Coronavirus News (270)

The Problem Is in the Internet’s Bones  It was as if the Interstate System of highways had been built using volunteer road crews, working without a map. No one present at the 1969 creation of the network that later became the internet imagined that this niche Pentagon project — built as a research tool for a small group of academic computer scientists — would one day become the backbone of the global economy. ...........   he has little patience for tech’s free-market mythmaking or for the gauzy abstractions — cloud, mobile, search, social — used to describe its products. ............  the difficulties inherent in having a global network born in and governed by America. ..............  The American government spied on its citizens and allowed the internet’s insecurities to be exploited by hackers. China, busily building up its tech infrastructure as our own system frays, is willing to take surveillance and industrial espionage even further. “This is the world that advertising capitalism has built” ............   “a world in which our expectations of any kind of private life are disappearing, and leaving us feeling disempowered against both our major corporations and our governments.” ............ Keenly aware of the intrusive track record of the national security state, Ball is reluctant to lean too hard on the government for answers. Instead, he argues, “we need to become systems thinkers” who recognize that Big Tech is only one piece of a larger whole. ................  we need to change our institutions as well as our thinking. As Ball’s evidence makes clear, a sharp power imbalance between public and private sectors is at the root of our problems. We are overdue for a systemic correction. 

Nikole Hannah-Jones of The New York Times  For a sweeping, provocative and personal essay for the ground-breaking 1619 Project, which seeks to place the enslavement of Africans at the center of America’s story, prompting public conversation about the nation’s founding and evolution. 

The Fight Over the 1619 Project Is Not About the Facts A dispute between a small group of scholars and the authors of The New York Times Magazine’s issue on slavery represents a fundamental disagreement over the trajectory of American society. ...........  they feel like they are understanding the architecture of their country in a way that they had not.” .............  The 1619 Project, named for the date of the first arrival of Africans on American soil, sought to place “the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.” Viewed from the perspective of those historically denied the rights enumerated in America’s founding documents, the story of the country’s great men necessarily looks very different. .............  whether Americans, from the Founders to the present day, are committed to the ideals they claim to revere .....................  slavery’s legacy still shapes American life ..............   If you think anti-black racism still shapes American society, then you are in agreement with the thrust of the 1619 Project ...............  Was America founded as a slavocracy, and are current racial inequities the natural outgrowth of that? Or was America conceived in liberty, a nation haltingly redeeming itself through its founding principles? ............  Americans have made less progress than they think, and in which black people continue to struggle indefinitely for rights they may never fully realize .................  “what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year.” ........... “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery” as abolitionist sentiment began rising in Britain. .............  millennia in which human slavery was accepted around the world ............ the Revolution was kindled in New England, where prewar anti-slavery sentiment was strongest .........  the original Constitution did give some ironclad protections to slavery without mentioning it.” ............  the authors’ pessimism that a majority of white people will abandon racism and work with black Americans toward a more perfect union. ............  Every essay tracing racial injustice from slavery to the present day speaks to the endurance of racial caste. And it is this profound pessimism about white America that many of the 1619 Project’s critics find most galling. ............ “the Neo-Confederate world view” that the “South actually won the Civil War by weaving itself into the fabric of post war society so it can then discredit the entire American enterprise.” ........... “anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country” .......... anti-black racism is a more intractable problem than most Americans are willing to admit. ........... “I think one would be very hard-pressed to look at the factual record from 1619 to the present of the black freedom movement and come away with any conclusion other than that most of the time, black people did not have a lot of allies in that movement,” Hannah-Jones told me. “It is not saying that black people only fought alone. It is saying that most of the time we did.” ........ something that has given a lot of black journalists and writers a chance to speak up in a really big way. So I support the 1619 Project as kind of a cultural event, ............ history is not objective .......... Both Du Bois and the Dunning School saw themselves as having reached the truth by objective means. But as a target of the Dunning School’s ideology, Du Bois understood the motives and blind spots of Dunning School scholars far better than they themselves did. .......... “We shall never have a science of history until we have in our colleges men who regard the truth as more important than the defense of the white race,” Du Bois wrote, “and who will not deliberately encourage students to gather thesis material in order to support a prejudice or buttress a lie.” ......... much of American history has been written by scholars offering ideological claims in place of rigorous historical analysis. But which claims are ideological, and which ones are objective, is not always easy to discern. 

Coronavirus News (269)

कोभिड- १९ को महामारीबीच एसिया बन्दैछ भूराजनीतिको ‘हटस्पट’ 

दैनिक आधा घण्टा पैदल हिँड्दा स्वास्थ्य लाभ 

अग्रपङ्क्तिमा काम गर्ने ७० प्रतिशतमा कुनै न कुनै किसिमको मानसिक समस्या

जसपा किन वैकल्पिक राजनीतिक शक्ति ? विश्वसमाजमा हाम्रो स्वतन्त्रता, समानता, आत्मासम्मानको रक्षा गर्न नेपाली पहिचान तथा नेपाल राज्य अपरिहार्य भइसकेको छ । नेपाल राज्यप्रति हाम्रो पनि दायित्व छ। तर, ‘नेपाली नागरिक राष्ट्रियता’ को पहिचान मात्रले हाम्रो स्वतन्त्रता, समानता र आत्मगौरव स्थापित भएन र हुँदैन । 

Anders Tegnell and the Swedish Covid experiment  The controversial epidemiologist believes lockdown is ‘using a hammer to kill a fly’. ..........  At the start of this year, Anders Tegnell was just a low-profile bureaucrat in a country of 10m people, heading a department that collects and analyses data on public health. Today, he has become one of the best known — and most controversial — figures of the global coronavirus crisis. ................  a rational approach as other countries have appeared to sacrifice science to emotion ...............  some on the American and British right have seized on Tegnell as a champion of freedoms they feel they have lost during lockdown. .............. The populist Sweden Democrats have called for him to resign after thousands of elderly in care homes died. That has given Sweden the fifth-highest death rate per capita in Europe, five times higher than neighbouring Denmark and about 10 times more than Norway and Finland...........  a bit resistant to quick fixes, to realise that this is not going to be easy, it is not going to be a short-term kind of thing ............. We see a disease that we’re going to have to handle for a long time into the future and we need to build up systems for doing that ...........   As coronavirus cases rise in pretty much all other European countries, leading to fears of a second wave including in the UK, they have been sinking all summer in Sweden. On a per capita basis, they are now 90 per cent below their peak in late June and under Norway’s and Denmark’s for the first time in five months. Tegnell had told me the first time we spoke in the spring that it would be in the autumn when it became more apparent how successful each country had been .............   Today, the architect of Sweden’s lighter-touch approach says the country will have “a low level of spread” with occasional local outbreaks. “What it will be in other countries, I think that is going to be more critical. They are likely to be more vulnerable to these kind of spikes. Those kind of things will most likely be bigger when you don’t have a level of immunity that can sort of put the brake on it” ...................    he argues immunity is at least in part responsible for the sharp recent drop in Swedish cases and questions how its neighbours will fare without it. “What is protecting Copenhagen today? We will see,” he adds  ...............  Unlike in pretty much every other country, it is not politicians who take the big decisions but Sweden’s public health agency, due to its constitution giving big powers to independent authorities. .............   The only other country not to lock down in Europe was authoritarian Belarus, I say. He erupts in a burst of nervous laughter: “That’s no comparison.” .............  his approach has been about having a strategy that can work for years if needs be, rather than the constant chopping and changing seen in the rest of Europe ................   I barely see a single person with a mask. ............ masks — which Sweden is one of the few countries not to recommend wearing in public ............... Tegnell, in a few short months, has become the most famous Swede, both at home and abroad. “It’s hype,” he says. “And it’s completely surreal.” ..................  he says his time just before that working on vaccination programmes in Laos for the World Health Organization was the most formative. “I really learned about the importance of broad thinking in public health. I think that’s also partly behind our strategy and also what the agency is doing. We are not just working with communicable diseases, we are working with public health as a whole”  ........  In June, Tegnell described the rush to lock down in the rest of Europe and the US as “it was as if the world had gone mad”. ....... Sweden, in the local vernacular, had “ice in its stomach” whereas other nations had acted emotionally ...........  Our conversation ends with Tegnell again swimming against the tide, and warning that a vaccine — if and when it comes — will not be the “silver bullet”.  

Covid World Map: Tracking the Global Outbreak  The coronavirus pandemic has sickened more than 37,560,500 people, according to official counts. As of Monday morning, at least 1,076,800 people have died, and the virus has been detected in nearly every country ........ After case numbers fell steadily in April and May, cases in the United States are growing again at about the same rapid pace as when infections were exploding in New York City in late March. But the hotspots are now mainly spread across the southern and western parts of the country. ..............   there are four factors that most likely play a role: how close you get to an infected person; how long you are near that person; whether that person expels viral droplets on or near you; and how much you touch your face afterwards. .......... Try to keep your hands away from your face unless you have just recently washed them. 

‘I Feel Like I Have Dementia’: Brain Fog Plagues Covid Survivors The condition is affecting thousands of patients, impeding their ability to work and function in daily life. ..........  After contracting the coronavirus in March, Michael Reagan lost all memory of his 12-day vacation in Paris, even though the trip was just a few weeks earlier. .............  Covid brain fog: troubling cognitive symptoms that can include memory loss, confusion, difficulty focusing, dizziness and grasping for everyday words. ............. “The impact on the work force that’s affected is going to be significant. .......... Scientists aren’t sure what causes brain fog, which varies widely and affects even people who became only mildly physically ill from Covid-19 and had no previous medical conditions. ...............  A French report in August on 120 patients who had been hospitalized found that 34 percent had memory loss and 27 percent had concentration problems months later. ..........  difficulty concentrating or focusing ............  the fourth most common symptom out of the 101 long-term and short-term physical, neurological and psychological conditions that survivors reported. Memory problems, dizziness or confusion were reported by a third or more respondents. .............    after overcoming a several-week bout with Covid-19 breathing problems and body aches. “I become almost catatonic. It feels as though I am under anesthesia.” .............. One morning, “everything in my brain was white static,” she said. “I was sitting on the edge of the bed, crying and feeling ‘something’s wrong, I should be asking for help,’ but I couldn’t remember who or what I should be asking. I forgot who I was and where I was.” ................  She resumed working in early August, but her mind wandered and reading emails was “like reading Greek” ......... In meetings, “I can’t find words,” said Mr. Reagan, who has now taken a leave. “I feel like I sound like an idiot.” ....... Inflammatory molecules, released in effective immune responses, “can also be sort of toxins, particularly to the brain” ...........  Mr. Sullivan navigates a spectrum of cognitive speed bumps. In the mildest state, which he calls “fluffy,” his head feels heavy. In the middling phase, “fuzzy,” he said, “I become angry when people talk to me because it hurts my brain to try and pay attention.” Most severe is “fog,” when “I cannot function” and “I sit and stare, unmotivated to move, my mind racing.” ............... Recently, she couldn’t even recall “toothbrush,” saying to a friend “‘You know, the thing that makes your teeth clean.’” .........  at the grocery store with his wife, he developed “full-blown fog,” gripped the cart and “wandered around the store like a zombie,” he said.