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Exercising muscle combats chronic inflammation on its own
Duke University School of Nursing, January 23, 2021
Biomedical engineers at Duke University have demonstrated that human muscle has an innate ability to ward off the damaging effects of chronic inflammation when exercised. The discovery was made possible through the use of lab-grown, engineered human muscle, demonstrating the potential power of the first-of-its-kind platform in such research endeavors.
The results appear online on January 22 in the journal Science Advances.
“Lots of processes are taking place throughout the human body during exercise, and it is difficult to tease apart which systems and cells are doing what inside an active person,” said Nenad Bursac, professor of biomedical engineering at Duke. “Our engineered muscle platform is modular, meaning we can mix and match various types of cells and tissue components if we want to. But in this case, we discovered that the muscle cells were capable of taking anti-inflammatory actions all on their own.”
Inflammation is not inherently good or bad. When the body is injured, an initial low-level inflammation response clears away debris and helps tissue rebuild. Other times, the immune system overreacts and creates an inflammatory response that causes damage, like the often deadly cytokine storms brought on by some cases of COVID-19. And then, there are diseases that lead to chronic inflammation, such as rheumatoid arthritis and sarcopenia, which can cause muscle to waste away and weaken its ability to contract.
Among many molecules that can cause inflammation, one pro-inflammatory molecule in particular, interferon gamma, has been associated with various types of muscle wasting and dysfunction. While previous research in humans and animals has shown that exercise can help mitigate the effects of inflammation in general, it has been difficult to distinguish what role the muscle cells themselves might play, let alone how they interact with specific offending molecules, such as interferon gamma.
“We know that chronic inflammatory diseases induce muscle atrophy, but we wanted to see if the same thing would happen to our engineered human muscles grown in a Petri dish,” said Zhaowei Chen, a postdoctoral researcher in Bursac’s laboratory and first author of the paper. “Not only did we confirm that interferon gamma primarily works through a specific signaling pathway, we showed that exercising muscle cells can directly counter this pro-inflammatory signaling independent of the presence of other cell types or tissues.”
To prove that muscle alone is capable of blocking interferon gamma’s destructive powers, Bursac and Chen turned to an engineered muscle platform that the laboratory has been developing for nearly a decade. They were first to grow contracting, functional human skeletal muscle in a Petri dish, and since then the lab has been improving its processes by, for example, adding immune cells and reservoirs of stem cells to the recipe.
In the current study, the researchers took these fully functional, lab-grown muscles and inundated them with relatively high levels of interferon gamma for seven days to mimic the effects of a long-lasting chronic inflammation. As expected, the muscle got smaller and lost much of its strength.
The researchers then applied interferon gamma again, but this time also put the muscle through a simulated exercise regime by stimulating it with a pair of electrodes. While they expected the procedure to induce some muscle growth, as shown in their previous studies, they were surprised to discover that it almost completely prevented the effects of the chronic inflammation. They then showed that simulated exercise inhibited a specific molecular pathway in muscle cells, and that two drugs used to treat rheumatoid arthritis, tofacitinib and baricitinib, which block the same pathway, had the same anti-inflammatory effect.
“When exercising, the muscle cells themselves were directly opposing the pro-inflammatory signal induced by interferon gamma, which we did not expect to happen,” said Bursac. “These results show just how valuable lab-grown human muscles might be in discovering new mechanisms of disease and potential treatments. There are notions out there that optimal levels and regimes of exercise could fight chronic inflammation while not overstressing the cells. Maybe with our engineered muscle, we can help find out if such notions are true.”
Juicing technique could influence healthfulness of fresh-squeezed juice
American Chemical Society, January 27, 2021
With the New Year, many people are making resolutions to eat healthier, by eating more vegetables, for example. But those who don’t like the taste or texture of some vegetables might prefer to drink them in a home-squeezed juice. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Food Science & Technology have found that the choice of household juicing technique can influence the phytochemical content and antioxidant activity of common vegetable juices.
Home juicing machines have become popular in recent years, with different types available. For example, blenders crush vegetables with fast, spinning blades, and the resulting juice is typically thick, with much pulp and dietary fiber. In contrast, high-speed centrifugal juicers quickly pulverize veggies and separate out pulp and fiber, making for a thinner juice. Low-speed juice extractors squeeze juice with a horizontal auger that rotates vegetables at a low speed, producing the least heat of the three methods and also removing pulp and fiber. Juicing can alter the levels of health-promoting phytochemicals and antioxidants in raw vegetables by exposing inner tissues to oxygen, light and heat and releasing enzymes. Therefore, Junyi Wang, Guddadarangavvanahally Jayaprakasha and Bhimanagouda Patil at Texas A&M University wanted to compare the phytochemical and antioxidant contents of 19 vegetables juiced with these three techniques.
After preparing juices with the different methods, the researchers observed that, in general, blending produced juices with the lowest amounts of some beneficial compounds, such as vitamin C, antioxidants and phenolics, probably because the technique produced the most heat. Low-speed juicing generated the highest amounts of beneficial compounds, although exceptions were found for certain vegetables. However, likely because of their higher fiber content, blended vegetable juices had the highest amounts of α-amylase inhibitors, which could help reduce hyperglycemia after a meal. The researchers then used mass spectrometry and chemometrics to identify and quantify 85 metabolites in juices prepared by the three methods, finding that the low-speed juicer produced more diverse metabolites than the other two methods, but the relative abundances for the three juicing methods differed based on the veggie type. Therefore, different vegetables and juicing methods could produce unique health benefits, the researchers say.
Stiffening of cancer cell membranes is key biophysical mechanism of cancer prevention by green tea polyphenols
Saitama University (Japan), January 25, 2021
According to news reporting originating from Saitama, Japan, research stated, “Over the past 30 years, research of green tea polyphenols, especially (-)-epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG), has revealed that consumption of green tea is a practical and effective primary cancer prevention method for the general population. More recently, we believe that green tea polyphenols are beneficial for tertiary cancer prevention using green tea alone or combined with anticancer drugs because EGCG has the potential to inhibit metastatic progression and stemness, and enhance antitumor immunity.”
Our news editors obtained a quote from the research from Saitama University, “In an effort to identify a common underlying mechanism responsible for EGCG’s multifunctional effects on various molecular targets, we studied the biophysical effects of EGCG on cell stiffness using atomic force microscopy. We found that EGCG acts to stiffen the membranes of cancer cells, leading to inhibition of signaling pathways of various receptors. Stiffening of membranes with EGCG inhibited AXL receptor tyrosine kinase, a stimulator of cell softening, motility and stemness, and expression of programmed cell death-ligand 1. This review covers the following: i) primary cancer prevention using EGCG or green tea, ii) tertiary cancer prevention by combining EGCG and anticancer drugs, iii) inhibition of metastasis with EGCG by stiffening the cell membrane, iv) inhibition of AXL receptor tyrosine kinase, a stimulator of cell softening and motility, with EGCG, v) inhibition of stemness properties with EGCG, and vi) EGCG as an alternative chemical immune checkpoint inhibitor.”
According to the news editors, the research concluded: “Development of new drugs that enhance stiffening of cancer cell membranes may be an effective strategy for tertiary cancer prevention and treatment.”
This research has been peer-reviewed.
Low vitamin D levels associated with allergic disease in children
Military Institute of Medicine (Poland), January 26, 2021
According to news originating from Warsaw, Poland, research stated, “Vitamin D, in addition to its superior role as a factor regulating calcium-phosphate metabolism, shows wide effects in other processes in the human body, including key functions of the immune system.”
The news reporters obtained a quote from the research from Military Institute of Medicine: “This is due to the presence of vitamin D receptors in most cells of the human body. In our study, we aimed to assess whether there is a correlation between vitamin D content and the clinical course of allergic diseases as well as establish their immunological parameters in children. We found that vitamin D deficiency was significantly more frequent in the group of children with an allergic disease than in the control group (* * p* * = 0.007). Statistically significant higher vitamin D concentrations in blood were observed in the group of children with a mild course of the disease compared to children with a severe clinical course (* * p* * = 0.03). In the group of children with vitamin D deficiency, statistically significant lower percentages of NKT lymphocytes and T-regulatory lymphocytes were detected compared to the group of children without deficiency (respectively, * * p* * = 0.02 and * * p* * = 0.05), which highlights a potential weakness of the immune system in these patients. Furthermore, statistically higher levels of interleukin-22 were observed in the group of children with vitamin D deficiency (* * p* * = 0.01), suggesting a proinflammatory alert state.”
According to the news editors, the research concluded: “In conclusion, these results confirm the positive relationship between the optimal content of vitamin D and the lesser severity of allergic diseases in children, establishing weak points in the immune system caused by vitamin D deficiency in children.”
Afternoon napping linked to better mental agility
Associated with better locational awareness, verbal fluency, and working memory
Journal of General Psychiatry, January 25, 2021
Taking a regular afternoon nap may be linked to better mental agility, suggests research published in the online journal General Psychiatry.
It seems to be associated with better locational awareness, verbal fluency, and working memory, the findings indicate.
Longer life expectancy and the associated neurodegenerative changes that accompany it, raise the prospect of dementia, with around 1 in 10 people over the age of 65 affected in the developed world.
As people age, their sleep patterns change, with afternoon naps becoming more frequent. But research published to date hasn’t reached any consensus on whether afternoon naps might help to stave off cognitive decline and dementia in older people or whether they might be a symptom of dementia.
The researchers explored this further in 2214 ostensibly healthy people aged at least 60 and resident in several large cities around China, including Beijing, Shanghai, and Xian.
In all, 1534 took a regular afternoon nap, while 680 didn’t. All participants underwent a series of health checks and cognitive assessments, including the Mini Mental State Exam (MMSE) to check for dementia.
The average length of night time sleep was around 6.5 hours in both groups.
Afternoon naps were defined as periods of at least five consecutive minutes of sleep, but no more than 2 hours, and taken after lunch. Participants were asked how often they napped during the week; this ranged from once a week to every day.
The dementia screening tests included 30 items that measured several aspects of cognitive ability, and higher function, including visuo-spatial skills, working memory, attention span, problem solving, locational awareness and verbal fluency.
The MMSE cognitive performance scores were significantly higher among the nappers than they were among those who didn’t nap. And there were significant differences in locational awareness, verbal fluency, and memory.
This is an observational study, and so can’t establish cause. And there was no information on the duration or timing of the naps taken, which may be important.
But there are some possible explanations for the observations found, say the researchers.
One theory is that inflammation is a mediator between mid-day naps and poor health outcomes; inflammatory chemicals have an important role in sleep disorders, note the researchers.
Sleep regulates the body’s immune response and napping is thought to be an evolved response to inflammation; people with higher levels of inflammation also nap more often, explain the researchers.
Melatonin in the lungs prevents infection by novel coronavirus
The hormone acts as a barrier against SARS-CoV-2, blocking the expression of genes that encode proteins in cells serving as viral entry points, according to a study by researchers at the University of São Paulo
University of São Paulo (Brazil), January 26, 2021
Melatonin synthesized in the lungs acts as a barrier against SARS-CoV-2, preventing expression of genes that encode proteins in cells such as resident macrophages in the nose and pulmonary alveoli, and epithelial cells lining the alveoli, all of which are entry points for the virus. The hormone, therefore, prevents infection of these cells by the virus and inhibits the immune response so that the virus remains in the respiratory tract for a few days, eventually leaving to find another host.
The discovery by researchers at the University of São Paulo (USP), in Brazil, helps understand why some people are not infected or do not manifest symptoms of COVID-19 even when reliably diagnosed as carriers of the virus by RT-PCR. In addition, it offers the prospect of nasal administration of melatonin, in drops or as a spray, to prevent disease from developing in pre-symptomatic patients.
Pre-clinical and clinical trials will be needed to prove the therapeutic efficacy of melatonin against the virus, the researchers stress in an article on the study published in the journal Melatonin Research.
The study was supported by FAPESP.
“We showed that melatonin produced in the lung acts as a barrier against SARS-CoV-2, preventing the virus from entering the epithelium, activating the immune system and triggering the production of antibodies,” Regina Pekelmann Markus, a professor at USP’s Institute of Biosciences (IB) and principal investigator for the project, told Agência FAPESP.
“This action mechanism by pulmonary melatonin must also involve other respiratory viruses such as influenza,” she added.
Markus began researching melatonin in the 1990s. In a study involving rodents, she showed that the hormone, produced at night by the pineal gland in the brain to tell the organism daylight has gone and it should prepare for sleep, can be produced in other organs, such as the lungs.
In a study also involving rodents, published in early 2020 in the Journal of Pineal Research, Markus and collaborators showed that resident macrophages in the pulmonary airspace absorb (phagocytize) particles of pollution. This aggressive stimulus induced the production of melatonin and other molecules by the macrophages, engulfing the particulate matter in the air breathed in by the animals and stimulating mucous formation, coughing, and expectoration to expel the particles from the respiratory tract.
When they blocked melatonin synthesis by resident macrophages, the researchers observed that the particles entered the bloodstream and spread throughout the organism, even invading the brain.
Based on the finding that melatonin produced in the lungs altered the entry points for particulate matter from air pollution, Markus and collaborators decided to investigate whether the hormone performed the same function with regard to SARS-CoV-2. “If so, the virus wouldn’t be able to bind to the ACE-2 receptor on cells, enter the epithelium and infect the organism,” Markus said.
Analysis of gene expression
To test this hypothesis, the researchers analyzed 455 genes associated in the literature with COVID-19 comorbidities, interaction between SARS-CoV-2 and human proteins, and viral entry points. The genes had been identified in studies conducted, among others, by Helder Nakaya, a professor at USP’s School of Pharmaceutical Sciences (FCF) and a co-author of the study on lung melatonin.
From this group of genes, they selected 212 genes involved in viral cell entry, intracellular traffic, mitochondrial activity, and transcription and post-translation processes, to create a physiological signature of COVID-19.
Using RNA sequencing data downloaded from a public database, they quantified the level of expression of the 212 COVID-19 signature genes in 288 samples from healthy human lungs.
They then correlated these gene expression levels with a gene index that estimated the capacity of the lungs to synthesize melatonin (MEL-Index), based on their analysis of the lungs in healthy rodents. They found that the lower the index the higher the level of expression of genes that encode proteins for resident macrophages and epithelial cells.
The index also correlated negatively with genes that modify proteins in cell receptor CD147, a viral entry point in macrophages and other immune cells, indicating that normal lung melatonin production may be a natural protector against the virus.
The results were corroborated by three statistical techniques: the Pearson test, which measures the degree of linear correlation between two variables; a gene set enrichment analysis; and a network analysis tool that maps the connections among the most expressed genes so as to compare the same set of genes in different states. The latter was developed by Marcos Buckeridge, a professor at IB-USP and also a co-author of the study.
“We found that when MEL-Index was high the entry points for the virus in the lungs were closed, and when it was low these ‘doors’ were open. When the doors are shut, the virus wanders around for a time in the pulmonary airspace and then tries to escape in search of another host,” Markus said.
Because lung melatonin inhibits transcription of these genes that encode proteins for viral entry point cells, application of melatonin directly into the lungs in the form of drops or spray could block the virus. More research is required to prove that this is indeed the case, however, the researchers note.
Another idea could be to use MEL-Index, the pulmonary melatonin metric, as a prognostic biomarker to detect asymptomatic carriers of SARS-CoV-2.
A healthy microbiome builds a strong immune system that could help defeat COVID-19
University of Massachusetts, January 25, 2021
In the past two decades scientists have learned our bodies are home to more bacterial cells than human ones. This community of bacteria that lives in and on us – called the microbiome – resembles a company, with each microbe species performing specialized jobs but all working to keep us healthy. In the gut, the bacteria balance the immune response against pathogens. These bacteria ensure the immune response is effective but not so violent that it causes collateral damage to the host.
Bacteria in our guts can elicit an effective immune response against viruses that not only infect the gut, such as norovirus and rotavirus, but also those infecting the lungs, such as the flu virus. The beneficial gut microbes do this by ordering specialized immune cells to produce potent antiviral proteins that ultimately eliminate viral infections. And the body of a person lacking these beneficial gut bacteria won’t have as strong an immune response to invading viruses. As a result, infections might go unchecked, taking a toll on health.
I am a microbiologist fascinated by the ways bacteria shape human health. An important focus of my research is figuring out how the beneficial bacteria populating our guts combat disease and infection. My most recent work focuses on the link between a particular microbe and the severity of COVID-19 in patients. My ultimate goal is to figure out how to enhance the gut microbiome with diet to evoke a strong immune response – for not just SARS-CoV-2 but all pathogens.
How do resident bacteria keep you healthy?
Our immune defense is part of a complex biological response against harmful pathogens, such as viruses or bacteria. However, because our bodies are inhabited by trillions of mostly beneficial bacteria, virus and fungi, activation of our immune response is tightly regulated to distinguish between harmful and helpful microbes.
Our bacteria are spectacular companions diligently helping prime our immune system defenses to combat infections. A seminal study found that mice treated with antibiotics that eliminate bacteria in the gut exhibited an impaired immune response. These animals had low counts of virus-fighting white blood cells, weak antibody responses and poor production of a protein that is vital for combating viral infection and modulating the immune response.
In another study, mice were fed Lactobacillus bacteria, commonly used as probiotic in fermented food. These microbes reduced the severity of influenza infection. The Lactobacillus-treated mice did not lose weight and had only mild lung damage compared with untreated mice. Similarly, others have found that treatment of mice with Lactobacillus protects against different subtypes of influenza virus and human respiratory syncytial virus – the major cause of viral bronchiolitis and pneumonia in children.
Chronic disease and microbes
Patients with chronic illnesses including Type 2 diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular disease exhibit a hyperactive immune system that fails to recognize a harmless stimulus and is linked to an altered gut microbiome.
In these chronic diseases, the gut microbiome lacks bacteria that activate immune cells that block the response against harmless bacteria in our guts. Such alteration of the gut microbiome is also observed in babies delivered by cesarean section, individuals consuming a poor diet and the elderly.
In the U.S., 117 million individuals – about half the adult population – suffer from Type 2 diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease or a combination of them. That suggests that half of American adults carry a faulty microbiome army.
Research in my laboratory focuses on identifying gut bacteria that are critical for creating a balanced immune system, which fights life-threatening bacterial and viral infections, while tolerating the beneficial bacteria in and on us.
Given that diet affects the diversity of bacteria in the gut, my lab studies show how diet can be used as a therapy for chronic diseases. Using different foods, people can shift their gut microbiome to one that boosts a healthy immune response.
A fraction of patients infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 disease, develop severe complications that require hospitalization in intensive care units. What do many of those patients have in common? Old age and chronic diet-related diseases like obesity, Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
Black and Latinx people are disproportionately affected by obesity, Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease, all of which are linked to poor nutrition. Thus, it is not a coincidence that these groups have suffered more deaths from COVID-19 compared with whites. This is the case not only in the U.S. but also in Britain.
Discovering microbes that predict COVID-19 severity
The COVID-19 pandemic has inspired me to shift my research and explore the role of the gut microbiome in the overly aggressive immune response against SARS-CoV-2 infection.
My colleagues and I have hypothesized that critically ill SARS-CoV-2 patients with conditions like obesity, Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease exhibit an altered gut microbiome that aggravates acute respiratory distress syndrome.
Acute respiratory distress syndrome, a life-threatening lung injury, in SARS-CoV-2 patients is thought to develop from a fatal overreaction of the immune responsecalled a cytokine storm that causes an uncontrolled flood of immune cells into the lungs. In these patients, their own uncontrolled inflammatory immune response, rather than the virus itself, causes the severe lung injury and multiorgan failures that lead to death.
Several studies described in one recent review have identified an altered gut microbiome in patients with COVID-19. And some companies including Seres Therapeutics, 4d Pharma PLC, Evelo Biosciences, VEDANTA bioscience, and Finch Therapeutics have recently attracted investor attention for their work on therapies for diseases including cancer, depression and inflammatory bowel diseases.
Identification of specific bacteria within the microbiome that could predict COVID-19 severity is lacking.
To address this question, my colleagues and I recruited COVID-19 hospitalized patients with severe and moderate symptoms. We collected stool and saliva samples to determine whether bacteria within the gut and oral microbiome could predict COVID-19 severity. The identification of microbiome markers that can predict the clinical outcomes of COVID-19 disease is key to help prioritize patients needing urgent treatment.
We demonstrated, in a paper which has not yet been peer reviewed, that the composition of the gut microbiome is the strongest predictor of COVID-19 severity compared to patient’s clinical characteristics commonly used to do so. Specifically, we identified that the presence of a bacterium in the stool – called Enterococcus faecalis– was a robust predictor of COVID-19 severity. Not surprisingly, Enterococcus faecalis has been associated with chronic inflammation.
Enterococcus faecalis collected from feces can be grown outside of the body in clinical laboratories. Thus, an E. faecalis test might be a cost-effective, rapid and relatively easy way to identify patients who are likely to require more supportive care and therapeutic interventions to improve their chances of survival.
But it is not yet clear from our research what is the contribution of the altered microbiome in the immune response to SARS-CoV-2 infection. A recent study has shown that SARS-CoV-2 infection triggers an imbalance in immune cellscalled T regulatory cells that are critical to immune balance.
Bacteria from the gut microbiome are responsible for the proper activation of those T-regulatory cells. Thus, researchers like me need to take repeated patient stool, saliva and blood samples over a longer time frame to learn how the altered microbiome observed in COVID-19 patients can modulate COVID-19 disease severity, perhaps by altering the development of the T-regulatory cells.
As a Latina scientist investigating interactions between diet, microbiome and immunity, I must stress the importance of better policies to improve access to healthy foods, which lead to a healthier microbiome. It is also important to design culturally sensitive dietary interventions for Black and Latinx communities. While a good-quality diet might not prevent SARS-CoV-2 infection, it can treat the underlying conditions related to its severity.
Do you drink bottled water? Read this
Bottled water is atrocious for the environment. You’re better off buying a water filter for healthier, tastier water
THE GUARDIAN, January 28, 2021
The Leadership Institute: PR School for Right-wingers
We’re familiar with Fox, the TV propaganda arm of the Trump administration remaining a far right-wing outlet under Rupert Murdoch and his mission of using media to push an arch-conservative agenda.
And we’re becoming aware of other radical right efforts to use media to indoctrinate people. There’s the right-wing Sinclair Broadcast Group seeking to buy up more local TV stations to deceive and lie from, and One America News and Newsmax TV.
As the headline of a recent article in The New York Times declared: “Pro-Trump Media Keeps the Disinformation Flowing.”
Much has to be done about this radical right drive to destroy the ideal of media being an independent monitor, a watchdog taking on power—not a partisan handmaiden.
Use of anti-trust regulations and implementation of Federal Communication Commission broadcast rules are on the top of the list.
But largely flying under the radar has been the training operation for right-wingers to be taught how to work the media, infiltrate government and otherwise promote a right-wing agenda in the United States and in recent years extending itself through the world especially to Europe.
It’s called The Leadership Institute and since it was set up in 1979 “has trained,” according to its website, “more than 200,000 conservative activists, leaders and students.”
One proud graduate of The Leadership Institute is Mitch McConnell, minority leader of the U.S. Senate, who on its website, below his photo, declares: “Thanks to you (Morton) and everyone who has served on your staff. There are countless conservatives making a difference in public policy across the country. As one of your earliest students, I know firsthand what a wonderful foundation the Leadership Institute’s education provides for someone involved in public service.”
The “Morton” he is referring to is Morton C. Blackwell, who founded The Leadership Institute, and remains its president and runs it.
Another graduate is now former U.S. Vice President Mike Pence.
As The Leadership Institute says on a page about its “Mission” on its website: “The Leadership Institute’s mission is to increase the number and effectiveness of conservative activists and leaders in the public policy process.”
“Institute programs prepare thousands of conservatives each year,” it says. And from it, “Conservatives learn how to…Succeed in the competitive field of broadcast media, Run successfully for elected office…Communicate a conservative message using the media…Formulate policy as elected officials or key staff members. The Leadership Institute is the center of conservative activist training. No other organization provides more training to conservative activists each year.”
Describing under “Headquarters” The Leadership Institute’s “facility” in Arlington, Virginia, the website says it includes “a training center, professional multimedia studies, dormitories.”
Blackwell’s trajectory through the years has been allied with the most conservative streams in U.S. politics as detailed on The Leadership Institute’s website.
“Mr. Blackwell was Barry Goldwater’s youngest elected delegate to the 1964 Republican National Convention in San Francisco,” it says. “He was a national convention Alternate Delegate for Ronald Reagan in 1968 and 1976, and a Ronald Reagan Delegate at the 1980 national convention. In 1980, he organized and oversaw the national youth effort for Ronald Reagan. He served as Special Assistant to the President on President Reagan’s White House Staff 1981-1984. Mr. Blackwell is something of a specialist in matters relating to the rules of the Republican Party….He serves now on the RNC’s Standing Committee on Rules and has attended every meeting of the Republican National Conventions’ Rules Committees since 1972.”
The biography also notes that The Leadership Institute’s total revenue since 1974 is $274 million. It currently has revenue of over $16.9 million a year and a full-time staff of 70.”
Despite its political purpose, The Leadership Institute has received 501(c)(3) non-profit status from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service.
In recent years, The Leadership Institute has extended its reach worldwide, especially to Europe.
The British-based organization openDemocracy (yes, the “o” is not capitalized and the words are combined) which seeks “to educate citizens to challenge power and encourage democratic debate across the world,” conducted an investigation that resulted in a report it published in October of last year.
It was headlined: “Undercover with the US conservatives who trained Mike Pence. This is how the architects of America’s culture wars are trying to export their tactics to Europe.”
Its authors, Adam Ramsay and Joni Hess, write: “Our host via Zoom, the Leadership Institute, exists to ‘place conservatives in the government, politics and media’– and it says its graduates include Trump’s vice-president, Mike Pence. Like a multi-level marketing scheme, the workshop taught us to recruit students to right-wing activism, who would in turn recruit others. Blair stressed a growing marginalisation of conservative ideology on college campuses, and a ‘moral obligation to save the US….Over several hours, we were taught to polarise discussions, to war game public debates, to reframe ‘anti-worker’ policies as ‘right to work’, to characterise pro-choice activists as ‘hating babies’.”
Under a subtitle, “The US culture wars go global,” they continue: “This bare-knuckled politics is no longer confined to the US. The Leadership Institute has spent around $350,000 bringing its agenda to Europe since 2016, according to a new investigation by openDemocracy. There has been a marked increase in its European activities in recent years—and it spends more money in Europe than anywhere else in the world, outside the US. openDemocracy’s research also reveals that the organisation has worked with controversial ultra-conservatives in Europe including a Lega politician in Italy, the Spanish far-right group CitizenGo, Croatia’s anti-LGBT ‘In the Name of the Family’ coalition and the neo-feudalist Tradition, Family and Property movement’s branches in Austria and France, as well as across Latin America.”
“The Leadership Institute has also worked with a number of conservative groups and politicians in the UK—including Tim Evans, a former lobbyist for privatised healthcare; a former chair of the conservative Bow Group think-tank; and Matthew Elliott, chief executive of the Vote Leave campaign in the Brexit referendum campaign.”
It continues: “Speaking to openDemocracy, the prominent UK LGBT rights activist Peter Tatchell accused the Leadership Institute of ‘a form of cultural imperialism’. ‘It is exporting culture wars to subvert our democracies and influence our politics. We [didn’t] even know it is happening, until now,’ he said.”
The piece goes on: “Leadership Institute was founded by its current president Morton Blackwell in 1979. Since then, it says it has trained thousands of US conservatives, from high-school students to senior politicians, in skills from email marketing to how to get jobs on Capitol Hill. In our workshop, we were told that Blackwell thought 1964 Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater was ideologically correct, but saw that that didn’t help him win. So he and other Goldwater supporters launched some key institutions of US conservatism: the anti-abortion and gun-rights movements, the Heritage Foundation think tank and the Leadership Institute, which works behind the scenes, recruiting, training, connecting—pushing allies onto the front lines of US politics. In the future, they swore, they’d win. And they have: their alumni, in addition to Pence, include George W. Bush’s strategist Karl Rove and Republican senate majority leader Mitch McConnell.”
Blackwell received the “Titan of Conservation Award” from the Heritage Foundation this past December. A Heritage Foundation press releasesaid the entity’s president, Kay C. James, “who calls Blackwell a personal mentor,” asserted: “Morton Blackwell is a living legend of the conservative movement.”
Trump is most thankfully gone. Trumpism, most unfortunately, is still with us—as is The Leadership Institute with its arch right-wing operation, now extending globally.
The Leadership Institute: PR School for Right-wingers
We’re familiar with Fox, the TV propaganda arm of the Trump administration remaining a far right-wing outlet under Rupert Murdoch and his mission of using media to push an arch-conservative agenda.
And we’re becoming aware of other radical right efforts to use media to indoctrinate people. There’s the right-wing Sinclair Broadcast Group seeking to buy up more local TV stations to deceive and lie from, and One America News and Newsmax TV.
As the headline of a recent article in The New York Times declared: “Pro-Trump Media Keeps the Disinformation Flowing.”
Much has to be done about this radical right drive to destroy the ideal of media being an independent monitor, a watchdog taking on power—not a partisan handmaiden.
Use of anti-trust regulations and implementation of Federal Communication Commission broadcast rules are on the top of the list.
But largely flying under the radar has been the training operation for right-wingers to be taught how to work the media, infiltrate government and otherwise promote a right-wing agenda in the United States and in recent years extending itself through the world especially to Europe.
It’s called The Leadership Institute and since it was set up in 1979 “has trained,” according to its website, “more than 200,000 conservative activists, leaders and students.”
One proud graduate of The Leadership Institute is Mitch McConnell, minority leader of the U.S. Senate, who on its website, below his photo, declares: “Thanks to you (Morton) and everyone who has served on your staff. There are countless conservatives making a difference in public policy across the country. As one of your earliest students, I know firsthand what a wonderful foundation the Leadership Institute’s education provides for someone involved in public service.”
The “Morton” he is referring to is Morton C. Blackwell, who founded The Leadership Institute, and remains its president and runs it.
Another graduate is now former U.S. Vice President Mike Pence.
As The Leadership Institute says on a page about its “Mission” on its website: “The Leadership Institute’s mission is to increase the number and effectiveness of conservative activists and leaders in the public policy process.”
“Institute programs prepare thousands of conservatives each year,” it says. And from it, “Conservatives learn how to…Succeed in the competitive field of broadcast media, Run successfully for elected office…Communicate a conservative message using the media…Formulate policy as elected officials or key staff members. The Leadership Institute is the center of conservative activist training. No other organization provides more training to conservative activists each year.”
Describing under “Headquarters” The Leadership Institute’s “facility” in Arlington, Virginia, the website says it includes “a training center, professional multimedia studies, dormitories.”
Blackwell’s trajectory through the years has been allied with the most conservative streams in U.S. politics as detailed on The Leadership Institute’s website.
“Mr. Blackwell was Barry Goldwater’s youngest elected delegate to the 1964 Republican National Convention in San Francisco,” it says. “He was a national convention Alternate Delegate for Ronald Reagan in 1968 and 1976, and a Ronald Reagan Delegate at the 1980 national convention. In 1980, he organized and oversaw the national youth effort for Ronald Reagan. He served as Special Assistant to the President on President Reagan’s White House Staff 1981-1984. Mr. Blackwell is something of a specialist in matters relating to the rules of the Republican Party….He serves now on the RNC’s Standing Committee on Rules and has attended every meeting of the Republican National Conventions’ Rules Committees since 1972.”
The biography also notes that The Leadership Institute’s total revenue since 1974 is $274 million. It currently has revenue of over $16.9 million a year and a full-time staff of 70.”
Despite its political purpose, The Leadership Institute has received 501(c)(3) non-profit status from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service.
In recent years, The Leadership Institute has extended its reach worldwide, especially to Europe.
The British-based organization openDemocracy (yes, the “o” is not capitalized and the words are combined) which seeks “to educate citizens to challenge power and encourage democratic debate across the world,” conducted an investigation that resulted in a report it published in October of last year.
It was headlined: “Undercover with the US conservatives who trained Mike Pence. This is how the architects of America’s culture wars are trying to export their tactics to Europe.”
Its authors, Adam Ramsay and Joni Hess, write: “Our host via Zoom, the Leadership Institute, exists to ‘place conservatives in the government, politics and media’– and it says its graduates include Trump’s vice-president, Mike Pence. Like a multi-level marketing scheme, the workshop taught us to recruit students to right-wing activism, who would in turn recruit others. Blair stressed a growing marginalisation of conservative ideology on college campuses, and a ‘moral obligation to save the US….Over several hours, we were taught to polarise discussions, to war game public debates, to reframe ‘anti-worker’ policies as ‘right to work’, to characterise pro-choice activists as ‘hating babies’.”
Under a subtitle, “The US culture wars go global,” they continue: “This bare-knuckled politics is no longer confined to the US. The Leadership Institute has spent around $350,000 bringing its agenda to Europe since 2016, according to a new investigation by openDemocracy. There has been a marked increase in its European activities in recent years—and it spends more money in Europe than anywhere else in the world, outside the US. openDemocracy’s research also reveals that the organisation has worked with controversial ultra-conservatives in Europe including a Lega politician in Italy, the Spanish far-right group CitizenGo, Croatia’s anti-LGBT ‘In the Name of the Family’ coalition and the neo-feudalist Tradition, Family and Property movement’s branches in Austria and France, as well as across Latin America.”
“The Leadership Institute has also worked with a number of conservative groups and politicians in the UK—including Tim Evans, a former lobbyist for privatised healthcare; a former chair of the conservative Bow Group think-tank; and Matthew Elliott, chief executive of the Vote Leave campaign in the Brexit referendum campaign.”
It continues: “Speaking to openDemocracy, the prominent UK LGBT rights activist Peter Tatchell accused the Leadership Institute of ‘a form of cultural imperialism’. ‘It is exporting culture wars to subvert our democracies and influence our politics. We [didn’t] even know it is happening, until now,’ he said.”
The piece goes on: “Leadership Institute was founded by its current president Morton Blackwell in 1979. Since then, it says it has trained thousands of US conservatives, from high-school students to senior politicians, in skills from email marketing to how to get jobs on Capitol Hill. In our workshop, we were told that Blackwell thought 1964 Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater was ideologically correct, but saw that that didn’t help him win. So he and other Goldwater supporters launched some key institutions of US conservatism: the anti-abortion and gun-rights movements, the Heritage Foundation think tank and the Leadership Institute, which works behind the scenes, recruiting, training, connecting—pushing allies onto the front lines of US politics. In the future, they swore, they’d win. And they have: their alumni, in addition to Pence, include George W. Bush’s strategist Karl Rove and Republican senate majority leader Mitch McConnell.”
Blackwell received the “Titan of Conservation Award” from the Heritage Foundation this past December. A Heritage Foundation press releasesaid the entity’s president, Kay C. James, “who calls Blackwell a personal mentor,” asserted: “Morton Blackwell is a living legend of the conservative movement.”
Trump is most thankfully gone. Trumpism, most unfortunately, is still with us—as is The Leadership Institute with its arch right-wing operation, now extending globally.
Democrats are determined to snuff out freedom of speech and assembly to protect the corporate ruling order – while pretending it’s to safeguard Black people.
“The militants seeking social transformation and peace under the Black Lives Matter umbrella must weigh the full implications of the Black Democratic Misleaders’ deal with the devil.”
The U.S. corporate ruling class finally has its “Reichstag fire” to justify suspension of constitutional liberties under cover of “national emergency.” There is, of course, no imminent threat to the U.S. state and its structures. The rightwing mob that broke through the U.S. Capitol’s remarkably thin blue line of defense on January 6th was visibly amazed at the ease of their penetration of the building, and clearly had no plan for what to do once they found themselves inside. However, the same corporate news media that spent four years convincing Americans that “the Russians” were bringing down “our democracy” through brilliant deployment of $100,000 in Facebook ads, now shrieks that free speech is poisoning the body politic. The great threat to the “stability” of American institutions is the proliferation of speech that does not conform to the corporate version of reality. Free speech must be brought “to heel” – as Hillary Clinton would put it.
The Reichstag fire that consumed the German national parliament in February of 1933 — supposedly set by a Jewish communist — allowed Adolph Hitler to turn his November 1932 electoral victory into a mandate to smash all opposition to Nazification of the country. From that point on, no worldview was permissible in Germany except Hitler’s own. The U.S. ruling class, beset by real crises of its own making at home and abroad, is desperate to regain control of the national and global narrative. As Barack Obama blurted out on stage with German chancellor Angela Merkel, barely two weeks after Hillary Clinton’s surprise 2016 loss to Donald Trump, he was fearful of “an age where there’s so much active misinformation and its packaged very well and it looks the same when you see it on a Facebook page or you turn on your television. If everything seems to be the same and no distinctions are made, then we won’t know what to protect.”
“Free speech must be brought ‘to heel.’”
What Obama and his corporate Democratic colleagues were determined to “protect” is the continuity of U.S. never-ending war policies abroad and the “Race to the Bottom” austerity regime at home. As real crises multiply, the first line of capitalist defense is the corporate narrative that deflects blame from the system, itself. But counternarratives of the Right and Left have found deep traction in social and online media whose audiences often dwarf CNN viewership. Thus, the oligarchs, whose obscene wealth multiplies by the day, are unable to halt by normal means the public’s consumption of narratives that question the corporate order. The ruling class’s crisis of legitimacy must be made to appear as a patriotic defense of American institutions and “values” – of truth, itself — requiring restraint of critical speech and deep surveillance of suspected dissidents. The proof of the threat is displayed on the streets of Washington, DC, where 25,000 troops remain on guard against invisible enemies .
Although corporate media claim that Donald Trump’s antics in the White House have necessitated curtailment of free speech rights, it was clear to us at Black Agenda Report four years ago that the corporate Democrats were preparing to muzzle dissent. On November 30, 2016, after the Washington Post published a list of 200 web sites slandered as “Russian propaganda outlets and sympathizers,” including Black Agenda Report, I wrote: “Had Clinton won the election, she would have begun a campaign of repression against the Left along the same national security lines as the Washington Post article, with that paper probably leading the propaganda charge.” The BAR article was titled, “Fascism with a Democratic Party Face” – a fascism that grows out of the neoliberal corporate order in crisis. As we wrote:
“Donald Trump’s fascism is largely the residue of the fascism of apartheid America, under Jim Crow, which had many of the characteristics of – and in some ways presaged – the ‘classic’ fascism of pre-World War Two Europe. The establishment corporate Democratic and Republican brand of fascism is far more racially, sexually and culturally inclusive, but just as ruthless. And, at this moment in history, the corporate Democratic fascists are the more aggressively warlike brand.”
“The oligarchs are unable to halt by normal means the public’s consumption of narratives that question the corporate order.”
Make no mistake: both brands of fascism are fully operative and intertwined. There is no bright line separating the two, as is exemplified by Joe Biden, himself, whose long career has been marked by white supremacist rhetoric and politics. But the inexorable darkening of the country has convinced most of the corporate ruling class that a deeper accommodation must be made with the more compliant sectors of Black and brown America, who are to be further incorporated into the ruling structures. In plain language that means more Black, brown and Asian faces in high places, even as the masses are pushed deeper into poverty and precarity, the domestic security forces become more brutal, and the U.S. intensifies its war-against-all abroad. Biden telegraphs the corporate fascist strategy when he assures the donor class that “nothing will change” while bragging that his regime will be the “the most diverse in history .”
The Democrats have every reason to expect that the Black Misleadership Class and its brown counterparts will be allies in the quest to establish a more politically stable corporate dictatorship in the United States, and in supporting never-ending war in defense of global capitalism. The continued political potency of the more blatantly white supremacist brand of fascism among the Trump Republicans will further solidify the unholy alliance of warmongering Democratic oligarchs and narrow Black “representational” politics. This deepening partnership presents a profound challenge to the militants seeking social transformation and peace under the Black Lives Matter umbrella, who must weigh the full implications of the Black Democratic Misleaders’ deal with the devil. Those forces that oppose racial capitalism and the police that buttress the corporate order are the real targets of the Democrats’ crackdown on freedom of speech and assembly. In the final analysis, the old and new fascisms will coexist and collaborate; the U.S. is, after all, a white settler colonial state whose mission is world domination. The only difference is that corporate Democrats want all (racial and ethnic) hands on deck and racial peace at home while furthering the imperial project.
Suck It, Wall Street
In a blowout comedy for the ages, finance pirates take it up the clacker
| Matt Taibbi | Jan 29 |
In the fall of 2008, America’s wealthiest companies were in a pickle. Short-selling hedge funds, smelling blood as the global economy cratered, loaded up with bets against finance stocks, pouring downward pressure on teetering, hyper-leveraged firms like Morgan Stanley and Citigroup. The free-market purists at the banks begged the government to stop the music, and when the S.E.C. complied with a ban on financial short sales, conventional wisdom let out a cheer.
“This will absolutely make a difference,” economist Peter Cardillo told CNN. “Now, if there is any good news, shorts will have to cover.”
At the time, poor beleaguered banks were victims, while hedge funds betting them down as the economy circled the drain were seen as antisocial monsters. “They are like looters after a hurricane,” seethed Andrew Cuomo, then-Attorney General of New York State, who “promised to intensify investigations into short selling abuses.” Senator John McCain, in the home stretch of his eventual landslide loss to Barack Obama, added that S.E.C. chairman Christopher Cox had “betrayed the public’s trust” by allowing “speculators and hedge funds” to “turn our markets into a casino.”
Fast forward thirteen years. The day-trading followers of a two-million-subscriber Reddit forum called “wallstreetbets” somewhat randomly decide to keep short-sellers from laying waste to a brick-and-mortar retail video game company called GameStop, betting it up in defiance of the Street. Worth just $6 four months ago, the stock went from $18.36 on the afternoon of the Capitol riot, to $43.03 on the 21st two weeks later, to $147.98 this past Tuesday the 26th, to an incredible $347.51 at the close of the next day, January 27th.
The rally sent crushing losses at short-selling hedge funds like Melvin Capital, which was forced to close out its position at a cost of nearly $3 billion. Just like 2008, down-bettors got smashed, only this time, there were no quotes from economists celebrating the “good news” that shorts had to cover. Instead, polite society was united in its horror at the spectacle of amateur gamblers doing to hotshot finance professionals what those market pros routinely do to everyone else. If you’ve ever seen Animal House, you understand the sentiment:
The press conveyed panic and moral disgust. “I didn’t realize it was this cultlike,” said short-seller Andrew Left of Citron Research, without irony denouncing the campaign against firms like his as “just a get rich quick scheme.” Massachusetts Secretary of State Bill Galvin said the Redditor campaign had “no basis in reality,” while Dr. Michael Burry, the hedge funder whose bets against subprime mortgages were lionized in “The Big Short,” called the amateur squeeze “unnatural, insane, and dangerous.”
The episode prompted calls to regulate Reddit and, finally, halt action on the disputed stocks. As I write this, word has come out that platforms like Robinhood and TD Ameritrade are curbing trading in GameStop and several other companies, including Nokia and AMC Entertainment holdings.
Meaning: just like 2008, trading was shut down to save the hides of erstwhile high priests of “creative destruction.” Also just like 2008, there are calls for the government to investigate the people deemed responsible for unapproved market losses.
The acting head of the SEC said the agency was “monitoring” the situation, while the former head of its office of Internet enforcement, John Stark, said, “I can’t imagine there isn’t an open investigation and probably a formal order to find out who’s on these message boards.” Georgetown finance professor James Angel lamented, “it’s going to be hard for the SEC to find blatant manipulation,” but they “owe it to look.” The Washington Post elaborated:
To establish manipulation that runs afoul of securities laws, Angel said regulators would need to prove traders engaged in “an intentional act to push a price away from its fundamental value to seek a profit.” In market parlance, this is typically known as a pump-and-dump scheme…
Even Nancy Pelosi, when asked about “manipulation” and “what’s going on on Wall Street right now,” said “we’ll all be reviewing it,” as if it were the business of congress to worry about a bunch of day traders cashing in for once.
The only thing “dangerous” about a gang of Reddit investors blowing up hedge funds is that some of us reading about it might die of laughter. That bit about investigating this as a “pump and dump scheme” to push prices away from their “fundamental value” is particularly hilarious. What does the Washington Post think the entire stock market is, in the bailout age?
America’s banks just had maybe their best year ever, raking in $125 billion in underwriting fees at a time when the rest of the country is dealing with record unemployment, thanks entirely to massive Federal Reserve intervention that turned a crash into a boom. Who thinks the “fundamental value” of most stocks would be this high, absent the Fed’s Atlas-like support in the last year?
For context, Goldman, Sachs posted revenues of $44.56 billion in 2020, its best year since 2009, a.k.a. the last year Wall Street cashed in on a bailout. Back then, the shortcut back to giganto-bonuses was underwriting fees for financial companies raising money to purge themselves of TARP debt. This time it’s underwriting fees for bond issues and IPOs. The subtext of both bailouts was that anyone who owned or underwrote financial assets got richer, while everyone else got the proverbial high hat. It’s no accident that income inequality dramatically accelerated after the last bailouts, and that the only people to see net gains in wealth since 2008 have been the richest 20% of Americans, a pattern almost certain to continue.
The constant in the bailout years has been a battery of artificial stimulants sent through the financial sector, from the TARP to years of zero-interest-rate policies (ZIRP) to outright interventions like the multiple trillion-dollar rounds of Quantitative Easing. All that froth allowed finance companies to suck out hundreds of billions in fees, encouraged lunatic risk-taking in every direction and rampages of private equity takeovers, and kept a vast stable of functionally dead companies alive on cheap credit.
Those so-called “zombie companies” make up roughly 30% of all corporations in America now, and they racked up over a trillion dollars in new debt since the pandemic alone. While policymakers may have stabilized the economy with the bailouts, they may also “inadvertently be directing the flow of capital to unproductive firms,” as Bloomberg euphemistically put it back in November.
In other words, it was all well and good for investment banks and executives of phoney-baloney companies to gorge themselves on funhouse profits on a funhouse economy, but when amateurs decided to funnel just a bit of this clown show into their own pockets, finance pros wailed like the grave of Adam Smith had been danced upon. The worst was Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman, who issued a somber warning that those behind the recent market frenzy are “in for a very rude awakening,” adding, “I don’t know if it is going to happen tomorrow, next week or in a month, but it will happen.”
This is the same James Gorman whose company just saw its 2020 fourth-quarter profits go up 51% versus the year before, with total revenues up 16% to $48.2 billion, matching almost exactly the 16% rise in the stock market last year. If you’re going to rake in $33 million as Gorman did last year captaining a firm that just siphoned off billions in essentially risk-free profits underwriting a never-ending bailout, should you really be worrying about someone else getting a “rude awakening”? There are 19 million people collecting unemployment who might be reading those profit numbers. Does this man know how to spell “pitchfork”?
GameStop has prompted more pearl-clutching than any news story in recent memory. Expert after gave-faced expert has marched on TV to tell Reddit traders that markets are complicated, this isn’t a game, and they wouldn’t be doing this, if they really understood how things work.
“I’m not sure everybody fully understands what’s happening here,” was the melancholy comment on CNBC of Wall Street’s famed fluffer-in-chief, Andrew Ross Sorkin. The author of Too Big to Fail added in pedagogic tones that while this “stick it to the man moment” might feel good, betting up the value of GameStop above Delta Airlines just isn’t right, because “there are no fundamentals here”:
Fundamentals? How much does Sorkin think his exalted Delta Airlines would be worth now, if the Fed hadn’t stopped its death plunge last March? How much would any of the airlines be worth in the Covid age, with their fleets of mothballed jets? What a joke!
Furthermore, everybody “understands” what happened with GameStop. Unlike some other Wall Street stories, this one isn’t complicated. The entire tale, in a nutshell, goes like this. One group of gamblers announced, “Fuck you!” Another group announced back: “No, fuck YOU!”
That’s it. Or, as one market analyst put it to me this morning, “A bunch of guys made a bet, got killed, then doubled and tripled down and got killed even more.”
Regarding improprieties, leaving aside that the Redditors were doing exactly what billion-dollar hedge funds do every day — colluding to move a stock for fun and profit — the notion that this should be the subject of a federal investigation is preposterous.
Is it completely outside the realm of possibility that the GME fiasco isn’t just day traders giving the finger to Wall Street, that “major players” are behind the stock’s movement, in an illegal manipulation scheme? No. Probably it’s not that, but it could be, just as some of the usual suspects may have piled on the long side once the frenzy started. But if there’s anything to investigate here, the obvious place to start is with the hedge funds and their brokers.
While it isn’t a complicated story, some of the awesome humor of GameStop is in the mechanics.
Unlike betting on a stock to go up (i.e. betting “long”), where you can only lose as much as you invest, the losses in shorting can be infinite. This adds a potential extra layer of Schadenfreude to the plight of the happy hedge fund pirate who might have borrowed gazillions of GameStop shares at five or ten hoping to tank the firm, only to go in pucker mode as Internet hordes drive the cost of the trade to ten, twenty, fifty times their original investment.
Short-sellers bet by borrowing shares from so-called prime brokers (Goldman, Sachs and JP Morgan Chase are among the biggest), selling them, and waiting for the price to drop, at which point they buy them back on the open market at the lower price and return them. The commonly understood rub is that prime brokers don’t always really procure those original borrowed shares, and often give out more “locates” than they should, putting more shares in circulation than actually exist (as in this case). GameStop is exposing this systematic plundering of firms using phantom shares and locates, by groups of actors who now have the gall to complain that they’re the victims of a “get rich quick” scheme.
Short-sellers are not inherently antisocial. They can be beneficial to society, instrumental in rooting out corruption and waste in whole sectors like the subprime industry, or in single companies like Enron. Moreover, the wiping out of such funds isn’t necessarily to be cheered. Sorkin correctly notes that many hedge funds invest on behalf of entities like pension funds, though maybe they shouldn’t, given their high cost and relatively mediocre performance, as I’ve noted before.
However, that’s the point. The degree to which even the beneficial functions of short-sellers are cheered or not is dependent upon whose corruption they’re uncovering. Let the record show that when the S.E.C. imposed a ban on shorts of financial stocks in 2008, they routed short-sellers who were dead right about the insolubility of America’s banking sector. The state prevented their correct judgment about companies like Wachovia and Washington Mutual, whose stocks kept plunging even after the ban and went bust soon after.
The shorts were right about all the other banks, too. The Inspector General of the TARP, Neil Barofsky, eventually told the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission that 12 of the 13 biggest banks were on the brink of failurewhen they got saved — by the short ban, by emergency overnight grants of commercial bank licenses to companies that weren’t commercial banks, by the bailouts, by the subsequent avalanche of underwriting fees, and most of all, by the lies about all of the above.
The home of James “rude awakening” Gorman, Morgan Stanley, got its bank holding company license (and the lifesaving Fed credit lines that came with it) late on a Sunday night in September, 2008, because the firm couldn’t have opened its doors without it the next Monday morning. They’d have been blown to bits, by “fundamentals.” Instead, they got rescued, given a forever pass to keep feeding at the neck of society while claiming, falsely, to be not-failures and not-welfare recipients, better somehow than the “dumb money” they think should be theirs alone to manage.
The rank selectivity of this makes any moral argument against the GameStop revolt moot. There’s no legitimate cause here, just an assertion of exclusive rights to plunder, which will doubtless be exercised now in the form of bans, investigations, and increased barriers to market entry. Probably also, in the political spirit of our times, there will some form of speech crackdown on platforms like Reddit, to protect us from the mob.
About that: there are many making hay of a description found on a Subreddit, to the effect that wallstreetbets is “like 4Chan found a Bloomberg terminal.” A columnist at the Guardian, settling into the rhetorical line sure to find acceptance among the wine-and-MSNBC crowd, admitted to finding the rampaging-id dynamic on 4chan funny as a young person, but strange now to “witness a brief and regretful adolescent occupation re-emerge as a prominent cultural force.” The author wanted to admit to laughing at this “intentionally senseless” behavior, but ultimately decried the “transgressive attitudes” of the Redditors.
This is where society will ultimately come down, of course, uniting to denounce $GME as financial Trumpism, even though it actually comes closer to being an updated and superior version of Occupy Wall Street. It’s likely not any evil manipulation scheme, but ordinary people acting — out of self-interest, but also out of sheer enthusiasm for one of the best reasons to do just about anything, because you can — on a few simple, powerful observations.
They’ve seen first that our markets are basically fake, set up to artificially accelerate the wealth divide, and not in their favor. Secondly they see that the stock market, like the ballot box, remains one of the only places where sheer numbers still matter more than capital or connections. And they’re piling on, and it’s delicious, not so much because they’re right, but because the people running for cover are so wrong, and still can’t admit it.
Buy the ticket, take the ride, nitwits. If you earned anything, it’s this.
This is why it’s such a joke to see Wall Street mouthpieces like Squawk Box co-host
Can President Joe Biden mend a torn America?
Joe Biden wants to unite Americans, but that won’t be easy when disgust at Trump’s actions matches disbelief at liberal attempts to censor opponents via Silicon Valley. Can there be any return to real liberal values and a sense of normality?
It is the ‘duty’ of American citizens, President Joe Biden announced in his inaugural address last week, to ‘defend the truth and to defeat the lies’. Much of Biden’s speech was an unremarkable stringing-together of patriotic platitudes, but this call for a great truth crusade stood out for its audacity. America is, after all, the homeland of the public relations industry, of televangelism, of Madison Avenue, of PT Barnum. Our leading scholars worship at the shrine of post-structuralism; our brightest college graduates go on to work for the CIA; our best newspapers dynamite the barrier between reporting and opinion; our greatest political practitioners are consultants who ‘spin’ the facts this way or that.
In declaring a national quest for truth, of course, Biden was referring to none of these things. His target was a single man: Donald Trump, the most energetic shit-shoveler ever to occupy the Oval Office.
Consider the events of just the last few months. After losing the election of 3 November, Trump refused to acknowledge what happened and instead filed lawsuit after preposterous lawsuit charging that the election had been stolen from him by some unspecified method. Ambitious young Republican politicians pushed the nonsense along, trying to agree as conspicuously as possible with the president’s vain theorising. The last straw came on 6 January, when Trump addressed a throng of hardcore true believers and urged them to take their protest to the Capitol itself, where the final electoral formalities were then taking place.
Mob shamed Trump’s own party
As the entire world now knows, the result was the mob attack on the US Capitol in which certain of its leading personalities showed up in costume, buffalo horns, face paint and tri-cornered hats. Members of the mob filmed themselves as they ran down the marble halls; they waved the Confederate flag, the snake flag, references to favourite Bible verses; they talked of murdering politicians and beat a policeman to death.
It is always shocking when people who believe idiotic things commit monstrosities on the basis of those stupid views, but in this case the people who stormed the Capitol may finally have accomplished what no one has been able to do for years: they shamed Donald Trump’s Republican Party.
One after another, Republicans in Congress turned against the president and colleagues who were still questioning the election results. Twitter banned its most famous customer, Donald J Trump. Congress impeached him — again. And then came the cruellest blow, as America’s gigantic banks cut off campaign donations to members of a party whose prime goal has always been to put those giant banks above the law.
These are enormous changes. But what do they signify? For the last decade, pundits have been announcing the imminent demise of conservatism, of the Reagan era, of the Republican Party. At the same time, they have celebrated the coming triumph of multicultural liberalism, the awakening of a generation. Will Trumpism’s collapse into madness and violence finally turn their predictions into reality?
To answer this question requires more than getting angry about the latest Republican outrage. If we are truly dedicated to truth, as Biden calls on us to be, we must consider the entire sweep of the Trump era and in particular the sort of voters who, over the last few decades, have been shifting from the Republican to the Democratic Party. As it happens, these are Americans I know well: people of taste and education, for whom modern life is a succession of splendours and pleasantries. I mean the residents of the nation’s richest white-collar suburbs.
In America’s 100 best-educated counties, the Wall Street Journal tells us, the Democrat Biden won 84% of the vote on 3 November. In the 100 counties with the highest median income, Biden won 57% (1). Thirty years ago, Republicans won overwhelmingly in both of these categories.
A popular way of looking at this shift is to sum up the economic output of the regions supporting the two parties. Hillary Clinton once boasted that, though she lost the election of 2016, she represented the country’s most ‘dynamic’ areas, places that between them ‘represent two thirds of America’s gross domestic product’. Well, Joe Biden did even better than that. The counties won by the Democrats account for 71% of ‘America’s economic activity’, Trump country just 29% (2).
Rich, white and Republican
I grew up in one of the places this data describes: Johnson County, Kansas, the sprawling suburban home of Kansas City’s white-flight suburbs. Although my family was not particularly well-to-do, the suburban county that surrounded us was by far the richest in the state of Kansas, a place of lawyers and doctors and architects whose children attended excellent public schools. Its residents worked in tidy office parks; they shopped in vast, glittering malls; they played on sumptuous golf courses; they ate at world-class restaurants; they lived in brand new, mansionised developments that extended for miles out onto the prairie. When I was younger and punk rock played constantly in my car, my friends and I would drive down Johnson County’s six-lane boulevards and its dainty cul-de-sacs, laughing at the bourgeois pretentiousness of it all.
We laughed at these people because they were the ruling class. Johnson County was rich, it was white, it was in charge, and it was one of the most Republican places in America. When I was growing up there, Republicans seemed to control virtually every office; they seemed to win virtually every election; and it seemed it had always been that way. Johnson County had not voted for a Democrat for president since 1916, when Woodrow Wilson was in the White House. It had sneered at Franklin Roosevelt and John F Kennedy, but it loved men like Barry Goldwater, the ferocious anti-communist who led the GOP to a crushing defeat in 1964.
But in November 2020, Johnson County finally gave it up and voted for Democrat Joe Biden, one of only five counties in Kansas to do so. Driving around my old neighbourhood before election day, I saw countless BLM (Black Lives Matter) signs in people’s yards and, in a lot across the street from the former home of President Eisenhower’s brother, a home-made piece of yard art in which a Statue of Liberty, covered with a scary-looking net, bore a sign reading ‘Please, SAVE ME! Save Democracy’.
The essential relationships here have not changed in any substantial way. Johnson County is still overwhelmingly white, intensely corporate and very affluent. The kids still go to good colleges, the real estate values are high and the pseudo-baronial palaces still stand. Johnson County still lords it over the region’s Republican masses, but it does so now from the left, as that term is used in America. You may still laugh at the pretentious homes of the ruling class, but these days you’ll often see a yard sign informing you that the affluents in residence are sensitive people who know that ‘Women’s Rights Are Human Rights’, ‘Science is Real’ and ‘Love is Love’.
Biden outspent Trump
An interesting political showdown last November pitted a Johnson County Democrat against a Republican from western Kansas for one of the state’s seats in the US Senate. The Democrat spent four times as much as the Republican — $28m versus $7m. She lost, but the essential truth of the matter remains: such lopsided spending would have been unthinkable a short time ago. Business support for the Republican Party was the monumental fact of the American political landscape. Any effort to understand our system began with this piece of information: this was why Republicans ruled as they did, why they professed their faith in markets and why their leaders retired to become lobbyists, and (of course) this was why Republicans spent so much more than Democrats on campaigns.
Not this time. Donald Trump followed the Republican playbook to the letter. He did amazing favours for business during his time in the White House, cutting taxes and making life easier for polluters. But it wasn’t enough.
In the 2020 race, the lifelong politician Joe Biden outraised and outspent the real-estate magnate Trump by $1.6bn to $1.1bn. Wall Street and Silicon Valley appear to have largely taken the Democrats’ side, with all five GAFAM companies (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft) showing up in Biden’s list of top contributors. Trump seems to have done best in sectors of the old, industrial economy, including agribusiness, coal and Big Oil.
Among the industries that define American culture, the anti-Trump ‘resistance’ was virtually airtight: the media and entertainment industries hated him, the tech industry hated him, academia hated him. The foreign policy community hated him, the NatSec community hated him, Iraq war Republicans hated him, the little world of the DC commentariat hated him, and the broader world of the press hated him too.
The mind-blowing detail about this Coalition of the Aghast was that it also included the Central Intelligence Agency. Not long ago, the CIA was the great bête noire for peace-minded liberals: as everyone knew, it was the government agency that overthrew foreign governments, deceived and misled people in distant lands and fought for dictatorship around the world. Its list of crimesagainst democracy was long and disturbing.
But over the last four years this picture changed completely. Now liberals were supposed to shed tears for the agency — because the poor CIA had been maligned and disrespected by Trump, who (among other things) claimed it exaggerated the role played by Russia in the 2016 election. Indeed, the affinity between liberalism and the spy agency eventually became so obvious to ‘resistance’ people that it didn’t have to be explained.
Exhibit A is the Washington Post’s ‘oral history’ of the opposition to Trump, published on 8 November (3). The long story is divided into chapters, each consisting of important people’s recollections of how outraged they were by Trumpian misbehaviour and how they came to participate in the ‘resistance’. The reader learns how bad these people felt on ‘The Day After’ Trump was elected in 2016 and how they got involved in the Women’s March of January 2017. Then we come to the ‘CIA Memorial Wall Speech’ when President Trump visited CIA headquarters in 2017, stood before a memorial to CIA agents who died in the field and, at ‘this revered place’, gave a stupid, self-absorbed talk.
‘A really dark moment’
The Post quotes Tammy Duckworth, a Democratic senator from Illinois, who says the speech was ‘beyond shameful’. Pete Buttigieg, Biden’s choice for transportation secretary, describes Trump’s disrespect for the CIA as ‘a really dark moment’, and Juli Briskman, a local politician, says she was moved to make a protest sign and picket Trump’s CIA appearance.
Protesting against a politician who insults the CIA is a notable innovation in left praxis. But its novelty is dwarfed by this remark on the Trump-CIA incident, made to the Post by former CIA director Michael Hayden: ‘Intelligence is about truth. The goal of an intelligence officer is to get as close to the truth as possible. Something I believe we have in common with the press.’
This is utterly fatuous and yet it is not wrong. In the Trump era, the press did indeed come to resemble what Washington calls the ‘intelligence community’. Hayden himself became an ‘analyst’ for CNN in 2017, as did James Clapper, former Director of National Intelligence. Former CIA chief John Brennan became one for NBC. Countless other former spies made similar moves, speculating on TV about ‘disinformation’ and the occult power Vladimir Putin had over Donald Trump.
This brings us to Russiagate, once the all-absorbing nightmare of the Trump years, but today a labyrinthine story whose particular hysterical details no one cares to remember. Still, if we are to pursue our national quest for truth, we must revisit it one more time.
The basic element of the scandal was ‘collusion’: that Trump had in some way conspired with or been compromised by the Russian government as it tried to intervene in the 2016 election. Which was to say that Trump was not merely incompetent or crooked but the agent of a hostile foreign power.
There were hundreds of accusations along those lines, ranging from gullibility to treason. Future historians will get to sort out which pundit pushed which particular details of the story, how journalism’s rules got suspended, and how cable news used Russia-fear to build its audience. Here, let us stick to the essential matter: this was the singular news story of the Trump years, the subject that dominated the headlines, and always in the same way — revelations of the most shattering sort were just around the corner. But somehow never quite revealed. Special Counsel Robert Mueller brought several Republican officials to book for other offenses, but he prosecuted no one for coordination or conspiracy with the Russian government. His report concluded in March 2019: ‘Ultimately, the investigation did not establish that the campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election-interference activities’ (4).
‘This generation’s WMD’
And so the most widely covered Trump scandal morphed into the ultimate journalism scandal. In their zeal to bring down a president they despised, the people of the press had given up any pretence of fairness or balance. They did not try to conceal this change, but rather spoke of it as a kind of breakthrough innovation made necessary by Trump’s constant lying. Journalism critic Matt Taibbi calls Russiagate ‘this generation’s WMD’ but on a grander level: ‘The sheer scale of the errors and exaggerations this time around dwarfs the last mess. We’ve become sides-choosers, obliterating the concept of the press as an independent institution whose primary role is sorting fact and fiction’ (5).
Yet as scandals go, this one had few consequences. Not many of the commentators who got Russiagate wrong were punished for it. After all, Trump was a jerk, objectively speaking. And also, the journalists pursuing the story were merely doing what everyone else in journalism was doing, a circumstance in which professional practitioners are rarely held accountable.
It is strange but true that, at this moment of colossal journalistic failure, journalists began to think of themselves as superheroes fighting gallantly against information villains from overseas and the ideological alien in the White House. As the melodramatic slogan adopted by the Washington Post in 2017 puts it, ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness’.
The favourite historical parallel during the Trump years was the cold war, another time when Russian darkness threatened democracy and when legitimate news reporting had to grapple with foreign propaganda. It was all happening again, journalists announced. From Black Lives Matter to the gun lobby, the 2018 New York Timesvideo series ‘Operation Infektion’ (6) tells us, ‘wherever there has been a division in society, Russia has used disinformation to pry it open, sowing chaos across the political spectrum.’ And now we have Donald Trump, both a product and a source of disinformation, whose love of bullshit makes him a ‘useful idiot’ right out of the KGB’s dreams. The video shows Trump telling some sinister fibs as the narrator concludes, ‘It’s weird but this is somehow worse than the cold war.’
How are we to win this new and even worse cold war, this war on truth itself? It’s hard to miss what the New York Times videos hinted at, because talk about it was in the air nearly every day during the Trump years. It is censorship, a cold war weapon that is clearly becoming fashionable again in this age of universal surveillance and universal aghastitude.
‘Incompatible with free speech’
The allure of censorship is everywhere in the liberal air these days. In a recent interview, the legendary American Civil Liberties Union leader Ira Glasser, a liberal of the old school, tells of speaking at a prestigious law school and noting with satisfaction that his audience was multi-racial. But then… ‘So I’m looking at this audience and I am feeling wonderful about it. And then after the panel discussion, person after person got up, including some of the younger professors, to assert that their goals of social justice for blacks, for women, for minorities of all kinds, were incompatible with free speech and that free speech was an antagonist.’
It is impossible to understand American politics without grasping what Glasser is suggesting. The dream of a certain kind of liberal today is not so much to represent ordinary people as to police them. The right-thinking, the correctly credentialed, the bona fide expert, such liberals believe, must come together with the tech industry to stamp out ‘disinformation’ or wrongful thinking to which the public might be exposed. Unwholesome voices must be de-platformed or ‘cancelled’. Counterfactual viewpoints, like Trump’s foolish post-election tweets, must be tagged by relevant authorities with appropriate warning labels. Podcasts which traffic in ‘fake, bogus and debunked claims’ must be scrutinised and, if necessary, cleansed from the relevant websites.
Before we enlist in the struggle to save democracy from Putinesque darkness, however, Americans would do well to recall a few baseline details about how the cold war actually unfolded. The Red Scare of the late 1940s was trumped up in large part to discredit the Truman administration (it was supposedly riddled with communists) and to push US policymakers to the right. The cold war also changed the face of American society, and not for the better. Professional red-hunters tracked down subversives and got them cancelled or fired — ruining the lives of plenty of innocent people along the way. It was a time of moral hysteria, during which suspicion and hence guilt could alight on virtually anyone.
Today’s political culture wars are clearly carrying us toward a similar kind of sustained hysteria, and the mob attack on the Capitol has only heightened the climate of fear and suspicion. But which side is which? Who are the disinformation-spreading subversives the nation is going to track down and suppress, and who are the J Edgar Hoovers who are going to inflame the panic and do the suppressing?
The New York Times videos I mentioned earlier tell us that Russian disinformation works by exploiting ‘division[s] in society’ — but those words might also describe the op-ed page of the Times. Twitter works the same way. So does CNN. So does Facebook, so does every other outlet. As Matt Taibbi shows in his book, this is the mass-media business model of our time: the culture wars are with us all day, every day, because outrage and divisiveness build an audience, allow the media to sell candy bars and adult diapers. Start up your car and there’s a voice on the radio criticising an actor for playing an inappropriate part in a movie. Turn on the TV and there’s antifa out of control, throwing stuff at the cops and defacing a statue. Open up the Times itself and there’s a startling reinterpretation of the entirety of US history.
Coalition of the Aghast knows
Obviously not all of this divisiveness is disinformation. The Timesclearly feels that the culture wars it chooses to prosecute are crusades for health and light. And no doubt conservatives also believe they should have the power to silence the other side, as they did at other times in our history. But this time around the conservatives don’t control the weapons. Cultural legitimacy lies entirely with the Coalition of the Aghast, and the answer they provide to the above question is simple: experts know. It is they who should administer society’s mute button.
What makes one culture-war pronouncement ‘legitimate’ is not really its truthfulness, since that’s sometimes hard to determine: instead, it’s the pronouncer’s standing within his or her professional community. What makes another pronouncement ‘misinformation’ is that it is made by just some ordinary person with no standing to speak of, some crank who criticises pundits on Twitter and spreads theories on Reddit.
The misinformation problem thus becomes another chapter in the broader crisis of elite authority that has haunted the liberal mind since Trump’s rise began. For five years now, they have moaned that the country has lost its faith in its credentialed elites. As Jonathan Rauch of Brookings wrote in The Atlantic in the awful summer of 2016, ‘Our most pressing political problem today is that the country abandoned the establishment, not the other way around.’
Worrying about the crisis of authority is what liberals do these days in the United States. Older concerns, like the economic problems of blue-collar whites, have become a subject for liberal sneering, but restoring the rightful hierarchy of credentialed expertise has become a matter of real moral urgency. ‘Respect Science’ say the signs and stickers you see in liberal neighbourhoods. Respect expertise. Respect hierarchy. Know your place.
What place for doubt?
Foreign policy, it is said, must be reclaimed by the foreign policy ‘community’. Central bank policy must be protected from the influence of farmers. From the consensus views of the relevant professions there can be no dissent, at least not in public. ‘Doubt,’ I read recently in the Washington Post, ‘is a cardinal virtue in the sciences … But it can be disastrous in public health, where lives depend on people’s willingness to trust those same experts.’ Therefore it has to be kept quiet, if not removed from view altogether — a thought-suppressing logic that can be extended into any field of knowledge you care to mention.
This essay is not a brief for free speech absolutism or an effort to rationalise conspiracy theory or an attack on higher learning. It is about the future of the Democratic Party, the future of the left, and here is the suggestion I mean to make: the form of liberalism I have described here is inherently despicable. A democratic society is naturally going to gag when it is told again and again in countless ways, both subtle and gross, that our great national problem is our failure to heed the authority of traditional elites.
Worse, when those traditional elites come together with unprecedented unanimity to insist their high rank proves their correctness and justifies their privilege … when they say we are in a new cold war against falsehood … when the news media dumps its neutrality and likens itself to superheroes and declares it is mystically attuned to truth and legitimacy … when they do those things and then get the biggest news story of the decade fabulously wrong, a society like ours is going to spot the hypocrisy. And we are going to resent it.
Which is to say that the effect of all this moral judgmentalism has been the opposite of what was intended. To spend four years scolding people in the shrillest notes of moral hysteria was perhaps the perfect recipe for convincing Trump supporters to redouble their dedication to this deluded and prejudiced man. It is well known that shaming people for failing to live up to your personal high standards of Covid hygiene is not a good strategy for changing their behaviour. Multiply that dynamic by 300 million and you’ve got America in the age of Trump. Ten per cent of a nation energetically scolding the other 90%.
Politics of scolding doesn’t work
Oddly enough, liberals already knew this kind of top-down politics of scolding doesn’t work. In the presidential election year of 1936, the upper reaches of American society came together in a kind of moral panic against the re-election of President Franklin Roosevelt: tycoons, society types, economists, corporation attorneys and more. An estimated 85% of the newspapers of the nation were against FDR; they did their part in the struggle by denouncing him in the most vituperative terms: he was a would-be dictator, a communist, a fascist; he was empowering cranks, ignoring credentialed expertise, and probably the tool of the Russians to boot.
That campaign backfired in the most spectacular way. Roosevelt fought back against the ‘economic royalists’ and proceeded to win in a great landslide. Unlike Donald Trump, FDR was a genuine populist, and genuinely popular. But, as commentators noted at the time, the unified front that upper America presented against him in 1936 made him even more popular still.
If historians still exist in 30 years, they will look back upon these last four years with disgust and bewilderment. Disgust when they contemplate the loud, vain ignoramus who sat in the White House scarfing hamburgers and spinning conspiracy theories on Twitter while Covid burned through the nation.
But when they look at liberals, they will shake their heads with disbelief. How could they have thought it was wise to try to enlist the great economic and cultural powers of our time — the masters of Silicon Valley — to try to censor our opponents? Ira Glasser, the old ACLU chief, relates how liberal academics embraced speech codes because they ‘imagined themselves as controlling who the codes would be used against’. What these well-meaning liberals didn’t understand, he continued, was that ‘speech restrictions are like poison gas. It seems like it’s a great weapon to have when you’ve got the poison gas in your hands and a target in sight, but the wind has a way of shifting — especially politically — and suddenly that poison gas is being blown back on you.’
As Glasser’s metaphor suggests, this cannot end well. The mob attack on the Capitol frightened us all. But for Democrats to choose censorship (via the monopolists of Silicon Valley) as the solution to the problem is a shocking breach of faith. There are many words one might use to describe a party that, over the last 30 years, has shown itself contemptuous of working-class grievances while protective of the authority of the respected… but ‘liberal’ isn’t one of them.
GOP seizes on CDC research to press Biden on schools
The Biden administration is coming under pressure from Republicans to support the reopening of schools after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published new research that says that schools can operate safely despite COVID-19.
The CDC researchers on Tuesday wrote that there is “little evidence” of widespread coronavirus transmission in schools when proper precautions are followed.
Teachers unions in several places across the country, however, are resisting the push to return to in-person instruction, arguing it is not safe.
Experts stress that the picture is nuanced, and schools should not be thrown open without care and precautions. But they say repeated evidence from around the country shows that schools can open safely under the right conditions.
That puts the new Biden administration in a tough political spot given support from teachers unions for the Democratic Party. And the GOP is seizing on the issue, arguing that schools should be reopened.
“Trust the ‘Science,’ Unless Special Interest Groups Say Otherwise,” read the title of a Wednesday statement from the office of House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).
“Open the schools,” the Senate Republican Conference tweeted simply on Tuesday night.
The Biden administration is calling on Congress to first pass $170 billion in new funding to help schools reopen safely, part of a $1.9 trillion coronavirus response package. It argues that this is a necessary step before seeking to reach its goal of having a majority of schools open in its 100 days.
White House chief of staff Ron Klain, pressed on the issue by CNN’s Erin Burnett in an interview on Tuesday night, defended the unions’ position after Burnett asked why “the unions in many cases are overruling what the studies show.”
“I don’t think unions are overruling studies,” he replied. “I think what you’re seeing is schools that haven’t made the investments to keep the students safe.”
Doug Andres, a spokesman for Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), pointed out Wednesday that Congress already passed $82 billion to help schools reopen in the relief package in December.
The CDC article in question, which was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on Tuesday, stated that “the preponderance of available evidence from the fall school semester has been reassuring,” about limited coronavirus transmission in schools.
The article also stated that precautions like universal mask-wearing, spreading people out and not over-crowding classrooms, as well as improving ventilation, can all help.
Klain pointed out that a CDC study of schools in Wisconsin that effectively prevented transmission involved students in small “cohorts” of less than 20 students to help limit the spread.
The CDC researchers did not say that vaccinating teachers is needed to return in-person, contrary to the position taken by some teachers unions.
“If schools are willing to strongly adhere to mitigation strategies they can open safely,” said Dr. Daniel Benjamin, a researcher at Duke University studying school reopening. “If you don’t have the mitigation strategies it’s going to be a dumpster fire.”
He recommended that schools begin with hybrid models, where half the students are in school in-person some days of the week, and half other days, to prevent overcrowding.
He said a step as simple as universal mask-wearing is most key, and that potentially-expensive widespread testing is not a necessity. Administrators should do random, unannounced checks to ensure mask compliance in classrooms, he said.
“If the schools are not fully committed to providing mitigation measures and strictly enforce them, I don’t want to send adults there,” he said.
Some teachers unions have drawn criticism for what are seen as unrealistic demands.
The teachers union in Fairfax County, Va., for example, tweeted earlier this month that “a safe return to schools includes 14 days of no community spread,” which would mean coronavirus has been all but eliminated in the area, as well as “staff & student vaccinations.”
Kimberly Adams, the president of the union, said Wednesday when asked about the tweet that it was “just the safest way to return” but that the union is still holding out for all staff who return to be vaccinated and wants community spread to fall below 200 cases per 100,000 residents, the level above which the CDC has found to be “highest risk” for schools.
In Chicago, a teachers strike is possible as the union voted to oppose the district’s plan for returning to school in person.
Researchers point out, though, that not only is education at risk without in-person schooling, but broader factors like mental health can also be damaged.
Clark County, Nev., is accelerating the return of in-person schooling after a string of suicides by students, The New York Times reported.
Republicans think a widespread desire of Americans to get back to in-person school is a potent political issue for them against Democrats.
“If Republicans can turn the page on the last three months and begin a unified message against this they will have majorities in both chambers after midterms,” tweeted Josh Holmes, a McConnell adviser, responding to Klain’s interview defending the teachers unions.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, stressed in a statement that teachers do want to go back to school, but have safety concerns.
“Teachers know how important in-person instruction is, but we have to make it safe,” she said. “Testing and vaccination, as well as masking and distancing, are crucial, as are accommodations for educators at risk.”
Schools should also be viewed in a broader context of what other establishments are open in a community, experts say. Some local leaders have taken criticism for allowing bars and indoor dining to remain open while schools are closed.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, said at the end of November on ABC that his mantra is: “Close the bars and keep the schools open.”
TOXIC CHEMICALS THREATEN HUMANITY’S ABILITY TO REPRODUCE
In a new book, epidemiologist Shanna Swan looks at the impact of environmental chemicals on human sexuality and reproductive systems.
THE INTERCEPT. January 24 2021
SHANNA SWAN IS the senior author of a 2017 study that documented a dramatic drop in sperm counts in Western countries over the past half-century. That meta-analysis of 185 studies involving 42,935 men found that total sperm count fell 59 percent between 1973 and 2011. Swan, a reproductive epidemiologist, pointed to the role of environmental chemicals in that trend. Now she has written “Count Down: How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race,” a book that ties industrial chemicals in everyday products to a wide range of changes taking place in recent years, including increasing numbers of babies born with smaller penises; higher rates of erectile dysfunction; declining fertility; eroding sex differences in some animal species; and potentially even behaviors that are thought of as gender-typical.
There was so much media coverage when that sperm study came out. Did that spark any policy changes or substantive actions around chemical exposure?
No, it did not. Speaking in scientific meetings and writing scientific papers hasn’t done it either. So maybe the book will help.
How did you get into studying chemicals and reproduction?
It started with the phthalate syndrome.
That was the discovery that fetal rats exposed to phthalates 18 to 21 days after mating were more likely to be born with malformed genitals, but the ones that were exposed to those endocrine-disrupting chemicals before or after that window didn’t have the problem, right?
Right. In 2000, a colleague from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told me they were able to measure lots of chemicals, including phthalates, at low doses for little cost in lots of people. This was a breakthrough in the field. And I had just done a study of the mothers of young babies, and I still had the urine from the pregnant women, and the babies were very young. He said I should study phthalates. So I thought, OK, what if I mimic the animal study and look for the same endpoints they found in rats? What if I could see those in humans and link them to phthalates?
And you did it?
I did. We found the syndrome in humans.
Your study showed that baby boys who had been exposed to four different phthalates at the end of the first trimester in the womb had a shorter anogenital distance, or AGD. Can you explain what AGD is and why it’s important?
Nobody is going to like that term, so you could use taint or gooch instead. But basically it’s the distance between the anus and the beginning of the genitals. And scientists have recognized its importance for a long time. I have a paper from 1912 that looks at AGD and showed that they were nearly 100 percent longer in males than in females. Our work has shown that chemicals, including the diethylhexyl phthalate, shorten the AGD in males.
You’ve also linked phthalate exposure to a lack of interest in sex.
Yes, we found a relationship between women’s phthalate levels and their sexual satisfaction. And researchers in China found that workers with higher levels of bisphenol A, commonly known as BPA, in their blood were more likely to have sexual problems, including decreased desire.
Of course, phthalates, which are added to plastics, food, cosmetics, and other products, aren’t the only problem. You write about lots of chemicals that interfere with the hormonal system and reproduction, including the pesticide atrazine, which you’ve linked to lower sperm quality, and glyphosate, which you’ve recently shown decreases AGD in rats and perhaps also in humans. It’s worth pointing out that all of these chemicals we’re talking about are still in use in the U.S., while some other countries have banned them. Anyway, tell me about the relationship between endocrine disrupting chemicals and how children play?
Sexually dimorphic play is controversial. Some people say it’s all socially determined. And it undoubtedly does have social determinants, but it also has physiological determinants. And we showed that in twostudies. We asked mothers of young children to tell us how their children play. It’s pretty simple: How often do they play with guns? Play with dolls? Play dress-up? Play with tea sets, etc. And it turns out that when boys are exposed to the same chemicals that affect AGD, they play in a less male-typical manner.
The chemicals can change how boys and girls learn to speak too?
One of the parts of the brain that’s sexually dimorphic has to do with language acquisition, and females are typically at an advantage. When you ask the mother of a young child how many words her child understands, girls generally have many more words. But this sex difference is decreased by phthalates. And that is an overriding theme: Whether you look at AGD or play behavior or language acquisition, these chemicals decrease sex differences.
Let’s talk about gender fluidity. You devote an entire chapter to exploring whether environmental chemicals could be affecting people’s genders. As you note, that’s a really sensitive question. I know I don’t want to feel that something so fundamental and personal could be affected by chemicals. Still, you point to established science that shows how these chemicals affect biological sex and mating habits in animals — studies showing that environmental chemicals can change male frogs into females, feminize toads and alligators, and change mating and sexual behavior in birds and fish. And you explain in the book that interference with hormone levels in the womb can alter the babies’ genitals. Animals don’t have gender consciousness, as far as we know, and biological factors don’t necessarily affect people’s genders, but what’s the direct evidence that these chemicals are affecting human gender and sex?
It’s tentative and limited at this point. Our cohort of children are 8 and 9 years old now, so it will be a long time before we can report on their sexuality or gender identity.
The chemical exposures you describe can impact generations. Can you explain how a person’s grandchildren might also be affected by their exposures?
Grandchildren are easy to explain. If you’re pregnant, and you’re carrying a boy, the chemicals you’re exposed to can pass to him through the placenta. So the germ cells that will create his children are already affected. Plus that boy is exposed to chemicals again as an adult. It’s a two-hit model. Or, for subsequent generations, a three-hit or four-hit model. Because you get the inherited contribution, and then you get your own life course contribution when you grow up.
How does that end?
Badly. That’s why we have this continuing decline in fertility and sperm quality. If we didn’t have a hit from our parents and our grandparents, then each generation would just start all over again. It would be bad, but the impact would be at the same level each time. The fact that we carry with us the problems of the past generations means that we’re starting at a lower level and getting hit again and again and again.
Glyphosate and Roundup disturb gut microbiome and blood biochemistry at doses that regulators claim to be safe
- Details
- GM WATCH : 27 January 2021
New study reveals evidence for potential cancer-causing damage. Report: Claire Robinson
Glyphosate and the glyphosate-based herbicide Roundup disrupt the gut microbiome by the same mechanism by which the chemical acts as a weedkiller, and these effects happen even at low doses that regulators claim to be safe, a newly published study has found.[1]
The new study was conducted by an international team of scientists based in London, France, Italy, and the Netherlands, led by Dr Michael Antoniou of King’s College London. It is published today in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.
The study is the first to describe a mechanism by which glyphosate and Roundup affect the function of the gut microbiome (bacterial populations and biochemical function) in rats, which are the standard model that regulators use for assessing the human health risks of chemicals. The study found that glyphosate disrupts the rat gut microbiome through the same route by which it kills weeds – inhibition of the shikimate biochemical pathway.
Humans and animals do not have the shikimate pathway, enabling industry and regulators to claim that glyphosate is nontoxic to humans.[2] However, some strains of gut bacteria do have this pathway, leading the researchers on the new study to investigate whether Roundup and glyphosate could affect the gut microbiome. Imbalances in gut bacteria have been linked to an ever-growing array of diseases, including cancer, type 2 diabetes, obesity, and depression.
The researchers found that both Roundup and glyphosate affected the microbiome at all doses tested, causing shifts in bacterial populations.
Moreover, by measuring molecular composition profiles in the blood and gut, the new study also showed that the Roundup formulation tested (MON 52276, marketed as Roundup BioFlow) was more disruptive than glyphosate alone. Rats consuming this Roundup formulation developed signs of oxidative (reactive oxygen) stress in their blood, which was not as evident with glyphosate alone.
This is a concern as oxidative stress can not only damage cells and organs, but also DNA, which can lead to serious disease such as cancer.
“Safe” doses not safe after all
In the study, glyphosate and Roundup (at the same glyphosate-equivalent dose) were fed to the rats in their drinking water to give a daily intake of 0.5 mg/kg, 50 mg/kg and 175 mg/kg of body weight per day (mg/kg bw/day), which respectively represent the EU acceptable daily intake (ADI), the EU “no observed adverse effect level” (NOAEL), and the US NOAEL.
The ADI is the dose that regulators judge safe to ingest on a daily basis over a lifetime and the NOAEL is the dose that is claimed to show no visible adverse effects in industry tests submitted to regulators.
The study reveals those assumptions to be unreliable, in that the doses tested were found to cause adverse effects. Some of these effects were found at all doses, though in general, stronger effects were seen with Roundup than from glyphosate, especially on the blood.
Importance of “omics”
The study was able to reveal adverse effects even over the relatively short exposure period of 90 days because the researchers used cutting-edge molecular analytical techniques known as “omics” to measure the composition of the blood and contents of the gut.
These techniques are more sensitive than the standard toxicity tests performed by industry to support regulatory approvals of pesticides.
The standard tests have come in for criticism from scientists for being outdated and not sensitive enough to show certain types of risk, especially those related to low doses.
Lead author of the study Dr Antoniou believes that “omics” analysis can make an important contribution to chemicals risk assessments: “Our study demonstrates the need for regulators to urgently adopt these methods as part of their risk assessments in order to more accurately evaluate the toxicity of chemical pollutants and thus better protect public health. Also, the molecular composition profiles found in this study can serve as signatures to measure the effects of glyphosate and Roundup in people.”
Roundup more toxic than glyphosate alone
More severe oxidative stress responses were found from exposure to the Roundup formulation than to glyphosate alone. However, pesticide regulators worldwide only look at the long-term toxicity of glyphosate in isolation rather than the toxicity of the formulated products.
Dr Antoniou says this approach fails to protect health and the environment: “Our results highlight the importance of investigating the long-term toxicity not just of glyphosate alone, but also the chemical mixtures that make up commercial Roundup formulations, to which we are all exposed.”
Protecting ourselves
While we wait for regulators to embrace up-to-date science, is there anything that we can all do to protect ourselves? Dr Antoniou says, “Our study calls into question the regulatory safety limits for glyphosate intake. So while that question remains, people should avoid exposure to glyphosate weedkiller and other pesticides as much as possible. This means eating organic and avoiding using pesticides in our gardens. This is a sensible precautionary approach to safeguard our own and our loved ones’ well-being.”
Notes
1. Mesnage R, Teixeira M, Mandrioli D, Falcioni L, Ducarmon QR, Zwittink RD, Mazzacuva F, Caldwell A, Halket J, Amiel C, Panoff J-M, Belpoggi F, Antoniou MN (2021) Use of shotgun metagenomics and metabolomics to evaluate the impact of glyphosate or Roundup MON 52276 on the gut microbiota and serum metabolome of Sprague-Dawley rats. Environmental Health Perspectives. https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/full/10.1289/EHP6990
2. In the Final addendum to the Renewal Assessment Report on glyphosate (October 2015), p23, rapporteur Member State Germany and co-rapporteur Member State Slovakia state, based on industry claims, “Action at the shikimic acid pathway is unique to glyphosate and the absence of this pathway in animals is an important factor of its low vertebrate toxicity.”
Heart disease #1 cause of death rank likely to be impacted by COVID-19 for years to come
AMERICAN HEART ASSOCIATION
DALLAS, Jan. 27, 2021 — Heart disease remains the leading cause of death worldwide, according to the American Heart Association’s Heart Disease and Stroke Statistics — 2021 Update, published today in the Association’s flagship journal Circulation, and experts warn that the broad influence of the COVID-19 pandemic will likely continue to extend that ranking for years to come.
Globally, nearly 18.6 million people died of cardiovascular disease in 2019, the latest year for which worldwide statistics are calculated. That reflects a 17.1% increase over the past decade. There were more than 523.2 million cases of cardiovascular disease in 2019, an increase of 26.6% compared with 2010.
Experts predict the global burden of cardiovascular disease will grow exponentially over the next few years as the long-term effects of the current COVID-19 pandemic evolve.
“COVID-19 has taken a huge toll on human life worldwide and is on track to become one of the top three to five causes of death in 2020. But its influence will directly and indirectly impact rates of cardiovascular disease prevalence and deaths for years to come,” said Salim S. Virani, M.D., Ph.D., FAHA, chair of the writing committee for the 2021 Statistical Update and an associate professor in cardiology and cardiovascular research sections at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. “Research is showing that the unique coronavirus can cause damage to the heart. Importantly, we also know people have delayed getting care for heart attacks and strokes, which can result in poorer outcomes.”
But Virani said an even more critical issue will be the cardiovascular health risks that are exacerbated by the poor lifestyle behaviors that have been prevalent throughout the pandemic.
“The extraordinary circumstances of dealing with COVID-19 have changed the way we live, including adopting unhealthy behaviors that are known to increase the risk of heart disease and stroke,” Virani said. “Unhealthy eating habits, increased consumption of alcohol, lack of physical activity and the mental toll of quarantine isolation and even fear of contracting the virus all can adversely impact a person’s risk for cardiovascular health. We’ll need to watch and address these trends as the full ramifications will likely be felt for many years to come.”
Based on the 2021 Statistical Update, which furnished U.S. mortality data from 2018, cardiovascular disease remains the leading cause of death in the U.S. In the year 2020, approximately 360,000 lives were lost to COVID-19 in the U.S.; the release of data regarding all causes of death in the coming years will enable rank comparison of disease-specific causes of mortality that include COVID-19.
Tracking such trends is one of the reasons the American Heart Association publishes the definitive statistical update annually, providing a comprehensive resource of the most current data, relevant scientific findings and assessment of the impact of cardiovascular disease nationally and globally. The annual update represents a compilation of the newest, most relevant statistics on heart disease, stroke and risk factors impacting cardiovascular health.
The U.S. data is gathered in conjunction with the National Institutes of Health and other government agencies, while the global trends are provided by the Global Burden of Disease Study from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.
New in this year’s report is a chapter devoted to adverse pregnancy outcomes, which are known to increase the risk of cardiovascular disease in mothers and their babies. Pregnancy complications including hypertensive disorders, gestational diabetes, preterm births and small for gestational age at birth deliveries occur in 10% to 20% of all pregnancies in the U.S. Cardiovascular deaths are the most common cause (26.5%) of maternal death in the U.S.
“We must address this issue to save the lives of mothers and to improve the health of their children at birth, but also over their lifetime,” Virani said. “There can be long-term effects on offspring of women who suffer pregnancy-related complications. But we can also help impact the health of future generations because as we help women learn to reduce their cardiovascular risk, they’re likely to adopt healthier lifestyles. In turn, they can influence the health behaviors of their families.”
The annual report continues to track trends related to ideal cardiovascular health, social determinants of health, global cardiovascular health, cardiovascular health genetics and health care costs. Virani emphasized the importance of this surveillance as a critical resource for the lay public, policy makers, media professionals, clinicians, health care administrators, researchers, health advocates and others seeking the best available data on these factors and conditions.
‘Natural Immunity’ to COVID-19: Taking Politics Out of Science
— Monica Gandhi, MD, talks to Marty Makary, MD, about the data beyond the debate
by Martin Makary MD, MPH, Editor-in-Chief, MedPage Today January 26, 2021
“Natural immunity” to COVID-19 reinfection has become a political hot-button issue, due in part to groups such as the Great Barrington Declaration organizers. In the first part of this exclusive MedPage Today video, Monica Gandhi, MD, of the University of California San Francisco, discusses the evidence with MedPage Today editor-in-chief Marty Makary, MD, of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and speaks about whether individuals who were previously infected with COVID-19 should be vaccinated when there are so many vulnerable populations who are still at risk of severe disease.
Following is a transcript of their remarks; note that errors are possible.
Marty Makary: Hi, I’m Marty Makary. I’m here with Dr. Monica Gandhi, a professor of medicine and infectious diseases physician at UCSF. Monica, great to be with you.
Monica Gandhi: Thank you so much. Nice to be with you.
Makary: I have got so many questions for you, just with you being at the center of so much of this area. First of all, let’s talk about natural immunity from prior infection, something that I think many experts have been dismissive of. Why are we vaccinating first-in-line people who have already had the infection? I’m still trying to understand why we don’t clarify that they should step aside and get to the back of the vaccine line when reinfection rates appear to be very rare, and when they do occur, they’re very mild.
Gandhi: Yes, so you’re absolutely right about that. Immunity to natural infection is like something we learned on the first day of medical school, this is not mysterious. That’s entirely how the immune system works and so we expected that you would get immunity after natural infection. Now we have incredible data on that, which we can talk about. But it is amazing that immunity became politicized to the degree it did, that people went so far as to say, “Don’t consider that you’re going to get immunity to natural infection,” because of this Great Barrington-John Snowdebate that came out, and neither one was correct.
There was probably a middle ground where it is accurate that protecting our elderly, and 40% of our deaths in this country were nursing home residents, was the most important thing we could do. It is correct that immunity develops and that it means a lot, and it is also correct that lockdowns have terrible economic effects on the poor and the young. This has been going on for a long time.
The Great Barrington Declaration was also incorrect in not saying that masks were a good idea because they didn’t bring in masks or non-pharmaceutical interventions into their discussion. They actually, literally, said more like, “Let it rip,” and certainly we want to protect people from severe disease.
Makary: Dr. Atlas had sort of suggested, possibly, that maybe that’s a strategy, that we should sort of let it rip among those who are not vulnerable, and I think — why is it, Monica, that if you believe in the scientific data that says natural immunity is highly protective, at least in the first year for which we have data, that that somehow is married to the idea of “let it rip,” which I would never suggest?
Gandhi: Correct.
Makary: And I’m open to your thoughts. We shouldn’t just let it rip.
Gandhi: We should never let it rip.
Makary: Absolutely.
Gandhi: Right.
Makary: But somehow if you believe in natural immunity, that has become sort of married to this idea that you should let it rip.
Gandhi: Those are completely de-linked concepts and that was the strange aspect, is that by saying from the beginning that you understand that pathogens confer often long-time immunity in a complex way with B cells, T cells, and antibodies to an infection, that should never have been married to the idea that you would want people to let this rip, that you didn’t believe in non-pharmaceutical interventions. You didn’t believe in masks, distancing, ventilation, hand hygiene, and ways to keep people safe.
I think it got married because of the extreme politics in our country, of which both sides are at fault. As you were intimating, my favorite paper had natural immunities which I will tout to the ends of the Earth because I just couldn’t believe how well done it was — it was this Science paper that was just published in November — because it had the longest data.
This was Jennifer Dan and colleagues from UCSD, and showing that if you follow these 888 people with COVID-19 with a wide range of severity of illness, some hospitalized, some asymptomatic and mild infection, that you get profoundly robust antibodies, expected, memory B cells that don’t even seem to have a half-life.
They just keep on going at the same level, so they’re estimating it could be lifelong memory B cells, and then memory T cells that are so high that they emulate the half-life of what happens after a yellow fever vaccination with memory T cells. The yellow fever vaccination is once in a lifetime.
Makary: To our original question, should we be vaccinating people with natural immunity right now? What are your thoughts on that question and why isn’t the CDC talking about this?
Gandhi: It could be because immunity to natural infection did become politicized and it could be that it became confusing… we can understand why that became controversial for some of the reasons we talked about before, so it is, they actually did talk about it. The ACIP, when they put out their recommendations on this right after the EUA of the Pfizer vaccine, which was, of course, the first one, it was a week ahead of the Moderna in mid-December. They had in their slide deck that if you have had natural infection you can wait 90 days.
Makary: Yeah. Where did 90 days came from? I saw that. It was almost like a footnote.
Gandhi: Yeah, and it was kind of tiny and it wasn’t, like you said, advertised enough. The 90 days came out from as we’ve been getting the immunity data it’s been getting longer and longer and longer by definition because SARS-CoV-2 has been around longer and longer and longer. Some of the first studies said 3 months, you get durable immunity. Just some of the first studies after 3 months. Then they said, “Okay, 90 days. You should wait.” They didn’t say it strong enough here. They said you can wait, because please give it to other people who need it more.
Then this recent data that’s gotten a lot of attention, the Science paper, would suggest you could wait 8 months. It actually could, by the half-life extrapolations, it’s suggesting you could wait many years. But at least if we want to be very strict about it, the Science paper went out to 8 months and you have profoundly strong immunity at 8 months after natural infection, very strong from all arms of the immune system, so you could at least wait 8 months.
So the CDC could say, very well grounded in excellent data, that you should wait 8 months. Just let everyone else get it first and then you can wait at least 8 months. They could very well say that on strong scientific data and it would help because people are estimating that at least 14% of the U.S. population and up to 20%… Paul Offit said maybe 20% of the U.S. population has had natural COVID-19 infection, which is not surprising. We’ve been the epicenter of the pandemic.
That would be a lot of people sitting aside and waiting for other people to have a turn. If we’re getting to herd immunity by 70%, if 20% sit aside, then 50% need to get it to get to herd immunity. That makes this whole thing to get back to normal life faster, so I don’t know. I would take that data and immediately issue a statement that, “Please wait your turn.”
Makary: It’s almost like antibody greed. It’s like, “I’ve got 90% immunity, but before you’re going to get 60% or any immunity, I want to take that up to 99%.” I guess it makes sense if you’re an older, at-risk person with kidney failure working in an ICU. That I could have some understanding for, but we’re immunizing right now communication staff, accounting staff working from home, spouses of hospital administrators in their 30s and 40s.
We’re sort of seeing the true colors of people come out at a time of rationing, which is really where we are. We are rationing. I think your point, though, or the point we’re making together here, is very important for everyday practicing physicians that if people come up and ask you, “I’ve had the infection” — confirmed, not one of these people, “I think I had it,” which is half of America, and they may not have had it because a lot of the viruses circulate. If people have had it for sure, they’ve been confirmed to have the positive COVID test or the antibodies, they should step aside in the vaccine line in order for us to save the most number of lives.
Gandhi: They should step aside.
Makary: Yeah.
Gandhi: I think you’re — it is, especially healthcare workers, because the reason we’ve been working since the beginning of the pandemic and we don’t have routine testing — as you know, we work with masks, distancing, ventilation, but without weekly testing, for example, routinely is because we have committed to help others. That is kind of what you do from the very beginning of being a healthcare worker. It would behoove a healthcare worker, that was your point, and you’re a young healthcare worker, to make that comment that, “I knew I had COVID. I actually got swabbed. It was back 6 months ago. I know Jennifer Dan says 8 months, so I’m going to wait.”
Makary: Monica Gandhi, great to be with you. Great insights. Thanks so much for being with us.
Gandhi: Thank you so much.
Global analysis suggests COVID-19 is seasonal
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURAL, CONSUMER AND ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES
With cities around the globe locking down yet again amid soaring COVID-19 numbers, could seasonality be partially to blame? New research from the University of Illinois says yes.
In a paper published in Evolutionary Bioinformatics, Illinois researchers show COVID-19 cases and mortality rates, among other epidemiological metrics, are significantly correlated with temperature and latitude across 221 countries.
“One conclusion is that the disease may be seasonal, like the flu. This is very relevant to what we should expect from now on after the vaccine controls these first waves of COVID-19,” says Gustavo Caetano-Anollés, professor in the Department of Crop Sciences, affiliate of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at Illinois, and senior author on the paper.
The seasonal nature of viral diseases is so widespread that it has become part of the English vernacular. For example, we often speak of the “flu season” to describe the higher incidence of influenza during the cold winter months. Early in the pandemic, researchers and public health officials suggested SARS-CoV-2 may behave like other coronaviruses, many of which rear their heads in fall and winter. But data was lacking, especially on the global scale. The work of Caetano-Anollés and his students fills that specific knowledge gap.
First, the researchers downloaded relevant epidemiological data (disease incidence, mortality, recovery cases, active cases, testing rate, and hospitalization) from 221 countries, along with their latitude, longitude, and average temperature. They pulled the data from April 15, 2020, because that date represents the moment in a given year in which seasonal temperature variation is at its maximum across the globe. That date also coincided with a time during the early pandemic when COVID-19 infections were peaking everywhere.
The research team then used statistical methods to test if epidemiological variables were correlated with temperature, latitude, and longitude. The expectation was that warmer countries closer to the equator would be the least affected by the disease.
“Indeed, our worldwide epidemiological analysis showed a statistically significant correlation between temperature and incidence, mortality, recovery cases, and active cases. The same tendency was found with latitude, but not with longitude, as we expected,” Caetano-Anollés says.
While temperature and latitude were unmistakably correlated with COVID-19 cases, the researchers are quick to point out climate is only one factor driving seasonal COVID-19 incidence worldwide.
They accounted for other factors by standardizing raw epidemiological data into disease rates per capita and by assigning each country a risk index reflecting public health preparedness and incidence of co-morbidities in the population. The idea was that if the disease was surging in countries with inadequate resources or higher-than-average rates of diabetes, obesity, or old age, the risk index would appear more important in the analysis than temperature. But that wasn’t the case. The index did not correlate with the disease metrics at all.
Earlier work from Caetano-Anollés and his coworkers identified areas in the SARS-CoV-2 virus genome undergoing rapid mutation, some represented in the new virus variant out of Britain, and other genomic regions becoming more stable. Since similar viruses show seasonal upticks in mutation rates, the research team looked for connections between mutational changes in the virus and temperature, latitude, and longitude of the sites from which genomes were sampled worldwide.
“Our results suggest the virus is changing at its own pace, and mutations are affected by factors other than temperature or latitude. We don’t know exactly what those factors are, but we can now say seasonal effects are independent of the genetic makeup of the virus,” Caetano-Anollés says.
Caetano-Anollés notes more research is needed to explain the role of climate and seasonality in COVID-19 incidences, but he suggests the impact of policy, such as mask mandates, and cultural factors, such as the expectation to look out for others, are key players as well. However, he doesn’t discount the importance of understanding seasonality in battling the virus.
The researchers say our own immune systems could be partially responsible for the pattern of seasonality. For example, our immune response to the flu can be influenced by temperature and nutritional status, including vitamin D, a crucial player in our immune defenses. With lower sun exposure during the winter, we don’t make enough of that vitamin. But it’s too soon to say how seasonality and our immune systems interact in the case of COVID-19.
“We know the flu is seasonal, and that we get a break during the summer. That gives us a chance to build the flu vaccine for the following fall,” Caetano-Anollés says. “When we are still in the midst of a raging pandemic, that break is nonexistent. Perhaps learning how to boost our immune system could help combat the disease as we struggle to catch up with the ever-changing coronavirus.”
Here’s the full list of Biden’s executive actions so far
NBC NEWS, January 27, 2021
In his first days in office, President Joe Biden moved to dismantle a slew of Trump-era regulations and make sweeping measures to bolster the nation’s Covid-19 response.
The new president also ordered the establishment a variety of environmental protections and changes to immigration policy.
As he embarks on his first full work week as president, Biden is poised to continue scrapping a number of the Trump administration’s policies, including the controversial transgender military ban.
Here’s a round-up of the measures that the president has taken so far.
Day One
Memorandum freezing approval of rules passed in final days of Trump presidency
According to Biden’s memorandum, all new and pending rules passed in the last days of Trump’s tenure will be reviewed by department and agency heads.
Executive order rejoining the Paris Agreement on climate change
Fulfilling one of his top campaign promises, Biden committed to putting the U.S. back in the Paris Agreement on climate change — an international pact aimed at curbing emissions that cause global warming. Trump withdrew from the agreement in 2017, citing costs to American taxpayers.
Executive order to promote racial equity
Biden ordered his government to conduct equity assessments of its agencies and reallocate resources to “advanc[e] equity for all, including people of color and others who have been historically underserved, marginalized and adversely affected by persistent poverty and inequality.”
Proclamation ending ban on U.S. entry from majority-Muslim countries
Biden’s proclamation reversed Trump’s policy that barred entry to the U.S. for refugees and residents from seven predominantly Muslim countries and orders plans within 45 days for resuming visa processing.
Executive order requiring mask-wearing on federal property
Biden has mandated mask-wearing and social distancing on all federal properties. While the president lacks the authority to institute a nationwide mask mandate, the order also “encourage[s] masking across America.”
Executive order coordinating a government-wide Covid-19 response
After the U.S. surpassed 400,000 COVID-19 deaths earlier this month, Biden’s order created the position of Covid-19 response coordinator, who will advise the president and oversee the distribution of vaccines, tests and other supplies.
Executive order revising immigration enforcement policies
Revoking a Trump-era policy that cracked down on communities shielding undocumented immigrants from deportation, Biden vowed to “protect national and border security” and “address the humanitarian challenges at the southern border.”
Executive order undoing regulatory restrictions on federal agencies
Biden’s order scrapped a batch of Trump-era executive actions that restricted how federal agencies make regulatory changes, including one measure requiring agencies to discard two regulations for every one proposed.
Executive order incorporating undocumented immigrants into census
Undocumented immigrants will be counted in the national decennial population count, according to Biden’s order, which overturned Trump’s attempt to exclude them during the 2020 census.
Executive order refocusing on the climate crisis and canceling the Keystone XL permit
Alongside a variety of actions to “advance environmental justice,” Biden revoked the permit for the controversial Keystone XL pipeline— a 1,200-mile pipeline system projected to carry crude oil from Canada to the U.S. that cuts through Indigenous lands.
The measure also restored several national monuments whose footprints were reduced by Trump and paused oil and gas leasing in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Executive order banning discrimination on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation
In a move lauded by LGBTQ advocates, Biden’s order will extend federal nondiscrimination protections to members of the LGBTQ community, building off the landmark Supreme Court decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, last year to expand protections against discrimination based on sex in federal agencies to include sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression as well.
Memorandum revamping regulatory review
In a memorandum, Biden directed the head of the Office of Budget and Management to oversee an effort to “modernize and improve” the regulatory review process.
Executive order mandating ethics pledge for government appointees
On the heels of Trump’s midnight bid to reverse ethics commitments for executive branch employees, Biden signed an order requiring all government appointees to sign an ethics pledge prohibiting the acceptance of gifts from registered lobbyists and lobbying for at least two years after exiting the government.
Proclamation pulling funds from border wall
Biden terminated the construction and funding of the wall at U.S. southern border — a key promise of the Trump administration that has drawn backlash for its environmental impacts and is being litigated at the Supreme Court for the allegedly improper use of funds.
Executive order pausing federal student loan payments
Biden requested an extension of the freeze on federal student loan payments, writing that “[t]oo many Americans are struggling to pay for basic necessities and to provide for their families.”
Memorandum reinstating deferred enforced departure for Liberians
Biden’s memorandum blocked the deportation of Liberian refugees living in the U.S., reinstating the deferment of their enforced departure granted by the Bush and Obama administrations.
Memorandum strengthening Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals
Biden reaffirmed DACA, an Obama-era program that Trump had long sought to dismantle that shielded undocumented immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as children from deportation.
Day Two
Executive order promoting Covid-19 safety in domestic and international travel
In an effort to curb the spread of Covid-19 through travel, Biden mandated mask-wearing on all forms of public transportation, including in airports, airplanes and buses.
Executive order expanding access to Covid-19 treatments
Biden’s order has directed the secretary of health to support research on Covid-19 treatments and increase support for critical care and long-term care facilities like nursing homes — which have been among the sites hit hardest by the pandemic.
Executive order promoting data-driven response to Covid-19
Another of Biden’s orders on the nation’s Covid-19 response directed all department and agency heads to “facilitate the gathering, sharing and publication of Covid-19-related data” in order to inform their decision-making and public understanding of the pandemic.
Memorandum supporting states’ use of National Guard in Covid-19 response
Biden’s memorandum directed the secretaries of defense and homeland security to support governors’ deployment of the National Guard in efforts to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, which will be fully funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Executive order strengthening public health supply chain
Biden’s order invoked the Defense Production Act to ramp up supplies for the pandemic response and requested the heads of various departments to assess the nationwide availability of personal protective equipment and other resources needed to distribute Covid-19 tests and coronavirus vaccines, as well as to develop a strategy to manufacture supplies for “future pandemics and biological threats.”
Executive order establishing the Covid-19 Health Equity Task Force
In an effort to address social inequities exacerbated by the pandemic, Biden’s order created the Covid-19 Health Equity Task Force, which will provide recommendations on the allocation of resources and funding in light of “disparities in COVID-19 outcomes by race, ethnicity and other factors.”
Executive order supporting the reopening and continuing operation of schools
In consultation with the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Education will develop guidance for elementary and secondary schools “in deciding whether and how to reopen, and how to remain open, for in-person learning; and in safely conducting in-person learning.”
Executive order promoting workplace safety amid the pandemic
Biden’s order directed the Department of Labor to revise and issue new guidance for employers to promote the health and safety of their workers, such as mask-wearing in the workplace.
Executive order establishing a Covid-19 pandemic testing board
Biden’s newly created pandemic testing board will coordinate national efforts to “promote Covid-19 diagnostic, screening and surveillance testing” as well as facilitate the distribution of free Covid-19 tests to those without comprehensive health insurance.
Day Three
Executive order expanding food assistance programs
Biden’s order aims to extend the 15% increase in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits and allow states to increase SNAP emergency allotments, as well as increase benefits under another aid program, the Pandemic Electronic Benefits Transfer, which gives students money for food.
Executive order assisting veterans with debt
Biden’s order asked the Department of Veterans Affairs with considering a freeze on federal debt and overpayment collection from about 2 million veterans.
Executive order guaranteeing unemployment insurance for workers who refuse work due to Covid-19
Biden has requested that the Department of Labor consider clarifying its rules to establish that workers “have a federally guaranteed right to refuse employment that will jeopardize their health,” and that workers who do so will still qualify for unemployment insurance.
Executive order establishing “benefit delivery teams”
Biden’s order established “a network of benefit delivery teams,” which will coordinate with state and federal agencies to facilitate the distribution of federal aid amid the pandemic.
Executive order facilitating delivery of stimulus payments
Biden’s order requested the Treasury Department to consider taking “a series of actions to expand and improve delivery” of direct stimulus payments, including the creation of online tools for recipients to claim their checks.
Executive order to address Covid-19 economic relief
Biden’s order directed all government departments and agencies to “promptly identify actions they can take within existing authorities to address the current economic crisis resulting from the pandemic.”
Executive order empowering federal workers and contractors
Undoing Trump-era regulations that rolled back protections for federal employees, Biden revoked a variety of measures, including a rule that made it easier to hire and fire civil servants in policy-making positions.
The order also requested the Department of Labor to develop recommendations that all federal government employees receive a minimum wage of $15 an hour.
Day Six
Executive order reversing transgender military ban
Biden repealed the ban on transgender people serving openly in the military and ordered the defense secretary to “immediately prohibit involuntary separations, discharges and denials of reenlistment or continuation of service on the basis of gender identity or under circumstances relating to their gender identity.”
Proclamation reinstating Covid-19 travel restrictions
Biden reinstated Covid-19 travel restrictions affecting non-U.S. citizens traveling from Brazil and much of Europe, which Trump had scrapped days before his term ended. Additionally, the ban will bar most non-U.S. citizens from entry if they have recently been in South Africa, where a new strain of Covid-19 has been identified.
Executive order promoting ‘Buy American’ agenda
In an effort to bolster American manufacturing, Biden signed an executive order directing agencies to strengthen requirements about purchasing products and services from U.S. workers and businesses and to “close loopholes that allow companies to offshore production and jobs while still qualifying for domestic preferences.”
Day Seven
Executive order calling for evaluation of Trump’s housing policies
Biden directed the Department of Housing and Urban Development to “examine the effects of the previous Administration’s regulatory actions that undermined fair housing policies and laws” and use its findings to implement the Fair Housing Act’s standards as needed.
Executive order to end reliance on private prisons
In an effort to terminate the federal government’s use of privately owned detention facilities, the Attorney General has been directednot to renew Department of Justice contracts with private prisons.
Executive order reaffirming commitment to tribal sovereignty
Emphasizing the administration’s commitment to respecting the sovereignty of American Indian and Alaska Native tribes, Biden’s order reaffirmed a Clinton-era policy mandating all department and agency heads regularly consult with tribal officials on policy matters that may affect them.
Executive order denouncing anti-Asian discrimination and xenophobia
In response to a surge in anti-Asian bias amid the coronavirus pandemic, Biden’s order urged the Department of Health and Human Services to consider issuing guidance on cultural competency and sensitivity toward Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders as part of the nation’s Covid-19 response. Additionally, the order directed the attorney general to work to prevent discrimination and hate crimes.
Delusions of Dominance
Biden Can’t Restore American Primacy—and Shouldn’t Try
By Stephen Wertheim
FOREIGN AFFAIRS JOURNAL January 25, 2021
Four years ago, as Joe Biden prepared to leave the vice-presidency, he told the World Economic Forum that the United States would continue to lead the “liberal international order” and “fulfill our historic responsibility as the indispensable nation.” The years that followed were not kind to Biden’s assurances. President Donald Trump rejected a world-ordering role for the United States, unleashing “America first” nationalism instead. More important, perhaps, Trump exposed the shallow domestic political support for the high-minded abstractions for which foreign policy elites ask soldiers to fight and citizens to pay. By the time of his presidential campaign in 2020, Biden no longer spoke much about the liberal international order or American indispensability. He emphasized healing the country’s domestic wounds and influencing others “not merely by the example of our power, but by the power of our example.”
But Biden will need to be much bolder if his presidency is to succeed. He is inheriting a long-standing U.S. grand strategy that is systemically broken and that no tonal adjustment or policy nuance can fix. For three decades, successive presidents—Trump included—continually expanded U.S. wars, forward deployments, and defense commitments in the pursuit of armed dominance across the globe. The price of primacy, as I wrote in these pageslast year (“The Price of Primacy,” March/April 2020), has been severe. By seeking global dominance rather than just its own defense, the United States has acquired a world of antagonists. These antagonists have in turn further increased the costs and dangers of dominance. As a result, U.S. foreign policy has failed in its most essential purpose: it has made the American people less safe where they live.
The Biden administration enters office intending to restore American primacy, not preside over its destruction. Yet realities will intrude. As Biden addresses urgent priorities in his early days—repairing democracy at home, ending a mass-killing pandemic, averting climate chaos, rescuing U.S. diplomacy—he will find, if he takes a hard look, that the burdens of primacy contradict his own goals at every turn.
BREAKING THE CYCLE
Biden has immediate decisions to make that will either set him on a constructive course or ensnare him in the same way, over the very same issues, as his predecessors. He has pledged to bring the United States’ “forever wars” to an end and enhance diplomacy in the greater Middle East. In his first hundred days, he will have two time-limited opportunities to do so. First, he can revive the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran and reverse the pressure toward war ahead of Iran’s presidential elections in June. Second, he can abide by the Doha Agreement with the Taliban and withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by May. On both, he will have to go big or see his efforts fail later.
Getting back into the nuclear deal will not be easy after the Trump administration senselessly punished Iran for holding up its end of the bargain. But Biden will require even more discipline and creativity in order to make the strategic changes needed for the deal to endure. The Obama administration suffered from excessive modesty when it concluded the agreement in 2015. To domestic audiences, it maintained that Iran remained a major threat to the United States. In the Middle East, it compensated Iran’s foes with aid, arms sales, and support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen. These allowances made sense if the goal was to maintain U.S. military dominance of the Middle East. But they also fueled the forces that led the United States to leave the nuclear deal under Trump.
The Biden administration must learn the right lesson. Not only should it come back into compliance with the agreement immediately, eschewing any temptation to use Trump’s sanctions as leverage, but it should unapologetically pursue a new era of normal diplomatic relations with Iran. Rather than reward U.S. partners in the region, Biden should fulfill his pledge to terminate U.S. support for Saudi intervention in Yemen, slash arms sales to the kingdom, and cut aid to Israel. Such measures are simply what is required to rescue American diplomacy in the Middle East. By the same stroke, however, the Biden administration would change U.S. grand strategy in the region, disentangling the United States from its excessive identification with one constellation of actors against the other.
Afghanistan offers another early opportunity for Biden to make rapid and lasting improvements. The Trump administration has handed him a mere 2,500 ground troops in the country and an agreement to withdraw the rest. Biden should accept the unwitting favor. His best chance to end the United States’ war in Afghanistan is now. He should order a full military withdrawal, scrapping his campaign plan to leave behind a residual counterterrorism force. Such a force is unnecessary to deter terrorist attacks emanating from Afghanistan, where the United States long ago achieved its mission of decimating al Qaeda and punishing the Taliban. Now, moreover, failing to withdraw fully would abrogate the U.S.-Taliban deal that Biden has inherited, causing the Taliban to abandon talks and pursue further gains on the battlefield.
Some U.S. officials will no doubt disagree, arguing for delaying withdrawal to allow more time for the parties within Afghanistan to negotiate a final settlement. But such negotiations can take place without U.S. forces, whose presence might even impede Afghans from finding a stable balance of their own. For the United States, half measures will perpetuate endless war. If Biden starts moving back the goalposts for withdrawal, he will embolden domestic critics to argue, in effect, that U.S. forces must remain under any circumstances, whether to preserve hard-won gains or to forestall further losses.
A NEW STRATEGIC LOGIC
If Biden acts decisively, he will emerge from his first six months having broken the grip of the old strategic logic and established proof of concept of a new one that puts the identifiable interests of the American people ahead of the futile quest for global dominance. As he engages diplomatically with Iran and ends the United States’ war in Afghanistan, Biden will face predictable accusations of abandoning U.S. partners and emboldening U.S. adversaries. For example, H. R. McMaster, Trump’s former national security adviser, has contended that pulling back U.S. forces would fail to tame bad behavior by Iran, the Taliban, and others.
Biden can use the bully pulpit to show how badly such arguments miss the point. The point is not to transform Iran or the Taliban into benevolent actors; it is rather to render them no longer threats to and problems for the United States. Iran will continue malign activities in the Middle East, and the Taliban will remain repressive, but they would have little to gain by targeting the United States if the United States were to stop attempting to control events in their neighborhood. By jettisoning grandiose objectives, the United States can shed unnecessary enemies and free itself to advance its interests. It can regain control over its foreign policy.
After scoring early successes in the greater Middle East, the administration could then apply its strategic logic elsewhere: step back from the frontlines to reduce the United States’ liabilities and make the gains that matter. North Korea presents a prime example. Having failed in every attempt to rid the regime of nuclear weapons, the United States should play a different game. It should accept that the regime will possess a nuclear capability for the foreseeable future, encourage peace building on the peninsula, and move to normalize relations. One day it might even be able to remove U.S. troops from the South. Such action is the best way to address the North’s threat—not by defusing all its bombs but by removing potential reasons for them to target the United States.
It will be more difficult for the Biden administration to exhibit restraint in relations with Russia and especially China. It will also be more important, lest the failures of U.S. policy that have afflicted the Middle East over the past two decades expand to Europe and East Asia in the next two decades. Biden has already signaled a desire to work with Beijing on public health and the environment and with Moscow on arms control. But these laudatory aims will ultimately be overwhelmed by rigid adherence to grand-strategic primacy, by which the United States, seeking to dominate each region permanently, fuels intense security competition with rising or assertive powers.
Biden can set clear priorities early by scrapping the last administration’s self-fulfilling construct of “great-power competition.” His first National Security Strategy should recognize that pandemic disease and climate changeconstitute far more direct threats to the American public than does the specter of armed attack by rival states. Further, it should highlight that China, as the world’s number two power and the leading producer of low-carbon energy technologies, remains an essential partner in addressing both challenges.
In order to limit antagonisms counterproductive to U.S. interests, Biden should resist growing calls to commit explicitly to waging war with China to defend Taiwan. He should proceed to revamp U.S. military strategy in East Asia. Rather than exercise dominance, the United States should equip its allies and partners to deny dominance of waterways and airspace to China. In Europe, he should call a halt to NATO enlargement, breaking with three decades of expansion that saddled the United States with unwarranted commitments, damaged relations with Russia, and stifled European initiative. Through prudent retrenchment, the United States can coexist with China and Russia and find the right mix of competition and cooperation as U.S. interests dictate. The alternative is to spend the rest of the twenty-first century guaranteeing conflictual relations, risking great-power war, and crowding out domestic investments.
DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA
The United States faces existential challenges at home, as Biden appreciates. His national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, has pledged to judge each policy “by a basic question: Will this make life better, easier, safer, for families across this country?” The American people need every part of their government to work to improve their lives and strengthen their democracy. A grand strategy of armed primacy does the opposite. It sustains animosity with the world, whips up fears of foreigners and supposed internal enemies, and lavishes more than half of federal discretionary spending on the Pentagon year after year. It straitjackets domestic renewal.
For the same reason, Biden has a surprising opportunity. He would foster national unity by pulling back U.S. forces abroad. Fully two-thirds of veterans, like the wider public, support bringing all U.S. troops home from Afghanistan and Iraq. It is finally time to deliver on the public’s demand to do less nation building abroad and more building in America. The United States remains an indispensable nation—to its people. Only by serving them can it play a responsible role in the world.
COVID-19 Has Exposed the Fragility of Our Food System—Here’s How We Can Localize It
By April M. Short, an editor, journalist and documentary editor and producer. She is a writing fellow at Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
The U.S. was once a haven for small-scale, family farmers. Today, food giants have gobbled up most of those family farms, creating the monstrous and unsustainable food industry known as Big Ag. The extent to which this massive, industrialized, global food system falls short became especially unmistakable in 2020. The current food system is “fraying.” It relies on the horrendous treatment of laborers, a wasteful allocation of resources, worldwide environmental devastation—and in a pinch, can quickly devolve into near-collapse of the entire system, as evidenced by the delays, shortages and pressure during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the deepening hunger crisis in America. Among the many necessary systemic changes 2020 has illuminated is the need to majorly restructure the way we cultivate and access food in our communities.
Faced with the shortcomings of the current food systems, food producers across the Pacific Northwest have been innovating ways to reestablish locally sourced, regional food systems. In the process of localizing the food supply chain, they aim to establish food security for their communities, create local jobs and support the surrounding ecosystems.
During a free, online event called Festival of What Works, which took place in November 2020, entrepreneurs from an array of backgrounds shared their success stories to demonstrate how it is possible to build and scale local food production across geography as well as institutions and create more food-secure communities. The festival was a project of a newly launched eco-trust network called Salmon Nation. It gathered a collection of voices from various cultures and focuses, to showcase solution-oriented projects from Northern California through Alaska (a region called “Salmon Nation” by many of the area’s Indigenous people) that offer place-based responses to the current political, economic and climate realities.
Here are three examples of localized food projects successfully challenging the current system—all of which lend themselves to replication in other areas.
1. Localizing Flour Mills Across a Region
When food giants wiped out family farmers, mills were no exception. Just about 120 years ago there were 24,000 mills in the United States. Today there are only 180.
In recent years, both Indigenous groups and small-scale, independent farmers in the Pacific Northwest have started to bring back regional grain farms and flour mills. These mills process non-commodity grains that are meant to grow within the specific regions where they are cultivated, and a regionally oriented food supply chain is beginning to reemerge around flour produced by the mills.
Kevin Morse, the founder of the regionally sourced and operated Cairnspring Mills flour mill in the Skagit Valley in Washington, says he founded the company as a way to bring back small-scale, local flour milling and respond to the ecological problems and issues of climate resilience associated with large-scale production.
The Cairnspring Mills sources from grain farmers across the region between Northern California and Northern Washington.
“[Regional food supply chains will be key into the future] when it comes to climate resilience because we’re going to have food deserts and food shortages,” Morse says. “By bringing back local supply chains and local production capacity to turn that crop into food, we automatically make the community more resilient because we’re not relying on imports.”
A video on the company’s website details how Cairnspring Mills was instrumental in keeping flour in production in the region during the COVID-19 outbreak. When many food supply chains were interrupted and grocery aisles sat empty, many of them without flour for months, Cairnspring stayed in operation and supported other local businesses in the process.
“Our supply chain is local, our grain storage is local, so we never skipped a beat on production [during the pandemic],” Morse says. “We were able to keep people employed and were able to help businesses that relied on flour to stay in operation. We were [also] able to keep the farmers farming and give them contracts so that they could go to the bank and get their financing. [Having a local mill] really brings back control [and] resilience.”
During the Food Democracy at Scale panel discussion on November 16, 2020, at the Festival of What Works, speaking about Cairnspring, Morse said that it is “the first craft mill in this country,” and currently operates at a similar scale to some of the early craft beer companies and small coffee roasters. He said the mill is doing for flour what “Starbucks did for coffee and Sierra Nevada did for craft beer.”
The mill has the capacity to make about 7 million pounds of flour per year, and it sells its flour to the surrounding community via commercial customers and craft bakeries—both locally and down the West Coast region into Northern California. In comparison, a single mill belonging to the large-scale milling companies in operation today can make the same amount of flour his mill produces in a year, in just two days, he says.
He, however, pointed out in the panel discussion that the flour produced by these large-scale milling companies is “a very different flour… What they have brought us, unfortunately, is grain that’s not healthy. What they have brought us is grain that’s oftentimes polluted with chemicals or grown in monocrop environments, which are contributing to other issues we have with water quality and disease resistance… They can source grain from Kazakhstan, Canada and Kansas, and that could all be in that white bag on your shelf.”
He says Cairnspring is doing the exact opposite by sourcing from farmers and paying them premiums above commodity pricing so that they can stay economically viable while being incentivized to steward the land. They’ve helped provide a market for regionally viable grains that have long been used as a financially unsustainable rotation crop. And, they’re focused on producing a quality, flavorful craft product rather than driving down prices with mass production.
Morse says when the pandemic hit, more people began to understand the importance of local food systems for community resilience and in the six months since March, the business has raised $2 million.
“There’s been a shift in consciousness—not only of people seeing the need for this, but more people are seeing that it’s just a better product and it has real market potential,” he says.
Morse has a background in farming, economic development and conservation ecology. Prior to founding the mill, he worked for a decade with the Nature Conservancy and was director of the Puget Sound Working Lands Program. It was his job, he says, to find ways to align conservation and farming, “to achieve conservation outcomes on private land.”
After working in various fields for 35 years, he came to see that all of the things he cared about—from regenerative and sustainable farming to conservation—were in response “to a food system that wasn’t serving us well.”
He explains that as the food system was centralized, local communities lost their access to local food processors. This, in turn, forced farmers into the commodities system, or into single-buyer markets, making them more vulnerable to market changes, and pricing out the majority of small-scale farmers. He came to realize that many of the environmental issues he came across in his work—like issues with water quality or wildlife habitat—stem from that commodity system.
“Modern farming and chemical agriculture were destroying habitat and not giving farmers an alternative market to take care of their lands,” he says. “I’ve never met a farmer that says, ‘I’d really love to use more chemicals on my land,’ or ‘I really don’t want to see any wildlife on my land.’”
He came to realize that in order to rebuild local food systems, there was a need to rebuild local processing infrastructure. He also realized farmers would need to get a higher premium for their “higher-value, better-tasting, more nutritious products.”
“Thankfully, we’re at a time where the consumers are demanding cleaner food and they have more awareness of the challenges with some of our modern agriculture,” Morse says.
The idea to create a local mill came out of community interest in adding value to local grains, which were seen as “a crop that farmers have lost money on for a hundred years, but they’ve used in cereal grain rotations as a way to break disease cycles and add organic matter to the soil to maintain a high quality in their other cash crops like potatoes or brassicas,” Morse adds.
At the time Morse had the idea for the mill, the Washington State University Bread Lab as well as port officials at the Port of Skagit, farmers and other interested stakeholders were already looking into better ways to utilize the grains grown in the region.
The mill now provides a local, resilient model of producing flour using those undervalued regional grains—and the model encourages ecologically supportive farming practices.
“[Farmers] have a market incentive to improve their stewardship of the land for healthy soils, water conservation, carbon sequestration,” he says. “They’re incentivized to implement those best practices instead of pushing them to the side because they can’t afford them in the current commodity system.”
Looking at the next five years or so, Morse says the company is considering expanding to bring small, locally operated mills with similar models into other regions—but not before the current mill is well established.
“We’re looking at a half-dozen places around the West, maybe one or two on the East Coast that are prime for partnerships and collaboration with new communities to build new mills.”
2. A Regenerative Way to Farm Chickens
An innovative chicken farming model in British Columbia could help pave the way for a new standard of poultry farming that is regenerative and solar-powered. The system is referred to as poultry-centered regenerative agriculture (PCRA), and Skeena Energy Solutions (SES), a project started by the Skeena Watershed Conservation Coalition(SWCC), is putting it into action. It has 1,500 chickens living in sustainably built, solar-powered coops, with free range to wander during the day under a low canopy of brush, which encourages increased egg production and healthier birds while also fertilizing and replenishing the soil where the birds graze.
“Canopy is really important as we discovered because chickens are jungle fowl, [not pasture animals],” says Kesia Nagata, energy coordinator for SWCC. She notes that even if poultry farms are free-range, but the range does not have a covering canopy to allow chickens to hide from potential predators, chickens’ wandering range will stay limited.
The regenerative poultry model gives the birds free access to rotating, fenced grazing areas. Rotating the area where the birds graze allows chickens to fertilize and nourish the soil while avoiding damage to the land by overuse, Nagata explains. The chickens are given locally grown feed from small-scale producers, and the project has hired local workers, the majority of them Indigenous people, who are paid living wages.
One of the big incentives for SWCC to explore the regenerative chicken farm concept is that it models a potential way for communities to stimulate their local farming economies. Ideally, it provides a method of raising 1,500 healthy, productive chickens at once on plots of land that are two acres or smaller, which keeps the cost of entry low.
“With this set-up on 1.5 to 2.5 acres, a single farmer can work three hours a day to produce 4,500 four-pound, free-range chickens in nine months, along with thousands of pounds of nuts, berries, and other cash crops… [translating] to over $80,000 (meat) or $250,000 (eggs) gross income per year, per single plot,” states an article by BC Local Newswhile quoting a description of the project provided by SES.
The idea behind the pilot chicken farm program was to demonstrate a sustainable, land-based, inclusive, ecologically and socially viable way of farming, Nagata says.
She says the idea to incorporate a chicken farming model for an organization like SWCC, which is usually focused on salmon, was inspired by a similar regenerative farming project in Minnesota that works to pair Indigenous and immigrant farmers with small land plots.
“The focus of [SWCC] is to look at community economic development as a basis for salmon conservation, and it’s all holistic. If you don’t have communities that are healthy and wealthy and connected, they don’t have the privilege to protect the land that they depend on,” she says.
The pandemic, intense weather and other unforeseen hiccups delayed certain aspects of the project as it was getting set up through 2020, and Nagata says one of the goals for SWCC is to work through all the potential kinks so that they can eventually offer a streamlined, regenerative chicken farming model that small-scale farmers might be able to replicate across the region.
“We wouldn’t expect a small-scale, low-income farmer to be able to do all of the research and take all the losses that we are taking,” she says. “Our hope is that we can iron out those details to make it a lot more accessible to people and potentially have a working business plan and a template for how to get loans and grants and so on for this type of project. Because it’s so adaptable. The whole thing can be scaled.”
Nagata says while the project’s first months have illuminated the challenges inherent to straying from the current food system, they also ended up stimulating the local economy in some unexpected ways.
“I’ve been really humbled by how hard it is to make such a tiny little dent in such a huge problem—as well as having to be part of the problem in some ways in order to make it work—but I get excited about the fact that one project like this has inspired so many people to think about how else they can tag onto it,” she says. “Supportive jobs, businesses, and products can be created around this one idea—and that’s where the real economic development part is for me. Like, okay, great, there are some chickens. But there’s also a chicken soup and a chicken pie company. There are also local grain growers. We’ve got the local feed store interested in helping out. There are also all the administrative jobs involved in running things. There’s also the potential for pet food—and whatever else. There’s so much potential for change from a single project like this.”
3. Sustainable Livestock Ranching
The American meat industry is unsustainable, and beef alone carries a significant carbon footprint. During the Food Democracy at Scale panel discussion at the Festival of What Works, Cory Carman, a fourth-generation cattle rancher, shared how and why she operates Carman Ranch, which is spread across 5,000 acres, as a sustainable, grass-fed, locally oriented meat business.
Carman Ranch, located in Northeast Oregon, is a century-old family business that raises grass-fed cows on an open pasture. The main focus of their business is on building healthy, carbon-sequestering soil while producing beef that is more nutritious and healthier than many of the mass-produced options.
The ranch recently began to partner with other family ranch producers across the greater region in order to stay afloat in a meat industry saturated by major conglomerates.
Carman said as she took charge of the family ranch and looked at what the fourth generation of the farm would need to look like into the future, she realized partnerships with other producers would be key.
“Individuals doing their own thing is not how you create change,” she said in the panel. “I started marketing grass-fed beef from our ranch and added additional producers from our region. Now we work with eight to ten producers in the Northwest, from Montana into Idaho, Washington and Northern California, to provide a year-round supply of grass-fed beef.”
The operations of Carman Ranch are also unique in that they ship cattle directly from the farm where they are raised to the meat-processing plant. From there, the meat goes directly to wholesale, or directly to the customer—and all of these steps happen within the local region. These steps are highly uncommon in the meat industry.
Carman said in the panel that the ranch produces 20,000 to 30,000 pounds of meat per week, on average. This is far less than what industrial cattle farms produce, and Carman said the biggest meat players can produce in a single day or even half a day what their ranch produces in a year. What they do provide, bolstered by regional partnerships, is enough to meet the demand for their product, which remains niche, and has a dedicated customer base.
“[Our customers] share our vision… [about] what the food system could look like and the values the food system could deliver,” she said during the panel discussion. And, through the COVID-19 pandemic, they’ve already proven more resilient than the large-scale meat industry.
“When it comes to food security, with the huge processing [plants] shut down [due to COVID], we weren’t impacted at all,” she said in the panel. “We have been a family-owned, smaller-scale processing facility, and a smaller crew that could take much more precautions… Nothing about our supply chain was impacted at all through COVID.”
Rather than focusing on expanding or scaling up their production to drive down costs, the company is focused on carving out a space in the market with their present setup, and investing the time to develop a successful long-term alternative to the unrealistic mainstream model.
“There is absolutely a vision toward changing the whole food system,” she said. “My biggest hope is if we have some success it will only make it easier for other people who want to do that same type of work.”
Their ultimate goal is to serve as a model or “learning laboratory” for sustainable meat production that future farms can pick up and replicate, Carman said. And, according to her, Carman Ranch is in a unique position to explore what does and doesn’t work well, as they have investors who support their larger vision of a more sustainable future for meat.
“We have a really distinct theory of change, [which] is that the food system of the future will be more distributed, more regional, and it will be scaled to ecological realities, not processing realities,” she said in the panel. “In that, we think about something like livestock production, we think about the places where it makes sense to [raise] livestock and how different regional companies could be connected to each other. In our vision of the future, there are a lot of regional grass-fed beef companies and they collaborate to potentially trade cuts, to do things like value-added co-packing that would benefit from aggregating products, maybe they do marketing together.”
She said that collaboration with other regional producers is what keeps the larger vision alive and inspired.
“The biggest breakthrough moments and things that bring me joy, they have to do with our alignment as a group around things like regenerative agriculture, soil health principles, carbon sequestration, animal welfare,” she said. “All these disparate producers are aligned; we’re doing things like nutrition testing on our beef to help us internally understand… what the relationship is between the soil health and nutritional density of the beef. Those are really esoteric things for the customers, but that sort of foundation of all of us working together, around these shared goals and vision… is the success that we feel every day.”
John Kerry, Davos, and the ‘Great Reset’
CAPITAL MATTERS, January 27, 2021
Last year, the World Economic Forum (“Davos”) announced that it was launching what it modestly referred to as the “Great Reset” initiative:
There is an urgent need for global stakeholders to cooperate in simultaneously managing the direct consequences of the COVID-19 crisis. To improve the state of the world, the World Economic Forum is starting The Great Reset initiative.
As I wrote in October:
Even if we pass over the presumption of the reset’s name, this is a small classic of the prose of soft authoritarianism. There is an “urgent need” that must be met. There is to be cooperation and management, the world is to be “improved,” and all of this is to be put in place by “global stakeholders,” — a conveniently vague phrase, with more than a suggestion of democracy bypassed about it.
As Klaus Schwab, the WEF’s founder and executive chairman, has made clear, the Great Reset is nothing if not ambitious:
The world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions. Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed. In short, we need a “Great Reset” of capitalism.
Writing back in October, I wondered why, given the mess that so many governments had made of their response to COVID-19, it was capitalism that needed a reset. The reality, of course, is that COVID-19 is just the latest excuse for Schwab to renew his longstanding campaign to replace free market capitalism with “stakeholder capitalism”. Stakeholder capitalism is (to put it too briefly) an expression of corporatism, an ideology that can be benign (as in post-war West Germany) or almost infinitely malign: It was, to varying degrees, an important part of fascist theory (if not always practice) in the interwar years and, in countries such as Spain, Portugal, and Argentina, for much longer still.
In fact, contemporary China is, in many respects, closer to being a corporatist than a Communist state.
Under the circumstances, perhaps we should not be surprised that on Monday, China’s Xi was an honored speaker at the “virtual” Davos being held this week. (The Wall Street Journal reported that “The Davos website effused that this was a ‘historic opportunity for collaboration.’”)
To be fair, as I noted in October, the WEF has not come up with its ideas in isolation:
The WEF acts as an amplifier and supporter of the soft authoritarianism of the globalist governing class in waiting — and not always in waiting. But it is a part of that ecosystem, not its controller. And the Great Reset is both a product of Schwab’s imagination and a summary of the corporatist ideas that have been floating around that class for a long time, from the focus on stakeholders, to the often cranky environmentalism, to the rejection of shareholder primacy . . .
Under the circumstances, this article in The Hill by Justin Haskins (from December, but I just saw it in a retweet) isn’t entirely reassuring:
At a panel discussion about the Great Reset hosted by the World Economic Forum in mid-November, former Secretary of State John Kerry — Biden’s would-be special presidential envoy for climate – firmly declared that the Biden administration will support the Great Reset and that the Great Reset “will happen with greater speed and with greater intensity than a lot of people might imagine.”
When asked by panel host Borge Brende whether the World Economic Forum and other Great Reset supporters are “expecting too much too soon from the new president, or is he going to deliver first day on this [sic] topics?,” Kerry responded, “The answer to your question is, no, you’re not expecting too much.”
“And yes, it [the Great Reset] will happen,” Kerry continued. “And I think it will happen with greater speed and with greater intensity than a lot of people might imagine. In effect, the citizens of the United States have just done a Great Reset. We’ve done a Great Reset. And it was a record level of voting.”
Kerry later argued that the Great Reset is necessary to slow the “climate crisis” and that “I know Joe Biden believes . . . it’s not enough just to rejoin Paris [the Paris Climate Accords] for the United States. It’s not enough for us to just do the minimum of what Paris requires.”
Kerry is, of course, now our climate czar, a suitably autocratic nickname for a role that is likely to involve an agenda with more than a touch of authoritarianism about it. Interestingly, he is combining that job with a seat on the National Security Council.
And we have already seen, via a series of pronouncements and executive orders, that the Biden administration will go far further than the Paris climate accords require.
But it is worth also reading the next paragraph of Haskins’s article:
Kerry also said that because of the Great Reset movement, he believes “we’re at the dawn of an extremely exciting time” and that “the greatest opportunity we have” to address social and economic problems is “dealing with the climate crisis.”
Never let a (climate) “crisis” go to waste.
Enemies of the Deep State: The Government’s War on Domestic Terrorism Is a Trap
By John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead
“This is an issue that all Democrats, Republicans, independents, Libertarians should be extremely concerned about, especially because we don’t have to guess about where this goes or how this ends. What characteristics are we looking for as we are building this profile of a potential extremist, what are we talking about? Religious extremists, are we talking about Christians, evangelical Christians, what is a religious extremist? Is it somebody who is pro-life? [The proposed legislation could create] a very dangerous undermining of our civil liberties, our freedoms in our Constitution, and a targeting of almost half of the country.”—Tulsi Gabbard, former Congresswoman
This is how it begins.
We are moving fast down that slippery slope to an authoritarian society in which the only opinions, ideas and speech expressed are the ones permitted by the government and its corporate cohorts.
In the wake of the Jan. 6 riots at the Capitol, “domestic terrorism” has become the new poster child for expanding the government’s powers at the expense of civil liberties.
Of course, “domestic terrorist” is just the latest bull’s eye phrase, to be used interchangeably with “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist,” to describe anyone who might fall somewhere on a very broad spectrum of viewpoints that could be considered “dangerous.”
Watch and see: we are all about to become enemies of the state.
In a déjà vu mirroring of the legislative fall-out from 9/11, and the ensuing build-up of the security state, there is a growing demand in certain sectors for the government to be given expanded powers to root out “domestic” terrorism, the Constitution be damned.
If this is a test of Joe Biden’s worthiness to head up the American police state, he seems ready.
As part of his inaugural address, President Biden pledged to confront and defeat “a rise of political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism.” Biden has also asked the Director of National Intelligence to work with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security in carrying out a “comprehensive threat assessment” of domestic terrorism. And then to keep the parallels going, there is the proposed Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2021, introduced after the Jan. 6 riots, which aims to equip the government with “the tools to identify, monitor and thwart” those who could become radicalized to violence.
Don’t blink or you’ll miss the sleight of hand.
This is the tricky part of the Deep State’s con game that keeps you focused on the shell game in front of you while your wallet is being picked clean by ruffians in your midst.
It follows the same pattern as every other convenient “crisis” used by the government as an excuse to expand its powers at the citizenry’s expense and at the expense of our freedoms.
As investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald warns:
“The last two weeks have ushered in a wave of new domestic police powers and rhetoric in the name of fighting ‘terrorism’ that are carbon copies of many of the worst excesses of the first War on Terror that began nearly twenty years ago. This New War on Terror—one that is domestic in name from the start and carries the explicit purpose of fighting ‘extremists’ and ‘domestic terrorists’ among American citizens on U.S. soil—presents the whole slew of historically familiar dangers when governments, exploiting media-generated fear and dangers, arm themselves with the power to control information, debate, opinion, activism and protests.”
Greenwald is referring to the USA Patriot Act, passed almost 20 years ago, which paved the way for the eradication of every vital safeguard against government overreach, corruption and abuse.
Free speech, the right to protest, the right to challenge government wrongdoing, due process, a presumption of innocence, the right to self-defense, accountability and transparency in government, privacy, press, sovereignty, assembly, bodily integrity, representative government: all of these and more have become casualties in the government’s war on the American people, a war that has grown more pronounced since Sept. 11, 2001.
Some members of Congress get it.
In a letter opposing expansion of national security powers, a handful congressional representatives urged their colleagues not to repeat the mistakes of the past:
“While many may find comfort in increased national security powers in the wake of this attack, we must emphasize that we have been here before and we have seen where that road leads. Our history is littered with examples of initiatives sold as being necessary to fight extremism that quickly devolve into tools used for the mass violation of the human and civil rights of the American people… To expand the government’s national security powers once again at the expense of the human and civil rights of the American people would only serve to further undermine our democracy, not protect it.”
Cue the Emergency State, the government’s Machiavellian version of crisis management that justifies all manner of government tyranny in the so-called name of national security.
This is the power grab hiding in plain sight, obscured by the political machinations of the self-righteous elite. This is how the government continues to exploit crises and use them as opportunities for power grabs under the guise of national security. Indeed, this is exactly how the government added red flag gun laws, precrime surveillance, fusion centers, threat assessments, mental health assessments, involuntary confinement to its arsenal of weaponized powers.
The objective is not to make America safe again. That has never been the government’s aim.
Greenwald explains:
“Why would such new terrorism laws be needed in a country that already imprisons more of its citizens than any other country in the world as the result of a very aggressive set of criminal laws? What acts should be criminalized by new ‘domestic terrorism’ laws that are not already deemed criminal? They never say, almost certainly because—just as was true of the first set of new War on Terror laws—their real aim is to criminalize that which should not be criminalized: speech, association, protests, opposition to the new ruling coalition.”
So you see, the issue is not whether Donald Trump or Roger Stone or MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell deserve to be banned from Twitter, even if they’re believed to be spouting misinformation, hateful ideas, or fomenting discontent.
Rather, we should be asking whether any corporation or government agency or entity representing a fusion of the two should have the power to muzzle, silence, censor, regulate, control and altogether eradicate so-called “dangerous” or “extremist” ideas.
This unilateral power to muzzle free speech represents a far greater danger than any so-called right- or left-wing extremist might pose.
The ramifications are so far-reaching as to render almost every American an extremist in word, deed, thought or by association.
Yet where many go wrong is in assuming that you have to be doing something illegal or challenging the government’s authority in order to be flagged as a suspicious character, labeled an enemy of the state and locked up like a dangerous criminal.
Eventually, all you will really need to do is use certain trigger words, surf the internet, communicate using a cell phone, drive a car, stay at a hotel, purchase materials at a hardware store, take flying or boating lessons, appear suspicious, question government authority, or generally live in the United States.
The groundwork has already been laid.
The trap is set.
All that is needed is the right bait.
With the help of automated eyes and ears, a growing arsenal of high-tech software, hardware and techniques, government propaganda urging Americans to turn into spies and snitches, as well as social media and behavior sensing software, government agents have been busily spinning a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports aimed at snaring potential enemies of the state.
It’s the American police state’s take on the dystopian terrors foreshadowed by George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Phillip K. Dick all rolled up into one oppressive pre-crime and pre-thought crime package.
What’s more, the technocrats who run the surveillance state don’t even have to break a sweat while monitoring what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, how much you spend, whom you support, and with whom you communicate. Computers by way of AI (artificial intelligence) now do the tedious work of trolling social media, the internet, text messages and phone calls for potentially anti-government remarks, all of which is carefully recorded, documented, and stored to be used against you someday at a time and place of the government’s choosing.
For instance, police in major American cities have been using predictive policing technology that allows them to identify individuals—or groups of individuals—most likely to commit a crime in a given community. Those individuals are then put on notice that their movements and activities will be closely monitored and any criminal activity (by them or their associates) will result in harsh penalties.
In other words, the burden of proof is reversed: you are guilty before you are given any chance to prove you are innocent.
Dig beneath the surface of this kind of surveillance/police state, however, and you will find that the real purpose of pre-crime is not safety but control.
Red flag gun laws merely push us that much closer towards a suspect society where everyone is potentially guilty of some crime or another and must be preemptively rendered harmless.
This is the same government that has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state.
For instance, if you believe in and exercise your rights under the Constitution (namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), you could be at the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.
Moreover, as a New York Times editorial warns, you may be an anti-government extremist (a.k.a. domestic terrorist) in the eyes of the police if you are afraid that the government is plotting to confiscate your firearms, if you believe the economy is about to collapse and the government will soon declare martial law, or if you display an unusual number of political and/or ideological bumper stickers on your car.
According to one FBI latest report, you might also be classified as a domestic terrorism threat if you espouse conspiracy theories, especially if you “attempt to explain events or circumstances as the result of a group of actors working in secret to benefit themselves at the expense of others” and are “usually at odds with official or prevailing explanations of events.”
Additionally, according to Michael C. McGarrity, the FBI’s assistant director of the counterterrorism division, the bureau now “classifies domestic terrorism threats into four main categories: racially motivated violent extremism, anti-government/anti-authority extremism, animal rights/environmental extremism, and abortion extremism.”
In other words, if you dare to subscribe to any views that are contrary to the government’s, you may well be suspected of being a domestic terrorist and treated accordingly.
Again, where many Americans go wrong is in naively assuming that you have to be doing something illegal or harmful in order to be flagged and targeted for some form of intervention or detention.
In fact, U.S. police agencies have been working to identify and manage potential extremist “threats,” violent or otherwise, before they can become actual threats for some time now.
In much the same way that the USA Patriot Act was used as a front to advance the surveillance state, allowing the government to establish a far-reaching domestic spying program that turned every American citizen into a criminal suspect, the government’s anti-extremism program renders otherwise lawful, nonviolent activities as potentially extremist.
In fact, all you need to do these days to end up on a government watch list or be subjected to heightened scrutiny is use certain trigger words (like cloud, pork and pirates), surf the internet, communicate using a cell phone, limp or stutter, drive a car, stay at a hotel, attend a political rally, express yourself on social media, appear mentally ill, serve in the military, disagree with a law enforcement official, call in sick to work, purchase materials at a hardware store, take flying or boating lessons, appear suspicious, appear confused or nervous, fidget or whistle or smell bad, be seen in public waving a toy gun or anything remotely resembling a gun (such as a water nozzle or a remote control or a walking cane), stare at a police officer, question government authority, or appear to be pro-gun or pro-freedom.
Be warned: once you get on such a government watch list—whether it’s a terrorist watch list, a mental health watch list, a dissident watch list, or a red flag gun watch list—there’s no clear-cut way to get off, whether or not you should actually be on there.
You will be tracked wherever you go.
You will be flagged as a potential threat and dealt with accordingly.
This is pre-crime on an ideological scale and it’s been a long time coming.
The government has been building its pre-crime, surveillance network in concert with fusion centers (of which there are 78 nationwide, with partners in the corporate sector and globally), data collection agencies, behavioral scientists, corporations, social media, and community organizers and by relying on cutting-edge technology for surveillance, facial recognition, predictive policing, biometrics, and behavioral epigenetics (in which life experiences alter one’s genetic makeup).
If you’re not scared yet, you should be.
Connect the dots.
Start with the powers amassed by the government under the USA Patriot Act, note the government’s ever-broadening definition of what it considers to be an “extremist,” then add in the government’s detention powers under NDAA, the National Security Agency’s far-reaching surveillance networks, and fusion centers that collect and share surveillance data between local, state and federal police agencies.
To that, add tens of thousands of armed, surveillance drones and balloons that are beginning to blanket American skies, facial recognition technology that will identify and track you wherever you go and whatever you do. And then to complete the picture, toss in the real-time crime centers being deployed in cities across the country, which will be attempting to “predict” crimes and identify so-called criminals before they happen based on widespread surveillance, complex mathematical algorithms and prognostication programs.
Hopefully you’re starting to understand how easy we’ve made it for the government to identify, label, target, defuse and detain anyone it views as a potential threat for a variety of reasons that run the gamut from mental illness to having a military background to challenging its authority to just being on the government’s list of persona non grata.
There’s always a price to pay for standing up to the powers-that-be.
Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, you don’t even have to be a dissident to get flagged by the government for surveillance, censorship and detention.
All you really need to be is a citizen of the American police state.
Facebook rival MeWe gains 2.5M members in a week as users seek privacy
The social network MeWe gained 2.5 million new members in the past week as social media users flock to privacy-focused apps.
The social network currently has 16 million members, according to the company. In June 2020, MeWe stated it had roughly 8 million members.
The ad-free platform aims to compete against traditional social media models that use data collection for targeted ads. MeWe, launched by Mark Weinstein in 2016, also vouches not to censor their users for behavior that might violate the policies of other networks, including Facebook and Twitter.
“People all over the world are leaving Facebook and Twitter in droves because they are fed up with the relentless privacy violations, surveillance capitalism, political bias, targeting and newsfeed manipulation by these companies,” MeWe’s marketing director, David Westreich, told USA TODAY.
Over 50% of MeWe users are located in North America. Meanwhile, 24% are located in Asia, 24% in Europe and 2% in Australia. Brazil and Argentina also have a small percentage of members.
Parler and MeWe saw momentum in November 2020 around the electionwith users pointing to the preservation of free speech as one of their main reasons for joining. Google and Apple both removed Parler from their respective app stores, and Amazon Web Services suspended Parler from its web hosting services, but the website made a partial reappearance on Monday.
The privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo also saw its average number of daily searches increase by 62%.
FCC:Extremists are turning to radio to plan attacks after being banned from social media
Google competitor:DuckDuckGo search engine increased its traffic by 62% in 2020 as users seek privacy
MeWe follows its “Privacy Bill of Rights,” which states the platform does not manipulate, filter or change the order of users’ newsfeeds or use facial recognition technology. Its terms of service prohibit users from posting content that is hateful, threatening, harmful or incites violence.
On Monday, MeWe became the second most downloaded free social app in the Google Play Store, according to the company.
Insider Q&A: Mark Weinstein, MeWe’s anti-Facebook CEO
Associated Press, January 14, 2021
BOSTON (AP) — Some users have fled Facebook and Twitter after the platforms booted President Donald Trump and some of his confederates for inciting unrest and spreading false claims about election fraud. Some migrated to far-right friendly sites like Parler or Gab. Others joined a service that aims to stand apart.
MeWe is a 4-year-old, full-featured social media company positioned as an anti-Facebook. It says it does not collect data on its users, and features a Privacy Bill of Rights. In the past year, MeWe more than doubled its membership to nearly 15 million. In the week ending Jan. 12, it was downloaded 787,000 times from Apple and Google’s U.S. smartphone app stores, according to SensorTower.
While Trump supporters’ disaffection with Facebook has surely helped, CEO Mark Weinstein says MeWe owes its growth to “everyone who is infuriated by their data being sold down the river” by surveillance capitalists.
Weinstein spoke to The Associated Press from his Southern California home. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Q: Where are your members? Under your “freemium” model, how many people pay for services such as additional data storage and video calling?
A: The members are 50% in North America, about 24% in Asia, 24% in Europe and 2% in Australia. Some are in South America, in Brazil and Argentina. We’re translated into 20 languages. Currently 3% to 4% of our members sign up for premium. We haven’t spent a penny on marketing. All our growth is organic.
Q: What does your capital investment and revenue look like? Who is behind the company?
A: We’ve got about $22 million from high net worth investors and our advisory board includes Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the World Wide Web, and Sherry Turkle, perhaps the most esteemed academic expert on the impact of technology on human beings. We have fewer than 100 employees and we did $1.2 million in revenue in 2020. Revenue grew 300 percent from November to December.
Q: Your terms of service are explicit about prohibiting hateful and inciteful content and insist it will be promptly taken down. But I’ve seen some incendiary language in chats. The watchdog Alethea Group reported similar, and it was apparently taken down. How can you be sure you are adequately moderating the site, especially amid a growth spurt you say has hit 20,000 new users an hour? How many moderators do you have?
A: Social media can get messy in times like these. And just like Facebook and Twitter, and other sites that also moderate we are doing the very best we can. We are expanding our moderation team as rapidly as we can, and we’re investigating reports from our members, who are helping. (Weinstein would not disclose the size of his moderation team.)
Q: You say MeWe is not built, as its big competitors are, to serve up politically charged material.
A: We are absolutely not an opinion chamber of one side or another. We are fundamentally different by design from Twitter or Parler or Gab. We’re a social media platform like Facebook, where family members and friends connect. Your news feed is purely and exclusively everything you choose to connect to. There is nothing injected into your news feed by us or anybody else on the platform. We don’t have trending topics. We don’t have boosted content.
Q: What is your stance on potentially dangerous speech and misinformation of the type that could, say adversely impact public health during a global pandemic?
A: We have absolutely no censorship for good people who follow our rules. We don’t care what your opinion is, if you’re on the right or the left. That’s none of our business. Also, MeWe’s structural design prohibits the amplification (of misinformation). Members do moderation for us, but a very deep violation can lead to immediate removal and being reported to outside authorities. For others, a member can be placed “in jail” — temporarily suspended — and then a three-strike rule applies.
Q: You said in a 2019 op-ed piece that you don’t believe that breaking up Facebook will solve the problem of competition in social media. Is that still your thinking?
A: Breaking up Facebook would just create a lot of mini-Facebooks. It doesn’t solve the problem of surveillance capitalism.
Facebook has lobbyists worldwide influencing legislation and government officials. And it doesn’t comply with regulations, anyhow. Regulating Facebook more carefully will only serve to institutionalize surveillance capitalism, make it harder for competition and sort of legitimize their business model, which is really an illegitimate form of capitalism.
Pure capitalism is, plain and simple, delight your customer, build a relationship of love and trust. Respect them and they will be your customer for a lifetime. Facebook has completely broken that bond. Facebook is a marketing company. Facebook is a data company. They’re not a true social network. Their customers are advertisers, marketers and political operatives. MeWe’s customers are its members.
Identifying the compound responsible for the antidiabetic properties of bitter melon
South Paris University (France), January 20, 2021
Researchers from France and Congo investigated the active components of Momordica charantia, also known as bitter melon, and evaluated the antidiabetic properties of its ethanol extract. They reported their findings in an article published in the Journal of Medicinal Plants Research.
- For their experiment, the researchers obtained an ethanolic extract from the leafy stem of M. charantia .
- After being treated with MSTFA (N-Methyl-N-(trimethylsilyl) trifluoroacetamide), the extract was analyzed using gas chromatography and mass spectrometry.
- The researchers confirmed the presence of a well-known antidiabetic compound — a stigmasterol glucoside, or B-sitosterol compound known as charantine — in the ethanolic extract.
- They tested the extract on rats with streptozotocin-induced diabetes and found that it reduced glycemia significantly by 51.62 percent after three hours.
Based on these findings, the researchers concluded that the presence of antidiabetic charantine in M. charantia justifies its use in Traditional Medicine.
Research establishes antibiotic potential for cannabis molecule
The main nonpsychoactive component of cannabis has been shown to kill Gram-negative bacteria for the first time
University of Queensland (Australia), January 19, 2021
Synthetic cannabidiol, better known as CBD, has been shown for the first time to kill the bacteria responsible for gonorrhoea, meningitis and legionnaires disease.
The research collaboration between The University of Queensland and Botanix Pharmaceuticals Limited could lead to the first new class of antibiotics for resistant bacteria in 60 years.
The UQ Institute for Molecular Bioscience‘s Associate Professor Mark Blaskovich said CBD – the main nonpsychoactive component of cannabis – can penetrate and kill a wide range of bacteria including Neisseria gonorrhoeae, which causes gonorrhoea.
“This is the first time CBD has been shown to kill some types of Gram-negative bacteria. These bacteria have an extra outer membrane, an additional line of defence that makes it harder for antibiotics to penetrate,” Dr Blaskovich said.
In Australia, gonorrhoea is the second most common sexually-transmitted infection and there is no longer a single reliable antibiotic to treat it because the bacteria is particularly good at developing resistance.
The study also showed that CBD was widely effective against a much larger number of Gram-positive bacteria than previously known, including antibiotic-resistant pathogens such as MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) or ‘golden staph’.
Dr Blaskovich said cannabidiol was particularly good at breaking down biofilms–the slimy build-up of bacteria, such as dental plaque on the surface of teeth–which help bacteria such as MRSA survive antibiotic treatments.
Dr Blaskovich’s team at the Centre for Superbug Solutions mimicked a two-week patient treatment in laboratory models to see how fast the bacteria mutated to try to outwit CBD’s killing power.
“Cannabidiol showed a low tendency to cause resistance in bacteria even when we sped up potential development by increasing concentrations of the antibiotic during ‘treatment’.”
“We think that cannabidiol kills bacteria by bursting their outer cell membranes, but we don’t know yet exactly how it does that, and need to do further research.
The research team also discovered that chemical analogs – created by slightly changing CBD’s molecular structure–were also active against the bacteria.
“This is particularly exciting because there have been no new molecular classes of antibiotics for Gram-negative infections discovered and approved since the 1960s, and we can now consider designing new analogs of CBD within improved properties.”
Vince Ippolito, the President and Executive Chairman of Botanix, said the research showed vast potential for the development of effective treatments to fight the growing global threat of antibiotic resistance.
“Congratulations to Dr Blaskovich and his team for producing this significant body of research–the published data clearly establishes the potential of synthetic cannabinoids as antimicrobials,” Mr Ippolito said.
“Our Company is now primed to commercialise viable antimicrobial treatments which we hope will reach more patients in the near future. This is a major breakthrough that the world needs now.”
Dr Blaskovich said collaborating with Botanix has sped up the research, with Botanix contributing formulation expertise that has led to the discovery that how cannabidiol is delivered makes a huge difference in its effectiveness at killing bacteria.
The collaboration has enabled Botanix to progress a topical CBD formulation into clinical trials for decolonisation of MRSA before surgery.
“Those Phase 2a clinical results are expected early this year and we hope that this will pave the way forward for treatments for gonorrhoea, meningitis and legionnaires disease.
“Now we have established that cannabidiol is effective against these Gram-negative bacteria, we are looking at its mode of action, improving its activity and finding other similar molecules to open up the way for a new class of antibiotics.”
Could NRF2 be your magic molecule for eternal youth?
Medical Xpress, January 19, 2021
NRF2 is just one of thousands of critical proteins in the cell, but it is one that we now know a lot about. Once any molecule achieves a certain level of celebrity status, it tends to acquire a groupie following in the supplement market. Today, we have all manner of NRF enhancers, releasers, activators and synergizers ready to arrive on your doorstep at the click of a button. But what could any of these things possibly do for us, and how much is too much of a good thing?
At the risk of overstating the obvious, if a little extra NRF2 is good for every cell in your body, and every cell in your body is good, then NRF2 must be good for your body. The weak link in that argument, however, is that all cells are not good. Nobody wants harmful bacterial cells to flourish, and nobody wants cancer cells to flourish. A paper recently published in Nature now suggests that inhibiting NRF2 can block the migration and invasion of non-small-cell lung cancer cells through the body. If anyone is going to derive benefit from NRF2, they may need to be smart about it.
The main reason NRF2, or Nuclear factor-erythroid 2-related factor 2, is so highly sought, is because it is a key transcriptional regulator of several antioxidant and anti-inflammatory enzymes. Unfortunately, as the authors above have revealed, it also moonlights as an activator of the Rho-ROCK pathway, which promotes actin filamentation and movement of cells. The researchers were able to block this activity of NRF2 by giving an inhibitor known as brusatol.
By now many people appreciate that viruses, bacteria and parasites have complex life cycles with various maturation waypoints within their hosts. Proteins, although they are typically confined within or on a cell, also have complicated life cycles. In this sense, our expansive knowledge of the larger NRF2 ecosystem permits us a convenient microcosm of the cell. For example, soon after NRF2 is made by ribosomes in the cytoplasm, it is normally sequestered by KEAP1, which quickly loops in the ubiquitin ligase Cullin3 for transport to the proteasome. Here, the ubiquitin is stripped off and NRF2 is degraded and recycled. If all is well in the cell, this process gives NRF2 a half life of about 20 minutes.
However, under oxidative or electrophilic stress, reduced cysteine residues in Keap1 are oxidized, ultimately blocking the ubiquitination cycle. As NRF2 concentration increases, it translocates to the nucleus, forms heterodimers, and binds the promoters of antioxidant genes to increase their expression. This particular set of genes, termed the NRF2 regulon, include modulators of drug metabolism, stress response, iron metabolism and excretion/transporter, and glutathione homeostasis. Glutathione keeps a normally protective apoptotic process called ferroptosis in check.
When cells don’t have enough cysteine to make glutathione, oxidation of membrane lipids go unrepaired and ferroptosis eliminates the cell. Glutamate cysteine ligase catalyzes ATP-dependent condensation of glutamate and cysteine in the first and rate-limiting step of glutathione synthesis. One of the main functions of NRF2 is the induction of glutamate cysteine ligase, and recent research indicates that this ligaseprotects against ferroptosis by a non-canonical mechanism, causing accumulation of γ-glutamyl-peptides.
While blocking NRF2 may be a good strategy to stop certain cancers, people with faults in their glutathione or ferroptosis pathways might benefit from a little extra NRF2 activation. One such person is Raghav Sanath, who we wrote about here not too long ago in another article on ferroptosis. I recently spoke with the boy’s father, Sanath, when I saw the latest NRF2 research, and was pleased to be informed that they have developed and will soon begin their own new NRF2 therapy, which they will offer to the world for anyone who might be facing a similar affliction.
Prenatal BPA exposure may contribute to the male bias of autism spectrum disorder
Tohoku University (Japan), January 19, 2021
A new study by researchers from Chulalongkorn University, Tohoku University, and The George Washington University is the first to identify autism candidate genes that may be responsible for the sex-specific effects of bisphenol A (BPA) on the brain. It suggests BPA may serve as an environmental factor that contributes to the prevalence of male bias in autism spectrum disorder (ASD).
The research was published in the journal Scientific Reports.
BPA is widely used in many products in our daily life and abundant in micro/nanoplastics found in the environment, food, or the human placenta. It is thought to be an environmental influence on ASD—a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by impaired social communication, restricted interests and repetitive behaviors. ASD is a major public health challenge around the world, with roughly one in 54 children in the United States being diagnosed.
“Many studies have shown BPA impairs neurological functions known to be disrupted in ASD, making scientists believe that BPA may be one of the key environmental risk factors for ASD. However, we still do not know how BPA can cause or increase the susceptibility of ASD and whether it also plays a role in the male bias of the disorder,” said assistant professor Dr.Tewarit Sarachana, head of the SYstems Neuroscience of Autism and PSychiatric disorders (SYNAPS) Research Unit at the Faculty of Allied Health Sciences, Chulalongkorn University.
“In fact, one of our recent studies has demonstrated that prenatal exposure to BPA altered the expression of several ASD candidate genes in the hippocampus in a sex-dependent pattern, but the link between the dysregulation of ASD candidate genes and impaired neurological functions is still lacking.”
“In this study, we showed exposure to BPA during the gestational period decreased neuronal viability and neuronal density in the hippocampus and impaired learning/memory in only the male offspring. Interestingly, the expression of several ASD-related genes in the hippocampus was dysregulated and showed sex-specific correlations with neuronal viability, neuritogenesis, and/or learning/memory. Under prenatal BPA exposure, these genes may play important roles in determining the risk of ASD and its higher prevalence in males,” said Surangrat Thongkorn, a Ph.D. candidate and first author of the study.
“The sex differences in the effects of BPA found in our study strongly suggest that BPA negatively impacts the male and female offspring brain through different molecular mechanisms. We are progressively working on these issues to identify the sex-specific molecular mechanism of BPA in the brain. Understanding the effects of BPA and its molecular mechanisms in ASD may lead to changes in the policy regarding the use of BPA or even the discovery of molecular targets for ASD treatment in the future,” concluded Dr.Sarachana.
Cruciferous vegetable compound decreases breast cancer stem cell-like properties
University of South China, January 20, 2021
According to news reporting originating from Hunan, People’s Republic of China, research stated, “Breast cancer is the most frequently diagnosed malignancy and leading cause of cancer-related deaths among women worldwide. Tumor recurrence, or metastasis, is caused by cancer stem cells and has a dismal prognosis for breast cancer patients.”
Our news editors obtained a quote from the research from the University of South China, “Thus, targeting breast cancer stem cells (BCSCs) for eradication is a potential method to improve clinical outcomes. Phenethyl isothiocyanate (PEITC) is a novel epigenetic regulator derived from cruciferous vegetables that has marked antitumor effects. However, the exact mechanism of these antitumor effects by PEITC is unknown. As breast cancer progresses, a tumor suppressor in the breast, cadherin 1 (CDH1), is silenced by hypermethylation of the promoter region, further promoting the stem cell-like properties of cancer. Herein, the ability of PEITC to reduce BCSC-like properties by epigenetic reactivation of CDH1 was investigated by multiple analyses such as MTT, colony formation and sphere formation assays, methylation-specific PCR, western blot analysis, Co-IP and qPCR. It was revealed that PEITC inhibited colony and mammosphere formation and decreased the expression of protein markers associated with BCSC-like properties via epigenetic reactivation of CDH1. Further exploration of this mechanism revealed inhibitory effects of PEITC on DNMTs and HDACs, which play a pivotal role in demethylating the hypermethylated CDH1 promoter region. Reactivated CDH1 suppressed the Wnt/beta-catenin pathway which confers BCSC-properties in breast cancer cells.”
According to the news editors, the research concluded: “These findings suggest a novel method to eradicate BCSCs from breast cancer patients.”
This research has been peer-reviewed.
Gut bacteria help digest dietary fiber, release important antioxidant
University of Illinois, January 20, 2021
Dietary fiber found in grains is a large component of many diets, but little is understood about how we digest the fiber, as humans lack enzymes to break down the complex molecules. Some species of gut bacteria break down the fiber in such a way that it not only becomes digestible, but releases ferulic acid, an important antioxidant with multiple health benefits, according to a new study led by researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Grains such as rice, oats, rye and wheat are rich in a class of dietary fiber called arabinoxylans, which humans cannot digest on their own. Many gut bacteria have enzymes to break down simple components of arabinoxylans; however, they lack the ability to break down complex ones—including those containing ferulic acid.
“Ferulic acid has been shown to have antioxidant, immunomodulatory and anti-inflammatory activities, and many reports have documented its protective activities in different disease conditions including diabetes, allergic inflammation, Alzheimer’s disease, cardiovascular disorders, microbial infections and cancer,” said study leader Isaac Cann, a professor of animal sciences and microbiology and a member of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at Illinois.
“The question, then, is what is the benefit of arabinoxylans to us, since our human genomes do not encode the enzymes that can degrade them or access the ferulic acid they contain?” Cann said.
To answer that question, Cann’s group and collaborators at the University of Michigan and Mie University in Japan studied the genomes and digestive activity of bacteria in the intestine. They found that a group of Bacteroides bacteria have several enzymes that break down arabinoxylans, some of which had not been seen or catalogued before. One enzyme the group discovered is so active that it cuts off any ferulic acid it comes across, releasing large amounts of the antioxidant, Cann said. The group published its findings in the journal Nature Communications.
“These bacteria can sense the difference between simple and complex arabinoxylans to deploy a large set of enzymes that function like scissors to cut the linkages in complex arabinoxylans into their unit sugars, and at the same time release the ferulic acid,” Cann said.
Importantly, none of the bacteria the group studied used the ferulic acid after releasing it—thus making it available for absorption in the human gut.
Understanding this mechanism of how bacteria in the colon help the body break down dietary fiber and access ferulic acid has applications for personalized nutrition. With the compound’s protective activity against certain diseases and its role in modulating inflammation and immune response, patients may benefit from probiotic ingestion of the ferulic acid-releasing bacteria or from consuming a diet rich in arabinoxylan fiber, Cann said.
Stress May Awaken Dormant Cancer Cells
University of Pittsburgh and AstraZeneca, January 13 2021
Research published in Science Translational Medicine has found that stress may help to awaken dormant cancer cells, causing cancer to recur. Findings suggest therapeutic targets to investigate for preventing cancer relapse
Sometimes cancer comes back long after the original tumor has been treated and removed. This is called recurrent cancer. Cancer can recur in the same place as the original tumor or in other places in the body if the tumor cells spread. Cancerous cells can lie dormant for years. But what triggers these cells to reawaken hasn’t been well understood.
Past studies have linked chronic stress with cancer progression. To investigate whether stress can awaken dormant tumor cells, a research team led by Dr. Dmitry Gabrilovich of AstraZeneca and Dr. Valerian Kagan of the University of Pittsburgh and Sechenov University developed mouse models with dormant tumors. Their study was funded in part by NIH’s National Cancer Institute (NCI). Results were published on December 2, 2020, in Science Translational Medicine.
The team tested the effects of several stress hormones—including cortisol, epinephrine, norepinephrine, and serotonin—on dormant tumor cells taken from the mice. They found that neutrophils, a type of disease-fighting immune cell, were activated by the stress hormones. The neutrophils then produced inflammation-inducing proteins called S100A8 and S100A9.
Further experiments showed that these proteins were needed to reactivate the dormant tumor cells. However, they didn’t directly affect dormant tumor cells. The presence of S100A8/A9 altered certain lipids (fats) and led to their accumulation in the neutrophils. These lipids interacted with the dormant tumor cells, leading to tumor cell reactivation and new tumors.
Periodically stressing mice with dormant tumors led to tumor growth. However, giving the mice a beta-blocker, which blocks stress hormone, prevented tumor cell reactivation.
To determine whether humans have a similar stress-induced response, the researchers tested blood samples taken from 80 people with non-small cell lung cancer. They compared levels of norepinephrine and S100A8/A9 in those who never had a cancer recurrence or had a late recurrence with those who had an early recurrence (within 33 months). Patients who had an early recurrence showed higher levels of the molecules.
“Our data suggest that stress hormone levels should be monitored in patients recovering from cancer and that managing stress to keep those hormones at bay would be beneficial to prolong remission,” says Dr. Michela Perego of The Wistar Institute, who is the first author of the paper.
There are multiple factors that come together to cause a recurrence of cancer. These results show that stress hormone levels are one that might be monitored and reduced in standard cancer treatment. The findings also suggest new therapeutic approaches to investigate for preventing cancer relapse.