Concerns About COVID-19 in India and Mississippi, and Sharing Vaccines

 #Billy Perrigo, "India's Disaster," TIME, May24/May 31, 2021. - "The true scale of the COVID-19 surges in India is impossible to accurately quantify. Officially, confirmed daily cases are plateauing just under 400,000, but remain higher than any other country has seen during the pandemic. Experts warn that the real umbers are far bigger, and may be rising fast as the virus rips through rural India, where two-thirds of the population lives, and where the testing infrastructure is frail."

"The University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) estimates the true number of new daily infections is around 8 million --the equivalent of the entire population of New York City being infected every day. Official reports say 254,000 people have died in India since the start of the pandemic, but the IMHE estimates that the true toll is more than 750,000 --a number researchers predict will double by the end of August." 

#Michael J. Mins, "Our eyes on the virus," TIME, June 17/June 24, 2021. - "In Mississippi, for example, only 31% of the population has received at least one [vaccine] dose." "As we navigate the next chapter of the pandemic, and work our way closer to normality, it is essential that we leverage accurate and highly accessible  rapid testing to keep schools, workplaces, and travel open in the safest way possible."

"Despite national support, the U.S. has failed to adopt a robust at-home rapid testing strategy that could make these kinds of tests available to all Americans at little or no cost to them."

#Gregg Gonvalses, "Sharing the Vaccine," The Nation, 5.31 - 6.7.2021. - "Luckily, $16 billion is sitting unused in the US Treasury right now, appropriated in the American Rescue Act for vaccine-related efforts just like this." "We are at the start of a race to vaccine the entire world, and there are larger tasks to accomplish -- particularly a massive tech transfer and industrial scale-up. The effort to vaccine as many people as we can, as the virus tries to outpace us, is the most urgent global priority of our time."

"The Biden Administration did the truly unexpected. Bucking the gigantic pharmaceutical lobby in Washington, it sided with low- and middle-income countries (LIMICs) by supporting a waiver provision to the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) that would set aside some intellectual property rights in order to expand the production of COVID-19 vaccines, which are now manufactured primarily by only a handful of companies in the world's richest nation."

#Katie Engelhart, "Home and Alone," The New Yorker, May 31, 2021. - "Older people are more likely to live alone in the United States than in most other places in the world. Nearly thirty per cent of Americans over sixty-five live by themselves, most of them women -- forty-three per cent of Americans over sixty-five identify as lonely." 

"Research from the A.A.R.P. and Stanford University has found that social isolation adds nearly seven billion dollars a year to the total cost of Medicare, in part because isolated people show up to the hospital sicker and stay longer."

"Robots are increasingly being used to win the affinity of a human. For robots to win this affinity, "it doesn't have to seem real; real enough will do." "If some experts worry about robots being inadequate caregivers, others fear that older people will come to prefer certain kinds of care from a machine. And then what might we lose?"

Robots have advanced to the point that they can "determine how 'adventurous' a person is, then adjusts how often it suggests new activities."

"In 'A Biography of Loneliness,' from 2019, the historian Fay Bound Albert writes that 'concern about loneliness among the aged... is a manifestation of broader concerns about an aging population in the West, and considerable anxiety over how that population will be supported in an individualistic age when families are often dispersed.' "

"The 1965 Older Americans Act (O.A.A.), is a lesser-known part of President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. At the time, around  thirty per cent of elderly Americans were living in poverty. (Today, around nine per cent are.)"

#Wes Moore, (CEO of Robin Hood), "Implement universal housing vouchers," TIME, May 24/May 31, 2021. - "Millions of American families faced a housing emergency even before the COVID-19 crisis, with over 11 million households spending over 50% of their income on rent, according to the Urban Institute." "When low income families receive housing vouchers, data shows that they are less likely to experience food insecurity, be separated from their children, and experience domestic violence."

I nvestigate Police Shootings; End Cash Bail; "Fundamental" Gun Rights; and Vaporizing Juul

 #Johiah Bates, "Create an independent body..." TIME, May 24/May 31, 2021. - "The solution proposed by activists: appoint investigate bodies to decide whether to prosecute police shootings." "During her 2019 campaign for the presidency, now-Vice President Kalama Harris proposed what might be a complementary body, 'a national Police Systems Review Board,' which would collect data and review police shootings..." 

#Katurah J. Herron, ACLU head in Kentucky, "Abolish cash bail," TIME, May 24/May 31, 2021. - "Nearly half a million people in the U.S. -- 43% of them Black -- are currently detained before trial. The bail system, which often requires defendants or their families to [gather] up large sums of cash in a short window, is reminiscent of 19th century debtors' prisons." "Combined with these measures, ending cash bail is one way to dismantle inequities faced by people who enter the U.S. criminal-justice system." 

#Kelefa Sanneh, "Guns and Butter," The New Yorker, May 31, 2021. - "For decades, the group [N.R.A. board] found ways to portray its product as a defense of liberty, shifting its focus from guns to gun rights, more generally." "Starting in the nineteen thirties, the N.R.A. turned its attention to fighting proposed laws that would limit the sale or use of guns." N.R.A. editorials that cited the Second Amendment, that Matthew Lacombe, the political scientist who authored 'Firepower' (Princeton University Press), reviewed, tended to portray guns as a means with which to resist tyranny from one's own government." 

Carol Anderson, the historian who wrote the 'Second Amendment: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America (Bloomberg), argues that the Second Amendment is 'steeped in anti-Blackness,' but it does not follow that every effort to curtail its publications is therefore pro-Black. 

Jamall Greene, a legal scholar at Columbia University, worries that the endless search for 'fundamental' rights makes disputes like this one more intractable problem. "But the legalization of same-sex marriage was the kind of sweeping and definitive victory that naturally leads advocates to wonder how many more might be attainable. "Observing these reversals, one can see what Greene calls 'rightsism' is less a philosophy than a strategy, by which a minority cause can achieve a fuller political victory than might otherwise be possible." 

#Jamie Deauchame, "How Juul got vaporized," TIME, May 24/May 31, 2021. - There are hundreds of lawsuits against Juul: "They claim that Juul purposely designed its stylish, flash-dive-like device and favored nicotine e-liquids to appeal to teenagers." "In 2020, about 2,000 high school students and 5% of middle-school students said they had vaped some sort of cigarette in the past month." "In 2015, the World Health Organization commissioned a report that warned e-cigarettes might damage the lungs and expose users to carcinogens."

"To this day, health experts and anti-vaping advocates often point to Juul's ill-fated Vaporized campaign as evidence that it purposely hooked teenagers, and engineered a brand-new addiction." "If the company kept marketing in ways that could be seen as targeting kids, Juul was going to be lumped in with Big Tobacco, an industry infamous for preying on young people with its marketing." 

ADDENDUM:

*Jamine Aguilira, "End Family Detention," TIME, May 24/May 31, 2021. - "The U.S. has three detention centers specifically for immigrant families." 

Israeli/Palestinian Conflict; Cheneyism; and Burnout

 #Steve Coll, "Ceasefire and Impasse," The New Yorker, May 31, 2021. - "In more than a thousand air and missile strikes, Israel said it targeted Hamas commanders and military infrastructure; but although Israeli forces adopted rules of attack designed to protect noncombatants and Palestinian children, casualties mounted." The fighting coincided with shocks inside Israel's recognized borders, where mob violence and attempted lynchings sundered ties between Jewish and Arab citizens and neighbors." 

"Netanyahu has been in power continuously since 2009, but his accommodations of far-right political parties and millenarian settler movements, coupled with hi rejection of reconciliation with Palestinians have failed to deliver durable security." 

#Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, "Israelis can't go back..." TIME, June 17/June 24, 2021. - Ayelet Gundar-Goshen "can't ignore the fact that that all of the doctors and executives are Jews, while the cleaners and medical workers are mostly Arabs. "For some of the Jewish majority, 'restoring the peace' means that Jews will return to their comfortable lives, while Arabs continue to suffer from poverty and discrimination." .S.

#Salam Khashan, "A doctor's account of life..." TIME, June 17/June 24, 2021. - "It was extremely difficult to get medical aid across the Egyptian border and it still is." "We have international laws against the murder of civilians. The message Palestinians receive from the international community is that Israelis are above these rules."

"On WhatsApp, more than 100 groups formed to organize attacks on Arabs. One message told volunteers to bring 'flags, bats, knives, guns, bras knuckles, wooden boards, pepper spray, anything that would hurt them." "But Arabs point to the reality of their lives in Israel: they are just over 20% of the population and about half of the poorest municipalities." 

"Netanyahu's government passed a law in 2018 that removed Arabic as an official language, and gave Jews an 'exclusive right to national self-determination.' " 

#Nicholas Lemann, "Cheneyism," The New Yorker, May 24, 2021. - "Hawks are now homeless in both parties, actually, and that poses a challenge to Joe Biden, whose tendencies are non-isolationist, but also un-Chaney-like. Yet the Biden Administration, so ambitious in domestic policy, has been far quieter in foreign policy." 

"The Blinken-Kagan article criticized the Obama Administration , in which Blinken served, for 'doing too little' in Syria, and criticized Trump for pulling out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. But Biden has not reversed these policies, or dramatically rejected most of Trump's other foreign policy positions... ." "Better to endorse her [Cheney's] stance on Trump, and to find a part for the U.S. to play in the Middle East that involves trying to reduce bloodshed and suffering, not provoking it."

#Jill Lepore, "It's just too much," The New Yorker, May 24, 2021. - "Around the world, three out of five workers say they're burned out. A 2020 U.S, study puts that figure at three in four," "If burnout is... universal and eternal, it's meaningless. If everyone is burned out, and always has been, burnout is just... the hell of life." 

"Burnout for [Byung Chul] Han, a writer for 'The Burnout Society,' is depression and exhaustion, the sickness of  society that suffers from 'excessive possibility,' an 'achievement society,' a 'yes-we-can' world in which nothing is impossible."

" 'Burnout cuts across executive and managerial levels,' 'Harvard Business Review' reported in 1981." "In 2020 polling, only forty-seven per cent of Americans belonged to an institution of faith." 

Burnout may be looked at as a combat metaphor. "In the conditions of late capitalism, from the Reagan era forward, work for many people has come to feel like a battlefield, and daily life, including          politics and like online, like yet more slaughter."

Black Dressmaking; HGTV Matters; Even Kni,etting and Home Ec

 #Judith Thurman, "Eye of the Needle," The New Yorker," March 29, 2021. - "[Dressmaker's] Lowe's driving ambition, she told Mike Douglas, as a guest on his talk show in 1964, was to  prove that a Negro could become a major dress designer."

"Women of color have been dressing First Ladies at least since the 1861,when Mary Todd Lincoln hired Elizabeth Keelay as her personal [designer.]" Mary Todd Lincoln, like Jackie [Kennedy], was a Francophile and a clotheshorse."

"The American South has never been a bastion of modernity in fashion. Even in the North, chic women of Lowe's generation -- of of Jackie's -- looked to Paris." 

"A black dressmaker could not get credit or rent a workplace in the downtown business district; her clients had to visit her in a segregated neighborhood."

#Ian Parker, "Fixer-Upper," The New Yorker," March 29, 2021. - "American cable-TV subscriptions peaked twenty years ago. The broader category of linear  pay television -- cable and satellite combined -- peaked in 2009, when subscriptions were maintained by eighty-eight of American households."

"An hour of HGTV may cost about two hundred thousand dollars to make." "An increasing number of network's shows in recent years have centered on contests or celebrities. But he rest is renovation. The implication that the hosts are involved in day-to-day management is less authentic." 

"HGTV's audience is still seventy per cent female, but according to Scott Feely, at 'High Noon,' there's evidence that scenes of demolition help 'help the men around.' " "According to Loren Ruch, ninety per cent of HGTV's renovations involve open floor plans." HGTV's primary value to its corporate parent lies for the moment in the "size of its library, which includes nineteen hundred episodes of 'House Hunters,' in its various formats." 

#Patricia Marx, "Stand Up Straight!" The New Yorker, March 29, 2021. - "Remarkably, I am not among the estimated eighty per cent of Americans who suffer from back troubles." "A study reported in the 'Annals of Internal Medicine' in 2017 found that subjects who interrupted their sitting every half hour reduced their chances of dying by fifty-five per cent." "A survey among seven hundred  and seventy-eight software workers in lockdown last spring, found that shoulder, elbow, and wrist pain had doubled."

"Sander Gilman, a historian, said over ZOOM, in regard to 'Stand Up Straight!: A History of Posture,' that he regards posture as a critical construct, a way to read an individual's social status, and 'a means for society to separate the 'primitive' from the 'advanced,' the 'ugly' from the 'beautiful,' and the 'ill' from the 'healthy.' " 

"At Ellis Island, immigrants' spinal bumps and bows were thought to indicate moral weaknesses, and provided grounds for denying people entry into the country." 

#Jelani Cobb, "The Battle for Georgia," The New Yorker, March 29, 2021. - "Today, eighteen Fortune 500 companies have operations in Georgia, the same number as in Florida, a state with twice the population." "To the extent that there is an impediment to the leadership's plunging the state into its ugly past, it will not likely to be love of democracy or the Constitution. It will be for reverence of another piece of paper that embodies deeply held American values: the dollar bill."

#Carrie Battan, The New Yorker, March 29, 2021. - "Yarn shops, like bike or record shops, can be alienating to newcomers; patrons and employees sometimes act like members of an exclusive club who share the the language of obscure wool blends." 

"The easiest type of hat to knit is a flat rectangle, folded and sewn together, which produces floppy corners that resemble cat ears. [Kat] Coyle, owner of 'Little Knittery,' knit three prototypes, and within a few days, her group had named it the Pussyhat, a reference to Trump's hot-mike moment with Billy Bush." "After Coyle posted the Pussyhat pattern to the site, [her group] worked with more than a hundred and seventy-five yarn shops around the world, which served as drop-off and pickup points for knitters and hat recipients.' 

" 'Revelry,' which is often called the Facebook of knitting, has nine million accounts -- about a million of which are active every month." " 'Revelry' became the largest crochet-and -pattern database in the world."

"Knitting was also a tool in the war against society's great fear: idleness. Anyone yielding a pair of needles takes on an air of industry, and one newspaper writer during the Revolutionary War, extolled the 'Knot of Misses' busy at their needles... . where they exclude idleness from their solitary moments." 

#Margaret Talbot, "Measure Twice," The New Yorker, April 26 & May 3, 2021. Home economics was a movement that emerged in the late nineteenth century with high ambitions." "Home economics offered a feminism palatable to non-feminists, a social-reform vision that highlighted personal habits. They promoted training in baby care on a utopian model, as in the practice houses, but for the most part did not agitate for shared or government-subsidized child care." 

"As Danielle Dreilinger, author of 'The Secret History of Home Economics: How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Live' (Norton) shows, these home economists had remarkable success. They created the seven food groups, they recommended daily allowances, and other approaches to virtuous eating." "Later, home ec collaborated cozily with the food industry, encouraging women to favor canned and frozen goods, and cake mixes, and coming up with recipes that provided convenience, and generated sales for their products." 

"Women on farms worked, on average, between sixty-four and seventy hours a week, and this, along with bearing many children was killing them younger." "Takeout and technology have deskilled us. Young people leave school unprepared for adulting, clueless about laundry, primed to annoy one another when they cohabit with housemates or partners." "Th new banquets of food shows, and how-to videos tend to be clear on one thing: neither the cooking nor the comforting is women's work only." 

#Maggie Doherty, "Adjunct Hell," The Nation, 5.17 - 24.2021. - " 'No Future' has become more of a lament than a rallying cry. The future is no longer something to protect or reject; it's something that's slowly being taken from children and adults alike. We're facing climate apocalypse, widening inequality, and a global pandemic. Is it any wonder that birthrates and rates of happiness are down in the United States, while rates of mortality and suicide have been rising? Can any of us imagine the future?"

After forecasting such a troublesome future, the author goes on to focus on the dire state of graduate and adjunct workers, but she still sees hope amid the despair. "Along with egregious working conditions, rage is fueling graduate and adjunct union drives across the country, one of the small signs of hope in a grim landscape of higher ed. The Service Employee International Union has organized academic workers at more than 60 campuses across the country. The United Auto Workers now represents over 8,000 graduate and adjunct workers nationwide."

Chain Gangs; U.F.Os; Limb Regrowth; and Separation Anxiety

#Winfred Rembert, "Hard Labor," The New Yorker, May 10, 2021. - "Have you ever seen a Black person tap-dance in front of white people just to show humbleness?" 

"The white boys really turned the prison camp into a chain gang." "The chain gang is one of the most ruthless places in the world. The state owns prisoners, so there are rules and regulations, but the country owns the chain gang, and there are no rules and regulations." 

"They put you in this wooden box, where you can't stand up and you can't sit down. You're in a crouch. You can't see out. It's dark, except for daylight coming in trough the cracks, and it's real hot in there -- sweating hot." Rembert found a way to avoid being put into the box: he would do crazy things, prompting everyone to say: 'that nigger crazy!' "One thing is for sure -- when inmates think you're crazy, you can survive. They don't mess with you. That tells you something about prison life. When you look at it from the outside, you can't see what's going on, but when you're up close you realize what you're up against."

Rembert has one observation from his years serving on a chain gang that may be controversial: he says that "because the white prisoners were a threat to run, the guards would shackle them to each other."

#Gideon Lewis-Kraus, "The U.F.O. Papers," The New Yorker, May 10, 2021. "Its officials were evenly split between those who thought that the 'flying discs' were of plausibly 'interplanetary origin,' and those who chalked up the sightings to rampant misperception." 

Deputy Secretary of Defense, David Norquist, publicly announced the existence of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force, whose report is anticipated in June.

"Astronomers have determined that there may be hundreds of millions of potentially habitable exoplanets in just our galaxy." "The government may not care about the resolution of the U.F.O. enigma. But in throwing up its hands and granting that there are things it simply cannot figure out, it has relaxed its grip on the taboo."

#Matthew Hutson. "Growing It Back," The New Yorker, May 10, 2021. - "In the past half century, scientists have come to see the brain with its trillions of neural interconnections, as a kid of computer. But Michael Levin, a development biologist at Tufts University, argues that the cells in our bodies use bioelectricity to communicate, and to make decisions among themselves about what they will become." (Salamanders can regenerate their several limbs and tails; if you remove a leg and graft on a tail, the tail morphs into a leg.)" "Cell groups, [Levin has said] are capable of following lots of different plants; they shift their goals depending on what their neighbors are doing."

None of the developmental biologists that Matthew Hutson spoke with expressed any doubt that we would some day be able to regrow human limbs.

#Sam Knight, "Separation Anxiety," The New Yorker, May 10, 2021. - "Om September 18, 2014, the people of Scotland voted no to independence by fifty-five to forty-five per cent, a margin of slightly less than four hundred thousand votes." The Scottish National Party (S.N.P.) is explicitly pro-immigration -- it wants Scotland's population to be more attentive to the rights of children, refugees, and trans people. 

Nicola Sturgeon, First Minister of Scotland and leader of the S.N.P., would like to introduce a universal basic income, and wants Scotland to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2045, five years ahead of the U.K.

ADDENDUM:

*Rebecca Mead, "A Giant Mystery," The New Yorker, May 24, 2021. - "Hill figures, or geoglypha, are scattered across southern England, whose chalk downs offer ready-made canvases to landscape artists." "The sample taken from the deepest layer of the giant dated from between 700 and 1100 A.D., most likely near the midpoint of the range, around the tenth century."

China's Reeducation Campaign; Media-Approved Lynchings; and North Korean Hacking

#Raffi Khatchadourian, "Ghost Walls," The New Yorker, April 12, 2021. - "As he, [Xi-Jinping], cleared   away the obstacles to life long rule, he eventually subjected more than a million government officials to punishments that ranged from censure to execution. Communist theoreticians  long debated the role that nationalities should pay in the march to utopia... ." "Xinjiang's insurgents had proved unable to gather many adherents; locals favored the Sufi tradition of Islam which emphasizes mysticism, not politics." "He [Chen Quanguo, a Party secretary] dispatched more than twenty thousand Communist party cadres into villages and rural monasteries, to propagandize, and to surveil."

"In 2005, the Chinese government began pacing surveillance cameras throughout the country, in a projcct called Project Skynet. After Xi Jinping came to power, China rolled out an enhanced version, Sharp Eyes, envisioned as a system of half a billion cameras that were 'omnipresent, fully networked, always on, and fully controllable.' " 

"About twenty-five million live in Xinjiang -- less than two per cent of China's population -- but, according to an assessment based on government data,  the end of 2017, the region was responsible for a fifth of all arrests in the country." "Chen Quanguo's crackdown was aimed at a single goal: moving a large percentage of Xinjiang's population into an archipelago of fortified camps for political reeducation." "Xinping had compared separation and radical Islam to a disease." 

In a typical cell, the "doors were chained to their frames and could not be opened more than a foot; detainees had to shimmy through." In the cell of a detainee named Sabit, "five bunk beds were crammed into a twelve-by-fifteen-foot space, with three cameras and a microphone hanging from the ceiling." 

"As a government document made clear, reeducation was intended to sever people from their native cultures" 'Break their lineage, break their roots, break their connections, and break their origins.' " "Every morning they had to stand and proclaim their fealty to the state: 'Ardently love the Chinese Communist Party! Ardently love the great motherland! Ardently love the Chinese people! Ardently love socialism with Chinese characteristics!" 

"Adrian Zenc, an independent academic who has unearthed troves of government documents on Chen's crackdown, estimated that there were as many as a million people in the camps -- a statistic echoed by the United Nations and others." "In the year that Sabit had been confined, Chen Quanguo was transforming Xinjiang. Cherished symbols of Muslim heritage were systematically targeted for destruction. Experts estimate that, since 2017, some sixteen thousand mosques have been razed or damaged, with minarets pulled down, and decorative features scrubbed away or painted over." 

"As a recent Freedom House report notes, 'China conducts the most sophisticated, global, and comprehensive campaign of transnational repression in the world. It's tactics have ranged from digital intimidation and threats of lawsuits, to unlawful deportations.' "  

#Channing Gerand Joseph, "Media Monuments and Hooded Headlines," The Nation, 5.3 - 10.2021. - "Two decades into the 21st century, more than a century and a half since the legal abolition of slavery, and other forms of racist terror -- much of it promoted and perpetuated by the news media." "Papers not only reported of lynchings in a manner that implied or explicitly indicated approval, they even published ads from racial terror groups." "American papers typically assumed that the victims of lynchings were guilty and deserved their fates."

" 'In practice, lynchers enjoyed immunity from state or local prosecution,' David Garland,  a professor of sociology at New York University wrote in 2005,' " "Lynching 'was usually regarded with broad approval by large sections of the communities in which the lynchings occurred, and it was tolerated (and often applauded) by local politicians and law officials' ".

#John Seabrook, "Scooter City," The New Yorker," April 26 & May 3, 2021. - "New York also engineered and built a subway system, above ground and below ground, which before the COVID- 19 pandemic hit, carried five and a half million riders every week day -- a landmark of American people -- movings the city may never reach again if remote work is here to stay." "Transportation wonks hailed scooter-sharing as the best solution to their 'last closest mile' problem." The N.Y.P.D. issued numerous  citations for bike riders, and sometimes took away bikes. "The lockdowns in the face of the pandemic brought scooter-mania to an abrupt halt."

"In the U.S., sixty per cent of all car trips are less than six miles. "If cities are going to meet the zero-emission goals they've set, and if automakers like Ford and G.M. are going to electrify their fleets by 2030, respectively, as they pledged, automobiles will have to become smaller, lighter, and more efficient, given the limits of lithium-ion-battery technology."

"In 2019, cars and trucks killed twenty-nine cyclists in New York City, a twenty-year high." "Ridership on the subway is still at only thirty-five per cent of its pre-pandemic levels; bus ridership is at about fifty per cent in NYC."

#Ed Caesar, "Rocket Men," The New Yorker, April 26 & May 3, 2021. - "Only Pyongyeng, the capital, emits a recognizably modern glow. The dark country is one of the last nominally Communist nations in the word -- a Stalinist personality cult centered on Kim Jong Un, the peevish, ruthless scion of the dynasty that has ruled North Korea since 1948, after the peninsula was divided." 

"A tiny fraction of one per cent of North Koreans has access to the Internet." North Korea, moreover, is the only nation in the world whose government is known to conduct nakedly criminal hacking for monetary gain." According to the U.N., many of the funds stolen by North Korea hackers are spent on the Korean Peoples' Army's weapons program, including the development of nuclear weapons."

"On February 4, 2016, the U.S. Federal Reserve received instructions from Bangladesh to make dozens of payouts, totaling nearly a billion dollars, to various accounts including one in Sri Lanka and four in the Philippines."

"The North Korean regime has long been considered a fundamentally criminal enterprise." "According to many estimates, about seven thousand North Koreans work in the country's cyber program. The employees are split between the General Staff Department of the military, which assists the Army's operations, and the Reconnaissance General Bureau." "North Korean hackers have conducted operations in more than a hundred and fifty countries."

#Elie Mystal, "Racism Never Sleeps," The Nation, 5. 17 - 24.2021. - "As always, white supremacists are pretty sure Black people should just be happy to be here, and any one of us who is not smiling and thankful under the yoke of unruly white rule is a dangerous Negro who should go back somewhere else." "That's the relentless of white supremacy. Every trauma must be dissected, every pain must be justified, and the prevailing white majority claims the sole right to determine whether those pains and traumas are legitimate, as if white people are the sovereigns of reality itself." "Black people are always on trial. We are always being policed: in how we fight, how we mourn, and how we die."

Living Longer; Asian Nationalism; and Aviation Pollution

 #Brooke Jarvis, "Good Years," The New Yorker, May 17, 2021. - "Between the Spanish flu of 1918 and the coronavirus pandemic of 2020, global life expectancy doubled." "For much of human history, our early years were so stalked by disease and infection and diarrhea that between a third and a half of us never escaped our own perilous childhoods." "Even in modern American cities, people born into poor neighborhoods can expect to live as many as thirty years fewer than people who are born into affluence ones across town." 

"An editorial in the journal 'Age and Aging' had noted that the latest trends seemed to be favoring the second theory, with extra years being achieved not through better overall health, but 'predominantly through the technological advances that have been made in extending the life' of people who were sick, and experiencing various degrees of suffering." "Doctors wo specialize in aid in dying often distinguish between 'despair suicides,' the most familiar version, and 'rational suicides,' those sought by people who have, in theory, weighed a terminal or painful or debilitating diagnosis, and made a measured, almost mathematical, choice about how to deal with it."

#Thomas Meaney, "Rising in the East," The New Yorker, May 17, 2021. - "[Benedict] Anderson, [author of "Imagined Communities'], and his generation of scholars saw nationalism in Asia as the work of, on the one hand, elites who were educated by colonialism, and then turned against it, and, on the other, mobilizations by peasants and urban youth whose total consciousness merely needed to be stirred." 

"The more empires tried to cultivate loyal subjects capable of working in their colonial bureaucracy, the more they produced frustrated, overeducated, dangerous, students who coordinated across borders." "Asian radicals were also tracked by a pervasive system of surveillance maintained by imperial intelligence departments."

#Rafia Zakaria, "The Argument," The Nation, 5.3 -10.2021. "At the height of the pandemic, the grounding of air travel in 2020 led to a 60 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions from aviation." "Prior to the pandemic year, the United States, with just over 4 percent of the world's population, was responsible for 24 percent of all emissions from passenger flights And within the US, just 12 percent of adults take 68 percent of the flights."

"American tourists who fly on a whim and imagine that their recycling efforts and use of cloth bags makes up for the huge costs they impose on the climate should be taken to task."

#[Rep.] Mark Pocan, "Q & A," The Nation, 5.3 - 3 - 10.2021. - "For them to argue about whether or not some of their workers have to urinate in bottles because of the schedules they're put on, to fight on a point like that -- which could so easily be disproven -- was really a huge miscalculation. It shows the arrogance of corporations that get too big." "If you look at the 1950s,when you had the highest rates of unionization, you had the lowest rates of income inequality. Since then, union membership has decreased from around 33 percent of the workforce to around 10 percent." 

#Kali Holloway, "Justice for George Floyd?" The Nation, 5.3 - 10.2021. - Eric Nelson, Derek Chauvin's defense attorney, leaned "into the fallacy of superior Black strength, and what the neuroscientist Carl L. Hart labels the 'drug-crazed Negro' myth. In his opening statement,  Nelson compared Floyd's 6-foot, 3-inch frame with Chauvin's 5-foot, 9-inch height, a contrast to paint Chauvin as helplessly dwarfed by Floyd." 

"Studies show that white people believe Black people are inherently more aggressive, larger, more threatening, and less susceptible to pain than white people, stereotypes that make victimhood off-limits to Black people."

ADDENDUMS: 

*Mark Hartsgaard, "Emergency Now!" The Nation, 5.3 - 10.2021. - " 'Failure to slash the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will make the extraordinary heat, storms, wildfires, and the ice melt of 2020, routine, and could render a significant portion of the earth uninhabitable,' warned a recent 'Scientific American' article."

*Paulina Cachero, "Close the digital divide," TIME, May 24/May 31, 2021. - "And the Biden Administration has proposed spending $100 billion to invest in 'future-proof' broadband networks, while Republicans pitched $65 billion." "According to the National Center for Education Statistics, about 16% of U.S, adults are not digitally literate because of lack of access and language barriers."

*Linda Harts, founder and CEO of The Memo, Time, May 24/May 31, 2021. - "Studies show companies with diverse and inclusive cultures outperform organizations that do not invest in diversity."