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This story is part of The Dallas Morning News monthlong series on how fentanyl has affected our community.
Fentanyl is a potent and lethal synthetic opioid, causing the majority of opioid overdoses in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Despite being the subject of many news stories and political talking points, the drug is still the source of a lot of confusion. PolitiFact recently dispelled common myths about fentanyl, including that unintentional exposure to the drug in its pill or powder form can cause an overdose.
We asked you to send us your questions about fentanyl. Here are answers to the most commonly asked questions.
Reader question: What’s the difference between “street fentanyl and medical fentanyl in hospitals?”
There are two types of fentanyl: pharmaceutical (what our reader called “medical fentanyl”), and illicit (which the reader called “street fentanyl”). Medical fentanyl also is a synthetic opioid, according to the CDC.
“Fentanyl is an old, well-understood drug that is used safely” every day in medicine, said Dr. Ryan Marino, a Case Western Reserve University toxicologist and emergency room physician who studies addiction. “It is one of the most valuable and most” commonly used “medical therapeutics.”
Illicit fentanyl, on the other hand, is made in clandestine labs and is the version of the drug most closely associated with overdose deaths. Illicit fentanyl, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration, can be sold as a powder, pill or nasal spray.
Reader question: If you can’t absorb fentanyl through the skin, why are there fentanyl patches?
Despite viral stories of police officers or emergency responders supposedly overdosing or getting sick through unintentional contact with fentanyl, experts say it’s not scientifically possible. Fentanyl isn’t well absorbed by the skin, especially in its illicit forms.
However, medical fentanyl is sometimes administered through skin patches. But experts say this isn’t evidence that you can get sick by touching fentanyl in powdered or pill form.
For example, even though there are nicotine patches, your skin can’t absorb nicotine by touching tobacco, “and the same principle applies to fentanyl,” according to a report from Brandon Del Pozo, a Brown University public health expert.
However, the Food and Drug Administration warns about the possibility of children accidentally overdosing after exposure to fentanyl patches. According to the Mayo Clinic, if you touch the sticky side of a fentanyl patch you should contact a medical professional and rinse the area with water.
Reader question: Does naloxone work on fentanyl overdoses in the same way it does for other opioids?
Naloxone, a medicine commonly sold under the brand name Narcan, reverses opioid overdoses, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Naloxone is administered via nasal spray or injection. Sometimes multiple doses are needed, depending on the strength of the opioid.
The National Institute on Drug Abuse says friends, family members and bystanders can give a person naloxone in case of an opioid overdose. However, the person should still seek emergency medical assistance. Naloxone reverses an opioid overdose for 30 to 90 minutes, so it is possible overdose symptoms can return once the treatment wears off.
Reader question: How much fentanyl is deadly?
The DEA says that as little as 2 mg of fentanyl can be deadly for an adult. However, a dose’s lethality can vary based on height, weight and tolerance from past exposure.
Fentanyl’s potency is what makes it so lethal.
Reader question: Does all illicit fentanyl come from the southern border?
Most illicit fentanyl in the U.S. comes from Mexico, mainly smuggled by U.S. citizens. Illicit fentanyl seizures are higher at official ports of entry than in between ports of entry, U.S. Customs and Border Protection data shows.
However, illicit fentanyl also arrives in the U.S. by mail, passenger boats, cargo ships, commercial planes and drones, according to a report from Rand Corp., a global policy think tank. Most of the illicit fentanyl that comes from Mexico is made in labs using chemicals from China, the Rand Corp. report said.
Reader question: Is it true that enough fentanyl has been seized at the southern border to kill every American?
Politicians, news reports and government agencies often cite federal fentanyl seizure statistics to claim that enough is seized to kill a high number of people. For example, in January, the DEA said that in 2022 it seized enough illicit fentanyl nationally to kill every American.
However, there are some caveats. As we mentioned before, certain characteristics, such as a person’s weight, can affect lethality. Also, it’s unclear how pure all the seized fentanyl is, which can also affect lethality, Timothy J. Pifer, the director of the New Hampshire State Police Forensic Laboratory and a specialist on fentanyl’s lethality, told PolitiFact in 2019.
Just because enough fentanyl has been seized to kill every American does not mean every American has the same chance of dying of a fentanyl overdose, said Dr. Andrew Stolbach, a toxicologist and emergency doctor at The Johns Hopkins Hospital.
“That would assume that all that drug was somehow going to get into everybody,” Stolbach said.
Stolbach said there’s likely enough water to drown everybody in the world. But that doesn’t mean everyone is going to drown.
By Maria Ramirez Uribe, PolitiFact staff writer
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This story is part of The Dallas Morning News monthlong series on how fentanyl has affected our community.
Fentanyl is a potent and lethal synthetic opioid, causing the majority of opioid overdoses in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Despite being the subject of many news stories and political talking points, the drug is still the source of a lot of confusion. PolitiFact recently dispelled common myths about fentanyl, including that unintentional exposure to the drug in its pill or powder form can cause an overdose.
We asked you to send us your questions about fentanyl. Here are answers to the
|
most commonly asked questions.
Reader question: What’s the difference between “street fentanyl and medical fentanyl in hospitals?”
There are two types of fentanyl: pharmaceutical (what our reader called “medical fentanyl”), and illicit (which the reader called “street fentanyl”). Medical fentanyl also is a synthetic opioid, according to the CDC.
“Fentanyl is an old, well-understood drug that is used safely” every day in medicine, said Dr. Ryan Marino, a Case Western Reserve University toxicologist and emergency room physician who studies addiction. “It is one of the most valuable and most” commonly used “medical therapeutics.”
Illicit fentanyl, on the other hand, is made in clandestine labs and is the version of the drug most closely associated with overdose deaths. Illicit fentanyl, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration, can be sold as a powder, pill or nasal spray.
Reader question: If you can’t absorb fentanyl through the skin, why are there fentanyl patches?
Despite viral stories of police officers or emergency responders supposedly overdosing or getting sick through unintentional contact with fentanyl, experts say it’s not scientifically possible. Fentanyl isn’t well absorbed by the skin, especially in its illicit forms.
However, medical fentanyl is sometimes administered through skin patches. But experts say this isn’t evidence that you can get sick by touching fentanyl in powdered or pill form.
For example, even though there are nicotine patches, your skin can’t absorb nicotine by touching tobacco, “and the same principle applies to fentanyl,” according to a report from Brandon Del Pozo, a Brown University public health expert.
However, the Food and Drug Administration warns about the possibility of children accidentally overdosing after exposure to fentanyl patches. According to the Mayo Clinic, if you touch the sticky side of a fentanyl patch you should contact a medical professional and rinse the area with water.
Reader question: Does naloxone work on fentanyl overdoses in the same way it does for other opioids?
Naloxone, a medicine commonly sold under the brand name Narcan, reverses opioid overdoses, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Naloxone is administered via nasal spray or injection. Sometimes multiple doses are needed, depending on the strength of the opioid.
The National Institute on Drug Abuse says friends, family members and bystanders can give a person naloxone in case of an opioid overdose. However, the person should still seek emergency medical assistance. Naloxone reverses an opioid overdose for 30 to 90 minutes, so it is possible overdose symptoms can return once the treatment wears off.
Reader question: How much fentanyl is deadly?
The DEA says that as little as 2 mg of fentanyl can be deadly for an adult. However, a dose’s lethality can vary based on height, weight and tolerance from past exposure.
Fentanyl’s potency is what makes it so lethal.
Reader question: Does all illicit fentanyl come from the southern border?
Most illicit fentanyl in the U.S. comes from Mexico, mainly smuggled by U.S. citizens. Illicit fentanyl seizures are higher at official ports of entry than in between ports of entry, U.S. Customs and Border Protection data shows.
However, illicit fentanyl also arrives in the U.S. by mail, passenger boats, cargo ships, commercial planes and drones, according to a report from Rand Corp., a global policy think tank. Most of the illicit fentanyl that comes from Mexico is made in labs using chemicals from China, the Rand Corp. report said.
Reader question: Is it true that enough fentanyl has been seized at the southern border to kill every American?
Politicians, news reports and government agencies often cite federal fentanyl seizure statistics to claim that enough is seized to kill a high number of people. For example, in January, the DEA said that in 2022 it seized enough illicit fentanyl nationally to kill every American.
However, there are some caveats. As we mentioned before, certain characteristics, such as a person’s weight, can affect lethality. Also, it’s unclear how pure all the seized fentanyl is, which can also affect lethality, Timothy J. Pifer, the director of the New Hampshire State Police Forensic Laboratory and a specialist on fentanyl’s lethality, told PolitiFact in 2019.
Just because enough fentanyl has been seized to kill every American does not mean every American has the same chance of dying of a fentanyl overdose, said Dr. Andrew Stolbach, a toxicologist and emergency doctor at The Johns Hopkins Hospital.
“That would assume that all that drug was somehow going to get into everybody,” Stolbach said.
Stolbach said there’s likely enough water to drown everybody in the world. But that doesn’t mean everyone is going to drown.
By Maria Ramirez Uribe, PolitiFact staff writer
|
Banking know-how is one of the most important steps on the road to financial stability, and it’s an area that often doesn’t get enough attention in schools. Some districts are taking steps to change that, steps that can help improve student outcomes in the long run.
Here’s a novel twist to us. Richardson ISD is opening a student-staffed bank in partnership with Credit Union of Texas at Berkner High School and STEM Academy that will be open to the general public, according to an RISD official.
Credit Union of Texas calls these high school banks “SMART Branches,” and while Richardson’s is the first in Dallas County, this isn’t a new program; there are two others in Allen and Little Elm.
In 2021, 5.6% of Texas households didn’t have a bank account, down from 7.7% in 2019 and 9.5% in 2017, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. That number can get even lower with education partnerships like these.
The parts of Dallas county south of Interstate 30 aren’t the only places that need better financial education. Roughly 56% of RISD students are considered economically disadvantaged, according to the TEA.
It doesn’t help that students will graduate from high school into a world of high costs and difficult financial decisions. The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers rose 0.6% last month after increasing 0.2% in July, according to the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. And Texas has an affordability crisis of its own to worry about.
Navigating all that without a bank account often drives people to manage their money in less secure ways like cashing checks with payday lenders or pawnshops. It leaves some in our communities more vulnerable to exploitation and financial failure.
Learning about finance through a bank in school can help prevent that outcome — and it will teach students in a hands-on, practical way that may even help unbanked parents and other family members. The students working in the branch will be trained by a bank manager to provide key services like opening accounts and cashing checks, an RISD official said. Pairing a physical location with on-the job education and classroom learning can improve engagement and retainment.
The SMART branch comes with a “Pay for Grades” program, which offers monetary rewards to some students who are credit union members for every A and B on their report card, according to a presentation to the school board.
That might sound like a strange way to incentivize opening a bank account and getting good grades, but it’s a way of encouraging students to take charge of their finances early on.
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Banking know-how is one of the most important steps on the road to financial stability, and it’s an area that often doesn’t get enough attention in schools. Some districts are taking steps to change that, steps that can help improve student outcomes in the long run.
Here’s a novel twist to us. Richardson ISD is opening a student-staffed bank in partnership with Credit Union of Texas at Berkner High School and STEM Academy that will be open to the general public, according to an RISD official.
Credit Union of Texas calls these high school banks “SMART Branches,” and while Richardson’s is the first
|
in Dallas County, this isn’t a new program; there are two others in Allen and Little Elm.
In 2021, 5.6% of Texas households didn’t have a bank account, down from 7.7% in 2019 and 9.5% in 2017, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. That number can get even lower with education partnerships like these.
The parts of Dallas county south of Interstate 30 aren’t the only places that need better financial education. Roughly 56% of RISD students are considered economically disadvantaged, according to the TEA.
It doesn’t help that students will graduate from high school into a world of high costs and difficult financial decisions. The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers rose 0.6% last month after increasing 0.2% in July, according to the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. And Texas has an affordability crisis of its own to worry about.
Navigating all that without a bank account often drives people to manage their money in less secure ways like cashing checks with payday lenders or pawnshops. It leaves some in our communities more vulnerable to exploitation and financial failure.
Learning about finance through a bank in school can help prevent that outcome — and it will teach students in a hands-on, practical way that may even help unbanked parents and other family members. The students working in the branch will be trained by a bank manager to provide key services like opening accounts and cashing checks, an RISD official said. Pairing a physical location with on-the job education and classroom learning can improve engagement and retainment.
The SMART branch comes with a “Pay for Grades” program, which offers monetary rewards to some students who are credit union members for every A and B on their report card, according to a presentation to the school board.
That might sound like a strange way to incentivize opening a bank account and getting good grades, but it’s a way of encouraging students to take charge of their finances early on.
|
21 species have been declared extinct, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says
Twenty-one species, including birds, a bat and several mussels, have been labeled extinct, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Servicesaid Monday.
The species were previously on the national list of threatened and endangered species.
The extinct species include:
- Eight Hawaiian honeycreeper birds
- Bridled white-eye bird of Guam
- Mariana fruit bat of Guam
- San Marcos gambusia, a one-inch long fish from Texas
- Scioto madtom, a small catfish found exclusively in the Big Darby Creek in Ohio
- Bachman's warbler, a black and yellow songbird found in several Southern states and Cuba
- Eight freshwater mussels: the flat pigtoe, green-blossom pearly mussel, southern acornshell, stirrupshell, tubercled-blossom pearly mussel, turgid-blossom pearly mussel, upland combshell and yellow-blossom pearly mussel
"Our determinations of whether the best available information indicates that a species is extinct included an analysis of the following criteria: detectability of the species, adequacy of survey efforts, and time since last detection," the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife first proposed the species be taken off the endangered and threatened list in 2021, as they had not been seen since as early as 1899 and as late as 2004.
There are now 650 species that have gone extinct in the U.S., according to the Center for Biological Diversity, which says factors such as climate change, pollution and invasive species contribute to species loss.
Between 2004 and 2022, climate change effects contributed to 39% of amphibian species moving closer to extinction. About 3 billion birds have been decimated in North America since 1970, Fish and Wildlife said.
Still, 99% of the animals on the endangered and threatened list have not reached extinction. Fifty-four have been taken off the list due to recovery efforts, while 56 have been downgraded from endangered to threatened, Fish and Wildlife said.
"Federal protection came too late to reverse these species' decline, and it's a wake-up call on the importance of conserving imperiled species before it's too late," Fish and Wildlife Director Martha Williams said. "As we commemorate 50 years of the Endangered Species Act this year, we are reminded of the Act's purpose to be a safety net that stops the journey toward extinction. The ultimate goal is to recover these species, so they no longer need the Act's protection."
The Hawaiian honeycreepers are now extinct due to their forest habitat being cut down for development and agriculture. Mosquitoes, which are not native to Hawaii, also spread avian pox and avian malaria.
Other Hawaiian birds, such as the 'akikiki, are also on the brink of extinction, with as little as five known pairs in the wild, the Center for Biological Diversity said.
According to the Center for Biological Diversity, the Bachman's warbler was also lost to habitat destruction and the bridled white-eye and Mariana fruit bat was lost to an invasive brown tree snake.
The Mariana fruit bat was also compromised by agriculture and overconsumption as food. The San Marcos gambusia suffered from water overuse that impacted groundwater supply and spring flow. The scioto madtom was lost to runoff and silt buildup from dams.
Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
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21 species have been declared extinct, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says
Twenty-one species, including birds, a bat and several mussels, have been labeled extinct, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Servicesaid Monday.
The species were previously on the national list of threatened and endangered species.
The extinct species include:
- Eight Hawaiian honeycreeper birds
- Bridled white-eye bird of Guam
- Mariana fruit bat of Guam
- San Marcos gambusia, a one-inch long fish from Texas
- Scioto madtom, a small catfish found exclusively in the Big Darby Creek in Ohio
- Bach
|
man's warbler, a black and yellow songbird found in several Southern states and Cuba
- Eight freshwater mussels: the flat pigtoe, green-blossom pearly mussel, southern acornshell, stirrupshell, tubercled-blossom pearly mussel, turgid-blossom pearly mussel, upland combshell and yellow-blossom pearly mussel
"Our determinations of whether the best available information indicates that a species is extinct included an analysis of the following criteria: detectability of the species, adequacy of survey efforts, and time since last detection," the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife first proposed the species be taken off the endangered and threatened list in 2021, as they had not been seen since as early as 1899 and as late as 2004.
There are now 650 species that have gone extinct in the U.S., according to the Center for Biological Diversity, which says factors such as climate change, pollution and invasive species contribute to species loss.
Between 2004 and 2022, climate change effects contributed to 39% of amphibian species moving closer to extinction. About 3 billion birds have been decimated in North America since 1970, Fish and Wildlife said.
Still, 99% of the animals on the endangered and threatened list have not reached extinction. Fifty-four have been taken off the list due to recovery efforts, while 56 have been downgraded from endangered to threatened, Fish and Wildlife said.
"Federal protection came too late to reverse these species' decline, and it's a wake-up call on the importance of conserving imperiled species before it's too late," Fish and Wildlife Director Martha Williams said. "As we commemorate 50 years of the Endangered Species Act this year, we are reminded of the Act's purpose to be a safety net that stops the journey toward extinction. The ultimate goal is to recover these species, so they no longer need the Act's protection."
The Hawaiian honeycreepers are now extinct due to their forest habitat being cut down for development and agriculture. Mosquitoes, which are not native to Hawaii, also spread avian pox and avian malaria.
Other Hawaiian birds, such as the 'akikiki, are also on the brink of extinction, with as little as five known pairs in the wild, the Center for Biological Diversity said.
According to the Center for Biological Diversity, the Bachman's warbler was also lost to habitat destruction and the bridled white-eye and Mariana fruit bat was lost to an invasive brown tree snake.
The Mariana fruit bat was also compromised by agriculture and overconsumption as food. The San Marcos gambusia suffered from water overuse that impacted groundwater supply and spring flow. The scioto madtom was lost to runoff and silt buildup from dams.
Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
|
The P-51 Mustang was one of WWII’s greatest fighters and one of the best era-adjusted fighter planes of all time. Within the American consciousness it is almost synonymous with WWII.
Decades after WWII and after the P-51 had left service as a fighter, the Mustang briefly “came back from the grave” to serve not in the US Air Force, but in the US Army.
(P-51 Mustang during WWII.)
(F-51D Mustang chase plane follows the Sikorsky YUH-60A prototype during the US Army’s UTTAS competition of 1976, seeking a replacement for the UH-1 Iroquois of Vietnam War fame. Sikorsky’s design defeated Boeing’s YUH-61 to win UTTAS and was developed into the UH-60 Blackhawk of today.) (official US Army photo)
(US Army F-51 Mustang during 1970s experiments with airborne recoilless rifles.)
the Mustang after WWII and the division of American airpower
The P-51 Mustang was a standard fighter in its class at the end of WWII in September 1945 and remained in service.
(P-51 Mustangs at Conn Barracks in the post-WWII American occupation zone of Germany. During WWII this was Flugplatz Schweinfurt of the Luftwaffe, home to a Ju-87 Stuka unit and later a fighter tactics school.) (photo by Peter Randall)
On 18 September 1947, the US Army Air Forces of WWII was split off into an independent fifth branch of the USA’s military, the US Air Force. One of the first changes was altering the aircraft nomenclature series, for example the pursuit (P-) category was rolled into a new overall fighter (F-) category and hence the P-51 Mustang became the F-51 Mustang.
For three days in March 1948, the heads of the armed forces met in Key West, FL to iron out what roles the air wings of the five armed forces would fill. The goal was to prevent inter-service squabbling or duplication of missions. It was agreed that the US Air Force would handle all strategic missions, land-based fighters, reconnaissance missions, ground attack duties, air logistics, and many other duties. It would also assist the US Navy with land-based overwater missions. The US Navy and by extension US Marine Corps would continue carrier-based aviation, shipboard helicopters, and land-based anti-submarine missions. The US Coast Guard’s tiny air wing was so specialized that it had already found its niche.
Finally this left the US Army. It would have a rump air wing, oriented towards “hyper-tactical” roles like the transport helicopters of air cavalry units, scout helicopters, little artillery spotting lightplanes, medevac helicopters, and a small number of utility planes.
This delineation of tasks was called “the Key West Agreement” and was made official Pentagon policy on 1 July 1948. It has remained so ever since.
(An example of US Army fixed-wing aviation after the Key West Agreement is this L-20 Beaver utility plane, here taking off from the WWII-veteran aircraft carrier USS Corregidor (CVU-58) during 1958.) (official US Navy photo)
As for the Mustangs in the US Air Force, by the start of the 1950s they were mostly in Air National Guard units, with the Korean War resulting in some being federalized and again returning to frontline combat service. After the Korean War surviving aircraft were transferred back to ANG units where they were soon replaced by jet fighters.
(“Wham Bam”, a F-51D of the West Virginia Air National Guard, the very last Mustang in the US Air Force.)
The last Mustang user overall – at least until the chase planes described below – was the West Virginia ANG. On 27 January 1957, it retired its last F-51 Mustang. It was the last Mustang in the US Air Force and the last remaining propeller fighter of any type still in use.
There in not much to elaborate about chase planes, as the concept is not complex. A chase plane follows another aircraft, usually a prototype or experimental design, on test flights as an observer. Chase planes are still used today in the 21st century but during aviation’s golden age, were even more important. Not until the 1950s did test flights have regular access to ground tracking radars, and inflight data recording and telemetry links came even later. If there was a crash, observations of the chase pilot were often the first step in determining what went wrong. They were also useful in real-time. For example if the test pilot reported severe turbulence but the chase pilot didn’t, it might indicate an impending problem on the aircraft rather than weather issues.
There is no rigid criteria for a chase plane. No air force is going to spend money developing a type just for this role, so they were invariably just some other existing design.
That said, there are a few loose needs. The chase plane has to have performance slightly superior to whatever it is chasing; obviously a chase plane slower and less maneuverable than the test aircraft would be of little use. At the same time it can’t be “too superior”; for example nobody would want a supersonic jet fighter as the chase plane for a prototype piston-engined trainer.
Other than that, there is little else needed for the job. During and after WWII, warplanes of the WWII generation were used as chase aircraft during test flights.
(P-40 Warhawk serving as the chase plane for the Douglas XB-19 over Los Angeles, CA during 1941.)
The P-40 Warhawk fighter served various Allied air forces during the first part of WWII. Only one XB-19 strategic bomber was built, as it was never ordered into production. The gigantic lone prototype served as a utility and test plane throughout WWII and then a year afterwards. The XB-19 was bigger than any production WWII bomber and the United States would not try a bomber this large again until the B-36 Peacemaker of the early Cold War era.
(P-51 Mustang serving as the chase plane for the second XP-82 prototype.)
Contrary to popular lore, the F-82 Twin Mustang was not two stock P-51s joined at the factory by a center wing section. It had a different electrical system, different tail structure, and other alterations. None the less it was clearly derived from its single-seat cousin. The F-82 Twin Mustang did not see combat during WWII but fought in the Korean War.
(P-61 Black Widow serving as the chase plane for the XB-35 prototype during 1946.)
The P-61 Black Widow was a successful night fighter of WWII, serving on until 1950. Northrop’s XB-35 project started early in WWII however development was protracted and not completed until WWII’s end. By the time the prototype was ready for test flights during 1946, the peacetime military had limited interest in a new piston-engined bomber and no order was placed. The design was reconfigured for jet engines as the YB-49. That type also never entered service.
The United States had a lot of high-quality types in inventory after the end of WWII in 1945 so it might seem logical that they would appear as chase planes for a long time afterwards, but that was not the case. Aeronautics was moving at an incredible pace after WWII and the problem was simple: even the best WWII types were soon just too slow. For example the XP-86 prototype, which would become the F-86 Sabre of Korean War fame, first flew only 25 months after Japan surrendered and the prototype YB-47 Stratojet bomber only ten weeks behind it.
(The third prototype Vought X-F6U jet fighter at Naval Air Test Center Patuxent, MD preparing for a flight in 1948. Its chase plane, a WWII F6F Hellcat, is already airborne and waiting.)
Design of the F6U Pirate carrier-based jet fighter started in December 1944 but the US Navy did not realistically expect it to enter fleet service before WWII ended. Only 33 Pirates were built and they only served 3½ years. Technology was advancing very fast.
One WWII fighter could marginally keep up as a chase plane, but it was one which did not see any active combat during WWII. The P-80 Shooting Star was the first American jet fighter to enter mass production. During WWII a few were deployed to Europe but none saw active combat. Redesignated F-80 after 1947, these saw combat in Korea and also use as chase planes during the first decade or so after WWII.
(F-80 Shooting Star chase plane with the prototype Lockheed XF-90 during 1949.)
A F-80 Shooting Star served as the chase plane for the swept-wing XF-90 during the summer of 1949. The XF-90 was 52% faster than a F-51 Mustang, which was still in use as a fighter at the time. The XF-90 was not selected for service. Off-topic, the XF-90 prototype was used as a target for a 1950s nuclear weapons test in Nevada after the project’s cancellation. During 2003, the smashed-up plane was rediscovered in the desert. With a half-century having decayed the radioactivity, the wreckage was taken to the USAF Museum in Dayton, OH for display as an artifact of 1950s nuclear testing.
the Cheyenne and the Mustang
The story of how the WWII legend P-51 Mustang briefly came “back from the grave” as chase planes began in 1964 with the US Army’s Advanced Aerial Fire Support System competition for a dedicated attack helicopter. This in turn would later intertwine with the post-WWII Key West Agreement which had been struck when the Mustang was still in service as a fighter.
Previously after WWII the US Army had armed some transport helicopters with door guns, then starting in 1962 began to assign “gunship” transport helicopters with no troops aboard to escort air cavalry helicopters. The next step was a dedicated attack type dispensing with a passenger cabin altogether. In what was supposed to be an interim step only, the AH-1 Cobra was quickly designed and put into production, pending a proper winner of the AAFSS competition.
Lockheed’s submission was the Cheyenne. Somewhat out of the scope of this writing, the two-seat AH-56 was a remarkable aircraft, either now in the 2020s or certainly for 1967 when the first prototype flew. It was a compound helicopter, with a vertically-oriented pusher propeller on the extreme rear receiving up to 75% of the engine’s power in forward flight. Much of the lift was provided by 26’7″-span airplane-style wings.
The gunner, who sat in the forward position, had a seat which rotated in unison with either the nose 40mm grenade launcher or belly 30mm autocannon, so he was physically looking the same direction as the weapon’s muzzle. Six hardpoints allowed use of unguided rockets or BGM-71 TOW missiles; for the latter the Cheyenne had night vision and laser rangefinder, with the gunner using a helmet sight. The pilot had a primitive digital “waypoint” feature by which he could lock in a particular location, and then let the navigation system guide him there for an attack.
(A BGM-71 missile fired by the Cheyenne prototype against a target hulk WWII M4 Sherman tank. This is probably painful for military museum curators of the 21st century to see, but the military still had a lot of relic WWII hardware in the late 1960s / early 1970s.) (photo via Lockheed-Martin)
The Cheyenne flew 190 kts in normal flight with a top speed of 212 kts. For 1960s comparison, the top speed of a AH-1 Cobra was 149 kts while the top speed of the then-most common helicopter, the UH-1 Iroquois, was 109 kts.
How the WWII Mustang entered the equation was the need for something to serve as the chase aircraft. Previously when the US Army tested a new helicopter, it simply used another helicopter. Now this would be impossible; the Cheyenne was twice as fast as a Huey and would leave it in the dust.
At the same time, as mentioned earlier, a chase plane is best not “too” much faster, as (especially with helicopters) a large portion of the test flight program is not full-bore speed runs but rather handling crosswinds, transitions to and from hover, etc.
For these reasons the US Army took the unusual step of resurrecting a WWII fighter for chase plane duties more than two decades after WWII had ended. The US Army procured three previously demilitarized Mustangs: a (basically) “stock” F-51D and two Cavalier Mustangs.
the three aircraft
The first Mustang obtained by the US Army was originally a P-51D, serial # 44-72990, ordered under the 1944 budget and built in 1945. The D model was the most common Mustang of WWII, with 8,102 built or roughly half of all versions combined. After WWII this particular plane went to the Royal Canadian Air Force, which retired it in 1959. Sold as surplus to an American buyer, it was refurbished for recreational flying with guns removed and a second “rumble seat” in the cockpit. This plane was acquired commercially by the US Army in 1967 specifically as a chase plane for the AH-56.
(The basically “stock” F-51D after being acquired by the US Army in 1967. Behind it is a U-8 Seminole utility plane, and behind that a CH-47 Chinook helicopter.) (photo via mustangsmustangs.com website)
After receiving this F-51D, it was considered a success for the chase plane role and two more Mustangs were acquired in 1967 – 1968. These were Cavalier Mustangs which are described later below.
(The two Cavalier Mustangs acquired as Cheyenne chase planes.)
The Mustang was not the only type suitable for being a chase plane to the Cheyenne. For example the T-37 Tweet, a jet trainer of the era, had a flight envelope roughly the same as the WWII propeller fighter. It cruised at 310 kts and topped out at 369 kts and was a decently-maneuverable plane already in military service.
Why exactly the US Army took the unorthodox route of using a WWII fighter plane in 1967 has been lost to time, and it is possible there really wasn’t one single reason. The Mustangs, either the modified F-51D or the two Cavaliers, had a second seat for a photographer, were as fast and as maneuverable as the Cheyenne, had no safety issues, and were not a big-dollar procurement. All things being equal with more contemporary types, something had to be selected and the Mustang ended up being it.
Perhaps another factor, for the second and third Mustangs, was that this was during a high point of interest in the Cavalier aircraft company within the United States government.
Cavalier was originally Trans-Florida Aviation Inc., a company founded in 1957 as the last F-51s left Air National Guard service. CEO David Lindsay’s vision was that the glut of Mustang airframes being disposed of by the Pentagon could be converted into private use; specifically that business executives might buy them and use them both for recreation and business travel. Trans-Florida took surplus F-51s and gutted them, zeroing out the airframe fatigue life and rebuilding the engine. The WWII gunsight and other remaining combat features were removed. Plush leather seating was installed, and a passenger seat was installed behind the pilot. A luggage compartment was added. To keep pace with FAA regulations a new radio was installed as was a Regency civilian flight transponder. Two removable fuel tanks were mounted on the wingtips. The tail was replaced by a new design 1’2″ taller.
(A F-51 Mustang being “cavaliered” at Trans-Florida’s Sarasota, FL factory during October 1961.) (photo via swissmustangs.ch website)
Mr. Lindsay’s vision for the “Executive Mustang” never caught on and sales were very poor. The concept was rebranded as the “Cavalier Mustang”, oriented towards sports flying, with only a handful more being sold during the early 1960s.
Things looked to possibly be turning around in the late 1960s when the Department Of Defense became interested in Cavalier Mustangs. The US Air Force had no interest in them itself, however, it was considered a good idea for supporting small, third-world allied air arms. A lot of these small air forces were flying WWII-surplus warplanes into the end of the 1950s. Now for the 1960s counter-insurgency (COIN) strike role the USAF considered that to aid them, it might be less preferable to wean them onto low-performance jets and more preferable to just give them another (updated) WWII piston-engined type. The company had proven itself competent with a contract to overhaul the Dominican Republic air force’s F-51 Mustangs.
Trans-Florida renamed itself Cavalier Aircraft Corporation. Three versions were made available: the Cavalier F-51 which was a rebuilt P-51D airframe, the Cavalier Mustang II which was the same but with weapons restored, and the exotic Cavalier Mustang III which used a Rolls-Royce Dart turboprop engine.
The two planes selected by the US Army as chase aircraft were Cavalier F-51s, the simplest of the three types. The Department of Defense considered the Cavalier rebuild so extensive that they were deemed “new” airplanes reusing some old components, and as such, the two received new serial numbers of the fiscal year 1968 series; 21 years after actual P-51 production had ended.
the Cheyenne test program
The AH-56 evaluation had two phases. The first ran from the first flight in September 1967 until April 1969. During this phase, the Cheyenne clearly demonstrated itself as a remarkable helicopter but was also found deficient in several key areas, mainly the flight controls, empty weight, and pilot workload. The US Army issued a “cure notice” which cancelled Lockheed’s planned production contract but did not altogether cancel the AH-56, leaving it an open developmental contract.
Lockheed was still confident in the design and worked out the problems. Test flights resumed later in 1969.
(One of the Cavalier chase planes shortly after delivery in November 1968.)
The Mustangs, the F-51D and two Cavaliers, worked exceptionally well in their role as chase planes for the Cheyenne. During 1968, the US Army issued a new pilot’s manual for the F-51 tailored for the chase plane role. It will remain almost certainly the last American military manual for operating the Mustang.
Both the modified F-51D and the two Cavalier rebuilds performed equally well. Between the two, surprisingly the F-51D was considered a favorite if there was one, as it was regarded by ground mechanics as less demanding to maintain.
(The modified “stock” F-51D. Warplane serials of the time used the last two digits of the contract year as their first two numerals, with the first digit truncated off. During the early post-WWII years and Korean War era this was no problem as aviation was advancing so rapidly, it was rare for a plane to stay in service more than a decade. As some WWII-generation planes lingered past the mid-1950s longer than expected, this presented an issue as a serial number might be repeated every 10 years. A prefix “0-” was added, the humor being that the 0 was really an O meaning “Old”.)
(One of the two Cavaliers with a UH-1 Iroquois. Like the Mustang had been during WWII, the Huey is often associated as the “classical” Vietnam War aircraft.)
(One of the two Cavaliers with a CH-54 Tarhe behind it.)
The demise of the Cheyenne is outside the scope of this writing and even today remains a debated topic. The final round of test flights were during 1972. Only two deficiencies were noted, an issue with the rigid rotors stalling and mediocre performance in bad weather.
The Cheyenne’s biggest hurdles were not mechanical but rather political. Within the US Army, the AH-56’s abilities were of course strongly wanted but there was hesitation at the Cheyenne’s complexity. US Army field mechanics would be servicing something basically on the same technology tier as high-performance US Air Force aircraft. At the same time, the supposedly interim AH-1 Cobra performed very well in Vietnam.
An unrelated, and probably bigger, problem was a simmering dislike of the project within the US Air Force. Since the post-WWII Key West Agreement, there had previously been little inter-service squabbling between the US Air Force and the US Army.
During 1966 US Air Force Gen. J.P. McConnell and US Army Gen. Harold Johnson held an informal meeting, sort of a “20 years on…” follow-up to the Key West Agreement, to look at how airpower had evolved. It was agreed that if the US Army abandoned interest in regaining fixed-wing strike planes, the US Air Force would be fine with it flying armed helicopters.
However now the Cheyenne was such an unexpectedly advanced thing that the USAF began to have second thoughts. The Cheyenne seemed to intrude upon the “A-X” attack plane concept the USAF was seeking funding for. The US Air Force lobbied Congress that the US Army was encroaching on its ground attack mission and that the Cheyenne should be cancelled.
In 1972 the US Army started the Advanced Attack Helicopter competition for an eventual replacement for the AH-1 Cobra. A lot of the AAFSS competition’s criteria overlapped that of the new AAH competition, and that may have been intentional. At the same time the Pentagon added a two-engine criteria to AAH, eliminating the single-engine Cheyenne from “re-submission” into the new competition. Perhaps the final nail in the coffin was an estimate that production Cheyennes would cost $500,000 more than originally envisioned; giving the Department Of Defense a politically-friendly reason to end the project. The Cheyenne was permanently cancelled that year.
The Mustangs had proven themselves as good chase aircraft and remained in service after the Cheyenne’s cancellation.
(The US Army Aviation Engineering Flight Activity was located on the grounds of Edwards AFB, CA. This 1977 photo shows an interesting lineup, with the WWII Mustang sharing apron space with aircraft of the Vietnam War and early post-Vietnam eras.) (photo via ARC online forum)
(One of the later helicopters the Mustangs served as chase planes for was the Hughes YAH-64A prototype which eventually became the AH-64 Apache.)
By the late 1970s the US Army had obtained great service from this surprising choice of a chase plane, but was ready to move on. A pair of T-28 Trojans, a propeller trainer of the mid-Cold War era, replaced them. With one of the Cavaliers already detailed to the recoilless rifle trials described later below, the last to go was the modified “stock” F-51D.
(photo by Larry Kline)
This F-51D made its last US Army flight on 7 February 1978. It was sent for museum display to Ft. Rucker, AL. With that the P-51’s career with the US Army ended, 38 years after it had started and three decades after the US Army gave up fixed-wing combat planes.
(North American Aviation’s NA-73X private-design prototype which eventually became the P-51 Mustang.)
the recoilless rifle trials
One of the “chase Mustangs” had another quite interesting mission after the Cheyenne’s cancellation.
During the summer of 1974, the Department of the Navy (the US Navy and US Marine Corps) tested a concept for a low-cost air-to-ground weapon to arm FAC/TacRec (forward air controller / tactical reconnaissance) types, mainly the USMC’s OV-10 Bronco.
Warplanes like the Bronco normally “target-find” for artillery or airstrike assets, perform battlefield reconnaissance, etc. They are not really intended as strike planes in their own right, but based upon experiences during the Vietnam War the US Marine Corps considered that giving them a decent air-to-ground ability might be beneficial. “Targets of opportunity” like an enemy tank unit vulnerable in road transit could be immediately attacked while an airstrike or howitzer fire was made ready. The plane might also pick off isolated targets like a scouting armored car not worth its own strike package, or give emergency help to friendly infantry on the ground at risk of being overrun.
The problem was suitable ordnance. Free-fall bombs had significant effect but in the tiny numbers one Bronco might carry, were unlikely to score first-pass hits. Once dropped, they were gone. Unguided rocket pods had a better area effect, but were unlikely to disable or destroy the latest Soviet tanks. And again, once the pod was fired there would be no second chance. First generation smart bombs like the Bullpup and Maverick were in service but defeated the low-cost objective, or were too big, or both.
It was theorized that a recoilless rifle mounted on a plane might be best: these had the punch to knock out a tank, were decently accurate, and could be repeatedly fired. The USMC had previously considered their use to deliver “willy petes” (white phosphorus target-marking rounds) but now wanted to perhaps just use them as de jure weapons.
(The “flying artillery” concept was by no means novel or new in 1974. During WWII, Beech designed the XA-34 Grizzly. It was centered on a T15E1 75mm autocannon in the nose. Both the T15E1 and XA-34 were very successful, however the Grizzly shared components with the B-29 Superfortress which was a higher priority. When production bottlenecks finally ended, Japan was near defeat anyways and there was no interest in fielding yet another new warplane type. The XA-34 was cancelled.) (photo via Old Machine Press)
Leonardo da Vinci is often credited with the original idea for a recoilless rifle but the concept wasn’t fully perfected and mass-produced until WWII.
(US Army paratroopers engage German forces with a M18 during 1945. One of the earliest and smallest recoilless rifles, the 57mm M18 was designed for tripod use but was light enough to be fired like a traditional rifle as seen here.)
A recoilless rifle is not a bazooka-type rocket launcher, although it often fills the same tactical niche. A recoilless rifle is a true firearm with a chamber and rifled barrel, firing a gun-configuration cartridge (casing, propellant, bullet). The difference is that recoilless rifle rounds have a perforated casing, which expels combustion laterally into a bellmouth at the rear end of the gun, countering the force exerted on the departing shell going the other way and negating its felt recoil.
By this a relatively lightweight, man-portable weapon can fire ammunition of calibers equal to that of towed field artillery. The disadvantages are that the projectile’s range is significantly less, and that use produces a back-blast danger zone along with significant noise and smoke.
(The M344 round used by the Mustang during the 1974 experiments. It is actually 105mm but labeled “106mm” to avoid confusion with incompatible 105mm ammunition.)
After WWII recoilless rifles had been repeatedly considered, and rejected, as ordnance for warplanes.
(Harvey Aluminum Company designed a lightweight recoilless rifle which could be semi-automatically reloaded. It was not accepted for production.)
The most major stumbling block was that recoilless rifles are hand-loaded with the breech being in the extreme rear of the gun. Unlike a machine gun or autocannon, there was no practical way to do this remotely and automatically external to an aircraft. The solution developed was for an internal magazine in the center of the plane’s fuselage, feeding downwards. A hydraulic “shuttle” would strip a round out of the magazine, carry it above the gun on an arm trailing behind the breech, lower it and chamber it, then catch the bellmouth section swinging it upwards, putting the rifle into battery.
There were lesser problems with the concept, and these are what the F-51 Mustang aimed to explore. A recoilless rifle produces a significant backblast. It was unknown how this would affect airflow over the plane’s tail. A recoilless rifle’s round flies a relatively flat profile. As a weapon designed to be static-fired on the ground, it was unclear how it would perform when fired off an object already moving through three dimensions.
As the US Army had no further use for all three chase Mustangs by 1974, it loaned one of the Cavaliers to Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, CA for US Marine Corps use. Watervliet Arsenal, NY provided two M40 105mm recoilless rifles and ammunition. The Mustang was flown by LtCol John Pipa of the US Marine Corps but remained painted in US Army colors.
For certain, there was zero interest in actually fielding this system on Mustangs. The Cavalier Mustang was just an available airframe. The M40s were mounted on the Mustang’s wingtips, replacing the Cavalier fuel tanks. The elaborate auto-loading system was not used, and the guns were hand-loaded on the ground for single-shot use.
During the spring of 1974, the idea was tested against two target hulk trucks in the desert. Firing took place with the WWII fighter in a 22º dive at 250 kts. The slant range to the trucks was 5,072yds or roughly a 2¾ miles line-of-sight for the pilot.
Mid-June, a final determining test series was run.
Out of eight shots from the Mustang, one direct hit on a truck was scored. The other seven rounds landed in a tight grouping. The US Marine Corps concluded that the marginal inaccuracy was likely due to flexing of the WWII wings on the Mustang, which would not be present on the rigid under-fuselage mounting envisioned for production use.
The pilot reported that the backblast of the M40s did not disrupt airflow around the tail and in fact, the only noticeable effect was the extremely loud noise produced by all recoilless rifles.
The concept was also investigated by mounting non-firing weapons on an OV-10 Bronco and a A-4 Skyhawk, plus a full firing set-up on a bizarre arrangement with a Bronco fuselage / cockpit section suspended from a gantry. That was as far as it went. Like a number of other early post-Vietnam War projects, Congress had no interest in funding it and the idea died.
The US Army did not want the test Cavalier Mustang back in 1974 and it was sold to a civilian owner.
In both the helicopter test flights and the gunnery test, the reborn Mustangs were an operational success and a budgetary one as well. The US Navy’s budget for the whole recoilless rifle project was $95,000 ($579,251 in 2023 money) which would have easily been exceeded by the flight-hour costs on a modern jet alone.
Somewhat off-topic, the head-butting between the US Army and US Air Force over the Cheyenne was the last of its type. When the AH-64 Apache helicopter and A-10 Thunderbolt II jet respectively entered use, both the US Army and US Air Force stated that overlaps between them were unavoidable and beneficial. In December 2022, the US Army picked Bell’s V-280 Valor winged tiltrotor as the replacement for the UH-60 and other helicopters, and again the US Air Force did not object. The Key West Agreement, struck 3 years after WWII, still seems to be good policy in the 21st century.
(photo by Larry Kline)
When the F-51D chase plane was retired in February 1978, perhaps there was a bit of silent satisfaction that the P-51 Mustang had ridden off into the sunset wearing US Army green, as it had when it began during WWII.
8 thoughts on “the last Mustangs in the US Army”
The idea of arming a Bronco with a M40 recoilless rifle baffled me… At this pace, we could have ended seeing a B-52 with a Long Tom under the wingtips.
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the OV-10D they used during Desert Storm did pretty well, it could carry a variety of more sensible weapons and could also carry AIM-9 Sidewinders
all of this is very interesting……did not know that the P-(F) 51 had such a long useful career……I have just seen a lot of them in private hands, and as racers….best..
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Reblogged this on .
Reminds me of the story of spitfires being used in place of possible Indonesian P51s against Lightnings – https://theaviationgeekclub.com/lightning-vs-spitfire-why-the-iconic-mach-2-interceptor-struggled-to-win-mock-dogfights-against-the-legendary-wwii-plane-during-the-trial-flights-conducted-by-the-raf-between-the-two-types/amp/
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Very good article.
I was at Ft Wolters, MWL, when one of the Cavalier Mustangs landed for a couple of days. The Army colonel pilot had a son going through helicopter flight school there and he was able to visit with him. A/C was in route to Ft Rucker for the AH 56 Cheyenne program. The second seat had a spot for his crew chief, an Army Master Sergeant that was a P 51 mechanic at one time. I got to climb up and get a good look inside. Great day for a young pilot. (About 1968-69 ish)
I had an uncle that flew the A 36 Apache ( P 51A) in WW 2.
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Great article, in particular the recoilless rocket part. Reminds me of the 6 bazookas that were installed on a WW2 artillery observation plane.
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As a side note, before WWII the Soviets developed recoilless rifle (by Leonid Kurchevsky) and tested those on the Tupolev I-12 and in service on the Grigorovich I-Z.
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The P-51 Mustang was one of WWII’s greatest fighters and one of the best era-adjusted fighter planes of all time. Within the American consciousness it is almost synonymous with WWII.
Decades after WWII and after the P-51 had left service as a fighter, the Mustang briefly “came back from the grave” to serve not in the US Air Force, but in the US Army.
(P-51 Mustang during WWII.)
(F-51D Mustang chase plane follows the Sikorsky YUH-60A prototype during the US Army’s UTTAS competition of 1976
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, seeking a replacement for the UH-1 Iroquois of Vietnam War fame. Sikorsky’s design defeated Boeing’s YUH-61 to win UTTAS and was developed into the UH-60 Blackhawk of today.) (official US Army photo)
(US Army F-51 Mustang during 1970s experiments with airborne recoilless rifles.)
the Mustang after WWII and the division of American airpower
The P-51 Mustang was a standard fighter in its class at the end of WWII in September 1945 and remained in service.
(P-51 Mustangs at Conn Barracks in the post-WWII American occupation zone of Germany. During WWII this was Flugplatz Schweinfurt of the Luftwaffe, home to a Ju-87 Stuka unit and later a fighter tactics school.) (photo by Peter Randall)
On 18 September 1947, the US Army Air Forces of WWII was split off into an independent fifth branch of the USA’s military, the US Air Force. One of the first changes was altering the aircraft nomenclature series, for example the pursuit (P-) category was rolled into a new overall fighter (F-) category and hence the P-51 Mustang became the F-51 Mustang.
For three days in March 1948, the heads of the armed forces met in Key West, FL to iron out what roles the air wings of the five armed forces would fill. The goal was to prevent inter-service squabbling or duplication of missions. It was agreed that the US Air Force would handle all strategic missions, land-based fighters, reconnaissance missions, ground attack duties, air logistics, and many other duties. It would also assist the US Navy with land-based overwater missions. The US Navy and by extension US Marine Corps would continue carrier-based aviation, shipboard helicopters, and land-based anti-submarine missions. The US Coast Guard’s tiny air wing was so specialized that it had already found its niche.
Finally this left the US Army. It would have a rump air wing, oriented towards “hyper-tactical” roles like the transport helicopters of air cavalry units, scout helicopters, little artillery spotting lightplanes, medevac helicopters, and a small number of utility planes.
This delineation of tasks was called “the Key West Agreement” and was made official Pentagon policy on 1 July 1948. It has remained so ever since.
(An example of US Army fixed-wing aviation after the Key West Agreement is this L-20 Beaver utility plane, here taking off from the WWII-veteran aircraft carrier USS Corregidor (CVU-58) during 1958.) (official US Navy photo)
As for the Mustangs in the US Air Force, by the start of the 1950s they were mostly in Air National Guard units, with the Korean War resulting in some being federalized and again returning to frontline combat service. After the Korean War surviving aircraft were transferred back to ANG units where they were soon replaced by jet fighters.
(“Wham Bam”, a F-51D of the West Virginia Air National Guard, the very last Mustang in the US Air Force.)
The last Mustang user overall – at least until the chase planes described below – was the West Virginia ANG. On 27 January 1957, it retired its last F-51 Mustang. It was the last Mustang in the US Air Force and the last remaining propeller fighter of any type still in use.
There in not much to elaborate about chase planes, as the concept is not complex. A chase plane follows another aircraft, usually a prototype or experimental design, on test flights as an observer. Chase planes are still used today in the 21st century but during aviation’s golden age, were even more important. Not until the 1950s did test flights have regular access to ground tracking radars, and inflight data recording and telemetry links came even later. If there was a crash, observations of the chase pilot were often the first step in determining what went wrong. They were also useful in real-time. For example if the test pilot reported severe turbulence but the chase pilot didn’t, it might indicate an impending problem on the aircraft rather than weather issues.
There is no rigid criteria for a chase plane. No air force is going to spend money developing a type just for this role, so they were invariably just some other existing design.
That said, there are a few loose needs. The chase plane has to have performance slightly superior to whatever it is chasing; obviously a chase plane slower and less maneuverable than the test aircraft would be of little use. At the same time it can’t be “too superior”; for example nobody would want a supersonic jet fighter as the chase plane for a prototype piston-engined trainer.
Other than that, there is little else needed for the job. During and after WWII, warplanes of the WWII generation were used as chase aircraft during test flights.
(P-40 Warhawk serving as the chase plane for the Douglas XB-19 over Los Angeles, CA during 1941.)
The P-40 Warhawk fighter served various Allied air forces during the first part of WWII. Only one XB-19 strategic bomber was built, as it was never ordered into production. The gigantic lone prototype served as a utility and test plane throughout WWII and then a year afterwards. The XB-19 was bigger than any production WWII bomber and the United States would not try a bomber this large again until the B-36 Peacemaker of the early Cold War era.
(P-51 Mustang serving as the chase plane for the second XP-82 prototype.)
Contrary to popular lore, the F-82 Twin Mustang was not two stock P-51s joined at the factory by a center wing section. It had a different electrical system, different tail structure, and other alterations. None the less it was clearly derived from its single-seat cousin. The F-82 Twin Mustang did not see combat during WWII but fought in the Korean War.
(P-61 Black Widow serving as the chase plane for the XB-35 prototype during 1946.)
The P-61 Black Widow was a successful night fighter of WWII, serving on until 1950. Northrop’s XB-35 project started early in WWII however development was protracted and not completed until WWII’s end. By the time the prototype was ready for test flights during 1946, the peacetime military had limited interest in a new piston-engined bomber and no order was placed. The design was reconfigured for jet engines as the YB-49. That type also never entered service.
The United States had a lot of high-quality types in inventory after the end of WWII in 1945 so it might seem logical that they would appear as chase planes for a long time afterwards, but that was not the case. Aeronautics was moving at an incredible pace after WWII and the problem was simple: even the best WWII types were soon just too slow. For example the XP-86 prototype, which would become the F-86 Sabre of Korean War fame, first flew only 25 months after Japan surrendered and the prototype YB-47 Stratojet bomber only ten weeks behind it.
(The third prototype Vought X-F6U jet fighter at Naval Air Test Center Patuxent, MD preparing for a flight in 1948. Its chase plane, a WWII F6F Hellcat, is already airborne and waiting.)
Design of the F6U Pirate carrier-based jet fighter started in December 1944 but the US Navy did not realistically expect it to enter fleet service before WWII ended. Only 33 Pirates were built and they only served 3½ years. Technology was advancing very fast.
One WWII fighter could marginally keep up as a chase plane, but it was one which did not see any active combat during WWII. The P-80 Shooting Star was the first American jet fighter to enter mass production. During WWII a few were deployed to Europe but none saw active combat. Redesignated F-80 after 1947, these saw combat in Korea and also use as chase planes during the first decade or so after WWII.
(F-80 Shooting Star chase plane with the prototype Lockheed XF-90 during 1949.)
A F-80 Shooting Star served as the chase plane for the swept-wing XF-90 during the summer of 1949. The XF-90 was 52% faster than a F-51 Mustang, which was still in use as a fighter at the time. The XF-90 was not selected for service. Off-topic, the XF-90 prototype was used as a target for a 1950s nuclear weapons test in Nevada after the project’s cancellation. During 2003, the smashed-up plane was rediscovered in the desert. With a half-century having decayed the radioactivity, the wreckage was taken to the USAF Museum in Dayton, OH for display as an artifact of 1950s nuclear testing.
the Cheyenne and the Mustang
The story of how the WWII legend P-51 Mustang briefly came “back from the grave” as chase planes began in 1964 with the US Army’s Advanced Aerial Fire Support System competition for a dedicated attack helicopter. This in turn would later intertwine with the post-WWII Key West Agreement which had been struck when the Mustang was still in service as a fighter.
Previously after WWII the US Army had armed some transport helicopters with door guns, then starting in 1962 began to assign “gunship” transport helicopters with no troops aboard to escort air cavalry helicopters. The next step was a dedicated attack type dispensing with a passenger cabin altogether. In what was supposed to be an interim step only, the AH-1 Cobra was quickly designed and put into production, pending a proper winner of the AAFSS competition.
Lockheed’s submission was the Cheyenne. Somewhat out of the scope of this writing, the two-seat AH-56 was a remarkable aircraft, either now in the 2020s or certainly for 1967 when the first prototype flew. It was a compound helicopter, with a vertically-oriented pusher propeller on the extreme rear receiving up to 75% of the engine’s power in forward flight. Much of the lift was provided by 26’7″-span airplane-style wings.
The gunner, who sat in the forward position, had a seat which rotated in unison with either the nose 40mm grenade launcher or belly 30mm autocannon, so he was physically looking the same direction as the weapon’s muzzle. Six hardpoints allowed use of unguided rockets or BGM-71 TOW missiles; for the latter the Cheyenne had night vision and laser rangefinder, with the gunner using a helmet sight. The pilot had a primitive digital “waypoint” feature by which he could lock in a particular location, and then let the navigation system guide him there for an attack.
(A BGM-71 missile fired by the Cheyenne prototype against a target hulk WWII M4 Sherman tank. This is probably painful for military museum curators of the 21st century to see, but the military still had a lot of relic WWII hardware in the late 1960s / early 1970s.) (photo via Lockheed-Martin)
The Cheyenne flew 190 kts in normal flight with a top speed of 212 kts. For 1960s comparison, the top speed of a AH-1 Cobra was 149 kts while the top speed of the then-most common helicopter, the UH-1 Iroquois, was 109 kts.
How the WWII Mustang entered the equation was the need for something to serve as the chase aircraft. Previously when the US Army tested a new helicopter, it simply used another helicopter. Now this would be impossible; the Cheyenne was twice as fast as a Huey and would leave it in the dust.
At the same time, as mentioned earlier, a chase plane is best not “too” much faster, as (especially with helicopters) a large portion of the test flight program is not full-bore speed runs but rather handling crosswinds, transitions to and from hover, etc.
For these reasons the US Army took the unusual step of resurrecting a WWII fighter for chase plane duties more than two decades after WWII had ended. The US Army procured three previously demilitarized Mustangs: a (basically) “stock” F-51D and two Cavalier Mustangs.
the three aircraft
The first Mustang obtained by the US Army was originally a P-51D, serial # 44-72990, ordered under the 1944 budget and built in 1945. The D model was the most common Mustang of WWII, with 8,102 built or roughly half of all versions combined. After WWII this particular plane went to the Royal Canadian Air Force, which retired it in 1959. Sold as surplus to an American buyer, it was refurbished for recreational flying with guns removed and a second “rumble seat” in the cockpit. This plane was acquired commercially by the US Army in 1967 specifically as a chase plane for the AH-56.
(The basically “stock” F-51D after being acquired by the US Army in 1967. Behind it is a U-8 Seminole utility plane, and behind that a CH-47 Chinook helicopter.) (photo via mustangsmustangs.com website)
After receiving this F-51D, it was considered a success for the chase plane role and two more Mustangs were acquired in 1967 – 1968. These were Cavalier Mustangs which are described later below.
(The two Cavalier Mustangs acquired as Cheyenne chase planes.)
The Mustang was not the only type suitable for being a chase plane to the Cheyenne. For example the T-37 Tweet, a jet trainer of the era, had a flight envelope roughly the same as the WWII propeller fighter. It cruised at 310 kts and topped out at 369 kts and was a decently-maneuverable plane already in military service.
Why exactly the US Army took the unorthodox route of using a WWII fighter plane in 1967 has been lost to time, and it is possible there really wasn’t one single reason. The Mustangs, either the modified F-51D or the two Cavaliers, had a second seat for a photographer, were as fast and as maneuverable as the Cheyenne, had no safety issues, and were not a big-dollar procurement. All things being equal with more contemporary types, something had to be selected and the Mustang ended up being it.
Perhaps another factor, for the second and third Mustangs, was that this was during a high point of interest in the Cavalier aircraft company within the United States government.
Cavalier was originally Trans-Florida Aviation Inc., a company founded in 1957 as the last F-51s left Air National Guard service. CEO David Lindsay’s vision was that the glut of Mustang airframes being disposed of by the Pentagon could be converted into private use; specifically that business executives might buy them and use them both for recreation and business travel. Trans-Florida took surplus F-51s and gutted them, zeroing out the airframe fatigue life and rebuilding the engine. The WWII gunsight and other remaining combat features were removed. Plush leather seating was installed, and a passenger seat was installed behind the pilot. A luggage compartment was added. To keep pace with FAA regulations a new radio was installed as was a Regency civilian flight transponder. Two removable fuel tanks were mounted on the wingtips. The tail was replaced by a new design 1’2″ taller.
(A F-51 Mustang being “cavaliered” at Trans-Florida’s Sarasota, FL factory during October 1961.) (photo via swissmustangs.ch website)
Mr. Lindsay’s vision for the “Executive Mustang” never caught on and sales were very poor. The concept was rebranded as the “Cavalier Mustang”, oriented towards sports flying, with only a handful more being sold during the early 1960s.
Things looked to possibly be turning around in the late 1960s when the Department Of Defense became interested in Cavalier Mustangs. The US Air Force had no interest in them itself, however, it was considered a good idea for supporting small, third-world allied air arms. A lot of these small air forces were flying WWII-surplus warplanes into the end of the 1950s. Now for the 1960s counter-insurgency (COIN) strike role the USAF considered that to aid them, it might be less preferable to wean them onto low-performance jets and more preferable to just give them another (updated) WWII piston-engined type. The company had proven itself competent with a contract to overhaul the Dominican Republic air force’s F-51 Mustangs.
Trans-Florida renamed itself Cavalier Aircraft Corporation. Three versions were made available: the Cavalier F-51 which was a rebuilt P-51D airframe, the Cavalier Mustang II which was the same but with weapons restored, and the exotic Cavalier Mustang III which used a Rolls-Royce Dart turboprop engine.
The two planes selected by the US Army as chase aircraft were Cavalier F-51s, the simplest of the three types. The Department of Defense considered the Cavalier rebuild so extensive that they were deemed “new” airplanes reusing some old components, and as such, the two received new serial numbers of the fiscal year 1968 series; 21 years after actual P-51 production had ended.
the Cheyenne test program
The AH-56 evaluation had two phases. The first ran from the first flight in September 1967 until April 1969. During this phase, the Cheyenne clearly demonstrated itself as a remarkable helicopter but was also found deficient in several key areas, mainly the flight controls, empty weight, and pilot workload. The US Army issued a “cure notice” which cancelled Lockheed’s planned production contract but did not altogether cancel the AH-56, leaving it an open developmental contract.
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Bullying has become a major concern especially in schools and other places of work and learning.How to Curb Bullying in Schools is what you will learn in the article you are about to read.
But before we dive in, let’s understand some basic concepts;
What is Bullying?
Bullying is a pattern of unsafe behavior that is usually intentional. It also involves an imbalance of power or strength. It typically includes actions or words that are meant to harm, intimidate, or control another person. Bullying can manifest in various forms, such as physical, verbal, social, or cyberbullying. It often occurs repeatedly over time, creating a hostile and distressing environment for the victim. Common examples of bullying include name-calling, teasing, spreading rumors, physical aggression, exclusion, and online harassment. It’s important to address bullying to protect the well-being and mental health of individuals.
Bullying is also when people intentionally use words or actions against someone or a group of people to cause distress. These actions are usually by people who have more influence or power over someone else. It can also be someone who want to make you feel less powerful or helpless.
Bullying is not the same as conflict between people or disliking someone. People even might bully each other because of conflict or dislike.
The sort of repeated behaviour that can be a form of bullying includes:
- Keeping someone out of a group (online or offline)
- Acting in an unpleasant way near or towards someone
- Giving nasty looks, making rude gestures, calling names, being rude and impolite, and constantly negative teasing.
- Spreading rumours or lies, or misrepresenting someone (i.e. using their Facebook account to post messages as if it were them)
- Mocking about that can sometimes go too far
- Harassing someone based on their race, sex, religion, gender or a disability
- Intentionally and repeatedly hurting someone physically
- Intentionally stalking someone
- Taking advantage of any power over someone else like a Prefect or a Student Representative.
Bullying can happen anywhere. It can be in schools, at home, at work, in online social spaces, via text messaging or via email. It can be physical, verbal, emotional, and it also includes messages, public statements and behaviour online intended to cause distress or harm (also known as cyberbullying). But no matter what form bullying takes, the results can be the same: severe distress and pain for the person.
Who is a Bully?
A bully is an individual who harasses, abuses, intimidates people. It is especially those with less power they have or those weaker or vulnerable in some way. The word often implies that such behavior is habitual.
Bully can also be a verb meaning to treat people in this way (to act as a bully toward them), as in The man who was a bully to his classmates in school is now teaching children how not to bully others. Someone who is treated in this way is said to be bullied. The act of treating people in this way is called bullying.
How to Curb Bullying in Schools?
Separation is a very effective way of curbing bullying in schools. It is important to keep the bully away from the person they are bullying. If you’re helping a peer who is experiencing bullying go with them to a safe space away from the bully. If you’re an adult trying to stop a bullying situation, do not force the two parties to be in the same room together or to shake hands and make up. Put them in separate rooms and talk with each one individually. At the end, you then look for a safe space to iron things out amicably.
Support plays a critical role in curbing bullying by addressing the needs and concerns of both victims and potential bullies. Another important way to get support is to ask for help. Students that are being bullied must learn to always speak up to avoid the situation from getting worse. The help and support that students gets can drastically reduce the effects of bullying on them. It will also help to reduce and curb bullying in schools.
Open Communication should be among students and even teachers so as to avoid misunderstanding. You can prevent Bullying easily through open communication and having honest conversations with the students or people. Another effective approach is for you to spread the word that bullying must stop. Communicate this with your peers and the people around you especially if you are in a school or an environment where bullying is very prevalent.
Are you in need of a web software solution that doesn’t only connect students and teachers but also connect parents and other stakeholders?SchoolTry makes it possible for teachers and students to connect without any hassle.
SchoolTry, a web platform that helps to Automate, Digitize and Transform Your School work. If you are a school owner who needs a web solution to make your school work better and more efficient. You can simply request for a free demo to understand how it works or click here to sign up for free. No credit card required.
|
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Bullying has become a major concern especially in schools and other places of work and learning.How to Curb Bullying in Schools is what you will learn in the article you are about to read.
But before we dive in, let’s understand some basic concepts;
What is Bullying?
Bullying is a pattern of unsafe behavior that is usually intentional. It also involves an imbalance of power or strength. It typically includes actions or words that are meant to harm, intimidate, or control another person. Bullying can manifest in various forms, such as physical, verbal, social, or cyberbullying. It often occurs repeatedly
|
over time, creating a hostile and distressing environment for the victim. Common examples of bullying include name-calling, teasing, spreading rumors, physical aggression, exclusion, and online harassment. It’s important to address bullying to protect the well-being and mental health of individuals.
Bullying is also when people intentionally use words or actions against someone or a group of people to cause distress. These actions are usually by people who have more influence or power over someone else. It can also be someone who want to make you feel less powerful or helpless.
Bullying is not the same as conflict between people or disliking someone. People even might bully each other because of conflict or dislike.
The sort of repeated behaviour that can be a form of bullying includes:
- Keeping someone out of a group (online or offline)
- Acting in an unpleasant way near or towards someone
- Giving nasty looks, making rude gestures, calling names, being rude and impolite, and constantly negative teasing.
- Spreading rumours or lies, or misrepresenting someone (i.e. using their Facebook account to post messages as if it were them)
- Mocking about that can sometimes go too far
- Harassing someone based on their race, sex, religion, gender or a disability
- Intentionally and repeatedly hurting someone physically
- Intentionally stalking someone
- Taking advantage of any power over someone else like a Prefect or a Student Representative.
Bullying can happen anywhere. It can be in schools, at home, at work, in online social spaces, via text messaging or via email. It can be physical, verbal, emotional, and it also includes messages, public statements and behaviour online intended to cause distress or harm (also known as cyberbullying). But no matter what form bullying takes, the results can be the same: severe distress and pain for the person.
Who is a Bully?
A bully is an individual who harasses, abuses, intimidates people. It is especially those with less power they have or those weaker or vulnerable in some way. The word often implies that such behavior is habitual.
Bully can also be a verb meaning to treat people in this way (to act as a bully toward them), as in The man who was a bully to his classmates in school is now teaching children how not to bully others. Someone who is treated in this way is said to be bullied. The act of treating people in this way is called bullying.
How to Curb Bullying in Schools?
Separation is a very effective way of curbing bullying in schools. It is important to keep the bully away from the person they are bullying. If you’re helping a peer who is experiencing bullying go with them to a safe space away from the bully. If you’re an adult trying to stop a bullying situation, do not force the two parties to be in the same room together or to shake hands and make up. Put them in separate rooms and talk with each one individually. At the end, you then look for a safe space to iron things out amicably.
Support plays a critical role in curbing bullying by addressing the needs and concerns of both victims and potential bullies. Another important way to get support is to ask for help. Students that are being bullied must learn to always speak up to avoid the situation from getting worse. The help and support that students gets can drastically reduce the effects of bullying on them. It will also help to reduce and curb bullying in schools.
Open Communication should be among students and even teachers so as to avoid misunderstanding. You can prevent Bullying easily through open communication and having honest conversations with the students or people. Another effective approach is for you to spread the word that bullying must stop. Communicate this with your peers and the people around you especially if you are in a school or an environment where bullying is very prevalent.
Are you in need of a web software solution that doesn’t only connect students and teachers but also connect parents and other stakeholders?SchoolTry makes it possible for teachers and students to connect without any hassle.
SchoolTry, a web platform that helps to Automate, Digitize and Transform Your School work. If you are a school owner who needs a web solution to make your school work better and more efficient. You can simply request for a free demo to understand how it works or click here to sign up for free. No credit card required.
|
The Inflation Reduction Act is a landmark piece of legislation that directs more than $1 trillion in subsidies and incentives toward clean energy production. It includes tax credits for buyers of new clean vehicles, production tax credits for clean energy like wind and solar, and more production tax credits for advanced energy technologies like batteries. The U.S. government has been waving around big financial incentives to lure manufacturing to the country, and many producers have taken notice.
While some battery makers were already well on their way to setting up new U.S. plants, others are now rethinking their location decisions. For instance, Tesla recently announced it will pause its plans to build a battery cell plant in Germany and forgo $1.3 billion of state aid there, and instead build one in Texas. Recent statements from electric vehicle and battery makers that they are expecting big government payouts thanks to the IRA raise the question: Just how much will the battery production credits cost American taxpayers?
Under Section 13502, “Advanced Manufacturing Production Credit,” the IRA includes production credits for battery cells and battery modules produced in the United States. The Congressional Budget Office’s cost estimate of the provision over the 2022-2031 fiscal years was $30.6 billion.
The credit can be monetized so that a producer is eligible for a direct payment from Treasury. (Section 13502 includes other production credits, but here I focus on the production credits for battery cell capacity and battery module capacity.)
The amount of the credit depends on the amount of energy the battery produces, in terms of kilowatt hours. As a Congressional Research Service report notes, battery cells can qualify for a credit of $35 per kilowatt hour of capacity, and battery modules for a credit of $10 per kilowatt of capacity, or $45 in the case of a battery module that does not use battery cells.
Estimating the potential cost of these production credits is speculative because of large uncertainties: How many eligible EV batteries will be produced in the United States? How many EVs will be sold in the U.S.? An Argonne National Labs report includes estimates of announced battery plant capacity in North America for plug-in EVs and the estimated U.S. share of that capacity. Taking those figures, and assuming the battery plants maintain at least 75% capacity utilization, we can come up with annual estimates for the production credits.
Applying the full $45 production credit across the board, the total value of the production credits over calendar years 2023 to 2032 is approximately $196.5 billion. Applying the $10 and $35 production credits, the value drops to $43.7 billion and $152.8 billion, respectively. Currently, most cell production is outside of North America and U.S. battery module assembly plants would only qualify for the $10 production credit until the full cell production is moved to the country. (My figures take into account the IRA’s phase out of the production credits: 100% from 2023-2029, 75% in 2030, 50% in 2031 and 25% in 2032.)
Despite the current numbers, the recent announcements on the surge of new battery cell plants across the country suggest more and more battery producers will be eligible for the higher credits in the coming years. Perhaps more than what was considered when the CBO conducted their cost estimates.
My figures also assume battery makers can get the minerals they need to make the batteries: If they cannot, then production levels and production credits would be less. On the other hand, if battery capacity were to increase beyond the ANL projections, then the production credits would be greater.
Finally, these production credits appear to be actual payments and not just tax write offs. This would suggest that even a company that does not pay taxes could still receive these monetized production credits.
CBO’s task of scoring massive pieces of legislation like the IRA is often next to impossible when so little information is available. But the difference between CBO’s estimates of $30.6 billion and estimates based on more recent information of up to $196.5 billion is large enough to warrant a deeper dive by policymakers. Treasury will be writing important guidelines in the coming months that will define eligibility. My hope is that these new figures spur discussion around the costs of the “Advanced Manufacturing Production Credit” in the IRA.
|
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The Inflation Reduction Act is a landmark piece of legislation that directs more than $1 trillion in subsidies and incentives toward clean energy production. It includes tax credits for buyers of new clean vehicles, production tax credits for clean energy like wind and solar, and more production tax credits for advanced energy technologies like batteries. The U.S. government has been waving around big financial incentives to lure manufacturing to the country, and many producers have taken notice.
While some battery makers were already well on their way to setting up new U.S. plants, others are now rethinking their location decisions. For instance, Tesla recently announced it will pause its plans to
|
build a battery cell plant in Germany and forgo $1.3 billion of state aid there, and instead build one in Texas. Recent statements from electric vehicle and battery makers that they are expecting big government payouts thanks to the IRA raise the question: Just how much will the battery production credits cost American taxpayers?
Under Section 13502, “Advanced Manufacturing Production Credit,” the IRA includes production credits for battery cells and battery modules produced in the United States. The Congressional Budget Office’s cost estimate of the provision over the 2022-2031 fiscal years was $30.6 billion.
The credit can be monetized so that a producer is eligible for a direct payment from Treasury. (Section 13502 includes other production credits, but here I focus on the production credits for battery cell capacity and battery module capacity.)
The amount of the credit depends on the amount of energy the battery produces, in terms of kilowatt hours. As a Congressional Research Service report notes, battery cells can qualify for a credit of $35 per kilowatt hour of capacity, and battery modules for a credit of $10 per kilowatt of capacity, or $45 in the case of a battery module that does not use battery cells.
Estimating the potential cost of these production credits is speculative because of large uncertainties: How many eligible EV batteries will be produced in the United States? How many EVs will be sold in the U.S.? An Argonne National Labs report includes estimates of announced battery plant capacity in North America for plug-in EVs and the estimated U.S. share of that capacity. Taking those figures, and assuming the battery plants maintain at least 75% capacity utilization, we can come up with annual estimates for the production credits.
Applying the full $45 production credit across the board, the total value of the production credits over calendar years 2023 to 2032 is approximately $196.5 billion. Applying the $10 and $35 production credits, the value drops to $43.7 billion and $152.8 billion, respectively. Currently, most cell production is outside of North America and U.S. battery module assembly plants would only qualify for the $10 production credit until the full cell production is moved to the country. (My figures take into account the IRA’s phase out of the production credits: 100% from 2023-2029, 75% in 2030, 50% in 2031 and 25% in 2032.)
Despite the current numbers, the recent announcements on the surge of new battery cell plants across the country suggest more and more battery producers will be eligible for the higher credits in the coming years. Perhaps more than what was considered when the CBO conducted their cost estimates.
My figures also assume battery makers can get the minerals they need to make the batteries: If they cannot, then production levels and production credits would be less. On the other hand, if battery capacity were to increase beyond the ANL projections, then the production credits would be greater.
Finally, these production credits appear to be actual payments and not just tax write offs. This would suggest that even a company that does not pay taxes could still receive these monetized production credits.
CBO’s task of scoring massive pieces of legislation like the IRA is often next to impossible when so little information is available. But the difference between CBO’s estimates of $30.6 billion and estimates based on more recent information of up to $196.5 billion is large enough to warrant a deeper dive by policymakers. Treasury will be writing important guidelines in the coming months that will define eligibility. My hope is that these new figures spur discussion around the costs of the “Advanced Manufacturing Production Credit” in the IRA.
|
Nestled between the snowy ranges of Mount Rainier and Glacier Peak, a significant glacier in Washington state has disappeared after existing full of ice and snowpack for millennia, according to a researcher who has tracked the glacier for years.
In this swath of mountain range in the Washington Cascades east of Seattle, the climate crisis dealt the final blow to the Hinman Glacier, the largest in the region, according to Mauri Pelto, a glaciologist with Nichols College. It’s not just the Northern Cascades that’s losing ice. Researchers recently found that up to half of the planet’s glaciers could be lost by the end of the century, even if the world’s ambitious global climate targets, including phasing out fossil fuels, are met.
To paint a picture of Hinman’s retreat, experts say an unofficially named “Hinman Lake” has replaced the former glacier, which contains traces of relict ice masses. As the lake filled from glacier melt, it became harder for hikers to traverse this part of the mountain range.
Pelto told CNN he has been visiting and observing Mount Hinman for 40 years. And in the summer of 2022, as temperatures soared and an unrelenting dry spell gripped the Northwest, Pelto led a team up the mountain only to see Hinman’s demise.
“It’s completely disappeared. This was the biggest glacier in this part of the mountain range — it was exceptional,” Pelto told CNN. The glacier could reform, he said, “but as we continue to warm into the future that will be even less hospitable.”
Roughly 50 miles east of Seattle, deep in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness, Hinman and its neighboring glaciers have been critical to the Pacific Northwest’s salmon population as well as other aquatic species. During the warmest and driest periods, Hinman fed the Skykomish River with a considerable amount of cool glacier runoff. But as the climate crisis advanced, the flow dropped significantly.
This decline in summer streamflow from the glaciers and warming freshwater reduces the not only the salmons’ quality of life but also that of people who rely on the river, experts say. Since the 1950s, the primary glaciers that feed the Skykomish River basin have lost around 55% of their surface area. Last year, Pelto and his team measured that the Columbia Glacier declined in area by 25%, Foss by 70%, Lynch by 40% and Hinman by 95%.
David Shean, professor of civil and environmental engineering who focuses on glaciers at the University of Washington, said he and collaborators with the US Geological Survey have been working to quantify the changes, including direct measurements of ice volume and mass change over time to tell the full story.
As glaciers thin and retreat, he said, they can form stagnant ice patches in alcoves that are less susceptible to extreme temperatures. But these ice patches are often too thin to flow downhill, which is an important criteria for an ice mass to be classified as a “glacier.”
Shean noted that not all of the lingering ice in those alcoves has yet vanished. But he also said “it may no longer technically qualify as a ‘glacier’ because it’s not flowing, and the residual ice will likely disappear completely in the coming decade or more.”
Many glaciers were formed during the last Ice Age. And while glaciologists including Pelto aren’t sure how far back the Hinman Glacier was created, he found strong evidence that Hinman was older than Mount Mazama eruption, which created Oregon’s Crater Lake, 7,000 years ago.
There’s still some hope, Pelto said. For a glacier to form and persist, it needs more average accumulation of snowfall. Hinman would need to see a bounty of above-average snowfall in the coming years for it to reform. But with the rate at which planet-warming pollution is accelerating, these icy landscapes as we know them may no longer be the same.
“The rate of loss in the past few decades is higher than earlier during the 20th century,” Shean said, noting that smaller glaciers are particularly hard hit. “We’ve seen more ice loss in the past 50 to 70 years for the smaller, lower elevation glaciers in the Washington North Cascades, compared to the larger, higher elevation glaciers, like those on Mt. Rainier, for example.”
Since Pelto started noticing the Hinman glacier’s decline in 2005, he decided he wanted to document it beyond science and bring in artists, including his daughter Jill, who can capture the changing landscape through painting.
“I really feel like the loss of [glaciers] from the landscape does tap into people’s emotions, and art does that better than science data,” Pelto said. “And so I’ve tried to bring artists out every summer.”
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Nestled between the snowy ranges of Mount Rainier and Glacier Peak, a significant glacier in Washington state has disappeared after existing full of ice and snowpack for millennia, according to a researcher who has tracked the glacier for years.
In this swath of mountain range in the Washington Cascades east of Seattle, the climate crisis dealt the final blow to the Hinman Glacier, the largest in the region, according to Mauri Pelto, a glaciologist with Nichols College. It’s not just the Northern Cascades that’s losing ice. Researchers recently found that up to half of the planet’s glac
|
iers could be lost by the end of the century, even if the world’s ambitious global climate targets, including phasing out fossil fuels, are met.
To paint a picture of Hinman’s retreat, experts say an unofficially named “Hinman Lake” has replaced the former glacier, which contains traces of relict ice masses. As the lake filled from glacier melt, it became harder for hikers to traverse this part of the mountain range.
Pelto told CNN he has been visiting and observing Mount Hinman for 40 years. And in the summer of 2022, as temperatures soared and an unrelenting dry spell gripped the Northwest, Pelto led a team up the mountain only to see Hinman’s demise.
“It’s completely disappeared. This was the biggest glacier in this part of the mountain range — it was exceptional,” Pelto told CNN. The glacier could reform, he said, “but as we continue to warm into the future that will be even less hospitable.”
Roughly 50 miles east of Seattle, deep in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness, Hinman and its neighboring glaciers have been critical to the Pacific Northwest’s salmon population as well as other aquatic species. During the warmest and driest periods, Hinman fed the Skykomish River with a considerable amount of cool glacier runoff. But as the climate crisis advanced, the flow dropped significantly.
This decline in summer streamflow from the glaciers and warming freshwater reduces the not only the salmons’ quality of life but also that of people who rely on the river, experts say. Since the 1950s, the primary glaciers that feed the Skykomish River basin have lost around 55% of their surface area. Last year, Pelto and his team measured that the Columbia Glacier declined in area by 25%, Foss by 70%, Lynch by 40% and Hinman by 95%.
David Shean, professor of civil and environmental engineering who focuses on glaciers at the University of Washington, said he and collaborators with the US Geological Survey have been working to quantify the changes, including direct measurements of ice volume and mass change over time to tell the full story.
As glaciers thin and retreat, he said, they can form stagnant ice patches in alcoves that are less susceptible to extreme temperatures. But these ice patches are often too thin to flow downhill, which is an important criteria for an ice mass to be classified as a “glacier.”
Shean noted that not all of the lingering ice in those alcoves has yet vanished. But he also said “it may no longer technically qualify as a ‘glacier’ because it’s not flowing, and the residual ice will likely disappear completely in the coming decade or more.”
Many glaciers were formed during the last Ice Age. And while glaciologists including Pelto aren’t sure how far back the Hinman Glacier was created, he found strong evidence that Hinman was older than Mount Mazama eruption, which created Oregon’s Crater Lake, 7,000 years ago.
There’s still some hope, Pelto said. For a glacier to form and persist, it needs more average accumulation of snowfall. Hinman would need to see a bounty of above-average snowfall in the coming years for it to reform. But with the rate at which planet-warming pollution is accelerating, these icy landscapes as we know them may no longer be the same.
“The rate of loss in the past few decades is higher than earlier during the 20th century,” Shean said, noting that smaller glaciers are particularly hard hit. “We’ve seen more ice loss in the past 50 to 70 years for the smaller, lower elevation glaciers in the Washington North Cascades, compared to the larger, higher elevation glaciers, like those on Mt. Rainier, for example.”
Since Pelto started noticing the Hinman glacier’s decline in 2005, he decided he wanted to document it beyond science and bring in artists, including his daughter Jill, who can capture the changing landscape through painting.
“I really feel like the loss of [glaciers] from the landscape does tap into people’s emotions, and art does that better than science data,” Pelto said. “And so I’ve tried to bring artists out every summer.”
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One of the potential difficulties with the concept of sustainability is its current context. It has become a value-laded term, employed by different, usually benevolent, interest groups. One benevolent interest is to safeguard the planet for future generations, with an underlying assumption that current human behaviour is making our planet unsustainable. “Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” (The Institute for Sustainable Development). This is the definition, often quoted, part of the modern origin story for the word that has become increasingly present in news headlines around the world alongside its downbeat sibling, “unsustainability”. From “the planet is dying” to “there is no sustainability problem” that line is crowded with different views. In recent years the balance has tipped towards the sustainability of our earth (and our lives on it) becoming the issue of our times.
From Sustainability to Restrainability
So, things can be ‘sustainable’ or ‘unsustainable’ or somewhere along a line between those two ideas. Evidence is then brought forward, depending on different interests, to claim a position along that binary line.
In recent years the evidence for the current global model of economics (and commerce) being basically unsustainable is presented as largely irrefutable. Governments and international organisations such as the United Nations have accepted the evidence for a currently unsustainable world emanating from tens of thousands of scientific studies and reports pulled together into authoritative digests.
Groups with interests against unsustainability have usually included the oil industry and large globally focused businesses; groups with interests in favour of unsustainability are diverse including small island states (who are already being flooded due to sea level rise, countries where there is already a lack of rainfall and rising famine, as well as the green lobby and the alternative energy sector. They have recently been joined (with more or less commitment)by various governments around the globe.
Sustainability as a concept is presented in the mainstream media as a binary line of sustainable or unsustainable. international organisations such as the United Nations have developed their own models of sustainability with its SDGs (sustainable development goals) Many of these have moved the definition outside of its traditional roots of being largely about Earth’s resources, pollution and climate change, to take in gender equality and education, among others. The UN’s 17 sustainable development goals are certainly not just about rising temperatures and sea levels.
The history of the term sustainable development is often rooted back to the 1960s. “The remit of the Brundtland Report was to investigate the numerous concerns that had been raised in previous decades, namely, that human activity was having severe and negative impacts on the planet, and that patterns of growth and development would be unsustainable if they continued unchecked. Key works that highlighted this thinking included Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), Garret Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons (1968), the Blueprint for Survival by the Ecologist magazine (1972) and the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth report (1972).”
A far less explored concept lies at the heart of the sustainability crises we now find ourselves in with the figure of 1.5 degrees the most quoted as a ceiling to at least avoid the worst of the impacts of climate change now showing itself on the planetary stage. The world is heating up, melting ice caps, raising sea levels, causing drought, flooding, famine and catastrophic changes to weather systems. This concept, when understood and explored points to how the sustainability crises could have been avoided or limited, and must now be approached as an urgent crisis, a “wicked” problem. That word is “restrainability”. The ability to hold back from full (and even over-) commitment to a process can ensure that risk of harm is minimised and possibly avoided altogether. If it is too late and a worsening crisis emerges, restrainability can limit further harm and even enable recovery and healing. Often a better outcome can be achieved, with less resource commitment when restraint is shown. and, of course, showing restraint can also lead a process to full short, fail and also cause harm.
Words, words words …
in common usage, the word ‘restrain’ is used in many different contexts. The police may restrain a violent person from causing harm to themselves or others. We sometimes say “I just couldn’t restrain my urge to tell her what I thought of her” or to “reach for that extra slice of gateau”. The ability to restrain involves a level of real-time discernment, the ability to hold back, to go for 50% instead of 100, to delay action or curb the urge to act entirely. The purpose of restraint is to limit or prevent a negative outcome, either for oneself or those around us. In terms of the current widely shared view of sustainability, restrainability is a fundamental ability we have to a more or less degree. It is lack of restraint on the part of many that has contributed to our climate emergency, itself at least partly the result of compulsive growth. Lack of restraint can become toxic.
An inability to show restraint can arise through an addictive nature, through grasping and greed and the wish to maximise gain. It can also arise through ignorance, where a lack of information, knowledge, context or awareness of consequences of one’s actions can be influential factors. Also being unwilling or unable to act with restraint can lead to a tipping point where the lack of restraint has caused a more or less dramatic or impactful outcome. we drain the lake dry, fish the river to extinction, talk the room into silence, overwork until we collapse.
When we lack restraint
Our lack of restraint in using oil, coal and natural gas has led to severe climate impacts. In winner take all business practices, a lack of restraint can create poverty, social breakdown and many other social problems and outcomes; the rich get richer, the poor get poorer and, perhaps ironically, both end up getting depressed as a result.
Without any restraint, social breakdown can occur as the “losers” (financially) eventually turn on the so-called winners whether that be through the rising up of the masses in angry revolution or workers simplyminimising or disengaging from their work.
For the most part, business owners and shareholders have understood the consequences and risks of “winner takes all” and exercised necessary restraint. However, in terms of our planet’s current overall health, we have clearly demonstrated poor collective restrainability as a human race. We have been poor stewards despite decades of emerging knowledge and calls to exercise collective restraint on planet Earth. We didn’t show restraint when we could have been in preventive mode, and we are struggling to agree internationally how to show restraint when the problems are right there before us.
When the first signs of a problem emerge, exercising restraint can, in some cases, be the best course of action. We turn down the volume on our music in order to avoid a bang on the wall from the neighbours. We change our diet and eat more healthily before we get a cholesterol problem (or worse). We slow the car down as the road becomes more hazardous with sudden rainfall. Restraint in advance, being preventive can diminish, even eliminate a growing problem. We can act instinctively (often our survival instinct comes into play, if we are in touch with it) or we can act on prior and emerging knowledge, information and advice from other people. Restraint kicks in to prevent a problem getting worse, or even developing in the first place. Restraint acts in creative opposition to going “too far” and over the cliff. Restraint can stop the inflation turning into an explosion, the riskiness becoming a crash or a fall.
We can go back even further in time. Before a specific problem has even shown itself we can act with restraint. This can also be instinctive or it can be through the value of history and hindsight. Stories from the past and from our peers can inspire is to consider risks and possibilities in advance of any overt showing of a problem. we can prevent another conflict by engaging in pre-emptive talks and signing cooperative agreements. we can change the controls on a product to make it even safer.
Showing restraint can be a personal act, almost in each moment of our lives. We slow down as we walk along a garden path in order to avoid treading on small insects and other tiny creatures. We eat more slowly to avoid indigestion. We make something last longer in order to savour it for longer. We create a simpler design for a product.
We hold back on being too direct with a friend in order to avoid hurting them. We save some of our money for a more difficult month to come, or we hold back from buying a new product straight away in order to wait for the upgrade, or the winter sales. Restraint is often goal-based and can be used to ensure better outcomes and avoidance of poor ones. It’s a natural behaviour, and some of us are better as it than others, based on our parenting, education, peer pressure, the goals and pressures of the organisations and businesses we work in.
Restrainability needs more attention right now
Without restraint we are greedy, grasping, fearfully short-term, and often closed to challenge and new information which might signal the need for restraint. With restraint we are often more discerning, future-aware, opening to new knowledge and information and more in control of ourselves and our behaviour. When restraint becomes compulsive we can be equally dangerous, avoiding opportunity and actions that can authentically benefit ourselves and our communities. Restraint itself can be applied in an unrestrained way to our cost!
In our current global crisis, restrainability needs more attention. Giving the concept more prominence focuses us on our own behaviour and the impact a lack of skills in acting with restraint is having on our planet.
Restraint in advance
Without the exercise of restraint in advance, of a problem appearing or worsening in the present and without being open to learning from the past, unsustainability gets worse. The problem-causing behaviours continue and assumptions lie unchallenged or questioned. And this is where the world sits today in terms of our sustainability crisis. Restrainability remains largely low, and happens too little and too late
What the world currently needs is restrainable development, not only our knowing when, why and how to hold back when making commitments of the Earth’s resources to human activity, but also through developing systems and processes that have built-in restrainability.
Tipping over the edge
We should design nothing that tips us irreversibly over the edge towards damage and disaster. A new definition of sustainable product and process innovation will be one that describes systems that have inherent, in-built restrainability. Some already do, like volume controls, like emission chimneys, but we have much legacy system and process that does not; we are still designing and marketing too many products that are largely unrecyclable and we are coding some products such as those based on artificial intelligence right now that may well get out of control. What if we design a robot than is inherently both unrestrainable (by us) and unable to restrain itself? we are still acting as if we are in a world in which restrainability is a low priority skill and behaviour set.
Restrainability became unfashionable during the era of growth. Unlimited growth and restrainability are not generally compatible with each other. As marketing and advertising promoted growth as a virtue in what became the ‘whoppa’-sized and ‘all you can eat’ culture of the ’80s and beyond annual upgrading to new smartphones and other gadgets alongside long distance holidays and ‘buy two get one free products’, exercising restraint was often presented a boring, even party pooping, just as abstention was confused (deliberately) in advertising and marketing with austerity and misery. exercising restraint was being a ‘meanie’.
Growth without limit was fashionable, obvious to all, even courageous in TV food shows that pit “man versus food”. The new Mile High Club was who could eat five Big Macs without vomitting. Double digit growth in business became (and often still is), not even best practice, but the expected norm. Restraint was portrayed as being weak-minded and over-cautious, lacking ambition and holding the business (and the planet) back.
We might restrain dangerous criminals, we might even restrain hyperactive dogs, but restraining business practice and the quest for limitless growth was irresponsibly antisocial and anti-business. Google the word “restraint” and that’s pretty much all you’ll find about a word that lies at the core of what we need to do to save our planet.
Restraining was something queens, kings and emperors did back in history when they stayed the hand of execution out of mercy. In the days of growth, restraint was hardly mentioned, almost taboo and certainly confined to the fringes of the spoilers and the scaredy-cats of a fun-loving society.
Renewing restrainability for modern times
So for many (and certainly many of the emerging generation on Earth), restraint, rarely used in recent decades in mainstream conversation, now feels like an archaic, official, even medical or military word, with a reek of parental language and telling us what (and what not) to do at a time when we (and certainly in the West) feel free to do pretty much whatever we want). it’s a bit culturally clumsy to use the word which is similar to how ‘sustainability’ sounded to many when it came into wider use as far back as the ’60s and ’70s and really made a more prominent appearance after 2000.
As a result. restrainability feels negative, concerned with the bit of the glass that is half empty (or overflowingly too full). It’s a bit of a ‘downer’ word, intent on stopping the fun and spoiling the party that was never supposed to end.
Similarly, many people , when they hear the word “sustainability’ these days they associate it with disaster scenarios, cutting down on the treats and indulgences, and even stopping stuff that makes us comfortable and abundant-feeling.
Developing a positive view
Yet sustainability in the spirit of its original appearance (and quoted above) was a positively focused thing, all about legacy and leaving the world in a better state for our kids and grandkids to inherit. It was (and is) about enjoying the process of sustainable living, of nurturing and living with our planet rather than treating it as an enemy. Acting with restraint can be a joyful thing as it opens space for possibility, creates latent resource, allows processes to settle, engenders healing and recover, can lower risk, can be more satisfyingly efficient, can result in benefit other people, animals and all aspects of nature to be less negatively impacted. It can even foster a longer term and, get this – more sustainable – growth.
When we show restraint we hold back from what we may have been about to say. Or we say it differently, perhaps with more subtlety and less pressure or force. Restraint can open up space for different kinds of conversation, a more considered response, space to pause, breathe reflect and even be silent and just ponder. Restraint can often reveal that a pause lets the land recover and that longer term yields of crops in our fields are better in the longer run. Restraint is a founding stone of sustainable farming. Restraint can make us more patient, able to see a longer view and to consider other paths to the same or a different outcome.It can apply the brakes, reduce the acceleration and let us take in more of the landscape of possibility.
Showing restraint in setting hard and often harsh, inflexible laws for people to follow can open space for people to learn and become more self-responsible. Freely willed following of guidance can often lead to better and more effective and efficient outcomes than harshly enforced rules and laws. Restrainability has always been a latent skill in all of us. To restrain is usually a choice. The word is used in medical and legal settings and, though a fundamental part of such fields of practice, the ability to self-restrain is a different use of the word.It is time for this key aspect of restrainability to be revived for, without free decision to practice restraint, our planet is truly in trouble. we must decouple ourselves fro the distorted view that restraint is always an imposed, forced thing. Of course it isn’t.
Restrainability makes use of the tools of dialogue and conversation and only rarely applies n iron grip on holding something back. Why? because dogmatic, fixed and unchanging restraint is, paradoxically, a form of its opposite. Punishment is aimed at compliance with varying degrees of success and often less and less restraint in enforcement and sanction. Taken to its extreme, unrestrained law enforcement becomes the tools of life incarceration and execution. if we become to restraining in our restraint it no longer becomes a contigent skill. Education and dialogue often can achieve the same compliance and usually a better volunteered, conscious participation in social norms and behaviours. Less can be more (note can). Ultimately, to exercise high ability restraint requires us to be flexible, agile and restrained in our restraint!
The benefits and urgency of a restrainable world
Restraint is usually less resource-intensive over time, leaner and grows a sense of personal and social responsibility in those exercising restraint. It isn’t the same as exiting, becoming indifferent, detaching for their own sakes. Restraint is an ability, developed with experience and practice – it is an ability to restrain oneself in different situations for a better, more sustainable outcome. Which is why sustainability is less important as a current set of environmentally focused practices, than a desired outcome or ongoing state. Restrainability is one of the keys to sustainability.
Our world is currently and desperately seeking to become re-balanced, to recover and heal. Restrainability is the priority to be taught in our schools. We also need to develop and reward a wider practice of it now, in our daily and working lives.
Interesting. Restrainability? It’s an innovating concept but why not go for addressing the root problems with Participatory AI-enabled systems regeneration? As the young climate activists say, Systems Change, Not Climate Change…!
Comments are closed.
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One of the potential difficulties with the concept of sustainability is its current context. It has become a value-laded term, employed by different, usually benevolent, interest groups. One benevolent interest is to safeguard the planet for future generations, with an underlying assumption that current human behaviour is making our planet unsustainable. “Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” (The Institute for Sustainable Development). This is the definition, often quoted, part of the modern origin story for the word that has become increasingly present in news headlines around the world
|
alongside its downbeat sibling, “unsustainability”. From “the planet is dying” to “there is no sustainability problem” that line is crowded with different views. In recent years the balance has tipped towards the sustainability of our earth (and our lives on it) becoming the issue of our times.
From Sustainability to Restrainability
So, things can be ‘sustainable’ or ‘unsustainable’ or somewhere along a line between those two ideas. Evidence is then brought forward, depending on different interests, to claim a position along that binary line.
In recent years the evidence for the current global model of economics (and commerce) being basically unsustainable is presented as largely irrefutable. Governments and international organisations such as the United Nations have accepted the evidence for a currently unsustainable world emanating from tens of thousands of scientific studies and reports pulled together into authoritative digests.
Groups with interests against unsustainability have usually included the oil industry and large globally focused businesses; groups with interests in favour of unsustainability are diverse including small island states (who are already being flooded due to sea level rise, countries where there is already a lack of rainfall and rising famine, as well as the green lobby and the alternative energy sector. They have recently been joined (with more or less commitment)by various governments around the globe.
Sustainability as a concept is presented in the mainstream media as a binary line of sustainable or unsustainable. international organisations such as the United Nations have developed their own models of sustainability with its SDGs (sustainable development goals) Many of these have moved the definition outside of its traditional roots of being largely about Earth’s resources, pollution and climate change, to take in gender equality and education, among others. The UN’s 17 sustainable development goals are certainly not just about rising temperatures and sea levels.
The history of the term sustainable development is often rooted back to the 1960s. “The remit of the Brundtland Report was to investigate the numerous concerns that had been raised in previous decades, namely, that human activity was having severe and negative impacts on the planet, and that patterns of growth and development would be unsustainable if they continued unchecked. Key works that highlighted this thinking included Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), Garret Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons (1968), the Blueprint for Survival by the Ecologist magazine (1972) and the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth report (1972).”
A far less explored concept lies at the heart of the sustainability crises we now find ourselves in with the figure of 1.5 degrees the most quoted as a ceiling to at least avoid the worst of the impacts of climate change now showing itself on the planetary stage. The world is heating up, melting ice caps, raising sea levels, causing drought, flooding, famine and catastrophic changes to weather systems. This concept, when understood and explored points to how the sustainability crises could have been avoided or limited, and must now be approached as an urgent crisis, a “wicked” problem. That word is “restrainability”. The ability to hold back from full (and even over-) commitment to a process can ensure that risk of harm is minimised and possibly avoided altogether. If it is too late and a worsening crisis emerges, restrainability can limit further harm and even enable recovery and healing. Often a better outcome can be achieved, with less resource commitment when restraint is shown. and, of course, showing restraint can also lead a process to full short, fail and also cause harm.
Words, words words …
in common usage, the word ‘restrain’ is used in many different contexts. The police may restrain a violent person from causing harm to themselves or others. We sometimes say “I just couldn’t restrain my urge to tell her what I thought of her” or to “reach for that extra slice of gateau”. The ability to restrain involves a level of real-time discernment, the ability to hold back, to go for 50% instead of 100, to delay action or curb the urge to act entirely. The purpose of restraint is to limit or prevent a negative outcome, either for oneself or those around us. In terms of the current widely shared view of sustainability, restrainability is a fundamental ability we have to a more or less degree. It is lack of restraint on the part of many that has contributed to our climate emergency, itself at least partly the result of compulsive growth. Lack of restraint can become toxic.
An inability to show restraint can arise through an addictive nature, through grasping and greed and the wish to maximise gain. It can also arise through ignorance, where a lack of information, knowledge, context or awareness of consequences of one’s actions can be influential factors. Also being unwilling or unable to act with restraint can lead to a tipping point where the lack of restraint has caused a more or less dramatic or impactful outcome. we drain the lake dry, fish the river to extinction, talk the room into silence, overwork until we collapse.
When we lack restraint
Our lack of restraint in using oil, coal and natural gas has led to severe climate impacts. In winner take all business practices, a lack of restraint can create poverty, social breakdown and many other social problems and outcomes; the rich get richer, the poor get poorer and, perhaps ironically, both end up getting depressed as a result.
Without any restraint, social breakdown can occur as the “losers” (financially) eventually turn on the so-called winners whether that be through the rising up of the masses in angry revolution or workers simplyminimising or disengaging from their work.
For the most part, business owners and shareholders have understood the consequences and risks of “winner takes all” and exercised necessary restraint. However, in terms of our planet’s current overall health, we have clearly demonstrated poor collective restrainability as a human race. We have been poor stewards despite decades of emerging knowledge and calls to exercise collective restraint on planet Earth. We didn’t show restraint when we could have been in preventive mode, and we are struggling to agree internationally how to show restraint when the problems are right there before us.
When the first signs of a problem emerge, exercising restraint can, in some cases, be the best course of action. We turn down the volume on our music in order to avoid a bang on the wall from the neighbours. We change our diet and eat more healthily before we get a cholesterol problem (or worse). We slow the car down as the road becomes more hazardous with sudden rainfall. Restraint in advance, being preventive can diminish, even eliminate a growing problem. We can act instinctively (often our survival instinct comes into play, if we are in touch with it) or we can act on prior and emerging knowledge, information and advice from other people. Restraint kicks in to prevent a problem getting worse, or even developing in the first place. Restraint acts in creative opposition to going “too far” and over the cliff. Restraint can stop the inflation turning into an explosion, the riskiness becoming a crash or a fall.
We can go back even further in time. Before a specific problem has even shown itself we can act with restraint. This can also be instinctive or it can be through the value of history and hindsight. Stories from the past and from our peers can inspire is to consider risks and possibilities in advance of any overt showing of a problem. we can prevent another conflict by engaging in pre-emptive talks and signing cooperative agreements. we can change the controls on a product to make it even safer.
Showing restraint can be a personal act, almost in each moment of our lives. We slow down as we walk along a garden path in order to avoid treading on small insects and other tiny creatures. We eat more slowly to avoid indigestion. We make something last longer in order to savour it for longer. We create a simpler design for a product.
We hold back on being too direct with a friend in order to avoid hurting them. We save some of our money for a more difficult month to come, or we hold back from buying a new product straight away in order to wait for the upgrade, or the winter sales. Restraint is often goal-based and can be used to ensure better outcomes and avoidance of poor ones. It’s a natural behaviour, and some of us are better as it than others, based on our parenting, education, peer pressure, the goals and pressures of the organisations and businesses we work in.
Restrainability needs more attention right now
Without restraint we are greedy, grasping, fearfully short-term, and often closed to challenge and new information which might signal the need for restraint. With restraint we are often more discerning, future-aware, opening to new knowledge and information and more in control of ourselves and our behaviour. When restraint becomes compulsive we can be equally dangerous, avoiding opportunity and actions that can authentically benefit ourselves and our communities. Restraint itself can be applied in an unrestrained way to our cost!
In our current global crisis, restrainability needs more attention. Giving the concept more prominence focuses us on our own behaviour and the impact a lack of skills in acting with restraint is having on our planet.
Restraint in advance
Without the exercise of restraint in advance, of a problem appearing or worsening in the present and without being open to learning from the past, unsustainability gets worse. The problem-causing behaviours continue and assumptions lie unchallenged or questioned. And this is where the world sits today in terms of our sustainability crisis. Restrainability remains largely low, and happens too little and too late
What the world currently needs is restrainable development, not only our knowing when, why and how to hold back when making commitments of the Earth’s resources to human activity, but also through developing systems and processes that have built-in restrainability.
Tipping over the edge
We should design nothing that tips us irreversibly over the edge towards damage and disaster. A new definition of sustainable product and process innovation will be one that describes systems that have inherent, in-built restrainability. Some already do, like volume controls, like emission chimneys, but we have much legacy system and process that does not; we are still designing and marketing too many products that are largely unrecyclable and we are coding some products such as those based on artificial intelligence right now that may well get out of control. What if we design a robot than is inherently both unrestrainable (by us) and unable to restrain itself? we are still acting as if we are in a world in which restrainability is a low priority skill and behaviour set.
Restrainability became unfashionable during the era of growth. Unlimited growth and restrainability are not generally compatible with each other. As marketing and advertising promoted growth as a virtue in what became the ‘whoppa’-sized and ‘all you can eat’ culture of the ’80s and beyond annual upgrading to new smartphones and other gadgets alongside long distance holidays and ‘buy two get one free products’, exercising restraint was often presented a boring, even party pooping, just as abstention was confused (deliberately) in advertising and marketing with austerity and misery. exercising restraint was being a ‘meanie’.
Growth without limit was fashionable, obvious to all, even courageous in TV food shows that pit “man versus food”. The new Mile High Club was who could eat five Big Macs without vomitting. Double digit growth in business became (and often still is), not even best practice, but the expected norm. Restraint was portrayed as being weak-minded and over-cautious, lacking ambition and holding the business (and the planet) back.
We might restrain dangerous criminals, we might even restrain hyperactive dogs, but restraining business practice and the quest for limitless growth was irresponsibly antisocial and anti-business. Google the word “restraint” and that’s pretty much all you’ll find about a word that lies at the core of what we need to do to save our planet.
Restraining was something queens, kings and emperors did back in history when they stayed the hand of execution out of mercy. In the days of growth, restraint was hardly mentioned, almost taboo and certainly confined to the fringes of the spoilers and the scaredy-cats of a fun-loving society.
Renewing restrainability for modern times
So for many (and certainly many of the emerging generation on Earth), restraint, rarely used in recent decades in mainstream conversation, now feels like an archaic, official, even medical or military word, with a reek of parental language and telling us what (and what not) to do at a time when we (and certainly in the West) feel free to do pretty much whatever we want). it’s a bit culturally clumsy to use the word which is similar to how ‘sustainability’ sounded to many when it came into wider use as far back as the ’60s and ’70s and really made a more prominent appearance after 2000.
As a result. restrainability feels negative, concerned with the bit of the glass that is half empty (or overflowingly too full). It’s a bit of a ‘downer’ word, intent on stopping the fun and spoiling the party that was never supposed to end.
Similarly, many people , when they hear the word “sustainability’ these days they associate it with disaster scenarios, cutting down on the treats and indulgences, and even stopping stuff that makes us comfortable and abundant-feeling.
Developing a positive view
Yet sustainability in the spirit of its original appearance (and quoted above) was a positively focused thing, all about legacy and leaving the world in a better state for our kids and grandkids to inherit. It was (and is) about enjoying the process of sustainable living, of nurturing and living with our planet rather than treating it as an enemy. Acting with restraint can be a joyful thing as it opens space for possibility, creates latent resource, allows processes to settle, engenders healing and recover, can lower risk, can be more satisfyingly efficient, can result in benefit other people, animals and all aspects of nature to be less negatively impacted. It can even foster a longer term and, get this – more sustainable – growth.
When we show restraint we hold back from what we may have been about to say. Or we say it differently, perhaps with more subtlety and less pressure or force. Restraint can open up space for different kinds of conversation, a more considered response, space to pause, breathe reflect and even be silent and just ponder. Restraint can often reveal that a pause lets the land recover and that longer term yields of crops in our fields are better in the longer run. Restraint is a founding stone of sustainable farming. Restraint can make us more patient, able to see a longer view and to consider other paths to the same or a different outcome.It can apply the brakes, reduce the acceleration and let us take in more of the landscape of possibility.
Showing restraint in setting hard and often harsh, inflexible laws for people to follow can open space for people to learn and become more self-responsible. Freely willed following of guidance can often lead to better and more effective and efficient outcomes than harshly enforced rules and laws. Restrainability has always been a latent skill in all of us. To restrain is usually a choice. The word is used in medical and legal settings and, though a fundamental part of such fields of practice, the ability to self-restrain is a different use of the word.It is time for this key aspect of restrainability to be revived for, without free decision to practice restraint, our planet is truly in trouble. we must decouple ourselves fro the distorted view that restraint is always an imposed, forced thing. Of course it isn’t.
Restrainability makes use of the tools of dialogue and conversation and only rarely applies n iron grip on holding something back. Why? because dogmatic, fixed and unchanging restraint is, paradoxically, a form of its opposite. Punishment is aimed at compliance with varying degrees of success and often less and less restraint in enforcement and sanction. Taken to its extreme, unrestrained law enforcement becomes the tools of life incarceration and execution. if we become to restraining in our restraint it no longer becomes a contigent skill. Education and dialogue often can achieve the same compliance and usually a better volunteered, conscious participation in social norms and behaviours. Less can be more (note can). Ultimately, to exercise high ability restraint requires us to be flexible, agile and restrained in our restraint!
The benefits and urgency of a restrainable world
Restraint is usually less resource-intensive over time, leaner and grows a sense of personal and social responsibility in those exercising restraint. It isn’t the same as exiting, becoming indifferent, detaching for their own sakes. Restraint is an ability, developed with experience and practice – it is an ability to restrain oneself in different situations for a better, more sustainable outcome. Which is why sustainability is less important as a current set of environmentally focused practices, than a desired outcome or ongoing state. Restrainability is one of the keys to sustainability.
Our world is currently and desperately seeking to become re-balanced, to recover and heal. Restrainability is the priority to be taught in our schools. We also need to develop and reward a wider practice of it now, in our daily and working lives.
Interesting. Restrainability? It’s an innovating concept but why not go for addressing the root problems with Participatory AI-enabled systems regeneration? As the young climate activists say, Systems Change, Not Climate Change…!
Comments are closed.
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Air quality alert in Louisville for sensitive groups issued for Thursday and Friday
Louisville Air Watch issued an air quality warning for sensitive groups — children, older adults, people with heart disease and breathing conditions — in Louisville and Southern Indiana as the area sees elevated levels of fine particles in the air.
Smoke from Canadian wildfires has extended from New York City down to the Carolinas, eclipsing many city skylines with a reddish haze. The edges of the smoke are stretching further west, according to the federal AirNow map.
While the poorest air quality is concentrated along the east coast, the map shows air quality alerts that may be related through Louisville, all the way to Chicago.
Several days in the last week have resulted in air quality alerts. Louisville and Southern Indiana’s air quality has been rated “unhealthy for some” Thursday and Friday.
According to Louisville Air Watch, the index rating for today is in the orange range, meaning it may be dangerous for sensitive groups. The primary pollutant is fine particles, to which forest fires can contribute.
Rachel Keith is a professor of medicine at the University of Louisville and the director of human studies at the Christina Lee Brown Envirome Institute. She said air quality concerns are a regular issue for the city, and the wildfire smoke has so far only minimally impacted local residents.
People in sensitive groups like seniors, children, and those with heart or breathing conditions should be careful going outside, Keith said. She recommended keeping an eye out for symptoms like coughing, shortness of breath or chest pain.
Consistent air pollution can have a long term impact even on otherwise healthy people, so everyone should limit their exposure, Keith said.
“What people don't think about because you don't feel it happening is that air pollution can impact heart disease. It can acutely help trigger things like heart attacks,” Keith said. “Long-term exposure … can also increase your risk of diabetes and different cancers.”
She advised that concerned people wear N95 masks outside and not exercise outdoors. Strenuous activity that leads to heavy breathing means inhaling more of the particles in the air. Keith also recommended using high efficiency particulate air, or HEPA, filters in the home.
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Air quality alert in Louisville for sensitive groups issued for Thursday and Friday
Louisville Air Watch issued an air quality warning for sensitive groups — children, older adults, people with heart disease and breathing conditions — in Louisville and Southern Indiana as the area sees elevated levels of fine particles in the air.
Smoke from Canadian wildfires has extended from New York City down to the Carolinas, eclipsing many city skylines with a reddish haze. The edges of the smoke are stretching further west, according to the federal AirNow map.
While the poorest air quality is concentrated along the east coast, the map shows air quality alerts
|
that may be related through Louisville, all the way to Chicago.
Several days in the last week have resulted in air quality alerts. Louisville and Southern Indiana’s air quality has been rated “unhealthy for some” Thursday and Friday.
According to Louisville Air Watch, the index rating for today is in the orange range, meaning it may be dangerous for sensitive groups. The primary pollutant is fine particles, to which forest fires can contribute.
Rachel Keith is a professor of medicine at the University of Louisville and the director of human studies at the Christina Lee Brown Envirome Institute. She said air quality concerns are a regular issue for the city, and the wildfire smoke has so far only minimally impacted local residents.
People in sensitive groups like seniors, children, and those with heart or breathing conditions should be careful going outside, Keith said. She recommended keeping an eye out for symptoms like coughing, shortness of breath or chest pain.
Consistent air pollution can have a long term impact even on otherwise healthy people, so everyone should limit their exposure, Keith said.
“What people don't think about because you don't feel it happening is that air pollution can impact heart disease. It can acutely help trigger things like heart attacks,” Keith said. “Long-term exposure … can also increase your risk of diabetes and different cancers.”
She advised that concerned people wear N95 masks outside and not exercise outdoors. Strenuous activity that leads to heavy breathing means inhaling more of the particles in the air. Keith also recommended using high efficiency particulate air, or HEPA, filters in the home.
|
National Hispanic Heritage Month highlights cultural diversity of Spanish-speaking Americans
Hispanic history and culture take center stage across the U.S. for National Hispanic Heritage Month, which is celebrated annually from Sept. 15 to Oct. 15. The celebration recognizes the contributions of Hispanic Americans, the fastest-growing racial or ethnic minority, according to the Census.
It includes people whose ancestors come from Spain, Mexico, the Caribbean and Central and South America.
With a U.S. population of over 63 million people, there will be a plethora of Hispanic Heritage Month celebrations all over the country starting Friday.
How did it come to be?
Before there was National Hispanic Heritage Month, there was Hispanic Heritage Week, created through legislation sponsored by Mexican American Rep. Edward R. Roybal of Los Angeles and signed into law in 1968 by President Lyndon B. Johnson. The annual celebration was to be held the week that included Sept. 15-16.
The weeklong commemoration was expanded to a month two decades later, with legislation signed into law by President Ronald Reagan.
Sept. 15 was chosen as the starting point, to coincide with the anniversary of the "Cry of Dolores," or "Grito de Dolores," issued in 1810 from a town in central Mexico that launched that country's war for independence from Spain.
The Central American nations of Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Costa Rica celebrate their independence on Sept. 15, and Mexico marks its national day on Sept. 16, the day after the cry for independence.
Also during National Hispanic Heritage Month, the South American nation of Chile observes its independence day on Sept. 18. Indigenous Peoples' Day, previously known as Columbus Day, is observed in the U.S. on the second Monday of October.
The four-week period is about honoring how Hispanic populations have shaped the U.S. in the past and present.
What is the socioeconomic outlook for Latinos?
Latinos account for the fastest-growing portion of the national Gross Domestic Product, said Luisa Godinez-Puig, an equity scholar with nonprofit research organization Urban Institute. The GDP of Latinos was an estimated $2.8 trillion in 2020, compared with $2.1 trillion in 2015 and $1.7 trillion in 2010.
It's a contradiction to the fact that Latinos still face obstacles with personal finances. Surveys show median wealth is five times lower for Latino families than their white counterparts. Less than half of Hispanic families own their own homes, Godinez-Puig added.
"Their needs are not being met," Godinez-Puig said. "Not having access to banking products, not having access to investment, not having access to credit — all of these things impact the wealth, building opportunities of families, which are passed from generation to generation."
What is the origin of the term Hispanic?
Hispanic was a term created by the federal government for people descended from Spanish-speaking cultures, said Anita Huízar-Hernández, associate director of Arizona State University's Hispanic Research Center. But for some, the label has a connotation of political conservatism and emphasizes a connection to Spain. It sometimes gets mistakenly interchanged with "Latino" or "Latinx."
"I think the most important thing to acknowledge is that people have their own definition of those terms," Huízar-Hernández said. "They don't always match. And that is very dependent on your generation, it's dependent on the part of the country that you live in."
For some, Latino reflects their ties to Latin America. So you may see some celebrations referred to as Latinx or Latin Heritage Month.
Latino Americans are not a monolith. There are a number of identifiers for Latin Americans, depending largely on personal preference. Mexican Americans who grew up during the 1960s Civil Rights era may identify as Chicano. Others may go by their family's nation of origin such as Colombian American or Salvadoran American.
All those various cultures have unique differences when it comes to music, food, art and other cultural touchstones.
"That is what makes this community complex, difficult to describe, difficult to create just one term about and yet, a really dynamic part of the story of lots of places, including the U.S.," Huizar-Hernandez said.
What are some celebrations happening?
From Los Angeles to Tampa, Florida, there is no shortage of festivities. Most are touting traditional Latin foods and entertainment like mariachi bands, folklórico dancing and salsa lessons. The revelry doesn't just showcase Mexican culture but Puerto Rican, Colombian and a host of others.
There are also events spotlighting Hispanic Americans in various industries like Suave Fest, a Latino Craft Beer Festival in Denver on Sept. 30, and the New York Latino Film Festival, which runs Friday through Sept. 24.
The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., is offering a slate of activities elevating Hispanic heritage. Its National Portrait Gallery will be teaming up with Lil' Libros, a bilingual children's book publisher for the second Fotos & Recuerdos Festival. There will be story times, arts and craft workshops and gallery tours.
The U.S. Postal Service has put its own stamp on the occasion. Earlier this month, the agency released new Forever stamps featuring piñatas. The handmade party favorites are typically associated with parties where blindfolded guests try to crack one open to get to the candy inside. But their history can be traced to the 16th century.
Corporations also partake in the celebrations. Walt Disney World Resort has chosen this week to debut live-action versions at Magic Kingdom Park of Mirabel and Bruno, two popular characters from the animated hit "Encanto." The movie, about a family in Colombia with extraordinary abilities, is credited with showing a large audience the nuances of Colombian culture.
"It's not Mexico and you can see them eating different foods and you can see like the music is different," said Huízar-Hernández, who is Mexican American. "Movies, TV, that's the way a lot of people learn."
A future source of learning will be the highly anticipated Smithsonian National Museum of the American Latino on the National Mall. In 2020, Congress passed bipartisan legislation to establish the museum.
The legislation also called for an American Latino History and Culture grant program. This summer Urban Institute researchers, like Godinez-Puig, have been working with the Institute of Museum and Library Services on how to dole out federal grants for American Latino museums and their programming. This initiative reflects the growing number of places occupied by Latino culture, she said.
"As s a Latina woman, myself, I'm just very excited to see that we ... not just only talk about where we are lagging, but also celebrate the variety of cultures that we have within our community and celebrate the hard-working people that contribute a lot to the American society," Godinez-Puig said. "Because they do."
Associated Press writer Anita Snow contributed to this report.
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National Hispanic Heritage Month highlights cultural diversity of Spanish-speaking Americans
Hispanic history and culture take center stage across the U.S. for National Hispanic Heritage Month, which is celebrated annually from Sept. 15 to Oct. 15. The celebration recognizes the contributions of Hispanic Americans, the fastest-growing racial or ethnic minority, according to the Census.
It includes people whose ancestors come from Spain, Mexico, the Caribbean and Central and South America.
With a U.S. population of over 63 million people, there will be a plethora of Hispanic Heritage Month celebrations all over the country starting Friday.
How did it come to be?
|
Before there was National Hispanic Heritage Month, there was Hispanic Heritage Week, created through legislation sponsored by Mexican American Rep. Edward R. Roybal of Los Angeles and signed into law in 1968 by President Lyndon B. Johnson. The annual celebration was to be held the week that included Sept. 15-16.
The weeklong commemoration was expanded to a month two decades later, with legislation signed into law by President Ronald Reagan.
Sept. 15 was chosen as the starting point, to coincide with the anniversary of the "Cry of Dolores," or "Grito de Dolores," issued in 1810 from a town in central Mexico that launched that country's war for independence from Spain.
The Central American nations of Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Costa Rica celebrate their independence on Sept. 15, and Mexico marks its national day on Sept. 16, the day after the cry for independence.
Also during National Hispanic Heritage Month, the South American nation of Chile observes its independence day on Sept. 18. Indigenous Peoples' Day, previously known as Columbus Day, is observed in the U.S. on the second Monday of October.
The four-week period is about honoring how Hispanic populations have shaped the U.S. in the past and present.
What is the socioeconomic outlook for Latinos?
Latinos account for the fastest-growing portion of the national Gross Domestic Product, said Luisa Godinez-Puig, an equity scholar with nonprofit research organization Urban Institute. The GDP of Latinos was an estimated $2.8 trillion in 2020, compared with $2.1 trillion in 2015 and $1.7 trillion in 2010.
It's a contradiction to the fact that Latinos still face obstacles with personal finances. Surveys show median wealth is five times lower for Latino families than their white counterparts. Less than half of Hispanic families own their own homes, Godinez-Puig added.
"Their needs are not being met," Godinez-Puig said. "Not having access to banking products, not having access to investment, not having access to credit — all of these things impact the wealth, building opportunities of families, which are passed from generation to generation."
What is the origin of the term Hispanic?
Hispanic was a term created by the federal government for people descended from Spanish-speaking cultures, said Anita Huízar-Hernández, associate director of Arizona State University's Hispanic Research Center. But for some, the label has a connotation of political conservatism and emphasizes a connection to Spain. It sometimes gets mistakenly interchanged with "Latino" or "Latinx."
"I think the most important thing to acknowledge is that people have their own definition of those terms," Huízar-Hernández said. "They don't always match. And that is very dependent on your generation, it's dependent on the part of the country that you live in."
For some, Latino reflects their ties to Latin America. So you may see some celebrations referred to as Latinx or Latin Heritage Month.
Latino Americans are not a monolith. There are a number of identifiers for Latin Americans, depending largely on personal preference. Mexican Americans who grew up during the 1960s Civil Rights era may identify as Chicano. Others may go by their family's nation of origin such as Colombian American or Salvadoran American.
All those various cultures have unique differences when it comes to music, food, art and other cultural touchstones.
"That is what makes this community complex, difficult to describe, difficult to create just one term about and yet, a really dynamic part of the story of lots of places, including the U.S.," Huizar-Hernandez said.
What are some celebrations happening?
From Los Angeles to Tampa, Florida, there is no shortage of festivities. Most are touting traditional Latin foods and entertainment like mariachi bands, folklórico dancing and salsa lessons. The revelry doesn't just showcase Mexican culture but Puerto Rican, Colombian and a host of others.
There are also events spotlighting Hispanic Americans in various industries like Suave Fest, a Latino Craft Beer Festival in Denver on Sept. 30, and the New York Latino Film Festival, which runs Friday through Sept. 24.
The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., is offering a slate of activities elevating Hispanic heritage. Its National Portrait Gallery will be teaming up with Lil' Libros, a bilingual children's book publisher for the second Fotos & Recuerdos Festival. There will be story times, arts and craft workshops and gallery tours.
The U.S. Postal Service has put its own stamp on the occasion. Earlier this month, the agency released new Forever stamps featuring piñatas. The handmade party favorites are typically associated with parties where blindfolded guests try to crack one open to get to the candy inside. But their history can be traced to the 16th century.
Corporations also partake in the celebrations. Walt Disney World Resort has chosen this week to debut live-action versions at Magic Kingdom Park of Mirabel and Bruno, two popular characters from the animated hit "Encanto." The movie, about a family in Colombia with extraordinary abilities, is credited with showing a large audience the nuances of Colombian culture.
"It's not Mexico and you can see them eating different foods and you can see like the music is different," said Huízar-Hernández, who is Mexican American. "Movies, TV, that's the way a lot of people learn."
A future source of learning will be the highly anticipated Smithsonian National Museum of the American Latino on the National Mall. In 2020, Congress passed bipartisan legislation to establish the museum.
The legislation also called for an American Latino History and Culture grant program. This summer Urban Institute researchers, like Godinez-Puig, have been working with the Institute of Museum and Library Services on how to dole out federal grants for American Latino museums and their programming. This initiative reflects the growing number of places occupied by Latino culture, she said.
"As s a Latina woman, myself, I'm just very excited to see that we ... not just only talk about where we are lagging, but also celebrate the variety of cultures that we have within our community and celebrate the hard-working people that contribute a lot to the American society," Godinez-Puig said. "Because they do."
Associated Press writer Anita Snow contributed to this report.
|
Khurram Hussain, associate professor of religion studies, takes a human-centered approach to reimagine where modern Islam belongs in the West.
According to Gallup, 52% of Americans agree the West does not respect Muslim societies, and studies show negative public opinion of Muslims continues to increase in the United States. Can Islam be compatible with the West? Are we paying attention to the fundamental humanity that people share? These are questions that prompted Khurram Hussain, associate professor of religion studies and director of Lehigh’s Humanities Center, to write The Muslim Speaks, published by Zed Books.
Hussain takes a human-centered approach in his research and finds modern Islam and the West intertwined in more ways than one. With nearly 2 billion Muslims in the world with different experiences and views, Hussain sees Islam as an integral extension of the West and not an isolated identity or concern.
An interdisciplinary background, Hussain’s research involves subjects and scholars from areas such as religion studies, international relations, philosophy and sociology.
History has shown that sharing different cultural, ethical and philosophical perspectives is how the modern world started, and the movement of the modern mind comes from a certain kind of curiosity, says Hussain. In this work, he expands on the importance of recognizing the way humans change and evolve, and not reducing society to a stagnant, “perfect culture.”
Identifying the way the West talks about Islam through themes of freedom talk, culture talk, and reason talk, Hussain makes an appeal to “let the Muslim speak,” and listen to different perspectives, with the goal of generating new ideas.
The point isn’t to support or reject Islam, says Hussain, but to build community between Muslims and the West. Hussain stresses the importance of figuring out the parameters of our common existence–something that is easier said than done, he adds.
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Khurram Hussain, associate professor of religion studies, takes a human-centered approach to reimagine where modern Islam belongs in the West.
According to Gallup, 52% of Americans agree the West does not respect Muslim societies, and studies show negative public opinion of Muslims continues to increase in the United States. Can Islam be compatible with the West? Are we paying attention to the fundamental humanity that people share? These are questions that prompted Khurram Hussain, associate professor of religion studies and director of Lehigh’s Humanities Center, to write The Muslim Speaks, published by Zed Books.
Hussain takes a human
|
-centered approach in his research and finds modern Islam and the West intertwined in more ways than one. With nearly 2 billion Muslims in the world with different experiences and views, Hussain sees Islam as an integral extension of the West and not an isolated identity or concern.
An interdisciplinary background, Hussain’s research involves subjects and scholars from areas such as religion studies, international relations, philosophy and sociology.
History has shown that sharing different cultural, ethical and philosophical perspectives is how the modern world started, and the movement of the modern mind comes from a certain kind of curiosity, says Hussain. In this work, he expands on the importance of recognizing the way humans change and evolve, and not reducing society to a stagnant, “perfect culture.”
Identifying the way the West talks about Islam through themes of freedom talk, culture talk, and reason talk, Hussain makes an appeal to “let the Muslim speak,” and listen to different perspectives, with the goal of generating new ideas.
The point isn’t to support or reject Islam, says Hussain, but to build community between Muslims and the West. Hussain stresses the importance of figuring out the parameters of our common existence–something that is easier said than done, he adds.
|
There are 38 resident bumblebee species in Finland and they have been monitored since 2019. Some of these are of particular interest, being Lapland specialists, and in 2018 a popular book about bumblebees, the first ever to look at the species in Finland, cemented a growing public interest.
This interest in bumblebees is perhaps indicative of a wider interest in pollinators generally in Finland. In 2022 this growing concern resulted in a national pollinator strategy.
Having acknowledged that bumblebee monitoring in Finland is in its infancy it is necessary to qualify that, with an acknowledgement that interest in bumblebees in Finland has a much longer history. As early as 1928 Olavi Hulkkonen, who worked as an assistant in Helsinki University’s botany department was responsible for one of the earliest publications on bumblebees. Sadly he died in his early thirties. His work to some extent was continued by Karl Johannes Valle who was an entomologist and keen bumblebee watcher. He studied bumblebees until the late 1950s, mainly around the nation’s capital, Helsinki.
With a population of 5.5m, almost exactly the same as Scotland, Finland is famed for its woodlands and lakes, indeed lakes cover almost 10% of Finland.
Finland’s national pollinator strategy shares largely the same goals as the Scottish version, which was used as one source of inspiration in designing it. The strategy was formed by a steering group including the most essential stakeholder groups (administration, farmers, conservation organizations etc.), led by the Ministry of Environment. The strategy includes several measures to prevent a further decline in pollinator numbers, as well as a commitment to improve the nationwide monitoring of pollinators. Finland has already had an on-going monitoring scheme for both moths and butterflies since the 90s. As a result of the goals in the pollinator strategy, new monitoring has also been started on solitary bees and hover flies. There are strong similarities between this and the UK PoMS work.
The bumblebee monitoring in Finland was started in 2019 as a two-year citizen-science project. The expectations were rather low; a result of around 10-20 monitoring sites was thought to be realistic. Instead, the coordinators were astonished by an unprecedented popular and media interest on bumblebees and their monitoring. The number of sites reached 70 in the first year alone, and continued to increase. As the pilot proved to be a resounding success, it was continued for further years.
The coverage in bumblebee monitoring, rather like in Scotland, tended to be geographically concentrated. Whereas the central belt sees most Scottish monitoring, it was the south of Finland that saw the greatest number of records submitted.
As few volunteers had previous experience in identifying bumblebees, they were allowed to record them on a level which suited their knowledge. Thus for some recorders it was sufficient to note at least a part of their observations simply as bumblebee spp, whereas others gave either species group or indeed individual species information.
Most of the bumblebee transects walked have been around 500 to 1000m long. Records were submitted online. In the first three years 125 transects were covered, and in total over 55,000 bumblebees were recorded. As the coordinators expected, the proportion of bumblebee individuals identified on species level has steadily increasing during the first four years of the monitoring. This proves that although most of the recorders were amateurs to begin with, they have increased their skills through practice and produce more detailed information each year.
The species with the most individual records was the white-tailed bumblebee (Bombus lucorum), followed close by the common carder (B. pascuorum). The tree bumblebee (B. hypnorum) provide the third highest number of individual precise records. The number of species per site has usually been around ten, with some over fifteen at the most diverse locations. The monitoring has already shown that some species that have only recently colonized Finland, e.g. B. schrencki and B. semenoviellus, have already spread quite widely in the country.
We wish our Finnish counterparts good luck with their pollinator strategy, and look forward to carrying further news of their monitoring efforts over the years.
Bumblebee species on red clover in central Finland by PENTTI HÄNNINEN
With sincere thanks to Janne Heliola of the Finnish Environment Institute for all of his help in compiling this article.
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There are 38 resident bumblebee species in Finland and they have been monitored since 2019. Some of these are of particular interest, being Lapland specialists, and in 2018 a popular book about bumblebees, the first ever to look at the species in Finland, cemented a growing public interest.
This interest in bumblebees is perhaps indicative of a wider interest in pollinators generally in Finland. In 2022 this growing concern resulted in a national pollinator strategy.
Having acknowledged that bumblebee monitoring in Finland is in its infancy it is necessary to qualify
|
that, with an acknowledgement that interest in bumblebees in Finland has a much longer history. As early as 1928 Olavi Hulkkonen, who worked as an assistant in Helsinki University’s botany department was responsible for one of the earliest publications on bumblebees. Sadly he died in his early thirties. His work to some extent was continued by Karl Johannes Valle who was an entomologist and keen bumblebee watcher. He studied bumblebees until the late 1950s, mainly around the nation’s capital, Helsinki.
With a population of 5.5m, almost exactly the same as Scotland, Finland is famed for its woodlands and lakes, indeed lakes cover almost 10% of Finland.
Finland’s national pollinator strategy shares largely the same goals as the Scottish version, which was used as one source of inspiration in designing it. The strategy was formed by a steering group including the most essential stakeholder groups (administration, farmers, conservation organizations etc.), led by the Ministry of Environment. The strategy includes several measures to prevent a further decline in pollinator numbers, as well as a commitment to improve the nationwide monitoring of pollinators. Finland has already had an on-going monitoring scheme for both moths and butterflies since the 90s. As a result of the goals in the pollinator strategy, new monitoring has also been started on solitary bees and hover flies. There are strong similarities between this and the UK PoMS work.
The bumblebee monitoring in Finland was started in 2019 as a two-year citizen-science project. The expectations were rather low; a result of around 10-20 monitoring sites was thought to be realistic. Instead, the coordinators were astonished by an unprecedented popular and media interest on bumblebees and their monitoring. The number of sites reached 70 in the first year alone, and continued to increase. As the pilot proved to be a resounding success, it was continued for further years.
The coverage in bumblebee monitoring, rather like in Scotland, tended to be geographically concentrated. Whereas the central belt sees most Scottish monitoring, it was the south of Finland that saw the greatest number of records submitted.
As few volunteers had previous experience in identifying bumblebees, they were allowed to record them on a level which suited their knowledge. Thus for some recorders it was sufficient to note at least a part of their observations simply as bumblebee spp, whereas others gave either species group or indeed individual species information.
Most of the bumblebee transects walked have been around 500 to 1000m long. Records were submitted online. In the first three years 125 transects were covered, and in total over 55,000 bumblebees were recorded. As the coordinators expected, the proportion of bumblebee individuals identified on species level has steadily increasing during the first four years of the monitoring. This proves that although most of the recorders were amateurs to begin with, they have increased their skills through practice and produce more detailed information each year.
The species with the most individual records was the white-tailed bumblebee (Bombus lucorum), followed close by the common carder (B. pascuorum). The tree bumblebee (B. hypnorum) provide the third highest number of individual precise records. The number of species per site has usually been around ten, with some over fifteen at the most diverse locations. The monitoring has already shown that some species that have only recently colonized Finland, e.g. B. schrencki and B. semenoviellus, have already spread quite widely in the country.
We wish our Finnish counterparts good luck with their pollinator strategy, and look forward to carrying further news of their monitoring efforts over the years.
Bumblebee species on red clover in central Finland by PENTTI HÄNNINEN
With sincere thanks to Janne Heliola of the Finnish Environment Institute for all of his help in compiling this article.
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The motor abilities of leadership skills enable individuals to navigate complex challenges, inspire others, and foster a collaborative and high-performing team environment, leading to enhanced productivity, innovation and overall success.
How does leadership skill develop in miniature school?
One day one book school system primarily focuses on individual learning. It still provides opportunities for collaboration, peer transfer learning, group projects and classroom discussions. Through these activities, students can enhance their teamwork performance, communication skills and leadership abilities. By experiencing these aspects of the learning process, students develop important interpersonal and leadership skills that are valuable for their personal growth and future endeavors.
Leadership skills and teamwork performance are essential abilities that contribute to individual and collective success in various contexts, including academic, professional and personal settings.
Leadership skills and teamwork performance are the basic abilities of entrepreneurs to launch a productive workplace for investing, working and earning. Future entrepreneur is born in the classroom of brainpage school and teamwork spirit is promoted to share learning transfer and brainpage development. Leadership skills develop from the miniature school of collaborative classroom through the working dimensions of motor science.
Also Read More…
- Teacher to students verbal knowledge transfer running in education system
- Development of leadership skills and teamwork performance in system learnography
- New Approach: Teaching is not everything in system learnography
- Everyone has something to offer in transfer, regardless of their level of achievement, experience or expertise
- School of taxshila teachers runs on system of big teachers and small teachers for knowledge transfer
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The motor abilities of leadership skills enable individuals to navigate complex challenges, inspire others, and foster a collaborative and high-performing team environment, leading to enhanced productivity, innovation and overall success.
How does leadership skill develop in miniature school?
One day one book school system primarily focuses on individual learning. It still provides opportunities for collaboration, peer transfer learning, group projects and classroom discussions. Through these activities, students can enhance their teamwork performance, communication skills and leadership abilities. By experiencing these aspects of the learning process, students develop important interpersonal and leadership skills that are valuable for their personal growth and future endeavors.
Leadership skills and teamwork performance
|
are essential abilities that contribute to individual and collective success in various contexts, including academic, professional and personal settings.
Leadership skills and teamwork performance are the basic abilities of entrepreneurs to launch a productive workplace for investing, working and earning. Future entrepreneur is born in the classroom of brainpage school and teamwork spirit is promoted to share learning transfer and brainpage development. Leadership skills develop from the miniature school of collaborative classroom through the working dimensions of motor science.
Also Read More…
- Teacher to students verbal knowledge transfer running in education system
- Development of leadership skills and teamwork performance in system learnography
- New Approach: Teaching is not everything in system learnography
- Everyone has something to offer in transfer, regardless of their level of achievement, experience or expertise
- School of taxshila teachers runs on system of big teachers and small teachers for knowledge transfer
Leave a Reply
|
More than 11,000 have died in the Türkiye-Syria earthquake. How does it compare to the world's deadliest quakes?
The death toll across Türkiye and war-ravaged northern Syria has exceeded 11,000, making Monday's earthquake the deadliest in more than a decade.
The World Health Organization has warned it expects the number of fatalities to rise significantly, with thousands trapped under buildings and cold weather hampering rescue efforts.
So, how does the event and death toll compare to other earthquakes across the world?
Where have the deadliest earthquakes hit?
It is Türkiye's deadliest earthquake since 1999, when a magnitude-7.6 earthquake hit Izmit, killing around 18,000 people.
One of the deadliest earthquakes in history happened off the coast of Indonesia on Boxing Day in 2004.
The magnitude-9.1 earthquake and resulting tsunami that swept across the Indian Ocean killed about 230,000 people.
The other deadliest earthquake in the past 25 years hit Haiti on January 12, 2010.
About 220,000 people were reportedly killed in the magnitude-7 quake.
It destroyed more than 300,000 buildings in Port-au-Prince and across the country's south-west.
However, the reported death toll varies from 100,000 to the government's estimation of more than 300,000.
Other deadly events include a magnitude-7.6 earthquake in Pakistan in 2005 that killed more than 80,000 people and a magnitude-7.9 quake that struck China in 2008, causing more than 87,500 fatalities.
A magnitude-9.0 quake off the north-east coast of Japan in 2011 triggered a tsunami which killed nearly 20,000 people.
Before Monday's earthquake, the deadliest in recent years was a magnitude-7.6 quake in Nepal in 2015 which killed 8,800 people.
Highest magnitude earthquakes on record
The most powerful earthquake on record hit southern Chile in 1960 with a magnitude of 9.5, according to the United States Geological Survey.
The earthquake and the resulting tsunami claimed 1,655 lives.
Four years later, a magnitude-9.2 quake hit Southern Alaska.
The Japanese quake and tsunami in 2011 and Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami in 2004 both reached a magnitude of 9.1.
How is magnitude measured?
To determine a size of an earthquake, the amplitude of the seismic waves and the distance of the seismograph is measured, according to Geoscience Australia.
They are then put in a formula to be converted to magnitude.
The magnitude measures the size of the earthquake by the energy released at the source.
Each whole number in the scale corresponds to the release of about 31 times more energy.
A magnitude-2 quake is typically said to be the smallest commonly felt by humans.
How does Monday's earthquake compare?
On average, there are fewer than 20 quakes over magnitude-7.0 in any year, making the earthquake in Türkiye and Syria severe.
A magnitude-6.2 earthquake that hit central Italy in 2016 killed some 300 people.
In comparison, the Türkiye-Syria earthquake released 250 times as much energy with a magnitude of 7.8.
That's according to Joanna Faure Walker, who is head of the University College London's institute for risk and disaster reduction.
Only two of the deadliest earthquakes from 2013 to 2022 were of the same magnitude as Monday's quake.
What are the challenges facing earthquake responses?
Every earthquake response comes with it its own set of challenges and issues.
This is evident as rescue teams in Türkiye and Syria battle severe weather conditions causing freezing temperatures and snow.
The conditions will also be affecting those who were left homeless or without shelter.
In 2015, Nepal's high altitude and mountainous areas provided response teams with huge issues, especially getting help to remote areas.
Monsoonal rains and subsequent landslides also created huge problems for the rescue effort.
The response to the Haiti earthquake in 2010 saw an influx of inexperienced first responders into the capital Port-au-Prince, which complicated relief efforts.
It was also later revealed that workers from the charity Oxfam were exploiting earthquake survivors for sex.
And the sheer size of the affected areas in the Boxing Day earthquake and tsunami in 2004 overwhelmed aid agencies.
Subsequent reports said charity rivalries, inappropriate aid and managing the huge amounts of money donated also hampered relief efforts.
ABC with wires
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More than 11,000 have died in the Türkiye-Syria earthquake. How does it compare to the world's deadliest quakes?
The death toll across Türkiye and war-ravaged northern Syria has exceeded 11,000, making Monday's earthquake the deadliest in more than a decade.
The World Health Organization has warned it expects the number of fatalities to rise significantly, with thousands trapped under buildings and cold weather hampering rescue efforts.
So, how does the event and death toll compare to other earthquakes across the world?
Where have the deadliest earthquakes hit?
It is Türkiye's deadliest
|
earthquake since 1999, when a magnitude-7.6 earthquake hit Izmit, killing around 18,000 people.
One of the deadliest earthquakes in history happened off the coast of Indonesia on Boxing Day in 2004.
The magnitude-9.1 earthquake and resulting tsunami that swept across the Indian Ocean killed about 230,000 people.
The other deadliest earthquake in the past 25 years hit Haiti on January 12, 2010.
About 220,000 people were reportedly killed in the magnitude-7 quake.
It destroyed more than 300,000 buildings in Port-au-Prince and across the country's south-west.
However, the reported death toll varies from 100,000 to the government's estimation of more than 300,000.
Other deadly events include a magnitude-7.6 earthquake in Pakistan in 2005 that killed more than 80,000 people and a magnitude-7.9 quake that struck China in 2008, causing more than 87,500 fatalities.
A magnitude-9.0 quake off the north-east coast of Japan in 2011 triggered a tsunami which killed nearly 20,000 people.
Before Monday's earthquake, the deadliest in recent years was a magnitude-7.6 quake in Nepal in 2015 which killed 8,800 people.
Highest magnitude earthquakes on record
The most powerful earthquake on record hit southern Chile in 1960 with a magnitude of 9.5, according to the United States Geological Survey.
The earthquake and the resulting tsunami claimed 1,655 lives.
Four years later, a magnitude-9.2 quake hit Southern Alaska.
The Japanese quake and tsunami in 2011 and Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami in 2004 both reached a magnitude of 9.1.
How is magnitude measured?
To determine a size of an earthquake, the amplitude of the seismic waves and the distance of the seismograph is measured, according to Geoscience Australia.
They are then put in a formula to be converted to magnitude.
The magnitude measures the size of the earthquake by the energy released at the source.
Each whole number in the scale corresponds to the release of about 31 times more energy.
A magnitude-2 quake is typically said to be the smallest commonly felt by humans.
How does Monday's earthquake compare?
On average, there are fewer than 20 quakes over magnitude-7.0 in any year, making the earthquake in Türkiye and Syria severe.
A magnitude-6.2 earthquake that hit central Italy in 2016 killed some 300 people.
In comparison, the Türkiye-Syria earthquake released 250 times as much energy with a magnitude of 7.8.
That's according to Joanna Faure Walker, who is head of the University College London's institute for risk and disaster reduction.
Only two of the deadliest earthquakes from 2013 to 2022 were of the same magnitude as Monday's quake.
What are the challenges facing earthquake responses?
Every earthquake response comes with it its own set of challenges and issues.
This is evident as rescue teams in Türkiye and Syria battle severe weather conditions causing freezing temperatures and snow.
The conditions will also be affecting those who were left homeless or without shelter.
In 2015, Nepal's high altitude and mountainous areas provided response teams with huge issues, especially getting help to remote areas.
Monsoonal rains and subsequent landslides also created huge problems for the rescue effort.
The response to the Haiti earthquake in 2010 saw an influx of inexperienced first responders into the capital Port-au-Prince, which complicated relief efforts.
It was also later revealed that workers from the charity Oxfam were exploiting earthquake survivors for sex.
And the sheer size of the affected areas in the Boxing Day earthquake and tsunami in 2004 overwhelmed aid agencies.
Subsequent reports said charity rivalries, inappropriate aid and managing the huge amounts of money donated also hampered relief efforts.
ABC with wires
|
UTSW researcher explores a "cooler" approach to treating brain cancer
Why is glioblastoma difficult to treat?
One of the things with cancers, especially something like glioblastoma, is that it is invasive. When you're working in the brain, you're always going to have some cells left over because you can only reset what you can see and you can only radiate, which you can kind of that region.
And then when you apply chemotherapy, you're going to kill only those cells that are sensitive to chemotherapy. And so any cells that already have some resistance, they'll become the predominant cell. And then when they become the predominant cells and they’ll recur.
Your research has focused on cooling or lowering the temperatures of cancer cells. So what exactly does that accomplish?
Tumor cells are constantly using resources and producing things. And because of this, they're also highly replicative, meaning they create lots of copies of themselves and that's how they grow and spread.
With hypothermia, the idea was something we can do that would reduce the metabolism, reduce the cell division, and reduce everything of the tumor cells that would still be safe. That way you're not just targeting one or two targets or one or two molecules. You're affecting multiple pathways at the same time in the tumor.
And so it's harder for the tumor to, you know, evolve around it or develop resistance around it. And at the same time, as long as, you know, the temperature is a good, safe region, it should be safe for the other cells of the brain as well since there's not as much cell division in the brain.
How exactly do you cool the cells?
We were able to make a device that uses something called a thermoelectric plate. It's similar to a heat pump where you apply power or electricity to this plate and it pulls heat. And so then we had a heat sink and a fan that would blow that into the surrounding air.
And so that's how we did it in rats. We had this probe that would go in the tumor, and then we had a plate that would pull that heat that was powered, and then get thrown out into the air with a heatsink and a fan.
But in patients, of course, you can't do that and you cannot imagine a patient wearing a big heat sink or a fan on their head.
And so what I'm working on now is instead of using a fan to blow the heat out into the air, I'm distributing that heat through the body, through the skin, with a different kind of system so that ultimately this could be a fully implantable system for patients.
The human brain could withstand that?
You know, people have been exploring cooling the brain for a really long time. The first part of even trying to cool tumor cells was one line in a paper that was back in 1959.
In the sixties or so, people started exploring hypothermia. And then in the nineties especially, they started using brain cooling to help end stroke and brain injuries.
There's still been a lot of debate as to how protective it is, but there is some evidence to suggest certain levels of hypothermia might be protective.
As far as you know at this point, could this be done on any case of glioblastoma or has the study run into limitations of any type?
Chances are whenever we start any trials, it's going to be we're going to first do standard-of-care therapy, would do surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation.
Then chances are from there, when the tumor most likely recurs, at least early on, that when we would intervene with this device, when you know, when there are no other options. Ultimately, of course, if things get better, we could start sooner, and probably early on we would be targeting tumors that are more superficial and more contained.
Eventually, as this device becomes more and more patient-centric, we envision that we'd be able to get to deeper tumors and deeper regions where we might not be able to reject those tumors, but we might be able to put a probe down in that deeper region. But those are far in the future.
Copyright 2023 KERA. To see more, visit KERA.
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UTSW researcher explores a "cooler" approach to treating brain cancer
Why is glioblastoma difficult to treat?
One of the things with cancers, especially something like glioblastoma, is that it is invasive. When you're working in the brain, you're always going to have some cells left over because you can only reset what you can see and you can only radiate, which you can kind of that region.
And then when you apply chemotherapy, you're going to kill only those cells that are sensitive to chemotherapy. And so any cells that already have some resistance, they'll become the predominant cell. And then when they
|
become the predominant cells and they’ll recur.
Your research has focused on cooling or lowering the temperatures of cancer cells. So what exactly does that accomplish?
Tumor cells are constantly using resources and producing things. And because of this, they're also highly replicative, meaning they create lots of copies of themselves and that's how they grow and spread.
With hypothermia, the idea was something we can do that would reduce the metabolism, reduce the cell division, and reduce everything of the tumor cells that would still be safe. That way you're not just targeting one or two targets or one or two molecules. You're affecting multiple pathways at the same time in the tumor.
And so it's harder for the tumor to, you know, evolve around it or develop resistance around it. And at the same time, as long as, you know, the temperature is a good, safe region, it should be safe for the other cells of the brain as well since there's not as much cell division in the brain.
How exactly do you cool the cells?
We were able to make a device that uses something called a thermoelectric plate. It's similar to a heat pump where you apply power or electricity to this plate and it pulls heat. And so then we had a heat sink and a fan that would blow that into the surrounding air.
And so that's how we did it in rats. We had this probe that would go in the tumor, and then we had a plate that would pull that heat that was powered, and then get thrown out into the air with a heatsink and a fan.
But in patients, of course, you can't do that and you cannot imagine a patient wearing a big heat sink or a fan on their head.
And so what I'm working on now is instead of using a fan to blow the heat out into the air, I'm distributing that heat through the body, through the skin, with a different kind of system so that ultimately this could be a fully implantable system for patients.
The human brain could withstand that?
You know, people have been exploring cooling the brain for a really long time. The first part of even trying to cool tumor cells was one line in a paper that was back in 1959.
In the sixties or so, people started exploring hypothermia. And then in the nineties especially, they started using brain cooling to help end stroke and brain injuries.
There's still been a lot of debate as to how protective it is, but there is some evidence to suggest certain levels of hypothermia might be protective.
As far as you know at this point, could this be done on any case of glioblastoma or has the study run into limitations of any type?
Chances are whenever we start any trials, it's going to be we're going to first do standard-of-care therapy, would do surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation.
Then chances are from there, when the tumor most likely recurs, at least early on, that when we would intervene with this device, when you know, when there are no other options. Ultimately, of course, if things get better, we could start sooner, and probably early on we would be targeting tumors that are more superficial and more contained.
Eventually, as this device becomes more and more patient-centric, we envision that we'd be able to get to deeper tumors and deeper regions where we might not be able to reject those tumors, but we might be able to put a probe down in that deeper region. But those are far in the future.
Copyright 2023 KERA. To see more, visit KERA.
|
U.S. surpassed 100 mass shootings in only 64 days
The U.S. has surpassed 100 mass shootings in 2023 on Sunday, according to the Gun Violence Archive (GVA), which defines mass shootings as situations in which at least four people are shot and either injured or killed, not including the shooter.
Why it matters: Only 64 days have passed so far this year, meaning there have been more mass shootings than days in the U.S. thus far.
- The 100th mass shooting of the year left three people, including a child, dead and another person injured in Bolingbrook, Illinois.
The big picture: The U.S. didn't exceed 100 mass shootings until March 19 in 2022 and March 22 in 2021, according to GVA data.
- There were 52 mass shootings in January, 41 in February and 11 so far in March — a total of 104 so far.
- At least 7,537 people have also died as a result of different forms of gun violence in the country so far this year.
Flashback: The U.S. didn't exceed 100 mass shootings until March 19 in 2022 and March 22 in 2021, according to GVA data.
- There were 647 mass shootings in 2022 and another 690 in 2021.
- Firearm-related injuries, like homicide and suicide, surpassed motor vehicle crashes as the leading cause of death for children and teenagers in 2020, according to an analysis of new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data published last year.
Of note: Since passing and signing into law the bipartisan gun safety bill in 2022 — the most significant piece of federal gun legislation in nearly three decades — it's unlikely a divided Congress will pass stricter gun laws.
Go deeper: All U.S. extremist mass killings in 2022 linked to far right, report says
|
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U.S. surpassed 100 mass shootings in only 64 days
The U.S. has surpassed 100 mass shootings in 2023 on Sunday, according to the Gun Violence Archive (GVA), which defines mass shootings as situations in which at least four people are shot and either injured or killed, not including the shooter.
Why it matters: Only 64 days have passed so far this year, meaning there have been more mass shootings than days in the U.S. thus far.
- The 100th mass shooting of the year left three people, including a
|
child, dead and another person injured in Bolingbrook, Illinois.
The big picture: The U.S. didn't exceed 100 mass shootings until March 19 in 2022 and March 22 in 2021, according to GVA data.
- There were 52 mass shootings in January, 41 in February and 11 so far in March — a total of 104 so far.
- At least 7,537 people have also died as a result of different forms of gun violence in the country so far this year.
Flashback: The U.S. didn't exceed 100 mass shootings until March 19 in 2022 and March 22 in 2021, according to GVA data.
- There were 647 mass shootings in 2022 and another 690 in 2021.
- Firearm-related injuries, like homicide and suicide, surpassed motor vehicle crashes as the leading cause of death for children and teenagers in 2020, according to an analysis of new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data published last year.
Of note: Since passing and signing into law the bipartisan gun safety bill in 2022 — the most significant piece of federal gun legislation in nearly three decades — it's unlikely a divided Congress will pass stricter gun laws.
Go deeper: All U.S. extremist mass killings in 2022 linked to far right, report says
|
The rate of people dying from cancer in the United States has continuously declined over the past three decades, according to a new report from the American Cancer Society.
The US cancer death rate has fallen 33% since 1991, which corresponds to an estimated 3.8 million deaths averted, according to the report, published Thursday in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians. The rate of lives lost to cancer continued to shrink in the most recent year for which data is available, between 2019 and 2020, by 1.5%.
The 33% decline in cancer mortality is “truly formidable,” said Karen Knudsen, chief executive officer of the American Cancer Society.
The report attributes this steady progress to improvements in cancer treatment, drops in smoking and increases in early detection.
“New revelations for prevention, for early detection and for treatment have resulted in true, meaningful gains in many of the 200 diseases that we call cancer,” Knudsen said.
In their report, researchers from the American Cancer Society also pointed to HPV vaccinations as connected to reductions in cancer deaths. HPV, or human papillomavirus, infections can cause cervical cancer and other cancer types, and vaccination has been linked with a decrease in new cervical cancer cases.
Among women in their early 20s, there was a 65% drop in cervical cancer rates from 2012 through 2019, “which totally follows the time when HPV vaccines were put into use,” said Dr. William Dahut, the society’s chief scientific officer.
“There are other cancers that are HPV-related – whether that’s head and neck cancers or anal cancers – so there’s optimism this will have importance beyond this,” he said.
The lifetime probability of being diagnosed with any invasive cancer is estimated to be 40.9% for men and 39.1% for women in the US, according to the new report.
The report also includes projections for 2023, estimating that there could be nearly 2 million new cancer cases – the equivalent of about 5,000 cases a day – and more than 600,000 cancer deaths in the United States this year.
During the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, many people skipped regular medical exams, and some doctors have seen a rise in advanced cancer cases in the wake of pandemic-delayed screenings and treatment.
The American Cancer Society researchers were not able to track “that reduction in screening that we know we all observed across the country during the pandemic,” Knudsen said. “This time next year, I believe our report will give some initial insight into what the impact was in the pandemic of cancer incidence and cancer mortality.”
‘The continuation of good news’
The new report includes data from national programs and registries, including those at the National Cancer Institute, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries.
Data showed that the US cancer death rate rose during most of the 20th century, largely due to an increase in lung cancer deaths related to smoking. Then, as smoking rates fell and improvements in early detection and treatments for some cancers increased, there was a decline in the cancer death rate from its peak in 1991.
Since then, the pace of the decline has slowly accelerated.
The new report found that the five-year relative survival rate for all cancers combined has increased from 49% for diagnoses in the mid-1970s to 68% for diagnoses during 2012-18.
The cancer types that now have the highest survival rates are thyroid at 98%, prostate at 97%, testis at 95% and melanoma at 94%, according to the report.
Current survival rates are lowest for cancers of the pancreas, at 12%.
The finding about a decreasing cancer death rate shows “the continuation of good news,” said Dr. Otis Brawley, an oncology professor at Johns Hopkins University who was not involved in the research.
“The biggest reason for the decline that started in 1991 was the prevalence of smoking in the United States started going down in 1965,” said Brawley, a former chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society.
“That’s the reason why we started having a decline in 1991, and that decline has continued because the prevalence of people smoking in the United States has continued to go down,” he said. “Now, in certain diseases, our ability to treat has improved, and there are some people who are not dying because of treatment.”
Some cancers are rising
Although the death rate for cancer has been on a steady decline, the new report also highlights that new cases of breast, uterine and prostate cancer have been “of concern” and rising in the United States.
Incidence rates of breast cancer in women have been increasing by about 0.5% per year since the mid-2000s, according to the report.
Uterine corpus cancer incidence has gone up about 1% per year since the mid-2000s among women 50 and older and nearly 2% per year since at least the mid-1990s in younger women.
The prostate cancer incidence rate rose 3% per year from 2014 through 2019, after two decades of decline.
Knudsen called prostate cancer “an outlier” since its previous decline in incidence has reversed, appearing to be driven by diagnoses of advanced disease.
On Thursday, the American Cancer Society announced the launch of the Impact initiative, geared toward improving prostate cancer incidence and death rates by funding new research programs and expanding support for patients, among other efforts.
“Unfortunately, prostate cancer remains the number one most frequently diagnosed malignancy amongst men in this country, with almost 290,000 men expected to be diagnosed with prostate cancer this year,” Knudsen said. Cancer diagnosed when it is confined to the prostate has a five-year survival rate of “upwards of 99%,” she said, but for metastatic prostate cancer, there is no durable cure.
“Prostate cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death for men in this country,” she said. “What we’re reporting is not only an increase in the incidence of prostate cancer across all demographics but a 5% year-over-year increase in diagnosis of men with more advanced disease. So we are not catching these cancers early when we have an opportunity to cure men of prostate cancer.”
‘It’s well past time for us to take health inequities seriously’
Breast, uterine and prostate cancers also have a wide racial disparity, in which communities of color have higher death rates and lower survival rates.
In 2020, the risk of overall cancer death was 12% higher in Black people compared with White people, according to the new report.
“Not every individual or every family is affected equally,” Knudsen said.
For instance, “Black men unfortunately have a 70% increase in incidence of prostate cancer compared to White men and a two- to four-fold increase in prostate cancer mortality as related to any other ethnic and racial group in the United States,” she said.
The data in the new report demonstrates “important and consistent” advances against cancer, Dr. Ernest Hawk, vice president of cancer prevention and population sciences at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, said in an email.
“Cancer is preventable in many instances and detectable at an early stage with better outcomes in many others. When necessary, treatments are improving in both their efficacy and safety. That’s all great news,” Hawk wrote.
“However, it’s well past time for us to take health inequities seriously and make them a much greater national priority. Inequities in cancer risks, cancer care and cancer outcomes are intolerable, and we should not be complacent with these regular reminders of avoidable inequities,” he said. “With deliberate and devoted effort, I believe we can eliminate these disparities and make even greater progress to end cancer.”
The White House responds
The new report shows “great progress,” White House Cancer Moonshot Coordinator Dr. Danielle Carnival said in a statement released Thursday.
The White House’s “Cancer Moonshot” initiative, which President Biden relaunched last year, commits the nation to work toward reducing the death rate from cancer by at least 50% over the next 25 years.
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Sign up here to get The Results Are In with Dr. Sanjay Gupta every Tuesday from the CNN Health team.
“The report showing the U.S. has cut cancer deaths by one-third over the last 30 years is great progress, which we’ve achieved through driving smoking rates down, improving early detection, and delivering better treatments for many cancers. It means millions of American families have been spared the immeasurable loss of a loved one,” Carnival said in the statement.
“The report also underscores that there’s more work to do to save more lives,” she said. “President Biden’s vision for ending cancer as we know it is building on the progress we’ve made with an all-hands-on-deck effort to develop new ways to prevent, detect, and treat cancer – and ensure that the tools we have and those we develop along the way reach all Americans.”
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The rate of people dying from cancer in the United States has continuously declined over the past three decades, according to a new report from the American Cancer Society.
The US cancer death rate has fallen 33% since 1991, which corresponds to an estimated 3.8 million deaths averted, according to the report, published Thursday in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians. The rate of lives lost to cancer continued to shrink in the most recent year for which data is available, between 2019 and 2020, by 1.5%.
The 33% decline in
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cancer mortality is “truly formidable,” said Karen Knudsen, chief executive officer of the American Cancer Society.
The report attributes this steady progress to improvements in cancer treatment, drops in smoking and increases in early detection.
“New revelations for prevention, for early detection and for treatment have resulted in true, meaningful gains in many of the 200 diseases that we call cancer,” Knudsen said.
In their report, researchers from the American Cancer Society also pointed to HPV vaccinations as connected to reductions in cancer deaths. HPV, or human papillomavirus, infections can cause cervical cancer and other cancer types, and vaccination has been linked with a decrease in new cervical cancer cases.
Among women in their early 20s, there was a 65% drop in cervical cancer rates from 2012 through 2019, “which totally follows the time when HPV vaccines were put into use,” said Dr. William Dahut, the society’s chief scientific officer.
“There are other cancers that are HPV-related – whether that’s head and neck cancers or anal cancers – so there’s optimism this will have importance beyond this,” he said.
The lifetime probability of being diagnosed with any invasive cancer is estimated to be 40.9% for men and 39.1% for women in the US, according to the new report.
The report also includes projections for 2023, estimating that there could be nearly 2 million new cancer cases – the equivalent of about 5,000 cases a day – and more than 600,000 cancer deaths in the United States this year.
During the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, many people skipped regular medical exams, and some doctors have seen a rise in advanced cancer cases in the wake of pandemic-delayed screenings and treatment.
The American Cancer Society researchers were not able to track “that reduction in screening that we know we all observed across the country during the pandemic,” Knudsen said. “This time next year, I believe our report will give some initial insight into what the impact was in the pandemic of cancer incidence and cancer mortality.”
‘The continuation of good news’
The new report includes data from national programs and registries, including those at the National Cancer Institute, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries.
Data showed that the US cancer death rate rose during most of the 20th century, largely due to an increase in lung cancer deaths related to smoking. Then, as smoking rates fell and improvements in early detection and treatments for some cancers increased, there was a decline in the cancer death rate from its peak in 1991.
Since then, the pace of the decline has slowly accelerated.
The new report found that the five-year relative survival rate for all cancers combined has increased from 49% for diagnoses in the mid-1970s to 68% for diagnoses during 2012-18.
The cancer types that now have the highest survival rates are thyroid at 98%, prostate at 97%, testis at 95% and melanoma at 94%, according to the report.
Current survival rates are lowest for cancers of the pancreas, at 12%.
The finding about a decreasing cancer death rate shows “the continuation of good news,” said Dr. Otis Brawley, an oncology professor at Johns Hopkins University who was not involved in the research.
“The biggest reason for the decline that started in 1991 was the prevalence of smoking in the United States started going down in 1965,” said Brawley, a former chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society.
“That’s the reason why we started having a decline in 1991, and that decline has continued because the prevalence of people smoking in the United States has continued to go down,” he said. “Now, in certain diseases, our ability to treat has improved, and there are some people who are not dying because of treatment.”
Some cancers are rising
Although the death rate for cancer has been on a steady decline, the new report also highlights that new cases of breast, uterine and prostate cancer have been “of concern” and rising in the United States.
Incidence rates of breast cancer in women have been increasing by about 0.5% per year since the mid-2000s, according to the report.
Uterine corpus cancer incidence has gone up about 1% per year since the mid-2000s among women 50 and older and nearly 2% per year since at least the mid-1990s in younger women.
The prostate cancer incidence rate rose 3% per year from 2014 through 2019, after two decades of decline.
Knudsen called prostate cancer “an outlier” since its previous decline in incidence has reversed, appearing to be driven by diagnoses of advanced disease.
On Thursday, the American Cancer Society announced the launch of the Impact initiative, geared toward improving prostate cancer incidence and death rates by funding new research programs and expanding support for patients, among other efforts.
“Unfortunately, prostate cancer remains the number one most frequently diagnosed malignancy amongst men in this country, with almost 290,000 men expected to be diagnosed with prostate cancer this year,” Knudsen said. Cancer diagnosed when it is confined to the prostate has a five-year survival rate of “upwards of 99%,” she said, but for metastatic prostate cancer, there is no durable cure.
“Prostate cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death for men in this country,” she said. “What we’re reporting is not only an increase in the incidence of prostate cancer across all demographics but a 5% year-over-year increase in diagnosis of men with more advanced disease. So we are not catching these cancers early when we have an opportunity to cure men of prostate cancer.”
‘It’s well past time for us to take health inequities seriously’
Breast, uterine and prostate cancers also have a wide racial disparity, in which communities of color have higher death rates and lower survival rates.
In 2020, the risk of overall cancer death was 12% higher in Black people compared with White people, according to the new report.
“Not every individual or every family is affected equally,” Knudsen said.
For instance, “Black men unfortunately have a 70% increase in incidence of prostate cancer compared to White men and a two- to four-fold increase in prostate cancer mortality as related to any other ethnic and racial group in the United States,” she said.
The data in the new report demonstrates “important and consistent” advances against cancer, Dr. Ernest Hawk, vice president of cancer prevention and population sciences at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, said in an email.
“Cancer is preventable in many instances and detectable at an early stage with better outcomes in many others. When necessary, treatments are improving in both their efficacy and safety. That’s all great news,” Hawk wrote.
“However, it’s well past time for us to take health inequities seriously and make them a much greater national priority. Inequities in cancer risks, cancer care and cancer outcomes are intolerable, and we should not be complacent with these regular reminders of avoidable inequities,” he said. “With deliberate and devoted effort, I believe we can eliminate these disparities and make even greater progress to end cancer.”
The White House responds
The new report shows “great progress,” White House Cancer Moonshot Coordinator Dr. Danielle Carnival said in a statement released Thursday.
The White House’s “Cancer Moonshot” initiative, which President Biden relaunched last year, commits the nation to work toward reducing the death rate from cancer by at least 50% over the next 25 years.
Get CNN Health's weekly newsletter
Sign up here to get The Results Are In with Dr. Sanjay Gupta every Tuesday from the CNN Health team.
“The report showing the U.S. has cut cancer deaths by one-third over the last 30 years is great progress, which we’ve achieved through driving smoking rates down, improving early detection, and delivering better treatments for many cancers. It means millions of American families have been spared the immeasurable loss of a loved one,” Carnival said in the statement.
“The report also underscores that there’s more work to do to save more lives,” she said. “President Biden’s vision for ending cancer as we know it is building on the progress we’ve made with an all-hands-on-deck effort to develop new ways to prevent, detect, and treat cancer – and ensure that the tools we have and those we develop along the way reach all Americans.”
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Financial health refers to the state of your personal monetary affairs and encompasses the peace of mind brought by knowing you are equipped to handle emergencies, can afford leisure without guilt, and make choices that allow you to enjoy life.
Assessing Your Financial Health
Evaluate Your Income And Expenses
The foundation of any financial assessment begins with understanding your cash flow. This requires a comprehensive review of:
- Sources Of Income: These can range from regular paychecks to passive income streams like rental income or dividends. Regularly updating and evaluating these sources can ensure that you are maximizing your earning potential.
- Fixed And Variable Expenses: While fixed expenses, like rent or mortgage, remain constant, variable expenses, such as entertainment or dining out, can fluctuate. Breaking down and reviewing these expenses helps in identifying areas where you might be overspending or could save.
- Surplus Or Deficit: Once you have totaled your monthly income and expenses, you will either have a surplus, which can be channeled into savings or investments, or a deficit, indicating the need for budget adjustments.
Analyze Your Debt And Credit Score
Debt, when mismanaged, can become a roadblock to financial prosperity. You should know the types and amount of debt you have and understand your credit score.
Differentiating between high-interest credit card debt, personal loans, mortgages, and student loans is essential. Each debt type has its implications and requires distinct strategies for management.
Meanwhile, your credit score is a reflection of your creditworthiness. Periodic reviews can help identify any discrepancies or areas for improvement. Familiarizing with the factors affecting your score, such as credit utilization or payment history, is also essential.
Analyzing debt and credit score will indicate if you are on track or need interventions like consolidation or refinancing.
Review Your Savings And Emergency Fund
Savings act as a financial buffer, providing peace of mind and the means to achieve long-term objectives.
It is advised to have three to six months’ worth of expenses in an easily accessible emergency fund. This fund should be re-evaluated, especially after significant life events or changes in monthly expenses.
Apart from the emergency fund, it is essential to differentiate between savings for short-term goals, like a vacation or a car, and long-term objectives, such as retirement or purchasing a home.
Evaluating your current savings against this benchmark can indicate if you are prepared for unexpected financial downturns or opportunities.
Strategies For Improving Financial Health
Financial well-being is a continuous journey. Implementing effective strategies ensures that you achieve your desired financial goals and maintain a robust financial position in the long term.
You can pave the path toward sustainable financial health by focusing on realistic goal setting, structured planning, and expert guidance.
Set Realistic Financial Goals
Break down your objectives based on the time frame:
- Short-Term Goals (1-3 Years): These can include saving for a vacation, purchasing a car, or building an emergency fund. It is essential to have these goals as they provide immediate motivation and offer short-term financial security.
- Mid-Term Goals (4-10 Years): Examples include buying a home, funding higher education, or starting a business. They require a more prolonged commitment and often more considerable capital.
- Long-Term Goals (10+ Years): These revolve around retirement, legacy planning, or long-term investments. Establishing these goals early can capitalize on compound interest, smoothing the financial journey.
You may also follow the SMART Goal-Setting Method:
- Specific: Clearly define what you want to achieve.
- Measurable: Determine the metrics or amounts necessary to realize the goal.
- Achievable: Ensure the goal is realistic based on your current and expected financial situation.
- Relevant: Align the goal with your broader financial plan and life objectives.
- Time-Bound: Set a definitive time frame for achieving the goal, providing motivation and a sense of urgency.
Create A Comprehensive Financial Plan
A well-constructed financial plan encompasses every aspect of your life, from daily expenses to retirement planning, to balance your present needs and future aspirations.
For example, if homeownership is a primary goal, consider saving for a down payment by setting aside a specific amount each month or exploring investment avenues that offer higher returns over your desired time frame.
Long-term goals like retirement require understanding various retirement savings accounts, monitoring market trends, and adjusting your risk appetite as you near retirement age.
However, a financial plan is not a set-it-and-forget-it tool. It requires regular review and potential adjustments to adapt to changing circumstances and significant life events.
Adjustments may involve reallocating assets, revising your investment strategy, or redefining your goals.
Seek Professional Financial Advice
Financial advisors and other professionals have spent years acquiring specialized knowledge and firsthand experience dealing with diverse situations, making them an invaluable resource for improving or maintaining your financial health.
They assess your unique financial position, aspirations, and risk tolerance, enabling the creation of a tailored strategy, aiming to optimize your resources for current and future objectives.
Financial advisors may be fee-based or commission-driven. Each type has its merits and potential conflicts of interest, so it is crucial to understand the nature of the relationship upfront.
Aside from compensation structure, evaluate advisors’ qualifications, experience, and fiduciary responsibility. Ask about their certifications—for example, whether they are a Certified Financial Planner or Chartered Financial Analyst.
These credentials indicate their expertise and commitment to ongoing education in the field. Moreover, inquiring about their fiduciary responsibility will ensure they are obligated to act in your best interests rather than their own or their firm’s.
Lastly, the right financial advisor should be someone you trust and feel comfortable discussing personal financial matters with. Building a rapport and ensuring open communication lines are essential for a successful, long-lasting professional relationship.
It is a collaboration where both parties should feel engaged and invested in achieving the desired financial outcomes.
Financial health is a multifaceted concept that extends beyond mere numbers in a bank account. It encompasses a sense of security, preparedness for the future, and the freedom to enjoy life’s pleasures without financial strain.
Evaluating and improving one’s financial health involves a keen understanding of income, expenses, debt, and savings, coupled with setting clear, realistic goals and executing actionable strategies.
While the journey to financial well-being can appear daunting, professional financial advisors can provide valuable support.
Commitment and proactive management are the pillars of sound financial health, serving as lifelong tools in navigating the evolving terrain of personal finance.
|
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|
Financial health refers to the state of your personal monetary affairs and encompasses the peace of mind brought by knowing you are equipped to handle emergencies, can afford leisure without guilt, and make choices that allow you to enjoy life.
Assessing Your Financial Health
Evaluate Your Income And Expenses
The foundation of any financial assessment begins with understanding your cash flow. This requires a comprehensive review of:
- Sources Of Income: These can range from regular paychecks to passive income streams like rental income or dividends. Regularly updating and evaluating these sources can ensure that you are maximizing your earning potential.
- Fixed And Variable Expenses: While fixed expenses
|
, like rent or mortgage, remain constant, variable expenses, such as entertainment or dining out, can fluctuate. Breaking down and reviewing these expenses helps in identifying areas where you might be overspending or could save.
- Surplus Or Deficit: Once you have totaled your monthly income and expenses, you will either have a surplus, which can be channeled into savings or investments, or a deficit, indicating the need for budget adjustments.
Analyze Your Debt And Credit Score
Debt, when mismanaged, can become a roadblock to financial prosperity. You should know the types and amount of debt you have and understand your credit score.
Differentiating between high-interest credit card debt, personal loans, mortgages, and student loans is essential. Each debt type has its implications and requires distinct strategies for management.
Meanwhile, your credit score is a reflection of your creditworthiness. Periodic reviews can help identify any discrepancies or areas for improvement. Familiarizing with the factors affecting your score, such as credit utilization or payment history, is also essential.
Analyzing debt and credit score will indicate if you are on track or need interventions like consolidation or refinancing.
Review Your Savings And Emergency Fund
Savings act as a financial buffer, providing peace of mind and the means to achieve long-term objectives.
It is advised to have three to six months’ worth of expenses in an easily accessible emergency fund. This fund should be re-evaluated, especially after significant life events or changes in monthly expenses.
Apart from the emergency fund, it is essential to differentiate between savings for short-term goals, like a vacation or a car, and long-term objectives, such as retirement or purchasing a home.
Evaluating your current savings against this benchmark can indicate if you are prepared for unexpected financial downturns or opportunities.
Strategies For Improving Financial Health
Financial well-being is a continuous journey. Implementing effective strategies ensures that you achieve your desired financial goals and maintain a robust financial position in the long term.
You can pave the path toward sustainable financial health by focusing on realistic goal setting, structured planning, and expert guidance.
Set Realistic Financial Goals
Break down your objectives based on the time frame:
- Short-Term Goals (1-3 Years): These can include saving for a vacation, purchasing a car, or building an emergency fund. It is essential to have these goals as they provide immediate motivation and offer short-term financial security.
- Mid-Term Goals (4-10 Years): Examples include buying a home, funding higher education, or starting a business. They require a more prolonged commitment and often more considerable capital.
- Long-Term Goals (10+ Years): These revolve around retirement, legacy planning, or long-term investments. Establishing these goals early can capitalize on compound interest, smoothing the financial journey.
You may also follow the SMART Goal-Setting Method:
- Specific: Clearly define what you want to achieve.
- Measurable: Determine the metrics or amounts necessary to realize the goal.
- Achievable: Ensure the goal is realistic based on your current and expected financial situation.
- Relevant: Align the goal with your broader financial plan and life objectives.
- Time-Bound: Set a definitive time frame for achieving the goal, providing motivation and a sense of urgency.
Create A Comprehensive Financial Plan
A well-constructed financial plan encompasses every aspect of your life, from daily expenses to retirement planning, to balance your present needs and future aspirations.
For example, if homeownership is a primary goal, consider saving for a down payment by setting aside a specific amount each month or exploring investment avenues that offer higher returns over your desired time frame.
Long-term goals like retirement require understanding various retirement savings accounts, monitoring market trends, and adjusting your risk appetite as you near retirement age.
However, a financial plan is not a set-it-and-forget-it tool. It requires regular review and potential adjustments to adapt to changing circumstances and significant life events.
Adjustments may involve reallocating assets, revising your investment strategy, or redefining your goals.
Seek Professional Financial Advice
Financial advisors and other professionals have spent years acquiring specialized knowledge and firsthand experience dealing with diverse situations, making them an invaluable resource for improving or maintaining your financial health.
They assess your unique financial position, aspirations, and risk tolerance, enabling the creation of a tailored strategy, aiming to optimize your resources for current and future objectives.
Financial advisors may be fee-based or commission-driven. Each type has its merits and potential conflicts of interest, so it is crucial to understand the nature of the relationship upfront.
Aside from compensation structure, evaluate advisors’ qualifications, experience, and fiduciary responsibility. Ask about their certifications—for example, whether they are a Certified Financial Planner or Chartered Financial Analyst.
These credentials indicate their expertise and commitment to ongoing education in the field. Moreover, inquiring about their fiduciary responsibility will ensure they are obligated to act in your best interests rather than their own or their firm’s.
Lastly, the right financial advisor should be someone you trust and feel comfortable discussing personal financial matters with. Building a rapport and ensuring open communication lines are essential for a successful, long-lasting professional relationship.
It is a collaboration where both parties should feel engaged and invested in achieving the desired financial outcomes.
Financial health is a multifaceted concept that extends beyond mere numbers in a bank account. It encompasses a sense of security, preparedness for the future, and the freedom to enjoy life’s pleasures without financial strain.
Evaluating and improving one’s financial health involves a keen understanding of income, expenses, debt, and savings, coupled with setting clear, realistic goals and executing actionable strategies.
While the journey to financial well-being can appear daunting, professional financial advisors can provide valuable support.
Commitment and proactive management are the pillars of sound financial health, serving as lifelong tools in navigating the evolving terrain of personal finance.
|
Electric vehicle (EV) users often desire three things: a longer driving range, quicker charging times, and an affordable price tag.
The Evolution of EV Batteries
To address these needs, auto manufacturers are working on replacing the conventional lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries that power most EVs with advanced solid-state variants. These next-generation superbatteries have been touted for their faster charging and extended driving range capabilities. After years of technical challenges, the production of the first solid-state Li-ion batteries is now imminent.
Toyota’s Solid-State Battery Breakthrough
Toyota, the world’s leading car manufacturer, started exploring solid-state batteries in 2012. Despite the lack of visible progress, the company recently announced a significant technological advancement. They plan to begin producing a solid-state battery by 2027. Toyota asserts that its new battery will enable an EV to travel approximately 1,200 km (746 miles), nearly double the distance many current models can cover, and recharge in roughly ten minutes.
Read more at The Economist.
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|
Electric vehicle (EV) users often desire three things: a longer driving range, quicker charging times, and an affordable price tag.
The Evolution of EV Batteries
To address these needs, auto manufacturers are working on replacing the conventional lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries that power most EVs with advanced solid-state variants. These next-generation superbatteries have been touted for their faster charging and extended driving range capabilities. After years of technical challenges, the production of the first solid-state Li-ion batteries is now imminent.
Toyota’s Solid-State Battery Breakthrough
Toyota, the world’s leading car manufacturer, started exploring solid-state batteries
|
in 2012. Despite the lack of visible progress, the company recently announced a significant technological advancement. They plan to begin producing a solid-state battery by 2027. Toyota asserts that its new battery will enable an EV to travel approximately 1,200 km (746 miles), nearly double the distance many current models can cover, and recharge in roughly ten minutes.
Read more at The Economist.
|
True paradigm shifts are rare, which helps to explain the buzz around ChatGPT, a chatbot driven by so-called generative artificial intelligence that promises to revolutionize the way people interact with computers. It’s become a global sensation since its November launch by giving seemingly sophisticated yet plain-language answers to almost any kind of question. Technology giants such as Microsoft Corp., Google and Baidu Inc. are betting heavily on this new technology, which has the potential to upend the lucrative search market, even as its wider use is turning up potentially serious flaws.
1. What is generative AI?
These systems use neural networks, which are loosely modeled on the structure of the human brain and learn to complete tasks in similar ways, chiefly through trial-and-error. During training, they’re fed vast amounts of information (for example, every New York Times bestseller published in 2022) and given a task to complete using that data, perhaps: “Write the blurb for a new novel.” Over time, they’re told which words and sentences make sense and which don’t, and subsequent attempts improve. It’s like a child learning to pronounce a difficult word under the instruction of a parent. Slowly, they learn and apply that ability to future efforts. What makes them so different to older computer systems is that the results are probabilistic, meaning responses will vary each time but will gradually get smarter, faster and more nuanced.
2. How does ChatGPT work?
ChatGPT is the latest iteration of GPT (Generative Pre-Trained Transformer), a family of text-generating AI programs developed by San Francisco-based laboratory OpenAI. GPTs are trained in a process called unsupervised learning, which involves finding patterns in a dataset without being given labeled examples or explicit instructions on what to look for. The most recent version, GPT-4, builds on its predecessor, GPT-3.5, which ingested text from across the web, including Wikipedia, news sites, books and blogs in an effort to make its answers relevant and well-informed. ChatGPT adds a conversational interface on top of the program. At their heart, systems like ChatGPT are generating convincing chains of words but have no inherent understanding of their significance, or whether they’re biased or misleading. All they know is that they sound like something a person would say.
3. Who is behind OpenAI?
It was co-founded as a nonprofit by programmer and entrepreneur Sam Altman to develop AI technology that “benefits all of humanity.” Early investors included LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman’s charitable foundation, Khosla Ventures and Elon Musk, who ended his involvement in 2018. OpenAI shifted to create a for-profit entity in 2019, when Microsoft invested $1 billion.
4. What’s been the response to ChatGPT?
More than a million people signed up to use it following the launch in late November. Social media has been abuzz with users trying fun, low-stakes uses for the technology. Some have shared its responses to obscure trivia questions. Others marveled at its sophisticated historical arguments, college “essays,” pop song lyrics, poems about cryptocurrency, meal plans that meet specific dietary needs and solutions to programming challenges. The flurry of interest also raised the profile of OpenAI’s other products, including software that can beat humans at video games and a tool known as Dall-E that can generate images – from the photorealistic to the fantastical – based on text descriptions.
5. Who’s going to make money from all this?
Tech giants like Microsoft have spotted generative AI’s potential to upend the way people navigate the web. Instead of scouring dozens of articles on a topic and firing back a line of relevant text from a website, these systems can deliver a bespoke response. Microsoft deepened its relationship with OpenAI in January with a multiyear investment valued at $10 billion that gave it a part-claim on OpenAI’s future profits in exchange for the computing power of Microsoft’s Azure cloud network. In February, Microsoft integrated a cousin of ChatGPT into its search engine Bing. The announcement was a challenge to rival search giant Google, which responded by trailing a launch of its own conversational AI service, Bard. China’s Baidu was also planning to introduce an AI chatbot. However, questions remain about how to monetize search when there aren’t pages of results into which you can insert ads.
6. How’s the competition going?
OpenAI spent the months since unleashing ChatGPT refining the program based on feedback identifying problems with accuracy, bias and safety. ChatGPT-4 is, the lab says, “40% more likely” to produce factual responses and is also more creative and collaborative. In Bloomberg tests, it still struggled to compose a cinquain poem about meerkats and regurgitated gender stereotypes. Google’s Bard got off to a rocky start when it made a mistake during a public demonstration in February, which sparked concerns that the company had lost ground in the race for the future of search. Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. was hurrying to put together a generative AI product group from teams that were previously scattered throughout the company.
7. What other industries could benefit?
The economic potential of generative AI systems goes far beyond web search. They could allow companies to take their automated customer service to a new level of sophistication, producing a relevant answer the first time so users aren’t left waiting to speak to a human. They could also draft blog posts and other types of PR content for companies that would otherwise require the help of a copywriter.
8. What are generative AI’s limitations?
The answers it pieces together from second-hand information can sound so authoritative that users may assume it has verified their accuracy. What it’s really doing is spitting out text that reads well and sounds smart but might be incomplete, biased, partly wrong or, occasionally, nonsense. These systems are only as good as the data they are trained with. Stripped from useful context such as the source of the information, and with few of the typos and other imperfections that can often signal unreliable material, ChatGPT’s content could be a minefield for those who aren’t sufficiently well-versed in a subject to notice a flawed response. This issue led StackOverflow, a computer programming website with a forum for coding advice, to ban ChatGPT responses because they were often inaccurate.
9. What about ethical risks?
As machine intelligence becomes more sophisticated, so does its potential for trickery and mischief-making. Microsoft’s AI bot Tay was taken down in 2016 after some users taught it to make racist and sexist remarks. Another developed by Meta encountered similar issues in 2022. OpenAI has tried to train ChatGPT to refuse inappropriate requests, limiting its ability to spout hate speech and misinformation. Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive officer, has encouraged people to “thumbs down” distasteful or offensive responses to improve the system. But some users have found work-arounds. Generative AI systems might not pick up on gender and racial biases that a human would notice in books and other texts. They are also a potential weapon for deceit. College teachers worry about students getting chatbots to do their homework. Lawmakers may be inundated with letters apparently from constituents complaining about proposed legislation and have no idea if they’re genuine or generated by a chatbot used by a lobbying firm.
--With assistance from Alex Webb and Nate Lanxon.
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
©2023 Bloomberg L.P.
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True paradigm shifts are rare, which helps to explain the buzz around ChatGPT, a chatbot driven by so-called generative artificial intelligence that promises to revolutionize the way people interact with computers. It’s become a global sensation since its November launch by giving seemingly sophisticated yet plain-language answers to almost any kind of question. Technology giants such as Microsoft Corp., Google and Baidu Inc. are betting heavily on this new technology, which has the potential to upend the lucrative search market, even as its wider use is turning up potentially serious flaws.
1. What is generative AI?
These systems use neural networks, which are
|
loosely modeled on the structure of the human brain and learn to complete tasks in similar ways, chiefly through trial-and-error. During training, they’re fed vast amounts of information (for example, every New York Times bestseller published in 2022) and given a task to complete using that data, perhaps: “Write the blurb for a new novel.” Over time, they’re told which words and sentences make sense and which don’t, and subsequent attempts improve. It’s like a child learning to pronounce a difficult word under the instruction of a parent. Slowly, they learn and apply that ability to future efforts. What makes them so different to older computer systems is that the results are probabilistic, meaning responses will vary each time but will gradually get smarter, faster and more nuanced.
2. How does ChatGPT work?
ChatGPT is the latest iteration of GPT (Generative Pre-Trained Transformer), a family of text-generating AI programs developed by San Francisco-based laboratory OpenAI. GPTs are trained in a process called unsupervised learning, which involves finding patterns in a dataset without being given labeled examples or explicit instructions on what to look for. The most recent version, GPT-4, builds on its predecessor, GPT-3.5, which ingested text from across the web, including Wikipedia, news sites, books and blogs in an effort to make its answers relevant and well-informed. ChatGPT adds a conversational interface on top of the program. At their heart, systems like ChatGPT are generating convincing chains of words but have no inherent understanding of their significance, or whether they’re biased or misleading. All they know is that they sound like something a person would say.
3. Who is behind OpenAI?
It was co-founded as a nonprofit by programmer and entrepreneur Sam Altman to develop AI technology that “benefits all of humanity.” Early investors included LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman’s charitable foundation, Khosla Ventures and Elon Musk, who ended his involvement in 2018. OpenAI shifted to create a for-profit entity in 2019, when Microsoft invested $1 billion.
4. What’s been the response to ChatGPT?
More than a million people signed up to use it following the launch in late November. Social media has been abuzz with users trying fun, low-stakes uses for the technology. Some have shared its responses to obscure trivia questions. Others marveled at its sophisticated historical arguments, college “essays,” pop song lyrics, poems about cryptocurrency, meal plans that meet specific dietary needs and solutions to programming challenges. The flurry of interest also raised the profile of OpenAI’s other products, including software that can beat humans at video games and a tool known as Dall-E that can generate images – from the photorealistic to the fantastical – based on text descriptions.
5. Who’s going to make money from all this?
Tech giants like Microsoft have spotted generative AI’s potential to upend the way people navigate the web. Instead of scouring dozens of articles on a topic and firing back a line of relevant text from a website, these systems can deliver a bespoke response. Microsoft deepened its relationship with OpenAI in January with a multiyear investment valued at $10 billion that gave it a part-claim on OpenAI’s future profits in exchange for the computing power of Microsoft’s Azure cloud network. In February, Microsoft integrated a cousin of ChatGPT into its search engine Bing. The announcement was a challenge to rival search giant Google, which responded by trailing a launch of its own conversational AI service, Bard. China’s Baidu was also planning to introduce an AI chatbot. However, questions remain about how to monetize search when there aren’t pages of results into which you can insert ads.
6. How’s the competition going?
OpenAI spent the months since unleashing ChatGPT refining the program based on feedback identifying problems with accuracy, bias and safety. ChatGPT-4 is, the lab says, “40% more likely” to produce factual responses and is also more creative and collaborative. In Bloomberg tests, it still struggled to compose a cinquain poem about meerkats and regurgitated gender stereotypes. Google’s Bard got off to a rocky start when it made a mistake during a public demonstration in February, which sparked concerns that the company had lost ground in the race for the future of search. Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. was hurrying to put together a generative AI product group from teams that were previously scattered throughout the company.
7. What other industries could benefit?
The economic potential of generative AI systems goes far beyond web search. They could allow companies to take their automated customer service to a new level of sophistication, producing a relevant answer the first time so users aren’t left waiting to speak to a human. They could also draft blog posts and other types of PR content for companies that would otherwise require the help of a copywriter.
8. What are generative AI’s limitations?
The answers it pieces together from second-hand information can sound so authoritative that users may assume it has verified their accuracy. What it’s really doing is spitting out text that reads well and sounds smart but might be incomplete, biased, partly wrong or, occasionally, nonsense. These systems are only as good as the data they are trained with. Stripped from useful context such as the source of the information, and with few of the typos and other imperfections that can often signal unreliable material, ChatGPT’s content could be a minefield for those who aren’t sufficiently well-versed in a subject to notice a flawed response. This issue led StackOverflow, a computer programming website with a forum for coding advice, to ban ChatGPT responses because they were often inaccurate.
9. What about ethical risks?
As machine intelligence becomes more sophisticated, so does its potential for trickery and mischief-making. Microsoft’s AI bot Tay was taken down in 2016 after some users taught it to make racist and sexist remarks. Another developed by Meta encountered similar issues in 2022. OpenAI has tried to train ChatGPT to refuse inappropriate requests, limiting its ability to spout hate speech and misinformation. Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive officer, has encouraged people to “thumbs down” distasteful or offensive responses to improve the system. But some users have found work-arounds. Generative AI systems might not pick up on gender and racial biases that a human would notice in books and other texts. They are also a potential weapon for deceit. College teachers worry about students getting chatbots to do their homework. Lawmakers may be inundated with letters apparently from constituents complaining about proposed legislation and have no idea if they’re genuine or generated by a chatbot used by a lobbying firm.
--With assistance from Alex Webb and Nate Lanxon.
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
©2023 Bloomberg L.P.
|
Researchers study COVID vaccine hesitancy in Eastern Ky.
LEXINGTON, Ky. (WYMT) - It is called the Kentuckians Vaccinating Appalachian Communities, or K-VAC, project.
Researchers want to address the lower vaccine rates in Eastern Kentucky compared to other parts of the state and the country.
”Part of the solution is providing the best information that we can, the most accurate the most current information that we can,” said Dr. Marc Kiviniemi with The University of Kentucky. “So people can make an informed choice about vaccination.”
The study covers 15 Appalachian counties. Researchers say there is a difference of nearly 10 percent across the region. Perry County has one of the highest vaccine rates in the state. They say it is nearly twice as high as Elliott and Knox Counties.
”We know that each county and each community is unique, both in terms of its strengths and in terms of its needs,” he said. “So to be able understand what’s working in some areas and what’s not, will be a very central part of what we do.”
They began collecting data within the last month. They are working with key leaders in their study counties. Researchers say transportation is a burden for some Eastern Kentuckians.
”We have some ideas based on what we heard to date, potential elements of interventions to remove barriers for individuals,” said Dr. Kathryn Cardarelli with The University of Kentucky.
You can read more on the project here.
Copyright 2023 WYMT. All rights reserved.
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Researchers study COVID vaccine hesitancy in Eastern Ky.
LEXINGTON, Ky. (WYMT) - It is called the Kentuckians Vaccinating Appalachian Communities, or K-VAC, project.
Researchers want to address the lower vaccine rates in Eastern Kentucky compared to other parts of the state and the country.
”Part of the solution is providing the best information that we can, the most accurate the most current information that we can,” said Dr. Marc Kiviniemi with The University of Kentucky. “So people can make an informed choice about vaccination.”
The study covers 15 Appalachian counties
|
. Researchers say there is a difference of nearly 10 percent across the region. Perry County has one of the highest vaccine rates in the state. They say it is nearly twice as high as Elliott and Knox Counties.
”We know that each county and each community is unique, both in terms of its strengths and in terms of its needs,” he said. “So to be able understand what’s working in some areas and what’s not, will be a very central part of what we do.”
They began collecting data within the last month. They are working with key leaders in their study counties. Researchers say transportation is a burden for some Eastern Kentuckians.
”We have some ideas based on what we heard to date, potential elements of interventions to remove barriers for individuals,” said Dr. Kathryn Cardarelli with The University of Kentucky.
You can read more on the project here.
Copyright 2023 WYMT. All rights reserved.
|
Lebanese American poet Khalil Gibran is perhaps best known as the author of "The Prophet," a collection of poetic essays that sold more than 10 million copies since its publication a century ago, in 1923.
What's far less known is that Gibran wrote the first draft of his most prominent work at a farm in Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts.
How did a young man from the mountains of Lebanon come to write what the BBC once referred to as "the Bible of the counterculture" at the entrance to the Cape?
Radio Boston's Tiziana Dearing sat down with Jean Gibran, a relative and biographer of the poet, to find out.
Highlights from this interview have been lightly edited for clarity.
On how the 12-year-old Kahlil Gibran arrived in Massachusetts in 1895:
"Gibran came with his mother, his half brother, and his two sisters. They came to a street that was called then Oliver Place, and they settled in the same tenement building as my late husband's grandfather. In other words, there were already Gibrans there. So they stayed and they lived with that crowd of Syrians. They were called Syrians in those days — Lebanon was not a part of the population's name and actually their passports had the Ottoman Empire seals on it because the Ottoman Empire was what ruled that area.
"Gibran immediately was enrolled in the Quincy School, which was at the Tyler Street, and a settlement house called the Denison House. Settlement houses were very important because they involved young people and tried to make it easier for these new immigrants to assimilate."
On how Gibran's talents were discovered after he sketched a notorious sculpture at the Boston Public Library:
"There a sculpture in the atrium — a nude sculpture called the Bacchante. It was very sensational because this was a nude woman carrying a child, obviously drinking alcohol. The censors in Boston became irritated, but here was this adolescent, young Syrian boy who was keeping now a daybook of drawings. He drew the Bacchante. That's very providential because Bostonians got rid of that sculpture within two years of its being installed.
"So one of the fabulous thing is that as a result of all his sketches and his talent, the people at Denison House called in a very, well-known photographer who was also well known as a publisher, Fred Holland Day. And working with Day is what introduced the young Syrian adolescent to literature.
"There is no question that he may have never encountered poetry and literature the way he was so early. He started to run around doing errands, posing for Fred Holland Day, and got immersed in the intellectual bohemianism of the early 20th century."
On how Gibran chose to assimilate in his new home:
"He was terribly aware of either completely joining the intellectual community surrounding him in Boston and in New York or just staying with the immigrants. And it's interesting that when he returned to the United States [from a visit to Paris, France], instead of settling in the Syrian community, he brought his sister, Mariana, into Beacon Hill.
"People don't remember that he did not settle in Little Syria, which meant he was interested in assimilating. [Similarly,] when he went to New York, he settled in Greenwich Village, and became very friendly with so many people who led him to [other literary figures]. You see what I'm saying? Could he have stayed in the Syrian community? Yes, but I don't think he would have become an international figure."
On the fateful invitation Gibran received in 1918 to join writer and poet Marie Garland on a literary retreat in Buzzards Bay:
"I think he had more fun down there than he ever had. He actually was driving in an automobile. He said, 'I can do anything here!' Now there was no driving an automobile in New York or Boston. He said he had all sorts of freedom...
"[Among others, he was with] a writer who was Hindu and his spouse, who was an American. So you can see it was an interesting, diverse community. And they were all enjoying each other and working. I think it was one of the places that Gibran felt free, felt liberated and was completely assimilated.
"There were no ethnic worries or considerations [for Gibran,] it was completely bohemian. And [he started] what was called then the "Councils" — that's what the poet first called ["The Prophet"]. One of the words he also used for it was the "Commonwealth."
"Many people are always saying, 'Oh, this is where "The Prophet" was written,' either in Boston or Cambridge or Greenwich Village. but it was started at Bay End Farm, Buzzards Bay."
On why "The Prophet" remains relevant today:
"He took every part of living and showed us as immigrants, as people who might not be completely assimilated, how to survive in this universe. That's what it is.
"I really mean it when I tell you that it was so important for him to embrace the universe. ['The Prophet' is a reflection of] universal, essential items of what people have to cope with — how to take care of your children, how to take care of education — every single one of these items is something we all have to do, no matter where we are.
"That's why ['The Prophet'] has become a universal Bible without the religious accoutrement. If you are religious, you have to obey certain commandments, but he doesn't. We don't have to do that when reading 'The Prophet.' All you have to do is to become habituated with the major theme, which is obviously love."
This article was originally published on June 05, 2023.
This segment aired on June 5, 2023.
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Lebanese American poet Khalil Gibran is perhaps best known as the author of "The Prophet," a collection of poetic essays that sold more than 10 million copies since its publication a century ago, in 1923.
What's far less known is that Gibran wrote the first draft of his most prominent work at a farm in Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts.
How did a young man from the mountains of Lebanon come to write what the BBC once referred to as "the Bible of the counterculture" at the entrance to the Cape?
Radio Boston's Tiziana Dearing sat down with Jean Gibran,
|
a relative and biographer of the poet, to find out.
Highlights from this interview have been lightly edited for clarity.
On how the 12-year-old Kahlil Gibran arrived in Massachusetts in 1895:
"Gibran came with his mother, his half brother, and his two sisters. They came to a street that was called then Oliver Place, and they settled in the same tenement building as my late husband's grandfather. In other words, there were already Gibrans there. So they stayed and they lived with that crowd of Syrians. They were called Syrians in those days — Lebanon was not a part of the population's name and actually their passports had the Ottoman Empire seals on it because the Ottoman Empire was what ruled that area.
"Gibran immediately was enrolled in the Quincy School, which was at the Tyler Street, and a settlement house called the Denison House. Settlement houses were very important because they involved young people and tried to make it easier for these new immigrants to assimilate."
On how Gibran's talents were discovered after he sketched a notorious sculpture at the Boston Public Library:
"There a sculpture in the atrium — a nude sculpture called the Bacchante. It was very sensational because this was a nude woman carrying a child, obviously drinking alcohol. The censors in Boston became irritated, but here was this adolescent, young Syrian boy who was keeping now a daybook of drawings. He drew the Bacchante. That's very providential because Bostonians got rid of that sculpture within two years of its being installed.
"So one of the fabulous thing is that as a result of all his sketches and his talent, the people at Denison House called in a very, well-known photographer who was also well known as a publisher, Fred Holland Day. And working with Day is what introduced the young Syrian adolescent to literature.
"There is no question that he may have never encountered poetry and literature the way he was so early. He started to run around doing errands, posing for Fred Holland Day, and got immersed in the intellectual bohemianism of the early 20th century."
On how Gibran chose to assimilate in his new home:
"He was terribly aware of either completely joining the intellectual community surrounding him in Boston and in New York or just staying with the immigrants. And it's interesting that when he returned to the United States [from a visit to Paris, France], instead of settling in the Syrian community, he brought his sister, Mariana, into Beacon Hill.
"People don't remember that he did not settle in Little Syria, which meant he was interested in assimilating. [Similarly,] when he went to New York, he settled in Greenwich Village, and became very friendly with so many people who led him to [other literary figures]. You see what I'm saying? Could he have stayed in the Syrian community? Yes, but I don't think he would have become an international figure."
On the fateful invitation Gibran received in 1918 to join writer and poet Marie Garland on a literary retreat in Buzzards Bay:
"I think he had more fun down there than he ever had. He actually was driving in an automobile. He said, 'I can do anything here!' Now there was no driving an automobile in New York or Boston. He said he had all sorts of freedom...
"[Among others, he was with] a writer who was Hindu and his spouse, who was an American. So you can see it was an interesting, diverse community. And they were all enjoying each other and working. I think it was one of the places that Gibran felt free, felt liberated and was completely assimilated.
"There were no ethnic worries or considerations [for Gibran,] it was completely bohemian. And [he started] what was called then the "Councils" — that's what the poet first called ["The Prophet"]. One of the words he also used for it was the "Commonwealth."
"Many people are always saying, 'Oh, this is where "The Prophet" was written,' either in Boston or Cambridge or Greenwich Village. but it was started at Bay End Farm, Buzzards Bay."
On why "The Prophet" remains relevant today:
"He took every part of living and showed us as immigrants, as people who might not be completely assimilated, how to survive in this universe. That's what it is.
"I really mean it when I tell you that it was so important for him to embrace the universe. ['The Prophet' is a reflection of] universal, essential items of what people have to cope with — how to take care of your children, how to take care of education — every single one of these items is something we all have to do, no matter where we are.
"That's why ['The Prophet'] has become a universal Bible without the religious accoutrement. If you are religious, you have to obey certain commandments, but he doesn't. We don't have to do that when reading 'The Prophet.' All you have to do is to become habituated with the major theme, which is obviously love."
This article was originally published on June 05, 2023.
This segment aired on June 5, 2023.
|
Climate change is increasing the fire risk on the mostly treeless Great Plains
A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
Climate change is increasing the fire risk on the mostly treeless Great Plains. Montana Public Radio's Aaron Bolton reports on efforts to get prairie dwellers to adapt to the new reality.
AARON BOLTON, BYLINE: Homebuilder Josh Poser lives in the small town of Denton, surrounded by the grasslands of eastern Montana. The last thing he thought he'd be doing is fighting a wildfire in December, but that's exactly what happened a couple of years ago as 70-mile-an-hour winds pushed flames across 10,000 acres.
JOSH POSER: Late that night, you know, we're putting some embers out in the yard and sprinkler on the roof, and they had patrols going all over the place.
BOLTON: Overnight, flames consumed Poser's house and 24 others. Don Pyrah is with Montana's state fire agency. He says firefighters were quickly overwhelmed because, unusually, there was no snow on the ground in December, and it was way too warm.
DON PYRAH: And it was 56 degrees in the middle of the night. That's not normal.
BOLTON: Researchers say the warming climate means more dry Decembers and a lot less snow cover across the Great Plains, meaning a lot more fire risk during a typically windier time of the year. University of Florida researcher Victoria Donovan led a 2017 study that found fire activity on the Great Plains has increased by 3 1/2 times in recent decades. She says that a century of fire suppression has also allowed more trees and woody vegetation to grow, making fires more intense.
VICTORIA DONOVAN: There's a lot more opportunities for these wildfires to occur and also for them to be a lot more destructive.
BOLTON: That kind of research isn't really embraced in conservative eastern Montana. Official growth policy in the county that had the big fire explicitly opposes President Biden's 2021 executive order on climate change. Mike DeVries is chief of the volunteer fire department in Denton, the town of 200 that was burned over a couple of Decembers ago.
MIKE DEVRIES: I mean, I grew up in Montana, and I know we've been through droughts. I don't know that people just attribute it to one thing.
BOLTON: But DeVries acknowledges that fire was well outside the norm.
DEVRIES: That was by far the most active and unbelievable year that we'd ever had.
BOLTON: Anika Peila with Montana's state fire agency is trying to help people better prepare their homes for fires. She says it's a tougher sell out here than in more forested parts of the state.
ANIKA PEILA: You can blame climate change, the drought, whatever you want to blame, but it ultimately starts with people's homes.
BOLTON: Peila will make suggestions for property owners, like shifting to metal roofs and less flammable building materials or cutting back trees and shrubs near their home. But there's been little interest so far.
PEILA: I feel like that's people's beauty. That's people's paradise.
BOLTON: But Josh Poser, who lost his house in the December fire, is still living with his family in a camper. He takes the threat of another wildfire more seriously now. Standing inside the unfinished walls of the new home he hopes to finish this fall, he says they are building in a more fire-resilient way to avoid losing their home again.
POSER: There will be concrete siding, metal roof. Before, we had - everything was wood - wood windows, wood siding, wood everything. So it was a recipe for disaster.
BOLTON: Those are exactly the kind of changes state fire managers would like to see more people in the Great Plains make. They're hoping others will be more likely to do the same if they see their neighbor do it first.
For NPR News, I'm Aaron Bolton in Denton, Mont.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
|
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Climate change is increasing the fire risk on the mostly treeless Great Plains
A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
Climate change is increasing the fire risk on the mostly treeless Great Plains. Montana Public Radio's Aaron Bolton reports on efforts to get prairie dwellers to adapt to the new reality.
AARON BOLTON, BYLINE: Homebuilder Josh Poser lives in the small town of Denton, surrounded by the grasslands of eastern Montana. The last thing he thought he'd be doing is fighting a wildfire in December, but that's exactly what happened a couple of years ago as 7
|
0-mile-an-hour winds pushed flames across 10,000 acres.
JOSH POSER: Late that night, you know, we're putting some embers out in the yard and sprinkler on the roof, and they had patrols going all over the place.
BOLTON: Overnight, flames consumed Poser's house and 24 others. Don Pyrah is with Montana's state fire agency. He says firefighters were quickly overwhelmed because, unusually, there was no snow on the ground in December, and it was way too warm.
DON PYRAH: And it was 56 degrees in the middle of the night. That's not normal.
BOLTON: Researchers say the warming climate means more dry Decembers and a lot less snow cover across the Great Plains, meaning a lot more fire risk during a typically windier time of the year. University of Florida researcher Victoria Donovan led a 2017 study that found fire activity on the Great Plains has increased by 3 1/2 times in recent decades. She says that a century of fire suppression has also allowed more trees and woody vegetation to grow, making fires more intense.
VICTORIA DONOVAN: There's a lot more opportunities for these wildfires to occur and also for them to be a lot more destructive.
BOLTON: That kind of research isn't really embraced in conservative eastern Montana. Official growth policy in the county that had the big fire explicitly opposes President Biden's 2021 executive order on climate change. Mike DeVries is chief of the volunteer fire department in Denton, the town of 200 that was burned over a couple of Decembers ago.
MIKE DEVRIES: I mean, I grew up in Montana, and I know we've been through droughts. I don't know that people just attribute it to one thing.
BOLTON: But DeVries acknowledges that fire was well outside the norm.
DEVRIES: That was by far the most active and unbelievable year that we'd ever had.
BOLTON: Anika Peila with Montana's state fire agency is trying to help people better prepare their homes for fires. She says it's a tougher sell out here than in more forested parts of the state.
ANIKA PEILA: You can blame climate change, the drought, whatever you want to blame, but it ultimately starts with people's homes.
BOLTON: Peila will make suggestions for property owners, like shifting to metal roofs and less flammable building materials or cutting back trees and shrubs near their home. But there's been little interest so far.
PEILA: I feel like that's people's beauty. That's people's paradise.
BOLTON: But Josh Poser, who lost his house in the December fire, is still living with his family in a camper. He takes the threat of another wildfire more seriously now. Standing inside the unfinished walls of the new home he hopes to finish this fall, he says they are building in a more fire-resilient way to avoid losing their home again.
POSER: There will be concrete siding, metal roof. Before, we had - everything was wood - wood windows, wood siding, wood everything. So it was a recipe for disaster.
BOLTON: Those are exactly the kind of changes state fire managers would like to see more people in the Great Plains make. They're hoping others will be more likely to do the same if they see their neighbor do it first.
For NPR News, I'm Aaron Bolton in Denton, Mont.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
|
Building on the global boom in viral surveillance during the pandemic, U.K. scientists on Tuesday unveiled an initiative to expand sequencing of the common seasonal respiratory bugs that have received comparatively little attention.
The Respiratory Virus & Microbiome Initiative, launched and funded by the Wellcome Sanger Institute, will track the evolution not just of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes Covid-19, but also other coronaviruses, different flu families, RSV, and other pathogens that typically just cause the sniffles but collectively lead to waves of illness every year. Researchers hope the initiative will enable them to better monitor viruses in the U.K. as they change, alert them to any worrisome mutations, and get tipped to the emergence of new viruses.
“The ability to track and look for these events early is obviously something that’s really important,” said Ewan Harrison, the head of the initiative.
The program, a collaboration with the U.K. Health Security Agency and other scientists, hopes to generate tons of data for academics and public health officials to use in their work, and also aims to “supercharge” research that could ultimately lead to the development of vaccines and therapeutics, Harrison said. It’s also simply about better understanding these viruses. While flu has attracted lots of research over the years, some of the other bugs — like rhinovirus or adenovirus — are not as well-monitored. Scientists don’t even understand their transmission dynamics all that well, he said.
Viral sequencing exploded during the pandemic, with global efforts helping detect variants like Delta and Omicron (and all the Omicron sublineages) and guiding response strategies. A major moment in the pandemic was when, in early January 2020, scientists publicly released the genome of the virus, which allowed responders around the world to start developing diagnostic tests and served as a starter’s pistol for vaccine development. From there, scientists shared millions of sequences on public trackers.
More recently, the number of Covid infections being sequenced has collapsed as much of the world has moved past the emergency phase — a trend public health officials globally have lamented.
It’s not just the detection of major new variants that sequencing can enable. Sequencing viruses can help scientists track routes of transmission, whether in a hospital or from country to country. When combined with lab studies or epidemiological research, it can answer questions about the virus’s basic biology, whether the virus is becoming more transmissible, or whether the impact of an infection is changing — like how the Delta variant seemed to cause more severe disease. It’s also a tool that can help track how well vaccines are holding up against evolving viruses.
Expanding routine sequencing is the type of research that could come in handy with other viruses. In the United States, for example, experts are trying to figure out why an anticipated wave of a rare polio-like condition that can occur after an infection with a common enterovirus never materialized last fall, despite a surge of those enterovirus infections. Researchers are exploring the virus’ genome to see if it changed in some way.
The new initiative is designed to build an infrastructure that becomes part of routine viral surveillance, but also one that can be deployed during the next epidemic or pandemic, Harrison said. During the pandemic, researchers got their first experience with sequencing data helping inform responses to a public health crisis.
“It’s now something we now think is really important to build upon,” Harrison said.
As the team develops the techniques and tools they’ll use in their project, one goal is to keep it as low-cost as possible, with the idea that other research teams around the world could adopt such protocols. All of their methods and computational software will be made freely available.
“Sequencing know-how is incredibly widespread now, so I think the opportunity for this to happen globally is there,” said Judith Breuer, a professor of virology at University College London and one of the researchers involved in the new program.
Get your daily dose of health and medicine every weekday with STAT’s free newsletter Morning Rounds. Sign up here.
Create a display name to comment
This name will appear with your comment
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Building on the global boom in viral surveillance during the pandemic, U.K. scientists on Tuesday unveiled an initiative to expand sequencing of the common seasonal respiratory bugs that have received comparatively little attention.
The Respiratory Virus & Microbiome Initiative, launched and funded by the Wellcome Sanger Institute, will track the evolution not just of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes Covid-19, but also other coronaviruses, different flu families, RSV, and other pathogens that typically just cause the sniffles but collectively lead to waves of illness every year. Researchers hope the initiative will enable them to better monitor viruses in the U.K. as
|
they change, alert them to any worrisome mutations, and get tipped to the emergence of new viruses.
“The ability to track and look for these events early is obviously something that’s really important,” said Ewan Harrison, the head of the initiative.
The program, a collaboration with the U.K. Health Security Agency and other scientists, hopes to generate tons of data for academics and public health officials to use in their work, and also aims to “supercharge” research that could ultimately lead to the development of vaccines and therapeutics, Harrison said. It’s also simply about better understanding these viruses. While flu has attracted lots of research over the years, some of the other bugs — like rhinovirus or adenovirus — are not as well-monitored. Scientists don’t even understand their transmission dynamics all that well, he said.
Viral sequencing exploded during the pandemic, with global efforts helping detect variants like Delta and Omicron (and all the Omicron sublineages) and guiding response strategies. A major moment in the pandemic was when, in early January 2020, scientists publicly released the genome of the virus, which allowed responders around the world to start developing diagnostic tests and served as a starter’s pistol for vaccine development. From there, scientists shared millions of sequences on public trackers.
More recently, the number of Covid infections being sequenced has collapsed as much of the world has moved past the emergency phase — a trend public health officials globally have lamented.
It’s not just the detection of major new variants that sequencing can enable. Sequencing viruses can help scientists track routes of transmission, whether in a hospital or from country to country. When combined with lab studies or epidemiological research, it can answer questions about the virus’s basic biology, whether the virus is becoming more transmissible, or whether the impact of an infection is changing — like how the Delta variant seemed to cause more severe disease. It’s also a tool that can help track how well vaccines are holding up against evolving viruses.
Expanding routine sequencing is the type of research that could come in handy with other viruses. In the United States, for example, experts are trying to figure out why an anticipated wave of a rare polio-like condition that can occur after an infection with a common enterovirus never materialized last fall, despite a surge of those enterovirus infections. Researchers are exploring the virus’ genome to see if it changed in some way.
The new initiative is designed to build an infrastructure that becomes part of routine viral surveillance, but also one that can be deployed during the next epidemic or pandemic, Harrison said. During the pandemic, researchers got their first experience with sequencing data helping inform responses to a public health crisis.
“It’s now something we now think is really important to build upon,” Harrison said.
As the team develops the techniques and tools they’ll use in their project, one goal is to keep it as low-cost as possible, with the idea that other research teams around the world could adopt such protocols. All of their methods and computational software will be made freely available.
“Sequencing know-how is incredibly widespread now, so I think the opportunity for this to happen globally is there,” said Judith Breuer, a professor of virology at University College London and one of the researchers involved in the new program.
Get your daily dose of health and medicine every weekday with STAT’s free newsletter Morning Rounds. Sign up here.
Create a display name to comment
This name will appear with your comment
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What's killing the swans in Swansea? Officials finally have an answer.
SWANSEA — Avian flu, also called bird flu, was the cause behind a cluster of deaths among the town’s swans, officials reported on Thursday.
Last month, Swansea’s animal control officer began monitoring a cluster of swans who were found dead in the town. Many of them turned up in the Compton’s Corner area of the Cole River in Ocean Grove. Animal Control Officer Lisa White notified the Massachusetts Division of Wildlife and Fisheries and sent some of the dead swans in for third-party testing.
In total, 24 swans and one goose have now died from the outbreak.
On Thursday, the town announced results from testing done by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), the National Wildlife Health Center and Tufts that said six dead swans and one good tested positive for Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza, or HPIA.
“At this time, there have been no reports of Avian flu detected in humans or domestic livestock in Swansea or Bristol County,” the announcement read in part.
What is Avian flu? Is it dangerous to humans?
Avian flu, also called “bird flu,” is a common strain of influenza that is most commonly carried by waterbirds and is most dangerous for poultry like chickens and turkeys.
Avian flu is highly contagious among birds but is not commonly seen in humans. While rare, it can spread from birds to humans through saliva, nasal secretion and feces, according to the CDC.
"Human infections with bird flu viruses are rare but can occur, usually after close contact with infected birds," the CDC says on its website.
Most songbirds or other birds found in the yard, like cardinals, robins, sparrows, blue jays, crows, or pigeons, do not usually carry bird flu viruses that can impact people or poultry, the CDC says. It is also rare, although technically possible, for the virus to spread to animals such as foxes or cats who eat infected birds.
According to the CDC, Avian flu has been detected in around 6,500 wild birds in the U.S. since January of last year, the first time the virus has been seen in the country since 2016. The virus has mostly impacted poultry, with more than 58 million poultry animals infected since January of 2022.
Since the current outbreak among U.S. birds began, only one case of a person infected with Avian flu has been found, in New Mexico.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has reported cases of HPAI in wild birds in several other counties in Massachusetts this year including Barnstable, Plymouth, Norfolk, Essex, Hamden and Worcester counties. The swans in Swansea are the first birds in Bristol County to be found to be suffering from the virus.
What should Swansea residents do about dead swans?
The town is advising that residents who have domestic flocks take care to not expose their birds to the virus through contaminated shoes, clothing or equipment and to keep wild waterbirds away from their flock.
Residents should also avoid contact with birds as much as possible, the town said.
“The Town of Swansea will continue to work with our state and federal partners to monitor bird activity in the area and, if needed, conduct further testing,” Board of Selectmen Chairman Christopher R. Carreiro said in the town’s statement. “We would like to strongly reiterate that at this time we have had no reports of Avian flu detected in any residents or their domestic livestock, however, we urge community members to exercise extreme caution and not interact with any wild birds.”
What to do if you find a dead bird
If you find a deceased bird in Swansea: call Animal Control Officer Lisa White at 508-679-6446.
If the bird is domestic: call MDAR Animal Health at 617-626-1795, or use the online Poultry Disease Reporting Form.
If the bird is wild: call MDFG Fisheries and Wildlife (MassWildlife) at 508-389-6300.
For more information about Avian flu from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, click here.
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What's killing the swans in Swansea? Officials finally have an answer.
SWANSEA — Avian flu, also called bird flu, was the cause behind a cluster of deaths among the town’s swans, officials reported on Thursday.
Last month, Swansea’s animal control officer began monitoring a cluster of swans who were found dead in the town. Many of them turned up in the Compton’s Corner area of the Cole River in Ocean Grove. Animal Control Officer Lisa White notified the Massachusetts Division of Wildlife and Fisheries and sent some of the dead swans in for third-party testing.
In total, 24 swans
|
and one goose have now died from the outbreak.
On Thursday, the town announced results from testing done by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), the National Wildlife Health Center and Tufts that said six dead swans and one good tested positive for Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza, or HPIA.
“At this time, there have been no reports of Avian flu detected in humans or domestic livestock in Swansea or Bristol County,” the announcement read in part.
What is Avian flu? Is it dangerous to humans?
Avian flu, also called “bird flu,” is a common strain of influenza that is most commonly carried by waterbirds and is most dangerous for poultry like chickens and turkeys.
Avian flu is highly contagious among birds but is not commonly seen in humans. While rare, it can spread from birds to humans through saliva, nasal secretion and feces, according to the CDC.
"Human infections with bird flu viruses are rare but can occur, usually after close contact with infected birds," the CDC says on its website.
Most songbirds or other birds found in the yard, like cardinals, robins, sparrows, blue jays, crows, or pigeons, do not usually carry bird flu viruses that can impact people or poultry, the CDC says. It is also rare, although technically possible, for the virus to spread to animals such as foxes or cats who eat infected birds.
According to the CDC, Avian flu has been detected in around 6,500 wild birds in the U.S. since January of last year, the first time the virus has been seen in the country since 2016. The virus has mostly impacted poultry, with more than 58 million poultry animals infected since January of 2022.
Since the current outbreak among U.S. birds began, only one case of a person infected with Avian flu has been found, in New Mexico.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has reported cases of HPAI in wild birds in several other counties in Massachusetts this year including Barnstable, Plymouth, Norfolk, Essex, Hamden and Worcester counties. The swans in Swansea are the first birds in Bristol County to be found to be suffering from the virus.
What should Swansea residents do about dead swans?
The town is advising that residents who have domestic flocks take care to not expose their birds to the virus through contaminated shoes, clothing or equipment and to keep wild waterbirds away from their flock.
Residents should also avoid contact with birds as much as possible, the town said.
“The Town of Swansea will continue to work with our state and federal partners to monitor bird activity in the area and, if needed, conduct further testing,” Board of Selectmen Chairman Christopher R. Carreiro said in the town’s statement. “We would like to strongly reiterate that at this time we have had no reports of Avian flu detected in any residents or their domestic livestock, however, we urge community members to exercise extreme caution and not interact with any wild birds.”
What to do if you find a dead bird
If you find a deceased bird in Swansea: call Animal Control Officer Lisa White at 508-679-6446.
If the bird is domestic: call MDAR Animal Health at 617-626-1795, or use the online Poultry Disease Reporting Form.
If the bird is wild: call MDFG Fisheries and Wildlife (MassWildlife) at 508-389-6300.
For more information about Avian flu from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, click here.
|
The rule of law is the political philosophy that all citizens (including leaders and lawmakers) and institutions are accountable to the same laws. It is fragile today because society is reaching peak fragility. The emotional coddling of a generation, a growing hatred of America and its founding principles, and the advent and infiltration of technology are converging to destabilize the rule of law and its ability to govern public life.
This is no accident. The ideologies that overprotect have been at work in multiple domains of life for decades. Starting in the 1970s, teachers were trained that affirming every child’s unique specialness was paramount in the classroom. Instead of focusing on scholastic rigor, Master of Education programs began to prioritize students’ emotional wellbeing, as if the knowledge that one is special sufficiently prepares a child for the real world. The prevailing philosophy holds that the world can and should be rebuilt to serve the needs of those most oppressed and marginalized. This is at odds with the concept of the rule of law, which doesn’t favor anyone.
Emotional affirmation is the job of the family. But the women’s rights movements of the 1960s and ’70s attacked the family unit, in part by encouraging women to pursue their own interests and forestall or even forgo creating and caring for families. Public education seems to believe itself responsible for picking up the emotional slack. It’s not evident, however, that saturating children in the knowledge of their unique specialness produces healthy and responsible adults capable of abiding by the rule of law.
Yet society continued to pursue fragilization. Rather than teaching children how to lose and process their emotions healthily while remaining respectful of—and even happy for—those who win, participation trophies became the norm for an entire generation. Children didn’t have to confront disappointment or learn how to examine their performance for ways to improve. And parents didn’t have to deal with children’s distress after falling short of their goals. The upshot? Arrested development all around.
Bubble-wrapping children out of a sincere but shortsighted desire to protect them from every ill doesn’t produce functional adults, it breeds entitlement and vulnerability and delays the process of cognitive and emotional maturation. Today, as a society, we seem to be experiencing an indefinite extension of adolescence. This is a problem, not least because one of the traits for which teenagers are most famous is rule-breaking. Teenage rebellion won’t topple a society when it’s limited to a phase of life, but our society is training people to engage in rebellion as a way of life and calling it social-justice activism.
The fragilization process continued with the arrival of content notes and trigger warnings. Children who never had to work through difficult feelings of failure become adults who believe that other people are supposed to protect them from ever encountering anything uncomfortable. This corrodes the idea of personal responsibility. When taken to its logical conclusion, the widespread demand for content and trigger warnings makes accountability, even from the legal system, seem incongruent with the lesson society has been teaching children for decades: someone else is responsible for your feelings.
We can trace a direct line from content warnings to “harmful words” lists and microaggression trainings in which people are trained to be afraid to say anything, including what they would intend to be compliments. In this world, impact matters and intention does not. Someone could take offense at anything and demand an apology for the impact they alone defined. Society is training us—socially and in the workplace now—to be emotionally codependent on others rather than considering why we might be so easily offended that we hear kind words as insults.
Language policing leads to the safe spaces of today’s cancel culture. Rules apply based on what you look like and whether your ideas affirm the prevailing narrative, which understands victimhood to be empowering, relativism to be liberating, and the self as the ultimate god. In order to further the idea that narrative is reality, that feelings are facts, and that the merits of an idea are based on identity, the pillars of law itself must now be questioned and found to be deficient.
Abolishing the police is not a new idea, but it resurged mightily in the wake of George Floyd’s death in May 2020. Protestors demanded the defunding of police in order to stop what they perceived to be the wanton murder of black men. The Defund The Police movement has yet to provide data in support of their claim that reducing the number of officers reduces the number of lethal-force incidents. There is evidence to suggest that the opposite is true—as progressive cities slash their police budgets, the absence of law enforcement has seen crime rise and open-air drug scenes proliferate. Sweeping statements denouncing the police as structurally racist have become so common that they are now articles of faith. And because law enforcement is frequently equated with the law itself, millions have now concluded that the law is racist.
That includes the Constitution, the document the majority of Americans once respected as the enumerator of their rights and the ultimate authority and guidance on the rule of law. A dubious revisionist-history initiative like the 1619 Project is being taught in schools, even though its central claims are hotly contested by properly qualified historians. But because feelings have become facts, equal accountability before the law is now seen as oppressive because it doesn’t permit the remaking of reality in the image of emotion. But a culture of victimhood can only conceive of personal responsibility as oppressive—it is the institutions that are racist, the social structures that are responsible for individuals’ pain. This has engendered hatred for America and a rejection of the ideals it strives to uphold. It even encourages a denial that the founding fathers ever wanted to create a country in which everyone was equal in the eyes of the law.
Both the focus on identity and the rejection of personal responsibility in favor of structural accountability undermine the rule of law. On one hand, the self must be allowed to act on whatever feeling it has in the moment and do whatever it wants to do lest it be “oppressed.” Since there are so few scenarios in which someone can do whatever they like at all times, the feeling of being oppressed becomes constant. This leads to constant rage—which is why those who believe that natural limitation or restraint are the same as persecution exhort others to “stay angry.” When this rage is turned upon the legal system as an agent of injustice rather than a structure capable of protecting the rights of every individual, it diminishes respect for the rule of law: if the law itself is oppressive, why should we want to be ruled by it?
On the other hand, the very claim that institutions and structures are the problem encourages the belief that individuals are not accountable before the law. Individuals are therefore helpless against vague but powerful systems, from which they must be liberated to “live their truth.” But an individual is powerless to create the life they desire because there are so many oppressive systems keeping them down. The more we repeat the story about structural oppression to ourselves, the more we start to see oppression everywhere, even in places it’s not. The self demands ever more power to feed its insatiable appetites, rule of law be damned, even as it points to societal structures, especially the legal system, as the reason it cannot obtain all it desires.
In a culture this fragile, this sensitized to personal failure, and this averse to difficult emotions, it is inevitable that the main object of worship will be the self. Those partaking in the worship of the self will not see it as such—they will see it as self-protection, and anything that does not accord with their narratives will be perceived as a threat. The greater the focus on the self, the more threatening everything outside of it becomes. In this paradigm, the self must be kept front and center as a matter of survival. When the self is the ultimate authority, the most egregious sin is suffering. The worst offenders, therefore, are those who either inflict suffering or impede pleasure. In the current swamp of moral relativism, what impedes pleasure can be anything from a lack of affirmation to being told “no” by reality itself. The opponents of pleasure are those who disagree, and they are not just wrong but immoral. They therefore deserve harsher social (and even legal) punishments than those they are allegedly oppressing.
It might not take more than cradle-to-grave emotional coddling to produce a generation of self-worshippers, but our culture has more to contribute to that end. Because human beings will worship something, whether it is a deity, science, or even a lack of belief in anything, the worship of self displaced something. The decline and retreat of religion has stripped Western societies of their ultimate authority. Dethroning that common understanding has left society vulnerable to moral relativism. In a society where “my truth” and “your truth” can apparently coexist even if these truths are mutually exclusive, can there be much hope for a strong rule of law?
In 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche declared that God is dead and that we had killed Him. Now that the self reigns supreme, abusing others is encouraged, even celebrated in the name of “self-care.” Cultural chauvinism blinds us to the flaws of our time and enables the belief that postmodern individuals know better than ancient peoples who didn’t have the understanding produced by the advanced technology we now enjoy. But technology is also part of the problem.
Since the late 1990s, when the Internet became available to the everyday consumer, technology has billed itself as the amoral savior of humanity. Marketers told us that we needed greater convenience in our breakneck modern lives, and that technology was the answer to that problem. But there have been costs to this shift, and it is not obvious that technology even delivered on its promise of convenience in the first place.
In the 20-plus years since technology injected itself into every aspect of the average person’s daily life, we have ceded authority from human to machine. We now believe that technology will provide the solution to every problem plaguing humanity, including the problem of our humanity. Only now, after the entrenchment of the Internet and the proliferation of personal electronic devices, are we starting to ask questions about machine-learning bias and consider the implications of the fact that the origin of all machine output is still human input.
The idea—possibly wishful—that computers are never wrong has further weakened our trust in human-made institutions and philosophies like the rule of law. As a result, our culture is hurtling into a future in which machines will rule as if a digital dictatorship will be more beneficial than the “messy” human-made systems that rely on centuries of philosophy, experimentation of different ways to run a society, and scholarly reflections on those systems through the ages. Somehow, computers are more trustworthy than all that.
The rule of self is supplanting the rule of law. Individualistic structures, we are told, must be dismantled in favor of socialistic ones, even though being “free” to live one’s individual truth is now conceptualized as the entire point of life. Any restrictions or limitations are oppressive. The rage produced by the inability to act on our feelings at every moment betrays a belief that it is our right to live without limits. A society that rejects limits even as it celebrates victimhood will see the rule of law as both too restrictive as well as oppressive.
Until the self becomes smaller in importance, it will make our world smaller and more fragile, treating everything—including that which would otherwise equalize—as a threat to its own survival. Ultimately, the rule of law flies in the face of the current cultural narrative that some people are more subject to the law than others. And so, the law, along with anything that challenges the current narrative, must be burned to the ground in favor of god only knows what.
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The rule of law is the political philosophy that all citizens (including leaders and lawmakers) and institutions are accountable to the same laws. It is fragile today because society is reaching peak fragility. The emotional coddling of a generation, a growing hatred of America and its founding principles, and the advent and infiltration of technology are converging to destabilize the rule of law and its ability to govern public life.
This is no accident. The ideologies that overprotect have been at work in multiple domains of life for decades. Starting in the 1970s, teachers were trained that affirming every child’s unique special
|
ness was paramount in the classroom. Instead of focusing on scholastic rigor, Master of Education programs began to prioritize students’ emotional wellbeing, as if the knowledge that one is special sufficiently prepares a child for the real world. The prevailing philosophy holds that the world can and should be rebuilt to serve the needs of those most oppressed and marginalized. This is at odds with the concept of the rule of law, which doesn’t favor anyone.
Emotional affirmation is the job of the family. But the women’s rights movements of the 1960s and ’70s attacked the family unit, in part by encouraging women to pursue their own interests and forestall or even forgo creating and caring for families. Public education seems to believe itself responsible for picking up the emotional slack. It’s not evident, however, that saturating children in the knowledge of their unique specialness produces healthy and responsible adults capable of abiding by the rule of law.
Yet society continued to pursue fragilization. Rather than teaching children how to lose and process their emotions healthily while remaining respectful of—and even happy for—those who win, participation trophies became the norm for an entire generation. Children didn’t have to confront disappointment or learn how to examine their performance for ways to improve. And parents didn’t have to deal with children’s distress after falling short of their goals. The upshot? Arrested development all around.
Bubble-wrapping children out of a sincere but shortsighted desire to protect them from every ill doesn’t produce functional adults, it breeds entitlement and vulnerability and delays the process of cognitive and emotional maturation. Today, as a society, we seem to be experiencing an indefinite extension of adolescence. This is a problem, not least because one of the traits for which teenagers are most famous is rule-breaking. Teenage rebellion won’t topple a society when it’s limited to a phase of life, but our society is training people to engage in rebellion as a way of life and calling it social-justice activism.
The fragilization process continued with the arrival of content notes and trigger warnings. Children who never had to work through difficult feelings of failure become adults who believe that other people are supposed to protect them from ever encountering anything uncomfortable. This corrodes the idea of personal responsibility. When taken to its logical conclusion, the widespread demand for content and trigger warnings makes accountability, even from the legal system, seem incongruent with the lesson society has been teaching children for decades: someone else is responsible for your feelings.
We can trace a direct line from content warnings to “harmful words” lists and microaggression trainings in which people are trained to be afraid to say anything, including what they would intend to be compliments. In this world, impact matters and intention does not. Someone could take offense at anything and demand an apology for the impact they alone defined. Society is training us—socially and in the workplace now—to be emotionally codependent on others rather than considering why we might be so easily offended that we hear kind words as insults.
Language policing leads to the safe spaces of today’s cancel culture. Rules apply based on what you look like and whether your ideas affirm the prevailing narrative, which understands victimhood to be empowering, relativism to be liberating, and the self as the ultimate god. In order to further the idea that narrative is reality, that feelings are facts, and that the merits of an idea are based on identity, the pillars of law itself must now be questioned and found to be deficient.
Abolishing the police is not a new idea, but it resurged mightily in the wake of George Floyd’s death in May 2020. Protestors demanded the defunding of police in order to stop what they perceived to be the wanton murder of black men. The Defund The Police movement has yet to provide data in support of their claim that reducing the number of officers reduces the number of lethal-force incidents. There is evidence to suggest that the opposite is true—as progressive cities slash their police budgets, the absence of law enforcement has seen crime rise and open-air drug scenes proliferate. Sweeping statements denouncing the police as structurally racist have become so common that they are now articles of faith. And because law enforcement is frequently equated with the law itself, millions have now concluded that the law is racist.
That includes the Constitution, the document the majority of Americans once respected as the enumerator of their rights and the ultimate authority and guidance on the rule of law. A dubious revisionist-history initiative like the 1619 Project is being taught in schools, even though its central claims are hotly contested by properly qualified historians. But because feelings have become facts, equal accountability before the law is now seen as oppressive because it doesn’t permit the remaking of reality in the image of emotion. But a culture of victimhood can only conceive of personal responsibility as oppressive—it is the institutions that are racist, the social structures that are responsible for individuals’ pain. This has engendered hatred for America and a rejection of the ideals it strives to uphold. It even encourages a denial that the founding fathers ever wanted to create a country in which everyone was equal in the eyes of the law.
Both the focus on identity and the rejection of personal responsibility in favor of structural accountability undermine the rule of law. On one hand, the self must be allowed to act on whatever feeling it has in the moment and do whatever it wants to do lest it be “oppressed.” Since there are so few scenarios in which someone can do whatever they like at all times, the feeling of being oppressed becomes constant. This leads to constant rage—which is why those who believe that natural limitation or restraint are the same as persecution exhort others to “stay angry.” When this rage is turned upon the legal system as an agent of injustice rather than a structure capable of protecting the rights of every individual, it diminishes respect for the rule of law: if the law itself is oppressive, why should we want to be ruled by it?
On the other hand, the very claim that institutions and structures are the problem encourages the belief that individuals are not accountable before the law. Individuals are therefore helpless against vague but powerful systems, from which they must be liberated to “live their truth.” But an individual is powerless to create the life they desire because there are so many oppressive systems keeping them down. The more we repeat the story about structural oppression to ourselves, the more we start to see oppression everywhere, even in places it’s not. The self demands ever more power to feed its insatiable appetites, rule of law be damned, even as it points to societal structures, especially the legal system, as the reason it cannot obtain all it desires.
In a culture this fragile, this sensitized to personal failure, and this averse to difficult emotions, it is inevitable that the main object of worship will be the self. Those partaking in the worship of the self will not see it as such—they will see it as self-protection, and anything that does not accord with their narratives will be perceived as a threat. The greater the focus on the self, the more threatening everything outside of it becomes. In this paradigm, the self must be kept front and center as a matter of survival. When the self is the ultimate authority, the most egregious sin is suffering. The worst offenders, therefore, are those who either inflict suffering or impede pleasure. In the current swamp of moral relativism, what impedes pleasure can be anything from a lack of affirmation to being told “no” by reality itself. The opponents of pleasure are those who disagree, and they are not just wrong but immoral. They therefore deserve harsher social (and even legal) punishments than those they are allegedly oppressing.
It might not take more than cradle-to-grave emotional coddling to produce a generation of self-worshippers, but our culture has more to contribute to that end. Because human beings will worship something, whether it is a deity, science, or even a lack of belief in anything, the worship of self displaced something. The decline and retreat of religion has stripped Western societies of their ultimate authority. Dethroning that common understanding has left society vulnerable to moral relativism. In a society where “my truth” and “your truth” can apparently coexist even if these truths are mutually exclusive, can there be much hope for a strong rule of law?
In 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche declared that God is dead and that we had killed Him. Now that the self reigns supreme, abusing others is encouraged, even celebrated in the name of “self-care.” Cultural chauvinism blinds us to the flaws of our time and enables the belief that postmodern individuals know better than ancient peoples who didn’t have the understanding produced by the advanced technology we now enjoy. But technology is also part of the problem.
Since the late 1990s, when the Internet became available to the everyday consumer, technology has billed itself as the amoral savior of humanity. Marketers told us that we needed greater convenience in our breakneck modern lives, and that technology was the answer to that problem. But there have been costs to this shift, and it is not obvious that technology even delivered on its promise of convenience in the first place.
In the 20-plus years since technology injected itself into every aspect of the average person’s daily life, we have ceded authority from human to machine. We now believe that technology will provide the solution to every problem plaguing humanity, including the problem of our humanity. Only now, after the entrenchment of the Internet and the proliferation of personal electronic devices, are we starting to ask questions about machine-learning bias and consider the implications of the fact that the origin of all machine output is still human input.
The idea—possibly wishful—that computers are never wrong has further weakened our trust in human-made institutions and philosophies like the rule of law. As a result, our culture is hurtling into a future in which machines will rule as if a digital dictatorship will be more beneficial than the “messy” human-made systems that rely on centuries of philosophy, experimentation of different ways to run a society, and scholarly reflections on those systems through the ages. Somehow, computers are more trustworthy than all that.
The rule of self is supplanting the rule of law. Individualistic structures, we are told, must be dismantled in favor of socialistic ones, even though being “free” to live one’s individual truth is now conceptualized as the entire point of life. Any restrictions or limitations are oppressive. The rage produced by the inability to act on our feelings at every moment betrays a belief that it is our right to live without limits. A society that rejects limits even as it celebrates victimhood will see the rule of law as both too restrictive as well as oppressive.
Until the self becomes smaller in importance, it will make our world smaller and more fragile, treating everything—including that which would otherwise equalize—as a threat to its own survival. Ultimately, the rule of law flies in the face of the current cultural narrative that some people are more subject to the law than others. And so, the law, along with anything that challenges the current narrative, must be burned to the ground in favor of god only knows what.
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Black History Month: Greenville County libraries help African Americans research genealogy
Marie Mason wants to know more about her family's roots and heritage.
The Greenville County Library System is helping residents, like Mason, get started on their own genealogical research.
On Wednesday, Mason attended an African American Genealogy event at Berea Public Library (Sarah Dobey Jones Branch).
"I am now in the stage of the elder of the family. I'm just trying to get information to our younger generation and let them know where our families come from, who we originated from and let Generation X know that we have legacies and we have families that done things and we need to be proud of our heritage," Mason said.
The African American Genealogy event is part of Greenville County libraries' Black History Month event series. Ashley Bright, librarian at The South Carolina Room, uses the series to give an introduction on how to get started on genealogy research. Bright has worked in genealogy research for 15 years. During the event, she explains which records to search, how to search through different records and presents challenges that are specific to this research.
"Everyone has a story worth telling, even if that story is hard to find," Bright said. "A lot of people struggle but it is worth it."
Here's why it's difficult for African Americans to research genealogy
There's a struggle getting information past 1865 or 1870 in research. Unless your ancestors were free prior to 1865, they wouldn't appear in the census by name until 1870, Bright said.
To find records of ancestors, people have to check unorthodox records. Dig into church records, which would include enslaved persons' christenings and records of membership, mortgage records can include enslaved people as collateral and deeds of gifts could include enslaved people as gifts and newspapers can list enslaved people for various reasons.
Despite the obstacles, Mason is determined to find out more about her ancestry.
"I think it's very important because you have to know where you come from. If you don't have a place of stability, a foundation, roots, you don't know who you are," Mason said.
At the South Carolina Room, you can Book a Librarian for an hour of individualized research assistance.
The next African American genealogy event will be Thursday, Feb. 9 at the Travelers Rest branch, and Friday, Feb. 10 at the Pelham Road location.
|
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|
Black History Month: Greenville County libraries help African Americans research genealogy
Marie Mason wants to know more about her family's roots and heritage.
The Greenville County Library System is helping residents, like Mason, get started on their own genealogical research.
On Wednesday, Mason attended an African American Genealogy event at Berea Public Library (Sarah Dobey Jones Branch).
"I am now in the stage of the elder of the family. I'm just trying to get information to our younger generation and let them know where our families come from, who we originated from and let Generation X know that we have legacies and we
|
have families that done things and we need to be proud of our heritage," Mason said.
The African American Genealogy event is part of Greenville County libraries' Black History Month event series. Ashley Bright, librarian at The South Carolina Room, uses the series to give an introduction on how to get started on genealogy research. Bright has worked in genealogy research for 15 years. During the event, she explains which records to search, how to search through different records and presents challenges that are specific to this research.
"Everyone has a story worth telling, even if that story is hard to find," Bright said. "A lot of people struggle but it is worth it."
Here's why it's difficult for African Americans to research genealogy
There's a struggle getting information past 1865 or 1870 in research. Unless your ancestors were free prior to 1865, they wouldn't appear in the census by name until 1870, Bright said.
To find records of ancestors, people have to check unorthodox records. Dig into church records, which would include enslaved persons' christenings and records of membership, mortgage records can include enslaved people as collateral and deeds of gifts could include enslaved people as gifts and newspapers can list enslaved people for various reasons.
Despite the obstacles, Mason is determined to find out more about her ancestry.
"I think it's very important because you have to know where you come from. If you don't have a place of stability, a foundation, roots, you don't know who you are," Mason said.
At the South Carolina Room, you can Book a Librarian for an hour of individualized research assistance.
The next African American genealogy event will be Thursday, Feb. 9 at the Travelers Rest branch, and Friday, Feb. 10 at the Pelham Road location.
|
Haga clic aquí para leer este artículo en español.
BOZEMAN — Buried in Montana State University’s Mark and Robyn Jones School of Nursing, right next to the campus duck pond, is a laboratory with no microscopes, no latex and no goggles. The space is called the Moyce Immigrant Health Lab, also known as Proyecto SALUD — “Scientists And Latinos United against Disparities.” In Spanish, it also means “health project.”
The lab was created by assistant professor Dr. Sally Moyce and includes an interdisciplinary group of researchers working to address health disparities in the Latino community in Gallatin County, a population that has increased dramatically in recent years. According to the census, Gallatin County saw a 138.7% increase in Latino or Hispanic residents between 2010 and 2020.
When Moyce moved to Bozeman, having worked with Latino immigrants before in Oregon and California, she saw a need.
“When I moved here, I noticed a real absence of Spanish-language services and resources,” she said in an email. “And I knew the community needed basic preventive health care and access to health services. I thought the Immigrant Health Lab could be a place where students and other researchers interested in the same things could work together to find solutions.”
Through health fairs, surveys and community advisory boards, the MSU researchers are gathering data on health needs in the Latino immigrant community.
The hope is to use the data to work with health care providers Community Health Partners and Bozeman Health, as well as other organizations in the area, to create more health awareness and access for Spanish-speaking immigrants.
“We work with [immigrant] representatives of the community to inform us, ‘What do you want us as researchers to focus on? Where do you want us to put our time, energy and resources?’” said Danika Comey, the lab’s lead researcher. “We don’t want to come in as researchers, especially white researchers, and be like, ‘Hey, we know what you guys need.’”
Carlos Medina is a community representative on the Bozeman Community Advisory Board. He and the other board members meet monthly to discuss, in Spanish, the health needs of the Latino community and report back to Comey and Moyce. Originally from Mexico, Medina and his family moved to Bozeman in 2020.
“I have five years living in the U.S., and I have seen that the Latino community is afraid to approach the hospitals due to a lot of barriers: language, culture, knowledge of rules and high insurance costs,” he said in an email. “This project is important because we help people to receive free medical and dental check-ups, and also, they have the opportunity to participate in health programs that may help them to have a better quality of life no matter what country they are from.”
The lab’s work started in 2019 with quarterly health fairs. Comey said 40 to 50 participants attend each health fair. At the fairs, Proyecto SALUD partners with Smiles Across Montana, a mobile dental clinic, which Comey said is a big draw.
“Every time we have a health fair now people are waiting before we open, and we fill up all of the dental slots within the first hour,” Comey said.
While at the fair, Comey said, the participants can get tested for diabetes and high blood pressure, get vaccines from the Gallatin City-County Health Department, and learn about the local food bank. Attendees are also given a survey — part of the lab’s data intake — which asks about their home situation, employment, comfort with English, education level and, critically, health insurance.
According to the surveys, 83% of health fair attendees do not have health insurance. Genesis Chavez, a lab volunteer who is originally from Nicaragua, said there are a variety of reasons for the lack of coverage.
“Insurance in the country is pretty expensive, and that’s not something everyone can afford. There’s so much involved in it,” Chavez said. “So if there are ways we can support and provide free health care for those that really need them, then let’s do it.”
Comey said there is a unique fear for migrants who don’t have documentation to be in the country legally.
“There’s fear as you’re going into a more bureaucratic system,” Comey said. “Are they going to report you if they find out that you are not legal to work in the United States? Are you going to face discrimination? When you get there, are the front desk staff going to roll their eyes at you when you start speaking Spanish?”
A lack of health care providers who read or speak Spanish poses another large obstacle for migrants whose first language is Spanish. Proyecto SALUD’s surveys showed that 64% of participants self-reported their ability to speak English as “poor.”
“It’s challenging throughout the whole process,” said Comey, who used to work at Bozeman Deaconess Hospital. “From the minute people walk in the door, having language barriers left and right, like even directional signs, even knowing where the office is.”
Comey said health care providers in the area are working to increase their Spanish resources, but, she said, “it’s slow.” A spokesperson from Bozeman Health said the hospital averaged “18 interpretation calls per day in Spanish” in 2022. The hospital last year began using iPads capable of translation, is working on a designated Spanish number for its call center, and awarded grants to Proyecto SALUD for the health fairs, among other efforts.
For Proyecto SALUD’s part, everything is in Spanish. Volunteers even read the surveys out loud for those who aren’t comfortable reading.
Yet another barrier to accessing health care is transportation. More than half of survey responders at health fairs said they work in construction, and many of those jobs are in Big Sky, an hour’s commute.
“If you are working, your only day off is Sunday, and you are working six days a week for 12 hours a day, you can’t go into traditional health care services,” Comey said. For that reason, health fairs are always on Sundays.
Besides the fairs, Proyecto SALUD has launched several other initiatives, in part to broaden its efforts to include mental health.
“We asked the community advisory board what their priority issue was, and they said mental health,” Moyce wrote. “So we did a root-cause analysis into the causes of poor mental health in the population and found that the lack of Spanish-speaking providers combined with a general stigma around seeking mental health care were the problems.”
To address these obstacles, the researchers are trying two different projects. One is a study involving health workers who use a technique called “motivational interviewing,” counseling that guides more than instructs and helps immigrants make changes in their own lives, mindset and health.
“That intervention, delivered over the phone, did work, so now we’re looking to secure funding to test it in a larger group,” Moyce wrote.
The other project, instituted last fall, is called Mujeres Unidas — “Women United” — and consisted of a cohort of 10 women who met regularly to learn and talk about different elements of health.
Isabel Romero, a graduate student from Peru who is working towards her masters degree in counseling at MSU, led the mental health-oriented sections of the group.
“The part that I developed was how to manage stress, and how to understand what is stress, what happens inside of our body,” Romero said. “It was basically a conversation with them.”
Romero said the informal, collaborative nature of the meetings is intentional.
“There is a lot of healing in just talking,” Romero said. “Just listening to other peoples’ stories and being able to relate to other women created a sense of community. And I have the belief that the community is the first mental health support that you will get.”
Chavez, a volunteer who was recently hired as a resource coordinator for Community Health Partners, also noted a unique challenge with mental health for some immigrants coming from South American countries.
“The reason why [some] people immigrate is because there are no opportunities where we live,” Chavez said. “So we experience so many challenges that we come here, and there’s this mindset: We should not complain because we were living in a worse situation.”
The researchers hope to continue to combat stigma and increase awareness with the Mujeres Unidas project with two more cohorts of women. They are also collecting feedback at the next health fair on what participants like and would like to see more of. That event will be held at the county fairgrounds on Sunday, Feb. 12, and the researchers are always looking for volunteers who speak Spanish.
In-depth, independent reporting on the stories impacting your community from reporters who call it home.
The Session: GOP controls the budget and lawmakers collaborate on elk management
A 14 billion dollar budget passed out of the Montana House with support from the Republican supermajority. Democrats don’t have the power to change it, but they still tried. Host Nadya Faulx and reporters Eric Dietrich, Ellis Juhlin, and Arren Kimbel-Sannit discuss the debate over how the state should spend tax dollars. The spending plan…
End of COVID emergency will usher in changes across the U.S. health system
The Biden administration’s decision to end the COVID-19 public health emergency in May will institute sweeping changes across the health care system that go far beyond many people having to pay more for COVID tests.
Henrietta Mann, “Native America Calling,” receive National Humanities Medals
Legendary Native American studies professor and historian Henrietta Mann, Cheyenne, was all smiles as she made her way into the White House for the 2021 National Humanities Medals dinner and ceremony on Tuesday afternoon. Following close behind her was Shawn Spruce, Laguna Pueblo, Jaclyn Sallee, Inupiaq, Denise Morris, Aleut, and Art Hughes of Native America Calling and Koahnic…
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Haga clic aquí para leer este artículo en español.
BOZEMAN — Buried in Montana State University’s Mark and Robyn Jones School of Nursing, right next to the campus duck pond, is a laboratory with no microscopes, no latex and no goggles. The space is called the Moyce Immigrant Health Lab, also known as Proyecto SALUD — “Scientists And Latinos United against Disparities.” In Spanish, it also means “health project.”
The lab was created by assistant professor Dr. Sally Moyce and includes an interdisciplinary group of researchers working to address health disparities in the
|
Latino community in Gallatin County, a population that has increased dramatically in recent years. According to the census, Gallatin County saw a 138.7% increase in Latino or Hispanic residents between 2010 and 2020.
When Moyce moved to Bozeman, having worked with Latino immigrants before in Oregon and California, she saw a need.
“When I moved here, I noticed a real absence of Spanish-language services and resources,” she said in an email. “And I knew the community needed basic preventive health care and access to health services. I thought the Immigrant Health Lab could be a place where students and other researchers interested in the same things could work together to find solutions.”
Through health fairs, surveys and community advisory boards, the MSU researchers are gathering data on health needs in the Latino immigrant community.
The hope is to use the data to work with health care providers Community Health Partners and Bozeman Health, as well as other organizations in the area, to create more health awareness and access for Spanish-speaking immigrants.
“We work with [immigrant] representatives of the community to inform us, ‘What do you want us as researchers to focus on? Where do you want us to put our time, energy and resources?’” said Danika Comey, the lab’s lead researcher. “We don’t want to come in as researchers, especially white researchers, and be like, ‘Hey, we know what you guys need.’”
Carlos Medina is a community representative on the Bozeman Community Advisory Board. He and the other board members meet monthly to discuss, in Spanish, the health needs of the Latino community and report back to Comey and Moyce. Originally from Mexico, Medina and his family moved to Bozeman in 2020.
“I have five years living in the U.S., and I have seen that the Latino community is afraid to approach the hospitals due to a lot of barriers: language, culture, knowledge of rules and high insurance costs,” he said in an email. “This project is important because we help people to receive free medical and dental check-ups, and also, they have the opportunity to participate in health programs that may help them to have a better quality of life no matter what country they are from.”
The lab’s work started in 2019 with quarterly health fairs. Comey said 40 to 50 participants attend each health fair. At the fairs, Proyecto SALUD partners with Smiles Across Montana, a mobile dental clinic, which Comey said is a big draw.
“Every time we have a health fair now people are waiting before we open, and we fill up all of the dental slots within the first hour,” Comey said.
While at the fair, Comey said, the participants can get tested for diabetes and high blood pressure, get vaccines from the Gallatin City-County Health Department, and learn about the local food bank. Attendees are also given a survey — part of the lab’s data intake — which asks about their home situation, employment, comfort with English, education level and, critically, health insurance.
According to the surveys, 83% of health fair attendees do not have health insurance. Genesis Chavez, a lab volunteer who is originally from Nicaragua, said there are a variety of reasons for the lack of coverage.
“Insurance in the country is pretty expensive, and that’s not something everyone can afford. There’s so much involved in it,” Chavez said. “So if there are ways we can support and provide free health care for those that really need them, then let’s do it.”
Comey said there is a unique fear for migrants who don’t have documentation to be in the country legally.
“There’s fear as you’re going into a more bureaucratic system,” Comey said. “Are they going to report you if they find out that you are not legal to work in the United States? Are you going to face discrimination? When you get there, are the front desk staff going to roll their eyes at you when you start speaking Spanish?”
A lack of health care providers who read or speak Spanish poses another large obstacle for migrants whose first language is Spanish. Proyecto SALUD’s surveys showed that 64% of participants self-reported their ability to speak English as “poor.”
“It’s challenging throughout the whole process,” said Comey, who used to work at Bozeman Deaconess Hospital. “From the minute people walk in the door, having language barriers left and right, like even directional signs, even knowing where the office is.”
Comey said health care providers in the area are working to increase their Spanish resources, but, she said, “it’s slow.” A spokesperson from Bozeman Health said the hospital averaged “18 interpretation calls per day in Spanish” in 2022. The hospital last year began using iPads capable of translation, is working on a designated Spanish number for its call center, and awarded grants to Proyecto SALUD for the health fairs, among other efforts.
For Proyecto SALUD’s part, everything is in Spanish. Volunteers even read the surveys out loud for those who aren’t comfortable reading.
Yet another barrier to accessing health care is transportation. More than half of survey responders at health fairs said they work in construction, and many of those jobs are in Big Sky, an hour’s commute.
“If you are working, your only day off is Sunday, and you are working six days a week for 12 hours a day, you can’t go into traditional health care services,” Comey said. For that reason, health fairs are always on Sundays.
Besides the fairs, Proyecto SALUD has launched several other initiatives, in part to broaden its efforts to include mental health.
“We asked the community advisory board what their priority issue was, and they said mental health,” Moyce wrote. “So we did a root-cause analysis into the causes of poor mental health in the population and found that the lack of Spanish-speaking providers combined with a general stigma around seeking mental health care were the problems.”
To address these obstacles, the researchers are trying two different projects. One is a study involving health workers who use a technique called “motivational interviewing,” counseling that guides more than instructs and helps immigrants make changes in their own lives, mindset and health.
“That intervention, delivered over the phone, did work, so now we’re looking to secure funding to test it in a larger group,” Moyce wrote.
The other project, instituted last fall, is called Mujeres Unidas — “Women United” — and consisted of a cohort of 10 women who met regularly to learn and talk about different elements of health.
Isabel Romero, a graduate student from Peru who is working towards her masters degree in counseling at MSU, led the mental health-oriented sections of the group.
“The part that I developed was how to manage stress, and how to understand what is stress, what happens inside of our body,” Romero said. “It was basically a conversation with them.”
Romero said the informal, collaborative nature of the meetings is intentional.
“There is a lot of healing in just talking,” Romero said. “Just listening to other peoples’ stories and being able to relate to other women created a sense of community. And I have the belief that the community is the first mental health support that you will get.”
Chavez, a volunteer who was recently hired as a resource coordinator for Community Health Partners, also noted a unique challenge with mental health for some immigrants coming from South American countries.
“The reason why [some] people immigrate is because there are no opportunities where we live,” Chavez said. “So we experience so many challenges that we come here, and there’s this mindset: We should not complain because we were living in a worse situation.”
The researchers hope to continue to combat stigma and increase awareness with the Mujeres Unidas project with two more cohorts of women. They are also collecting feedback at the next health fair on what participants like and would like to see more of. That event will be held at the county fairgrounds on Sunday, Feb. 12, and the researchers are always looking for volunteers who speak Spanish.
In-depth, independent reporting on the stories impacting your community from reporters who call it home.
The Session: GOP controls the budget and lawmakers collaborate on elk management
A 14 billion dollar budget passed out of the Montana House with support from the Republican supermajority. Democrats don’t have the power to change it, but they still tried. Host Nadya Faulx and reporters Eric Dietrich, Ellis Juhlin, and Arren Kimbel-Sannit discuss the debate over how the state should spend tax dollars. The spending plan…
End of COVID emergency will usher in changes across the U.S. health system
The Biden administration’s decision to end the COVID-19 public health emergency in May will institute sweeping changes across the health care system that go far beyond many people having to pay more for COVID tests.
Henrietta Mann, “Native America Calling,” receive National Humanities Medals
Legendary Native American studies professor and historian Henrietta Mann, Cheyenne, was all smiles as she made her way into the White House for the 2021 National Humanities Medals dinner and ceremony on Tuesday afternoon. Following close behind her was Shawn Spruce, Laguna Pueblo, Jaclyn Sallee, Inupiaq, Denise Morris, Aleut, and Art Hughes of Native America Calling and Koahnic…
|
A new breakthrough in treating pancreatitis | Pet Peeves
I am continually amazed at the breakthroughs in medicine occurring so frequently. In veterinary medicine, we will soon have a new treatment for pancreatitis. Pancreatitis, seen most often in older dogs, can be quite a deadly disease.
It helps to understand the mechanism of pancreatitis in the dog to fully understand the newest medicine being released for its treatment. The pancreas is an organ that is located right next to where the small intestine exits the stomach. It is situated there because the job of the pancreas is to create and release digestive enzymes that help break down the food as it leaves the stomach and travels through the small intestine. The pancreatic enzymes are especially effective in breaking down fats, sugars and proteins.
Usually, the cause of pancreatitis in dogs is dietary indiscretion. If the dog is fed a very fatty or rich meal, the pancreas goes into overdrive and releases too many enzymes, which causes the pancreatic tissue to become inflamed. That inflammation is the first step on the path to pancreatitis.
When the pancreas becomes inflamed, it triggers a group of anti-inflammatory factors called chemokines. The chemokines react to the inflammation by drawing white blood cells called neutrophils to the area. The neutrophils are supposed to help clean up the inflammation, but there are too many coming in and they release additional inflammatory mediators, causing more inflammation. This triggers the chemokines to draw in even more neutrophils. It becomes a vicious cycle. The pancreatic enzymes are damaging the pancreas. The white blood cells are attacking everything in their path. The area becomes a sterile abscess.
The new treatment for pancreatitis is called Panoquell-CA1. I believe it gets its name by combining “Pano” to represent pancreas and “quell,” which is defined as “putting an end to.” So, Panoquell-CA1 puts an end to the pancreatic inflammation. It does this by inhibiting LFA-1. LFA-1 is the antigen that is stimulated by the chemokines to draw in the white blood cell neutrophils to the pancreas.
By inhibiting LFA-1, the inflammatory response is turned off. The pancreas is not overrun with white blood cells, and it is able to quietly begin to heal.
When a pet has pancreatitis, the symptoms are vomiting, pain in the abdomen, decreased appetite, decreased activity levels and dehydration. This new medication used to treat pancreatitis uses these symptoms as an index to determine if the medication is working. The studies show a significant reduction in the clinical signs by day three of treatment. The most exciting part of this is that these pets that are treated with Panoquell-CA1 are able to stay out of the hospital. They go home during the treatment, not requiring hospitalization and intravenous fluid therapy.
Pancreatitis is a very serious disease in dogs. Sometimes we forget how bad it can be. In severe cases, it can lead to diabetes mellitus and exocrine pancreatic insufficiency. Severe cases can cause multiple organ failure and even death.
Panoquell-CA1 has been in use in Japan since 2018. There is a good bit of data for this product, and safety studies in the United States have shown this product to be extremely safe. It can be used along with conventional pancreatitis treatments and medications. Panoquell-CA1 will be available in the United States the first week of April, and the veterinary community will certainly be greatly benefitted as will any pets unlucky enough to develop a case of pancreatitis.
|
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A new breakthrough in treating pancreatitis | Pet Peeves
I am continually amazed at the breakthroughs in medicine occurring so frequently. In veterinary medicine, we will soon have a new treatment for pancreatitis. Pancreatitis, seen most often in older dogs, can be quite a deadly disease.
It helps to understand the mechanism of pancreatitis in the dog to fully understand the newest medicine being released for its treatment. The pancreas is an organ that is located right next to where the small intestine exits the stomach. It is situated there because the job of the pancreas is to create and release digestive enzymes that help break down the food as it leaves the stomach
|
and travels through the small intestine. The pancreatic enzymes are especially effective in breaking down fats, sugars and proteins.
Usually, the cause of pancreatitis in dogs is dietary indiscretion. If the dog is fed a very fatty or rich meal, the pancreas goes into overdrive and releases too many enzymes, which causes the pancreatic tissue to become inflamed. That inflammation is the first step on the path to pancreatitis.
When the pancreas becomes inflamed, it triggers a group of anti-inflammatory factors called chemokines. The chemokines react to the inflammation by drawing white blood cells called neutrophils to the area. The neutrophils are supposed to help clean up the inflammation, but there are too many coming in and they release additional inflammatory mediators, causing more inflammation. This triggers the chemokines to draw in even more neutrophils. It becomes a vicious cycle. The pancreatic enzymes are damaging the pancreas. The white blood cells are attacking everything in their path. The area becomes a sterile abscess.
The new treatment for pancreatitis is called Panoquell-CA1. I believe it gets its name by combining “Pano” to represent pancreas and “quell,” which is defined as “putting an end to.” So, Panoquell-CA1 puts an end to the pancreatic inflammation. It does this by inhibiting LFA-1. LFA-1 is the antigen that is stimulated by the chemokines to draw in the white blood cell neutrophils to the pancreas.
By inhibiting LFA-1, the inflammatory response is turned off. The pancreas is not overrun with white blood cells, and it is able to quietly begin to heal.
When a pet has pancreatitis, the symptoms are vomiting, pain in the abdomen, decreased appetite, decreased activity levels and dehydration. This new medication used to treat pancreatitis uses these symptoms as an index to determine if the medication is working. The studies show a significant reduction in the clinical signs by day three of treatment. The most exciting part of this is that these pets that are treated with Panoquell-CA1 are able to stay out of the hospital. They go home during the treatment, not requiring hospitalization and intravenous fluid therapy.
Pancreatitis is a very serious disease in dogs. Sometimes we forget how bad it can be. In severe cases, it can lead to diabetes mellitus and exocrine pancreatic insufficiency. Severe cases can cause multiple organ failure and even death.
Panoquell-CA1 has been in use in Japan since 2018. There is a good bit of data for this product, and safety studies in the United States have shown this product to be extremely safe. It can be used along with conventional pancreatitis treatments and medications. Panoquell-CA1 will be available in the United States the first week of April, and the veterinary community will certainly be greatly benefitted as will any pets unlucky enough to develop a case of pancreatitis.
|
Weak, declining lawns common in spring | Gardening
Many North Florida lawns are not looking too good this spring. Some lawns are weak, and some have dead areas that used to be alive and green. Unfortunately, this is relatively common.
Not being satisfied with the appearance of their lawn, many homeowners make matters worse by fertilizing too early. Sometimes, they are fertilizing already dead lawn grass.
All of our lawn grasses respond to daylength and temperature in order to resume growth in spring. The correct daylength happens first, slowly followed by the correct soil temperature.
Most lawns in our area begin to resume top growth (new green leaves) sometime in March, triggered by the correct daylength. However, the second trigger (warm soil) lags behind. It takes consistently warm nights to allow the root area (soil) to sufficiently warm to allow optimal root growth and subsequently efficient uptake of fertilizer. Most years, it’s not until mid-April or May before the soil warms up enough to allow the lawn roots to regrow and to efficiently take up the fertilizer. As a result, it’s best to wait until at least mid-April before applying any fertilizer to a North Florida lawn.
Fertilizing too soon, in February or March, can force new growth too soon only for that new, tender growth caused by early fertilization to be injured by the predictable last killing frost of mid-March. This weakens the lawn even more. In addition, fertilizing before the root area (soil) is sufficiently warm results in the fertilizer quickly leaching. And, fertilizer elements such as iron and potassium remain poorly available to lawn roots under cool soil conditions. Finally, during the transition from winter to spring, the lawn is attempting to grow a new root system. These young, tender roots are easily burned by early fertilizer applications.
Regardless of the cause, weak, declining areas within lawns are slow to recover in spring. Cool soil temperatures don’t allow rapid root regeneration in spring. Consistently warmer nights allow soil temperatures to warm, which will improve turf root growth, nutrient availability and lawn recovery. But this is a gradual process, not a quick recovery.
If your lawn has not made significant improvement by late spring or early summer, it may be time to consider replanting those dead, declining areas. And, take time to learn how to correctly manage a Florida lawn. But whatever you do, don’t continue to follow lawn maintenance practices that do not work in Florida and that contribute to your lawn’s demise.
Here is a link to a UF/IFAS Extension publication on Best Management Practices for a Florida lawn: edis.ifas.ufl.edu/ep236. Call 850-689-5850 to have a copy mailed to you.
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Weak, declining lawns common in spring | Gardening
Many North Florida lawns are not looking too good this spring. Some lawns are weak, and some have dead areas that used to be alive and green. Unfortunately, this is relatively common.
Not being satisfied with the appearance of their lawn, many homeowners make matters worse by fertilizing too early. Sometimes, they are fertilizing already dead lawn grass.
All of our lawn grasses respond to daylength and temperature in order to resume growth in spring. The correct daylength happens first, slowly followed by the correct soil temperature.
Most lawns in our area begin to resume
|
top growth (new green leaves) sometime in March, triggered by the correct daylength. However, the second trigger (warm soil) lags behind. It takes consistently warm nights to allow the root area (soil) to sufficiently warm to allow optimal root growth and subsequently efficient uptake of fertilizer. Most years, it’s not until mid-April or May before the soil warms up enough to allow the lawn roots to regrow and to efficiently take up the fertilizer. As a result, it’s best to wait until at least mid-April before applying any fertilizer to a North Florida lawn.
Fertilizing too soon, in February or March, can force new growth too soon only for that new, tender growth caused by early fertilization to be injured by the predictable last killing frost of mid-March. This weakens the lawn even more. In addition, fertilizing before the root area (soil) is sufficiently warm results in the fertilizer quickly leaching. And, fertilizer elements such as iron and potassium remain poorly available to lawn roots under cool soil conditions. Finally, during the transition from winter to spring, the lawn is attempting to grow a new root system. These young, tender roots are easily burned by early fertilizer applications.
Regardless of the cause, weak, declining areas within lawns are slow to recover in spring. Cool soil temperatures don’t allow rapid root regeneration in spring. Consistently warmer nights allow soil temperatures to warm, which will improve turf root growth, nutrient availability and lawn recovery. But this is a gradual process, not a quick recovery.
If your lawn has not made significant improvement by late spring or early summer, it may be time to consider replanting those dead, declining areas. And, take time to learn how to correctly manage a Florida lawn. But whatever you do, don’t continue to follow lawn maintenance practices that do not work in Florida and that contribute to your lawn’s demise.
Here is a link to a UF/IFAS Extension publication on Best Management Practices for a Florida lawn: edis.ifas.ufl.edu/ep236. Call 850-689-5850 to have a copy mailed to you.
|
About 60 per cent of the food in our supermarket trolleys is “ultraprocessed”. But what exactly is the difference between processed and ultraprocessed?
The level of food processing is a continuum. Unprocessed food has little to no intervention – a bag of potatoes, for instance.
Processed foods use techniques such as freezing and drying to preserve the shelf-life of food – a tin of fish.
Ultraprocessed foods use advanced food manufacturing – extrusion, hydrogenation, hydrolysis and sensory-enhancing processes such as bulking, aerating and foaming. Think Pringles.
First Look: New south Co Dublin restaurant with wood-fired grills, Sunday roasts and inventive cocktails
There is one crucial difference between processed and ultraprocessed, and it is an economic one. Food is ultraprocessed not only to extend shelf life, but to make it “hyperpalatable”. In essence, you know if you are eating an ultraprocessed food if it delivers a taste bomb in your mouth at the same time your hand is reaching for the next one, always with a vague feeling of never quite getting enough of it.
[ Ireland's obesity crisis has reached epidemic proportions, says WHO ]
The era of ultraprocessing has led to a Cambrian explosion of food tastes and textures. The problem is that it works too well. The food tastes too good, and it is too cheap, too available, too efficient and too convenient. We now know that ultraprocessed foods have uniquely harmful effects on the human body, irrespective of their calorie content, and this contributes to obesity, diabetes, cancer and other health problems. This is why ultraprocessed foods are viewed by public-health actors as junk foods.
In response, the Irish Government (as well as almost every other world government) has instituted a policy of reformulation – in essence, reducing the levels of saturated fats, sugar and salt in these foods. On the face of it, this looks like a brilliant win-win: unlike other public-health policies, it has the potential also to benefit the ultraprocessed-food industry, because the focus is on changing the nutrient profile of a product rather than decreasing its overall consumption. Think Diet Coke.
Yet no ultraprocessed food manufacturer has decreased its overall output.
So where does this increasing food pile go?
In one of the most cited works in history, Garrett Hardin asked the reader to imagine a field that was open to all, a commons. Each herder would try to put as many cattle as possible on this commons, because they get a direct benefit from their own animals grazing, and suffer only a postponed cost from when their own and others’ cattle overgraze and the commons deteriorates. In other words, each herder is motivated to add more and more animals because they get a direct advantage from their own animals, but the herder carries only a small and delayed cost that arises from overgrazing.
Hardin sums up the situation of the commons with these words: “Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit – in a world that is limited.”
What is public health if not a biological commons? It is a limited and shared resource. Limited because there are only so many calories our bodies can take in without negative effects. Shared because, while many individuals are not sick, it is easy to see that the population is. We have many population illnesses – heart disease, obesity, alcoholism, tobacco, depression, gambling – and if they don’t affect your individual body, they affect your social body: your family, your hospital, your community, your workplace, your prisons, your next generation.
In our case, one can see how junk-food manufacturers compete for a shared but limited common pasture on which to graze. The population’s body is open to all junk-food companies, which compete intensely for a share of it. Each junk-food manufacturer acts rationally – they know there is only so much ultraprocessed food we can eat. But it is a logic shared by dozens of other competitors, encouraging a limitless production on a commons that is limited.
An interesting aspect of any commons dilemma, from traffic congestion to the nuclear-arms race, is that once individuals become aware that others are exploiting the commons, they are more likely to increase their own exploitation of it. This phenomenon is known as stimulated exploitation. Observing the success of competitors’ ultraprocessed foods in the market place is likely to spur competitor efforts to create even more hyperpalatable but nutritionally empty products.
Have you seen the bread aisle in the supermarket recently? Count how many bread brands have branched into lines of pancakes, brioches and flapjacks. Look at how every cereal manufacturer now has product extensions in breakfast bars, granolas and sweet spreads. Breads and cereals are biscuitised, dairy is dessertised, vegetables are crispified.
There is growing awareness of corporate practices such as greenwashing, pinkwashing, wokewashing, and leanwashing. This happens where a veneer of corporate social responsibility is applied intentionally to mask business as usual, deflecting attention towards visible but ultimately superficial changes in corporate agendas. “X-washing” is the intent to cynically deceive, manipulate, and aggressively persuade stakeholders.
In spite of this, we have not met a single food producer who wishes for their consumers to be ill. None of them wake up in the morning hoping to make a child overweight.
The junk-food industry ardently believes its efforts to tackle the obesity crisis are genuine, commensurate with the scale of the problem and well-intentioned. This psychology might be better understood as “leanwishing”– the use of corporate responsibility practices by the food industry with the sincere hope that these will reverse the obesity crisis and protect their customers from the harmful effects of their products.
We have been constantly losing the battle with the drivers of obesity in Ireland over the past 30 years. We need a more objective measurement tool – a ratio which compares the scale, scope and speed of food-industry reformulation against the scale, scope and speed of formulation, namely the creation of new products, product-line extensions, flavours, delivery channels, snacking occasions and portion sizes. We need to stop the mass infiltration of healthy food with ultraprocessed-food variations.
There is a world of difference between stabilising the extremely high prevalence of being overweight in Ireland and reversing it. Reversing it means accepting that obesity is as much about overproduction as it is about overconsumption. In order to reverse obesity, we must enclose and protect the biological commons using taxation, advertising legislation, channel restriction, plain packaging and mandatory reformulation, simultaneously.
The crisis of overproduction requires a more empathetic response to ultraprocessed food manufacturers too. They are currently obliged to engage in two contradictory actions: to increase production and reduce consumption. If a food manufacturer changed its entire product portfolio to protect the biological commons, they would be utterly foolish: a dozen other manufacturers would just race in to fill the void.
Effective policies to protect the commons would come as a welcome relief to junk food manufacturers, who currently have inadequate solutions at their disposal to limit their overgrazing.
Dr Norah Campbell is an associate professor of marketing at Trinity Business School; Dr Sarah Browne is an assistant professor of marketing at Trinity Business School; Dr Marius Claudy is associate professor of marketing at UCD School of Business; Kathryn Reilly is policy manager with the Irish Heart Foundation; Prof Francis Finucane is consultant endocrinologist at Galway University Hospitals and honorary full professor in medicine at University of Galway
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About 60 per cent of the food in our supermarket trolleys is “ultraprocessed”. But what exactly is the difference between processed and ultraprocessed?
The level of food processing is a continuum. Unprocessed food has little to no intervention – a bag of potatoes, for instance.
Processed foods use techniques such as freezing and drying to preserve the shelf-life of food – a tin of fish.
Ultraprocessed foods use advanced food manufacturing – extrusion, hydrogenation, hydrolysis and sensory-enhancing processes such as bulking, aerating and foaming. Think Pringles.
First Look: New south Co Dublin restaurant with
|
wood-fired grills, Sunday roasts and inventive cocktails
There is one crucial difference between processed and ultraprocessed, and it is an economic one. Food is ultraprocessed not only to extend shelf life, but to make it “hyperpalatable”. In essence, you know if you are eating an ultraprocessed food if it delivers a taste bomb in your mouth at the same time your hand is reaching for the next one, always with a vague feeling of never quite getting enough of it.
[ Ireland's obesity crisis has reached epidemic proportions, says WHO ]
The era of ultraprocessing has led to a Cambrian explosion of food tastes and textures. The problem is that it works too well. The food tastes too good, and it is too cheap, too available, too efficient and too convenient. We now know that ultraprocessed foods have uniquely harmful effects on the human body, irrespective of their calorie content, and this contributes to obesity, diabetes, cancer and other health problems. This is why ultraprocessed foods are viewed by public-health actors as junk foods.
In response, the Irish Government (as well as almost every other world government) has instituted a policy of reformulation – in essence, reducing the levels of saturated fats, sugar and salt in these foods. On the face of it, this looks like a brilliant win-win: unlike other public-health policies, it has the potential also to benefit the ultraprocessed-food industry, because the focus is on changing the nutrient profile of a product rather than decreasing its overall consumption. Think Diet Coke.
Yet no ultraprocessed food manufacturer has decreased its overall output.
So where does this increasing food pile go?
In one of the most cited works in history, Garrett Hardin asked the reader to imagine a field that was open to all, a commons. Each herder would try to put as many cattle as possible on this commons, because they get a direct benefit from their own animals grazing, and suffer only a postponed cost from when their own and others’ cattle overgraze and the commons deteriorates. In other words, each herder is motivated to add more and more animals because they get a direct advantage from their own animals, but the herder carries only a small and delayed cost that arises from overgrazing.
Hardin sums up the situation of the commons with these words: “Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit – in a world that is limited.”
What is public health if not a biological commons? It is a limited and shared resource. Limited because there are only so many calories our bodies can take in without negative effects. Shared because, while many individuals are not sick, it is easy to see that the population is. We have many population illnesses – heart disease, obesity, alcoholism, tobacco, depression, gambling – and if they don’t affect your individual body, they affect your social body: your family, your hospital, your community, your workplace, your prisons, your next generation.
In our case, one can see how junk-food manufacturers compete for a shared but limited common pasture on which to graze. The population’s body is open to all junk-food companies, which compete intensely for a share of it. Each junk-food manufacturer acts rationally – they know there is only so much ultraprocessed food we can eat. But it is a logic shared by dozens of other competitors, encouraging a limitless production on a commons that is limited.
An interesting aspect of any commons dilemma, from traffic congestion to the nuclear-arms race, is that once individuals become aware that others are exploiting the commons, they are more likely to increase their own exploitation of it. This phenomenon is known as stimulated exploitation. Observing the success of competitors’ ultraprocessed foods in the market place is likely to spur competitor efforts to create even more hyperpalatable but nutritionally empty products.
Have you seen the bread aisle in the supermarket recently? Count how many bread brands have branched into lines of pancakes, brioches and flapjacks. Look at how every cereal manufacturer now has product extensions in breakfast bars, granolas and sweet spreads. Breads and cereals are biscuitised, dairy is dessertised, vegetables are crispified.
There is growing awareness of corporate practices such as greenwashing, pinkwashing, wokewashing, and leanwashing. This happens where a veneer of corporate social responsibility is applied intentionally to mask business as usual, deflecting attention towards visible but ultimately superficial changes in corporate agendas. “X-washing” is the intent to cynically deceive, manipulate, and aggressively persuade stakeholders.
In spite of this, we have not met a single food producer who wishes for their consumers to be ill. None of them wake up in the morning hoping to make a child overweight.
The junk-food industry ardently believes its efforts to tackle the obesity crisis are genuine, commensurate with the scale of the problem and well-intentioned. This psychology might be better understood as “leanwishing”– the use of corporate responsibility practices by the food industry with the sincere hope that these will reverse the obesity crisis and protect their customers from the harmful effects of their products.
We have been constantly losing the battle with the drivers of obesity in Ireland over the past 30 years. We need a more objective measurement tool – a ratio which compares the scale, scope and speed of food-industry reformulation against the scale, scope and speed of formulation, namely the creation of new products, product-line extensions, flavours, delivery channels, snacking occasions and portion sizes. We need to stop the mass infiltration of healthy food with ultraprocessed-food variations.
There is a world of difference between stabilising the extremely high prevalence of being overweight in Ireland and reversing it. Reversing it means accepting that obesity is as much about overproduction as it is about overconsumption. In order to reverse obesity, we must enclose and protect the biological commons using taxation, advertising legislation, channel restriction, plain packaging and mandatory reformulation, simultaneously.
The crisis of overproduction requires a more empathetic response to ultraprocessed food manufacturers too. They are currently obliged to engage in two contradictory actions: to increase production and reduce consumption. If a food manufacturer changed its entire product portfolio to protect the biological commons, they would be utterly foolish: a dozen other manufacturers would just race in to fill the void.
Effective policies to protect the commons would come as a welcome relief to junk food manufacturers, who currently have inadequate solutions at their disposal to limit their overgrazing.
Dr Norah Campbell is an associate professor of marketing at Trinity Business School; Dr Sarah Browne is an assistant professor of marketing at Trinity Business School; Dr Marius Claudy is associate professor of marketing at UCD School of Business; Kathryn Reilly is policy manager with the Irish Heart Foundation; Prof Francis Finucane is consultant endocrinologist at Galway University Hospitals and honorary full professor in medicine at University of Galway
|
In a first, viewers on Earth got a chance to see Mars nearly in real time.
The European Space Agency streamed on YouTube historic live images directly from the red planet.
The event celebrated the 20th anniversary of the launch of the agency’s Mars Express orbiter — a mission to take three-dimensional images of the planet’s surface to see it in more complete detail.
“Normally, we see images from Mars and know that they were taken days before,” said James Godfrey, spacecraft operations manager at ESA’s mission control center in Darmstadt, Germany, in a statement. “I’m excited to see Mars as it is now — as close to a martian ‘now’ as we can possibly get!”
But haven’t we seen images of Mars before? Yes, but not live, the ESA said.
Often data and observations of the red planet are taken when a spacecraft is not in direct contact with Earth, so the images are stored until they can be sent back, ESA said.
Depending on where Mars and Earth are in their orbits around the sun, the messages that journey through space can take anywhere from 3 to 22 minutes.
The ESA had estimated it would take about 17 minutes for the light needed to form the images to travel directly from Mars to Earth and then another minute to get through the wires and servers on the ground to get the live stream started, the agency said.
“Note, we’ve never tried anything like this before, so exact travel times for signals on the ground remain a little uncertain,” the agency said in a statement prior to the event.
No stars were visible in the background of the images because Mars is quite bright, noted Colin Wilson, a project scientist at ESA.
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In a first, viewers on Earth got a chance to see Mars nearly in real time.
The European Space Agency streamed on YouTube historic live images directly from the red planet.
The event celebrated the 20th anniversary of the launch of the agency’s Mars Express orbiter — a mission to take three-dimensional images of the planet’s surface to see it in more complete detail.
“Normally, we see images from Mars and know that they were taken days before,” said James Godfrey, spacecraft operations manager at ESA’s mission control center in Darmstadt, Germany, in a statement. “I’m excited to see Mars as it is
|
now — as close to a martian ‘now’ as we can possibly get!”
But haven’t we seen images of Mars before? Yes, but not live, the ESA said.
Often data and observations of the red planet are taken when a spacecraft is not in direct contact with Earth, so the images are stored until they can be sent back, ESA said.
Depending on where Mars and Earth are in their orbits around the sun, the messages that journey through space can take anywhere from 3 to 22 minutes.
The ESA had estimated it would take about 17 minutes for the light needed to form the images to travel directly from Mars to Earth and then another minute to get through the wires and servers on the ground to get the live stream started, the agency said.
“Note, we’ve never tried anything like this before, so exact travel times for signals on the ground remain a little uncertain,” the agency said in a statement prior to the event.
No stars were visible in the background of the images because Mars is quite bright, noted Colin Wilson, a project scientist at ESA.
|
The holy month of Ramadan begins for Muslims in Delaware
Ramadan, the holy month of Islam, begins Wednesday, March 22, at sundown for Delaware's Muslim community.
Here's what to know about the most important month of one of the largest and fastest-growing religions in the world.
What is Ramadan?
Ramadan is a monthlong observance dedicated to the celebration of the Quran and the strengthening of Muslims' relationship with God. In the Islamic faith, it is believed that during the holy month of Ramadan, the Prophet Muhammad was given the Quran, the holy book of Islam, and was revealed as a prophet to spread the messages and teachings of God.
Ramadan is the ninth month of the Islamic calendar. Since the calendar is connected to the lunar cycles, the beginning of Ramadan is celebrated around 10 to 12 days earlier every year. Ramadan ends with the holy holiday of Eid al-Fitr, which will fall on April 21.
It is predicted that in 2030 there will be two Ramadans, which hasn't occurred since 1997.
How is Ramadan celebrated?
Throughout the month Muslim individuals fast from sunup to sundown, abstaining from eating, drinking and other indulgences. A breaking of the fast occurs twice daily during Ramadan.
Dr. Naveed Baqir, executive director of the Delaware Council on Global and Muslim Affairs, spoke about what the practice of fasting means for those who celebrate Ramadan. According to Baqir, a major part of fasting is understanding the struggle of those who are less fortunate while also attaining righteousness as a community.
More:'If I'm walking up 10 flights of stairs, it's hard to not take a sip of water': A Ramadan day
"It creates a sense of elevated consciousness that allows us to become more conscious about our actions, how we deal with people and attempt to create an improvement," Baqir said.
Suhoor is the meal eaten before sunrise and iftar is eaten after sundown. Usually, the meals shared during this time are halal, meaning they don't contain certain ingredients that are not permissible under Islamic law such as pork products or alcohol.
It is not just food or drink that is abstained from during Ramadan. Any action that could be considered indulgent or harmful such as cursing or smoking is typically avoided during this time.
Nightly prayers, called Tarawih, are also a part of Ramadan celebrations. A portion of the Quran is recited in prayer each night, with the idea that by the end of the holy month, the practicing individual will have recited the entire holy book.
Meals and prayers are typically held in communal settings. In a post-pandemic world, this means even more to Baqir.
"In this day and age when we have issues with isolation, having daily iftar dinners with a community ... is a welcome break from all of that," Baqir said.
More:The Ramadan Kitchen Diary: Saying goodbye to Ramadan with a special treat
Ramadan ends with the holy day of Eid al-Fitr, which translates to "the feast of the breaking of the fast.”
During Eid, Muslims are advised to wear their nicest clothes and engage in morning prayer, which is usually held outdoors; the giving of gifts; and spending time with loved ones.
Islam is the second-largest and fastest-growing religion with almost 2 billion followers worldwide. According to the World Population Review, the United States has a total of around 3.5 million practicing Muslims. Delaware has one of the highest populations of Muslim people in the country, with an estimated 793 Muslims per 100,000 residents.
School districts around Delaware are implementing ways to acknowledge and celebrate Ramadan into their classrooms and curriculums. Recently, Christina School District began offering halal meal options for Muslim students and Ramadan accommodations. Eid al-Fitr will also be celebrated as a holiday for the entire school district starting next year.
Contact Molly McVety at <email-pii>. Follow her on Twitter @mollymcvety.
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The holy month of Ramadan begins for Muslims in Delaware
Ramadan, the holy month of Islam, begins Wednesday, March 22, at sundown for Delaware's Muslim community.
Here's what to know about the most important month of one of the largest and fastest-growing religions in the world.
What is Ramadan?
Ramadan is a monthlong observance dedicated to the celebration of the Quran and the strengthening of Muslims' relationship with God. In the Islamic faith, it is believed that during the holy month of Ramadan, the Prophet Muhammad was given the Quran, the holy book of Islam, and was revealed as a prop
|
het to spread the messages and teachings of God.
Ramadan is the ninth month of the Islamic calendar. Since the calendar is connected to the lunar cycles, the beginning of Ramadan is celebrated around 10 to 12 days earlier every year. Ramadan ends with the holy holiday of Eid al-Fitr, which will fall on April 21.
It is predicted that in 2030 there will be two Ramadans, which hasn't occurred since 1997.
How is Ramadan celebrated?
Throughout the month Muslim individuals fast from sunup to sundown, abstaining from eating, drinking and other indulgences. A breaking of the fast occurs twice daily during Ramadan.
Dr. Naveed Baqir, executive director of the Delaware Council on Global and Muslim Affairs, spoke about what the practice of fasting means for those who celebrate Ramadan. According to Baqir, a major part of fasting is understanding the struggle of those who are less fortunate while also attaining righteousness as a community.
More:'If I'm walking up 10 flights of stairs, it's hard to not take a sip of water': A Ramadan day
"It creates a sense of elevated consciousness that allows us to become more conscious about our actions, how we deal with people and attempt to create an improvement," Baqir said.
Suhoor is the meal eaten before sunrise and iftar is eaten after sundown. Usually, the meals shared during this time are halal, meaning they don't contain certain ingredients that are not permissible under Islamic law such as pork products or alcohol.
It is not just food or drink that is abstained from during Ramadan. Any action that could be considered indulgent or harmful such as cursing or smoking is typically avoided during this time.
Nightly prayers, called Tarawih, are also a part of Ramadan celebrations. A portion of the Quran is recited in prayer each night, with the idea that by the end of the holy month, the practicing individual will have recited the entire holy book.
Meals and prayers are typically held in communal settings. In a post-pandemic world, this means even more to Baqir.
"In this day and age when we have issues with isolation, having daily iftar dinners with a community ... is a welcome break from all of that," Baqir said.
More:The Ramadan Kitchen Diary: Saying goodbye to Ramadan with a special treat
Ramadan ends with the holy day of Eid al-Fitr, which translates to "the feast of the breaking of the fast.”
During Eid, Muslims are advised to wear their nicest clothes and engage in morning prayer, which is usually held outdoors; the giving of gifts; and spending time with loved ones.
Islam is the second-largest and fastest-growing religion with almost 2 billion followers worldwide. According to the World Population Review, the United States has a total of around 3.5 million practicing Muslims. Delaware has one of the highest populations of Muslim people in the country, with an estimated 793 Muslims per 100,000 residents.
School districts around Delaware are implementing ways to acknowledge and celebrate Ramadan into their classrooms and curriculums. Recently, Christina School District began offering halal meal options for Muslim students and Ramadan accommodations. Eid al-Fitr will also be celebrated as a holiday for the entire school district starting next year.
Contact Molly McVety at <email-pii>. Follow her on Twitter @mollymcvety.
|
Zero-emissions agriculture is still years away, farmers and scientists say as food systems are set to come under the spotlight at this year's global climate summit.
- Food systems will be a key focus for the first time at global climate conference COP28
- Agriculture is deeply affected by climate change but also produces significant greenhouse gas emissions
- Farmers say food and fibre emissions are hard to cut back
Food production has largely been overlooked in the 30 years since world leaders first agreed to cut greenhouse gas emissions and halt climate change.
But agriculture will be on the agenda like never before when delegates meet at the United Nations climate conference COP28.
Host country the United Arab Emirates is drumming up support for a leaders' declaration on resilient and sustainable food systems, and climate action.
A day dedicated to discussing food, agriculture, and water will also be on the host's agenda for the first time.
Agriculture is deeply affected by climate change, bearing the brunt of increasingly extreme weather.
But it is also a significant producer of greenhouse gas emissions — with methane from livestock and carbon from land clearing the leading sources.
Extreme weather impact
"Agriculture is the sector in the world that is most affected by climate change," CEO of Farmers for Climate Action Natalie Collard said.
"In an era of climate change, repeat fires, floods, droughts, are sending insurance costs through the roof.
"But also, the fine art of farming successfully has got harder for every single Australian farmer."
Most sectors within agriculture have lost about 20 per cent productivity over the past 20 years due to climate change.
That's about $30,000 per farm, according to federal Agriculture Minister Murray Watt, who has launched consultation to produce a net zero plan for agriculture.
"Farmers are some of the frontline victims of the same thing that we're part of causing," Tammi Jonas, a pig producer and the president of the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance, said.
"That interplay between causing those things and being a victim of those things puts farming in a unique position in climate change."
Cutting farm emissions
About 17 per cent of Australia's greenhouse gas emissions come from food and fibre production — and that share is set to increase as other industries decarbonise.
While alternative technologies are being developed in other sectors, agriculture is struggling to keep up.
Researchers are looking for ways to reduce the methane that ferments in a cow or sheep's stomach — their rumen — and is then belched into the atmosphere.
Methane is a short-lived but powerful greenhouse gas.
"It's quite likely that we won't ever be producing cattle that don't produce any methane," Jared Greenville, the executive director of the federal agriculture and water research body ABARES, said.
"We might have good technology that can help lower that amount, but at this stage with our technology it doesn't seem to be the case."
National Farmers' Federation president David Jochinke is leading a delegation of Australian producers headed for COP28.
He said Australia was leading the world in climate-friendly food production and should not be the target of international policies.
"We want to make sure we can still produce food in a sustainable way, but we're not going to cut our arms off in doing so," Mr Jochinke said.
"There are a lot of technologies and techniques out there that have been adopted already.
"But we also want to acknowledge that there is a limited amount that we can do, when it's dry or when we've got the soil types that we have, to be able to decarbonise."
Time to change what we eat?
The IPCC, the world's peak climate science advisory panel, has said global meat and dairy production needs to be cut back to reduce emissions.
But Richard Eckard, a professor of sustainable agriculture at the University of Melbourne, said the world had only just begun to explore how to curb livestock emissions.
"I'm a big believer in technology," Professor Eckard said.
"Before we go down the track of radical change to diets, I believe we haven't really given technology its full chance to solve the problem.
"The rumen of an animal took 50 million years to evolve to a steady state and we decided 20 years ago this was a problem we needed to change."
He said dedicated research programs were needed to approach the problem "seriously".
"If in 10 years' time [after] giving it 10 years of concentrated funding we still can't eliminate the methane from, say, the extensive cattle industry — well then, we have to think again," he said.
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Zero-emissions agriculture is still years away, farmers and scientists say as food systems are set to come under the spotlight at this year's global climate summit.
- Food systems will be a key focus for the first time at global climate conference COP28
- Agriculture is deeply affected by climate change but also produces significant greenhouse gas emissions
- Farmers say food and fibre emissions are hard to cut back
Food production has largely been overlooked in the 30 years since world leaders first agreed to cut greenhouse gas emissions and halt climate change.
But agriculture will be on the agenda like never before when delegates meet at the United Nations climate conference CO
|
P28.
Host country the United Arab Emirates is drumming up support for a leaders' declaration on resilient and sustainable food systems, and climate action.
A day dedicated to discussing food, agriculture, and water will also be on the host's agenda for the first time.
Agriculture is deeply affected by climate change, bearing the brunt of increasingly extreme weather.
But it is also a significant producer of greenhouse gas emissions — with methane from livestock and carbon from land clearing the leading sources.
Extreme weather impact
"Agriculture is the sector in the world that is most affected by climate change," CEO of Farmers for Climate Action Natalie Collard said.
"In an era of climate change, repeat fires, floods, droughts, are sending insurance costs through the roof.
"But also, the fine art of farming successfully has got harder for every single Australian farmer."
Most sectors within agriculture have lost about 20 per cent productivity over the past 20 years due to climate change.
That's about $30,000 per farm, according to federal Agriculture Minister Murray Watt, who has launched consultation to produce a net zero plan for agriculture.
"Farmers are some of the frontline victims of the same thing that we're part of causing," Tammi Jonas, a pig producer and the president of the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance, said.
"That interplay between causing those things and being a victim of those things puts farming in a unique position in climate change."
Cutting farm emissions
About 17 per cent of Australia's greenhouse gas emissions come from food and fibre production — and that share is set to increase as other industries decarbonise.
While alternative technologies are being developed in other sectors, agriculture is struggling to keep up.
Researchers are looking for ways to reduce the methane that ferments in a cow or sheep's stomach — their rumen — and is then belched into the atmosphere.
Methane is a short-lived but powerful greenhouse gas.
"It's quite likely that we won't ever be producing cattle that don't produce any methane," Jared Greenville, the executive director of the federal agriculture and water research body ABARES, said.
"We might have good technology that can help lower that amount, but at this stage with our technology it doesn't seem to be the case."
National Farmers' Federation president David Jochinke is leading a delegation of Australian producers headed for COP28.
He said Australia was leading the world in climate-friendly food production and should not be the target of international policies.
"We want to make sure we can still produce food in a sustainable way, but we're not going to cut our arms off in doing so," Mr Jochinke said.
"There are a lot of technologies and techniques out there that have been adopted already.
"But we also want to acknowledge that there is a limited amount that we can do, when it's dry or when we've got the soil types that we have, to be able to decarbonise."
Time to change what we eat?
The IPCC, the world's peak climate science advisory panel, has said global meat and dairy production needs to be cut back to reduce emissions.
But Richard Eckard, a professor of sustainable agriculture at the University of Melbourne, said the world had only just begun to explore how to curb livestock emissions.
"I'm a big believer in technology," Professor Eckard said.
"Before we go down the track of radical change to diets, I believe we haven't really given technology its full chance to solve the problem.
"The rumen of an animal took 50 million years to evolve to a steady state and we decided 20 years ago this was a problem we needed to change."
He said dedicated research programs were needed to approach the problem "seriously".
"If in 10 years' time [after] giving it 10 years of concentrated funding we still can't eliminate the methane from, say, the extensive cattle industry — well then, we have to think again," he said.
|
One of the most fascinating examples of a large-scale transformation programme is the ‘great leap forward’ introduced by Mao Zedong in communist China in the late 1950s.
Mao was frustrated at the slow pace of China’s development and was determined to accelerate it. One of his key priorities was to increase grain production. To help with this, he introduced a campaign urging everyone in China to kill sparrows.
Sparrows were thought to consume 2kg of grain a year each, so Mao reasoned that every sparrow less would mean 2kg more grain that he could export to earn valuable foreign currency.
Nests were destroyed, eggs were smashed, chicks were killed. Millions of volunteers formed into groups, banging pots and pans under sparrows’ nests so they couldn’t rest and would eventually drop dead from exhaustion.
The campaign was remarkably effective. Within a few months, sparrows had all but disappeared from the Chinese countryside.
The problem was that, as well as eating grain, the sparrows had also been eating all the locusts and other insects that would otherwise have been attacking the crops.
As the sparrow population dwindled, the insect population surged, wreaking havoc in the grain fields: instead of a surplus, China found itself struggling with a shortage.
And this is where the story gets really dark.
Because it was such a priority to increase grain production, local party officials were under pressure to deliver ever-higher quotas. The rewards for reporting the biggest increases were spectacular – including the chance to meet Mao himself – while the penalties for failure were brutal.
As a result, officials competed with each other to report production figures that were up to ten times higher than reality. Delighted by the apparent success of his policies, Mao struck a series of deals to export grain to other countries.
In order to meet these export commitments, the officials were now required to deliver the ‘surplus’ they had reported. Grain stores all over the country were ransacked, leaving the people who had picked it to starve to death. Only when the stench of rotting corpses became too great to hide did the truth begin to emerge.
Some 30 million people are now known to have died in the Great Chinese Famine. Mao remained in power, but was edged aside from economic affairs. The reforms of the ‘great leap forward’ were quietly shut down. And 250,000 sparrows were imported from the Soviet Union to begin rebalancing China’s ecology.
What conclusion should we draw from this? That ambitious transformation projects are doomed to fail? Not necessarily – although KPMG estimates that 70% of major transformational change projects don’t work.
For me, there are two big lessons.
First: simple solutions to complex problems are always attractive, but there’s usually a reason why no-one’s tried them before. So, before you kill all the sparrows, spend a bit of time thinking about what will happen next.
Second: be honest about failure. Most change doesn’t work first time, however much you may want it to. If you incentivise people to pretend it’s working when it isn’t, you won’t be able to fix it until it’s too late.
|
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|
One of the most fascinating examples of a large-scale transformation programme is the ‘great leap forward’ introduced by Mao Zedong in communist China in the late 1950s.
Mao was frustrated at the slow pace of China’s development and was determined to accelerate it. One of his key priorities was to increase grain production. To help with this, he introduced a campaign urging everyone in China to kill sparrows.
Sparrows were thought to consume 2kg of grain a year each, so Mao reasoned that every sparrow less would mean 2kg more grain that he could export to earn valuable foreign currency.
Nests
|
were destroyed, eggs were smashed, chicks were killed. Millions of volunteers formed into groups, banging pots and pans under sparrows’ nests so they couldn’t rest and would eventually drop dead from exhaustion.
The campaign was remarkably effective. Within a few months, sparrows had all but disappeared from the Chinese countryside.
The problem was that, as well as eating grain, the sparrows had also been eating all the locusts and other insects that would otherwise have been attacking the crops.
As the sparrow population dwindled, the insect population surged, wreaking havoc in the grain fields: instead of a surplus, China found itself struggling with a shortage.
And this is where the story gets really dark.
Because it was such a priority to increase grain production, local party officials were under pressure to deliver ever-higher quotas. The rewards for reporting the biggest increases were spectacular – including the chance to meet Mao himself – while the penalties for failure were brutal.
As a result, officials competed with each other to report production figures that were up to ten times higher than reality. Delighted by the apparent success of his policies, Mao struck a series of deals to export grain to other countries.
In order to meet these export commitments, the officials were now required to deliver the ‘surplus’ they had reported. Grain stores all over the country were ransacked, leaving the people who had picked it to starve to death. Only when the stench of rotting corpses became too great to hide did the truth begin to emerge.
Some 30 million people are now known to have died in the Great Chinese Famine. Mao remained in power, but was edged aside from economic affairs. The reforms of the ‘great leap forward’ were quietly shut down. And 250,000 sparrows were imported from the Soviet Union to begin rebalancing China’s ecology.
What conclusion should we draw from this? That ambitious transformation projects are doomed to fail? Not necessarily – although KPMG estimates that 70% of major transformational change projects don’t work.
For me, there are two big lessons.
First: simple solutions to complex problems are always attractive, but there’s usually a reason why no-one’s tried them before. So, before you kill all the sparrows, spend a bit of time thinking about what will happen next.
Second: be honest about failure. Most change doesn’t work first time, however much you may want it to. If you incentivise people to pretend it’s working when it isn’t, you won’t be able to fix it until it’s too late.
|
Mosquitoes carrying the West Nile virus (WNV) were detected in Boston for the first time this year.
The Department of Public Health confirmed that the virus was found in a mosquito sample collected July 6 in Brookline.
“We often find the first evidence of WNV in mosquitoes at about this time every year,” said DPH Commissioner Robert Goldstein.
There were 10 human cases of the virus in 2022. No human or animal cases have been detected so far this year.
West Nile virus is usually transmitted to humans through the bite of an infected mosquito. While it can infect people of all ages, people over the age of 50 are at higher risk for severe disease. Most people infected with the virus will have no symptoms. When present, symptoms tend to include fever and a flu-like illness. In rare cases, more severe illness can occur.
“With the recent rain and the warmer weather, mosquito populations will increase and we will start to see more of them carrying WNV,” said state epidemiologist Catherine M. Brown. She suggested several steps that could reduce potential exposure to the virus:
Avoid mosquito bites
Apply insect repellent when outdoors. Use a repellent with an EPA-registered ingredient Be aware that repellent products should not be used on infants under two months of age and should be used in concentrations of 30 percent or less on older children. Oil of lemon eucalyptus should not be used on children under three years of age.
Be aware of peak mosquito hours
The hours from dusk to dawn are peak biting times for many mosquitoes. Consider rescheduling outdoor activities that occur during evening or early morning in areas of high risk.
Clothing can help reduce mosquito bites
Wearing long sleeves, long pants and socks when outdoors will help keep mosquitoes away from your skin.
Mosquito-proof your home
Drain standing water, as mosquitoes lay their eggs there and check to see where water might pool in areas around your home, like unused flowerpots or wading pools. If you have a birdbath, change the water frequently. Keep mosquitoes outside by having tightly fitting screens on all of your windows and doors.
Protect your animals
Make sure you drain any containers or troughs your animals use on a regular basis. Water troughs especially provide excellent mosquito breeding habitats and should be flushed out at least once a week during the summer months to reduce mosquitoes near paddock areas. Horse owners should keep horses in indoor stalls at night to reduce their risk of exposure to mosquitoes. Talk to your vet about animal-approved mosquito repellents, and any vaccinations that are available to protect your pets or livestock.
|
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Mosquitoes carrying the West Nile virus (WNV) were detected in Boston for the first time this year.
The Department of Public Health confirmed that the virus was found in a mosquito sample collected July 6 in Brookline.
“We often find the first evidence of WNV in mosquitoes at about this time every year,” said DPH Commissioner Robert Goldstein.
There were 10 human cases of the virus in 2022. No human or animal cases have been detected so far this year.
West Nile virus is usually transmitted to humans through the bite of an infected mosquito. While it can infect people of all ages, people
|
over the age of 50 are at higher risk for severe disease. Most people infected with the virus will have no symptoms. When present, symptoms tend to include fever and a flu-like illness. In rare cases, more severe illness can occur.
“With the recent rain and the warmer weather, mosquito populations will increase and we will start to see more of them carrying WNV,” said state epidemiologist Catherine M. Brown. She suggested several steps that could reduce potential exposure to the virus:
Avoid mosquito bites
Apply insect repellent when outdoors. Use a repellent with an EPA-registered ingredient Be aware that repellent products should not be used on infants under two months of age and should be used in concentrations of 30 percent or less on older children. Oil of lemon eucalyptus should not be used on children under three years of age.
Be aware of peak mosquito hours
The hours from dusk to dawn are peak biting times for many mosquitoes. Consider rescheduling outdoor activities that occur during evening or early morning in areas of high risk.
Clothing can help reduce mosquito bites
Wearing long sleeves, long pants and socks when outdoors will help keep mosquitoes away from your skin.
Mosquito-proof your home
Drain standing water, as mosquitoes lay their eggs there and check to see where water might pool in areas around your home, like unused flowerpots or wading pools. If you have a birdbath, change the water frequently. Keep mosquitoes outside by having tightly fitting screens on all of your windows and doors.
Protect your animals
Make sure you drain any containers or troughs your animals use on a regular basis. Water troughs especially provide excellent mosquito breeding habitats and should be flushed out at least once a week during the summer months to reduce mosquitoes near paddock areas. Horse owners should keep horses in indoor stalls at night to reduce their risk of exposure to mosquitoes. Talk to your vet about animal-approved mosquito repellents, and any vaccinations that are available to protect your pets or livestock.
|
Messages in bottle found in Cotuit may be from World War II POWs held on Cape Cod
COTUIT — A day of landscaping turned into a voyage of historical discovery for Shane Adams last week. Adams was working at a property in the Point Isabella neighborhood of Cotuit when he stumbled upon a half-buried bottle on a hillside near the water's edge.
There were messages inside the bottle. Adams peered through the glass, trying to decipher them.
"There were three or four little notes," he said, some of them written on cardboard from a Quaker rice box.
"I saw German names and a date of 1944 and it said something like 'prisoner of war,'" said Adams. He could see the names of Johann Huppertz, Andreas Wollny and Lothar Gernert.
Realizing he had something that might hold historical value, Adams, of Marstons Mills, left the fragile notes in the bottle and brought it to the Historical Society of Santuit & Cotuit.
The society's administrator and archivist Amy Johnson was intrigued by the find. She wondered if the note might somehow be associated with the World War II-era training area in Cotuit known as Camp Can Do It, where troops learned techniques of amphibious warfare.
Johnson also thought the bottle might make a dandy historical exhibit, "once we research more of its provenance," she said.
Many Cape Codders might be surprised to learn that there was a sizeable population of German World War II prisoners of war (POWs) housed at Camp Edwards, located on Joint Base Cape Cod on the Upper Cape.
According to a Camp Edwards history published by the Massachusetts National Guard, "shortly after the Allies' North African campaign began in 1944, the U.S. Army built a prisoner of war (POW) camp for captured German soldiers at Camp Edwards. The POW camp, located at the south end of the runway, housed up to 2,000 POWs at a given time, many of whom were from Rommel's famed Afrika Korps."
Military:Soldiers' memories shape National Guard history at Joint Base Cape Cod
And the POWs didn't spend all their time at the base. According to the Massachusetts National Guard, "the prisoners worked around Camp Edwards much of the time, but were also sent to work in the area's farms and cranberry fields. German prisoners also assisted in salvaging millions of board-feet of lumber after the Otis (air base) vicinity was devastated by a hurricane in September 1944 … by the end of the war, the camp had received, processed and repatriated up to 5,000 POWs."
Joseph Yukna, co-founder of the Cape Cod Military Museum, thinks Adams' discovery could be the real deal.
"It all fits the narrative and history that I'm aware of," he said.
Yukna said that German POWs were involved in the demolition of Camp Can Do It after amphibious training ceased at the Cotuit site. "They tore down all the buildings and warehouses."
More:Hope floats: Man who launched a message in a bottle found in France says more are out there
He also wondered if the messages in the bottle might be more of a time capsule; buried in the hillside for posterity as opposed to launching it into the water.
Adams, who found the bottle, hopes it might be possible to get word of the messages to families of the German POWs. He said the discovery has made him reflect on the dangerous and turbulent World War II era.
"It made me think about how tough men had it in the 1940s," he said.
Contact Eric Williams at <email-pii>. Follow him on Twitter: @capecast
Stay connected with Cape Cod news, sports, restaurants and breaking news.Download our free app.
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Messages in bottle found in Cotuit may be from World War II POWs held on Cape Cod
COTUIT — A day of landscaping turned into a voyage of historical discovery for Shane Adams last week. Adams was working at a property in the Point Isabella neighborhood of Cotuit when he stumbled upon a half-buried bottle on a hillside near the water's edge.
There were messages inside the bottle. Adams peered through the glass, trying to decipher them.
"There were three or four little notes," he said, some of them written on cardboard from a Quaker rice box.
"I saw German names and a date of
|
1944 and it said something like 'prisoner of war,'" said Adams. He could see the names of Johann Huppertz, Andreas Wollny and Lothar Gernert.
Realizing he had something that might hold historical value, Adams, of Marstons Mills, left the fragile notes in the bottle and brought it to the Historical Society of Santuit & Cotuit.
The society's administrator and archivist Amy Johnson was intrigued by the find. She wondered if the note might somehow be associated with the World War II-era training area in Cotuit known as Camp Can Do It, where troops learned techniques of amphibious warfare.
Johnson also thought the bottle might make a dandy historical exhibit, "once we research more of its provenance," she said.
Many Cape Codders might be surprised to learn that there was a sizeable population of German World War II prisoners of war (POWs) housed at Camp Edwards, located on Joint Base Cape Cod on the Upper Cape.
According to a Camp Edwards history published by the Massachusetts National Guard, "shortly after the Allies' North African campaign began in 1944, the U.S. Army built a prisoner of war (POW) camp for captured German soldiers at Camp Edwards. The POW camp, located at the south end of the runway, housed up to 2,000 POWs at a given time, many of whom were from Rommel's famed Afrika Korps."
Military:Soldiers' memories shape National Guard history at Joint Base Cape Cod
And the POWs didn't spend all their time at the base. According to the Massachusetts National Guard, "the prisoners worked around Camp Edwards much of the time, but were also sent to work in the area's farms and cranberry fields. German prisoners also assisted in salvaging millions of board-feet of lumber after the Otis (air base) vicinity was devastated by a hurricane in September 1944 … by the end of the war, the camp had received, processed and repatriated up to 5,000 POWs."
Joseph Yukna, co-founder of the Cape Cod Military Museum, thinks Adams' discovery could be the real deal.
"It all fits the narrative and history that I'm aware of," he said.
Yukna said that German POWs were involved in the demolition of Camp Can Do It after amphibious training ceased at the Cotuit site. "They tore down all the buildings and warehouses."
More:Hope floats: Man who launched a message in a bottle found in France says more are out there
He also wondered if the messages in the bottle might be more of a time capsule; buried in the hillside for posterity as opposed to launching it into the water.
Adams, who found the bottle, hopes it might be possible to get word of the messages to families of the German POWs. He said the discovery has made him reflect on the dangerous and turbulent World War II era.
"It made me think about how tough men had it in the 1940s," he said.
Contact Eric Williams at <email-pii>. Follow him on Twitter: @capecast
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Key dates in the history of Zimbabwe:- 1980: Independence -Zimbabwe is born on April 18, 1980, after 90 years as the British colony of Southern Rhodesia, which ended in a brutal seven-year war between black nationalists and white supremacists trying to prevent majority rule.Guerrilla leader Robert Mugabe becomes prime minister on a promise of reconciliation and democracy.- 1983-84: Massacres in Matabeleland -Shortly after he takes power Mugabe, seeking to establish a one-power state, deploys an elite North Korean-trained army unit to crack down on dissidents loyal to his rival Joshua Nkomo in the western Matabeleland region, the heartland of the Ndebele minority.At least 20,000 people are killed in operation “Gukurahundi”, a term in the majority Shona language, which translates loosely as “the early rain that washes away the chaff”.- 1987: Mugabe’s grip tightens -Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) and Nkomo’s Zimbabwe’s African People’s Union (ZAPU) merge to form ZANU-PF.Mugabe changes the constitution to become an executive president.- 1999: Dawn of the opposition -Trade unionist Morgan Tsvangirai founds the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) which, alongside civic groups, backs the successful “No” campaign against a constitutional referendum on land redistribution and presidential powers.- 2000: White-owned farms seized -Smarting from the referendum defeat, Mugabe gives the go-ahead for black veterans of the liberation war and ruling party activists to seize white-owned farms. Hundreds of white commercial farmers are driven off their land in the first of a series of events that precipitate a severe economic crisis. Western countries impose sanctions on Zimbabwe and donors cut aid.- 2002: Election violence -Mugabe is re-elected president in an poll marked by widespread violence and intimidation of opposition supporters. The Commonwealth suspends Zimbabwe.Five years later Tsvangirai suffers a fractured skull after being badly beaten by police in detention after being arrested as officers broke up a rally.- 2009: Unity government -In March 2008 with the economy in freefall and record hyperinflation, the opposition claims victory in presidential and parliamentary elections. The state withholds the results for a month before announcing a run-off for president between Mugabe and Tsvangirai, which the latter boycotts. Under pressure from Zimbabwe’s neighbours, Mugabe agrees to a power-sharing government with the MDC, in which Tsvangirai becomes prime minister in February 2009.- 2017: Mugabe out, Mnangagwa in -After 37 years in power Mugabe, then aged 93, is deposed in November by the army after trying to position his unpopular wife Grace as his successor. He dies two years later in Singapore.Army-backed vice president Emmerson Mnangagwa, nicknamed the “Crocodile” for his political cunning, takes over from Mugabe. He wins elections in July 2018 by a wafer-thin majority. The army kills six people after it is called in to quell demonstrations after the disputed vote.- 2019: New crackdown -Mnangagwa is accused of emulating Mugabe’s tactics in January after a brutal military crackdown on nationwide demonstrations over a doubling of fuel prices. At least 17 people are killed and hundreds injured, many from gunshot wounds.- 2022: Launch of new opposition -After splits in the largest opposition MDC, Nelson Chamisa launches a new party, the Coalition of Citizens for Change (CCC), ahead of the August 2023 election.Opposition campaigns are hampered through banned meetings and jailing of opponents by the government.
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Key dates in the history of Zimbabwe:- 1980: Independence -Zimbabwe is born on April 18, 1980, after 90 years as the British colony of Southern Rhodesia, which ended in a brutal seven-year war between black nationalists and white supremacists trying to prevent majority rule.Guerrilla leader Robert Mugabe becomes prime minister on a promise of reconciliation and democracy.- 1983-84: Massacres in Matabeleland -Shortly after he takes power Mugabe, seeking to establish a one-power state, deploys an elite North Korean-trained
|
army unit to crack down on dissidents loyal to his rival Joshua Nkomo in the western Matabeleland region, the heartland of the Ndebele minority.At least 20,000 people are killed in operation “Gukurahundi”, a term in the majority Shona language, which translates loosely as “the early rain that washes away the chaff”.- 1987: Mugabe’s grip tightens -Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) and Nkomo’s Zimbabwe’s African People’s Union (ZAPU) merge to form ZANU-PF.Mugabe changes the constitution to become an executive president.- 1999: Dawn of the opposition -Trade unionist Morgan Tsvangirai founds the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) which, alongside civic groups, backs the successful “No” campaign against a constitutional referendum on land redistribution and presidential powers.- 2000: White-owned farms seized -Smarting from the referendum defeat, Mugabe gives the go-ahead for black veterans of the liberation war and ruling party activists to seize white-owned farms. Hundreds of white commercial farmers are driven off their land in the first of a series of events that precipitate a severe economic crisis. Western countries impose sanctions on Zimbabwe and donors cut aid.- 2002: Election violence -Mugabe is re-elected president in an poll marked by widespread violence and intimidation of opposition supporters. The Commonwealth suspends Zimbabwe.Five years later Tsvangirai suffers a fractured skull after being badly beaten by police in detention after being arrested as officers broke up a rally.- 2009: Unity government -In March 2008 with the economy in freefall and record hyperinflation, the opposition claims victory in presidential and parliamentary elections. The state withholds the results for a month before announcing a run-off for president between Mugabe and Tsvangirai, which the latter boycotts. Under pressure from Zimbabwe’s neighbours, Mugabe agrees to a power-sharing government with the MDC, in which Tsvangirai becomes prime minister in February 2009.- 2017: Mugabe out, Mnangagwa in -After 37 years in power Mugabe, then aged 93, is deposed in November by the army after trying to position his unpopular wife Grace as his successor. He dies two years later in Singapore.Army-backed vice president Emmerson Mnangagwa, nicknamed the “Crocodile” for his political cunning, takes over from Mugabe. He wins elections in July 2018 by a wafer-thin majority. The army kills six people after it is called in to quell demonstrations after the disputed vote.- 2019: New crackdown -Mnangagwa is accused of emulating Mugabe’s tactics in January after a brutal military crackdown on nationwide demonstrations over a doubling of fuel prices. At least 17 people are killed and hundreds injured, many from gunshot wounds.- 2022: Launch of new opposition -After splits in the largest opposition MDC, Nelson Chamisa launches a new party, the Coalition of Citizens for Change (CCC), ahead of the August 2023 election.Opposition campaigns are hampered through banned meetings and jailing of opponents by the government.
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