idea because you’re going to be exposed to the same thing” as the neglected playground, Stelly said. “You’re going to be exposed to the same levels of noise. It’s not a wise decision to build anything under here.”

Using Science to Inform Policy

Since her group’s proposal was denied, Stelly and her organization are turning to a new strategy: helping with a new study funded by the Environmental Protection Agency on the expressway’s health impacts. They hope the data will support them in their efforts to remove the highway from their neighborhood.

In addition to noise impacts, the EPA-funded study is looking at the health impacts of pollution under the Claiborne Expressway — especially harmful pollutants like particulate matter 2.5, or PM 2.5.

These microscopic particles, measuring 2.5 microns or less in diameter, are released from the tailpipes of passing vehicles, said Adrienne Katner, an associate professor at the Louisiana State University School of Public Health, who is the principal investigator on the EPA study. They’re so small that, when inhaled, they lodge deep in the lungs. From there, they can migrate to the circulatory system, and then spread and potentially affect every system in the body.

“So the heart, the brain,” said Katner. “If a woman is pregnant, it can cross the placental barrier. So it has a lot of impacts.”

Katner and her team of researchers are beginning the study by taking preliminary readings with monitors at different points along the expressway. Completing the research and publishing the data will likely take two to three years.

One of Katner’s monitoring sites is Hunter’s Field Playground. Graduate researcher Jacquelynn Mornay said the noise levels registered there could cause permanent hearing damage after an hour or so of exposure. The pollution levels recorded hover around 18 micrograms per cubic meter.

“It should be at most — at most — 12,” said Beatrice Duah, another graduate student researcher. “So it is way over the limits.”

Residents and workers occupying the homes and businesses lining the area under the expressway are exposed daily to these levels of noise and pollution. When complete, this EPA study will join a decades-long body of research about how traffic pollution affects the human body.

“We’re not inventing the science here,” Katner said. “All I’m doing is showing them what we already know and then documenting it, giving them the data to then inform and influence policy. That’s all I can do.”

‘Removal Is the Only Cure’

Eventually, the study’s findings could help other communities divided by infrastructure across the country, Katner said.

“A lot of cities are going through this right now and they’re looking back at their highway systems,” she said. “They’re looking back at the impacts that it’s had on a community and they’re trying to figure out what to do next. I’m hoping that this project will inform them.”

Amy Stelly said she’s always known the air she and her neighbors breathe isn’t safe, but she’s hopeful that having concrete data to support her efforts will do more to persuade policymakers to address the problem. That could mean taking down the dangerous on- and off-ramps — or scrapping what she considers to be the wasteful plan of putting a market and event space under the highway overpass.

Stelly sees only one true solution to the problems posed by the Claiborne Expressway, only one way to really right the wrongs done to her community.

“Removal is the only cure,” Stelly said. “I’m insisting on it because I’m a resident of the neighborhood and I live with this every day.” And, she said, “the science tells us there’s no other way.”

This article is from a partnership that includes WWNO, NPR, and KFF Health News.

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. 

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Tax the rich and end Republican welfare for the wealthy

Sabrina Haake
March 17, 2024 

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (center) arrives at the 2021 Met Gala in New York City wearing a dress reading "TAX THE RICH." (Photo by James Devaney/GC Images)

Over the past 50 years, before the GOP went all in on fascism and isolationism, the most dramatic difference between Democrats and Republicans lurked in the driest of places: tax policies.

Democrats essentially wanted to tax the rich to help the middle class and working poor, while Republicans argued that helping the rich would lift all ships and eventually help everyone.

Trickle-down economists gave the GOP political cover for decades, providing Republican Presidents Reagan, Bush and Trump the plausible justification they needed to pass massive tax cuts for their donor class. Conservative economists-for-hire claimed that gifts to wealthy individuals and corporations would drive economic investment. Tax breaks for top-bracket earners, they argued, would result in the creation of more jobs, higher average wages, and an overall upturn in national economic indicators.

But decades of Republicans’ welfare-for-the-wealthy have finally delivered enough data to put trickle-down where it belongs: in the political scam column.

And Democrats need to fiercely own that fact during their campaigns for Congress and the White House.

Research debunks trickle-down as a scam

Economic indicators reveal that helping the rich helps only the rich.

As National Economic Council Director Lael Brainard told the Economic Club of New York last year, although tax cuts for the wealthy added trillions to the national debt, the cuts didn’t deliver measurable gains in jobs, they didn’t cause an increase in wages earned by the average worker and they didn’t — despite a promise of more “capital to build factories, to buy equipment, and hire more people” — lead to any increase in investment whatsoever.

ALSO READ: Is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s ‘Squad’ dying?

Instead of delivering these — or any — economic benefits to the middle and lower classes, tax gifts to the rich caused economic inequality to increase, as many communities suffered from stagnated investments in infrastructure and sustained disinvestment.

For the first four years following Trump's 2018 corporate tax cuts, the largest corporations spent their savings to enrich themselves and their shareholders through stock buybacks. Instead of investing the money in plants, employees or equipment to increase production, they spent the tax windfall on themselves.

Reduced tax income from the top, which increased the national debt, also led to higher interest rates overall, increasing the costs of day to day necessities. In result, while top earners retained even more disposable earnings, income for other Americans failed to keep pace with rising costs of living.

A con job

The U.S. economy is not alone in debunking the GOP’s trickle-down con job.

A joint paper by the London School of Economics and King’s College of London tracked data from 18 developed countries over a 50-year period. Researchers compared economic data from countries that passed tax cuts for the rich in a specific year with countries that did not pass tax cuts for the rich that same year, between 1965 to 2015.

The conclusion? “Per capita gross domestic product and unemployment rates were nearly identical after five years in countries that slashed taxes on the rich and in those that didn’t.”

ALSO READ: Two Trump legal lifelines are tilting Election 2024 in Donald's favor

Forbes reported the same thing about Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy. Noting that “Trump tax cuts helped billionaires pay less taxes than the working class in 2018,” Forbes reported that for “the first time in American history, the 400 wealthiest people paid a lower tax rate than any other group,” citing economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman’s book, The Triumph Of Injustice: How the rich dodge taxes and how to make them pay.

In 2022, after President Joe Biden had been in office for nearly two years, income inequality finally declined for the first time since 2007. But the disparity remains striking: 10 percent of households in 2022 had income above $216,000 (a 5.5 percent reduction from the 2021 estimate of $228,600), while 10 percent of households had income at or below $17,100.

Biden’s budget vs. Trump’s tax giveaway to the rich

Seeking to reduce such aggressive imbalances, which lead to other costs which increase other taxes, the Biden administration last week released its proposed budget for the upcoming fiscal year.

Biden’s plan requires wealthy and high earners to contribute more in taxes (cue the massive dark money contributions to Trump), while keeping Biden’s promise not to raise taxes on anyone who makes less than $400,000 a year.

Biden’s proposed budget also reigns in national debt after Republicans added an unprecedented $8 trillion to the nation’s debt under Trump. In 2017, Republicans reduced the top corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, gifting corporations — strong political donors — with a 40 percent reduction in their tax burden, largesse that did not trickle down.


President Joe Biden talks about his proposed FY2024 federal budget during an event at the Finishing Trades Institute on March 9, 2023, in Philadelphia. 

(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

As former Republican Rep. David Jolly of Florida observed, a quarter of the nation’s total debt was incurred under Trump alone: “Roughly 25 percent of our total national debt incurred over the last 230 years actually occurred during the four years of the Trump administration.”

Following Trump’s colossal $2.3 trillion tax giveaway to corporations and the nation’s wealthy, Trump reminded his rich donor friends, “You all just got a lot richer.”


Did they ever.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office calculated that, over the next 11 years, Republicans’ 2017 tax cuts would increase the national debt by another $1.9 trillion. As Trump so sagaciously observed, “This is the United States government … you never have to default because you print the money.”
Biden’s proposed budget

Fast forward to when there’s an adult in the room.

Under Biden’s plan, wealthy individuals and corporations would pay more in taxes — partially rescinding Trump’s gifts to the rich — which would pay for tax credits to the working poor and middle class. Economists project that Biden’s plan will cut $3.3 trillion from the deficit over 10 years as it lifts families with children out of poverty and cuts annual taxes by an average of $2,600 for low to middle income families.

According to Biden’s fact sheet, the plan would also close the windfall for high wage earners who stop paying Social Security payroll taxes after they’ve earned $168,000 in income, which, for the highest earners, happens in the month of January alone, leaving the rest of their annual earnings free of Social Security taxes.

Biden’s proposed budget would also help young people become first-time home buyers after the Supreme Court overturned Biden’s student debt forgiveness that would have benefitted the same group. It calls for an annual $5,000 tax credit a year for two years, effectively reducing the mortgage rate by more than 1.5 percentage points for those two years. Biden’s plan also encourages people to move out of starter homes and put them on the market, and commits to build and preserve 2 million homes.

Biden also tackles rising rents by subsidizing new construction and renovation and seeks to “curb unfair and illegal pricing across the economy” to “combat egregious rent increases and other practices driving up rents.” David Dworkin, president and chief executive officer of the National Housing Conference, told the Washington Post that Biden’s plan, as revealed in his State of the Union address, was “the most consequential set of housing recommendations in a State of a Union in over 50 years...”
Democrats need to recognize Biden’s seeds of success

When they review Biden’s proposed budget, Republicans will howl about redistributive wealth and pennies to welfare recipients, without acknowledging their $2 trillion tax giveaway to their uber-wealthy donors.

Democrats — during this election year when the White House, U.S. House and U.S. Senate are all in play— should counter the gaslighting with economic fact.

Bidenomics are working, but lasting effects will take time. When compared to other G7 industrial economies post-COVID, the U.S. economy recovered faster and with lower inflation — a credit to both the Federal Reserve and the Biden administration’s investment in key industries. In less than a year, the Inflation Reduction Act prompted massive investment in a manufacturing and transportation buildout across the states.

As Biden predicted, private investment and hiring did, indeed, follow public investment. This stands in stark contrast to the previous administration’s gifts to the rich. The U.S. Treasury department reported that more than 10½ million businesses started up in 2021 and 2022, leading to the creation of 3 million new jobs, as a direct result of federal investments under the pandemic-era American Rescue Plan.

Since Biden took office, companies have announced over $500 billion in investments in the United States, including over $200 billion in semiconductor and electronics manufacturing and nearly $225 billion in clean energy, electric vehicle, and battery investments. Overall, according to the U.S. Treasury Department, spending on manufacturing construction has nearly doubled since the end of 2021.

Although Biden’s budget faces significant pushback from donor-protective Republicans, years of disinvestment from the GOP’s trickle down scam are finally over. Manufacturing trends are demonstrably, undeniably and remarkably moving up.

Democrats can do themselves- and the nation- a favor by owning this success and selling it to a public that sometimes forgets, even as they begin to reap the benefits.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. Follow her on Substack.

Spanish farmers stage fresh protests in Madrid

Madrid (AFP) – Hundreds of farmers paraded through the Spanish capital on foot and by tractor on Sunday in the latest protest over the crisis facing the agricultural sector.

Issued on: 17/03/2024

Protesting farmers drive tractors through central Madrid 

© PIERRE-PHILIPPE MARCOU / AFP

The farmers marched from the Ministry of Ecological Transition to the Ministry of Agriculture after the European Union proposed legislative changes to drastically ease the environmental rules of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) Friday.

Rallied by their trade union, farmers carried banners proclaiming "We are not delinquents" to the sound of horns and whistles. One decorated his tractor with a mock guillotine.

"It is as if they want to cut off our necks," said Marcos Baldominos explaining his guillotine.

"We are being suffocated by European rules," the farmer from Pozo de Guadalajara, 50 kilometres (30 miles) east of Madrid, added.

Friday's concessions in Brussels aimed to loosen compliance with some environment rules, EU chief Ursula von der Leyen said.

While the move was welcomed by Spain’s left-wing government, some environmental NGOs criticised the measures.

"We are faced with a pile of bureaucratic rules that make us feel more like we are at an office than on a farm," the trade union behind Sunday’s march, Union de Uniones, said with reference to requirements "that many small and medium-sized farms" cannot "cope with".

Sunday marked the fourth demonstration in Madrid since the start of the wider European farm protest movement in mid-January.

© 2024 AFP

OPINION: Western Values Are Not Just Western, They Are Universal

Many of the Western ideals autocrats claim to reject are universal. Not only are the critics unable to offer an alternative, but they even go so far as to imitate the West.

By Charles Cockell
March 17, 2024, 

Protesters hold a Ukrainian flag and a placard during a demonstration in support of Ukraine, during a Foreign Affairs Council meeting at the EU headquarters in Brussels on January 23, 2023.

 John THYS / AFP

In this day and age, people feel reticent about saying that some Western values are universal. Very reasonably, it brings back unpleasant memories of missionaries and other Westerners traveling the world to enlighten the local savages in our civilized ways.

However, there are aspects of the Western world, and the values for which Ukraine fights, that I argue are universal.

For a start, despite the repudiation of the West and the criticism of our apparently untraditional values, it is an irony that Russia commits much effort to convincing its people that it adheres to one of the central precepts of modern Western civilization – an accountable executive branch of government determined by elections.

Indeed, Russia aside, it is a telling characteristic of many present-day autocracies that they clothe themselves in the garb of Western-style presidential elections. This is an explicit and unambiguous recognition that people want to choose who their leaders are, even when it is blindingly obvious that only one candidate is on offer.
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In the old days, dictatorships didn’t bother with that façade. I am your Emperor, get used to it. Then Western society came along, embraced the democratic ideas of ancient Greece and Rome, and some others besides, and built governments whose executive branch could be dismissed by the will of the people.

If you can’t criticize the structure of your democracy, it’s unlikely you have a functioning democracy at all

In the modern relatively educated world, there are very few people who will look you in the eye and tell you that they prefer to be ruled by a despot with unlimited power and who is never beholden to their authority being withdrawn. Democracy is accepted so ubiquitously that even modern dictatorships realize they must pretend to be doing it. In so doing, they negate themselves, but that doesn’t stop them from putting on the spectacle anyway.

OTHER TOPICS OF INTEREST
Accepting New Realities at Home and Abroad

Ukraine in the conditions of a protracted war and changes in the approaches of the US.

Beyond democratic principles, the ideas of freedom of conscience, speech, and religion, I would be bold enough to say, are universal. Of course, the extent to which they are implemented, where we draw the line in those freedoms, and what we even mean by them, is always something to debate. Yet most people agree that constructing an environment where we can argue about these issues makes for a better society. To put it simply, one of the most fundamental freedoms is the freedom to disagree on what we mean by freedom.

The reason why this is an ironclad concept is that society cannot advance unless we are willing to engage in discussion about its purposes and goals. We cannot open the field to improvements in social conditions unless we are keen to hear out people’s ideas. This is neither controversial nor an especially complicated thought.

In the legislative sphere, there are broad propositions that seem to meet a criterion of being universally agreed upon by reasonable people. One of them is that people who transgress the laws laid down by the democratically elected powers, which I have already mentioned, should receive humane treatment.

I can’t speak for others but let me say that not at a single time in my life has anyone said to me: “If I was to be arrested by the police, I’d like to be tortured and treated as a political prisoner.” It seems to me trivially the case that all members of the public, if they find themselves under the glare of society’s disapprobation, would at least like to be handled fairly.

Western society’s legal systems are hardly utopian, but in a general sense, our societies do make a conscious effort to strive towards impartiality. Any law student in a Western university, if they are worthy of their institution, considers the purpose of their education to be to learn how to become an impartial lawyer and to advance improvements in that tradition.

Indeed, I don’t think it would be hubris to say that the construction of such a legal system, assembled from the juridical branch of government, law courts, university training in law, and so forth, is one of the most stupendous achievements and intellectual edifices of Western civilization.

We have the Romans to thank for a lot of inspiration, but let’s not be demure about our own hard work to bring into being a system that, with all its imperfections, we should cherish and defend. Its ambitions in legal decency are as admirable as they are fundamentally universal.

Yet another tradition of the West is allowing the introspective criticism of the political and economic order. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov recently gave a speech in which he said: “We will no longer tolerate criticism of our democracy. Our democracy is the best.”

However, one feature of democracy, and one of its purposes, is to question itself and to discover whether it is indeed the best.

If you can’t criticize the structure of your democracy, it’s unlikely you have a functioning democracy at all, let alone discover impartially whether it is the best.

If you want proof of the universal reach of Western ideas, the evidence is in autocratic states that reject Western society, yet at the same time do their best to offer their people a mirage of Western-style democracy.

Western society isn’t a liberal, flower-festooned paradise. But largely, we do try to encourage critique; and it is noteworthy that this ability to self-criticize was one factor that led to the abolition of systematic slavery, a curse that blighted all human societies. Western society, in its imperfect and haphazard manner, does at least create educational institutions that allow for self-deprecation of its own systems of power.

I suggest that the foundations of Western society and the girders that hold it up are not especially Western. They have been designated as “Western” only because they have been trenchantly, and quite robustly, built here. But there is nothing intrinsically Western about them.

Seen at the larger geopolitical level, a belief in these things is what unites the democratic world, politically and militarily. When asking: “What is common to Western societies?” the answer is not: “We dislike this or that country.” It is that we place a high value on the ideas that I have suggested and we wish to defend them, without reference to other countries. We feel moved to help other countries aspiring to these ideals.

However, ask the same question of the alliance of the world’s current autocracies. If the answer is: “We oppose Western values,” then this is a non-answer. You must say what it is that you stand for, not what you are against. Other answers, like “We believe in a multipolar world” are equally nebulous.

These are veiled statements of opposition to the West rather than any manifesto for a better society with clear goals and unambiguous and honest arguments about the freedoms on offer.

I think the West should be less reticent about stating a view that many of the things we stand for are universal, not Western. This isn’t presumptuous. It’s the product of many centuries of trial and error and the result of much sacrifice and fighting to secure liberties and the dignity of the individual. We have sought to throw off the old habits of absolute rule and build open societies.

If you want some proof of the universal reach of so-called Western ideas, don’t look to Western society. The evidence is in autocratic states that reject Western society, yet at the same time do their best to offer their people a mirage, a palimpsest, of Western-style democracy.

The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.

Charles Cockell is Professor of Astrobiology at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.