so glad not to see any Skeleton War nonsense on my dash this year. such a dumb concept. as if the skeletons could ever not win, literally every human is a sleeper agent

“Still, at some point in your life, you’ve probably heard about the theory of “nuclear deterrence” embraced by so many in our military and those of other major powers globally. The idea is that nuclear weapons actually keep us all “safe” by their mere presence in the hands of those powers. According to such thinking, their existence restrains the leaders of such countries from directly making war on each other for fear of setting off a world-ending nuclear conflict. And in that context, yes, the U.S. military spends tens of billions of dollars annually on the upkeep of some 5,428 nuclear weapons of every sort and their delivery systems to keep us safe. Worse yet, it plans to “invest” upwards of two trillion dollars more “modernizing” that arsenal in the coming decades.

As a retired military officer’s spouse steeped in exactly this line of thinking, there were times when I did indeed find it at least somewhat compelling. It’s true, after all, that since the U.S. used two nuclear bombs to destroy the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, taking hundreds of thousands of lives in those blasts and their aftermath, and Japan surrendered, ending World War II, the absolute number of deaths in armed conflict globally has decreased. Nonetheless, over the last decade, when I listened to people I knew (and didn’t know) extolling nuclear deterrence at military get-togethers and in the popular press, I couldn’t help thinking that our capacity to threaten, torment, and kill one another has not exactly abated in that same 78-year period.

To take just the most obvious recent example, nuclear weapons no more prevented Russian President Vladimir Putin from invading Ukraine than they had stopped the U.S. invasion of Iraq (based, in fact, on the false claim that autocrat Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction). Nor have they recently stopped the U.S. from sending close to $50 billion and counting in weaponry and ammunition, not to speak of training and intelligence technology, to Ukraine in response. And count on one thing: some of what our country has provided will impact Ukrainians for generations to come, including depleted uranium tank shells and cluster munitions, those bundles of bomblets banned by more than 100 countries because of their indiscriminate tendency to go off years later, often killing innocent civilians.

(…)

In these decades, the lack of deterrence of violence itself, even if not the nuclear version of it, has been profound. The Costs of War Project at Brown University, which I helped found, has made it all too clear that suffering from armed conflict extends far beyond the battlefield and generations into the future. If we are going to say something about “deterrence,” then we need to be clear on what we’re deterring. After all, thanks to just this century’s conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen, our project has estimated that 4.5-4.7 million people have died from bullets, bombs, improvised explosive devices, drone missiles, and other versions of war’s violence, as well as from disease, accidents, and various side effects and aftereffects of such conflicts (not to mention suicide).

In these years, a staggering number of people have had their lives forever changed by losing limbs or loved ones, suffering post-traumatic stress disorder and chronic pain — and all such suffering from war-making doesn’t even take into account certain signature consequences of prolonged conflict like the deterioration of democracy or the loss of educational opportunities, not to speak of the mass displacement of populations. It’s true that, as conflicts go, the forever wars our country has fought since September 11, 2001, don’t faintly measure up to the direct slaughter and bloodshed of World War II. Still, when it comes to human suffering globally (the Holocaust aside), the scale of what we’ve witnessed in these years of our disastrous Global War on Terror (even before the Ukraine War began) should be considered stunning.

(…)

Of all our preconceptions about nuclear weapons, what’s probably the most destructive is the unstated assumption that they are the sole alternative to a more constant state of conventional warfare. There are, of course, conflict-resolution options that don’t involve violence at all, including diplomacy, the use of targeted intelligence, and anti-poverty programs the likes of which the United Nations and its affiliated human rights and humanitarian organizations promote. Conventional warfare exacts staggering opportunity costs and only makes it harder for leaders to pursue such routes.

Yet the sole type of conflict that could foreclose all alternatives whatsoever is, of course, nuclear war. It could vaporize the very skeleton of civilization — infrastructure, communications, government, and of course people in staggering numbers — all potentially in a matter of minutes, or less time than it takes you to read this piece.

These days, however, we in the U.S. seldom talk about the ever-present possibility of nuclear annihilation by, for instance, intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), warhead-bearing projectiles capable of traveling thousands of miles (of which the U.S. and Russia have about 400 each). To be sure, there are checkpoints in place that the leaders of each country would need to cross to launch such an attack, but an error, or even confusion, at any one of those checkpoints could lead to disaster.

Scenarios that would place us all on the brink of nuclear annihilation could involve an all-too-human mix of everyday mistakes, incompetence, and heightened emotions. Consider, for instance, the possibility that a simple accident might detonate a warhead before it even leaves the ground, killing untold numbers of people. For example, in 1980 at a Strategic Air Command base in Damascus, Arkansas, a technician tasked with maintaining nuclear-armed ICBMs (capable of producing an explosion several times the magnitude of both bombs that destroyed Nagasaki and Hiroshima) accidentally dropped an eight-pound socket from a socket wrench. It punctured one of those missiles, causing it to explode and blow its nuclear component out of the silo. Fortunately, that didn’t explode and so only a single worker there was killed. Had the attached warhead detonated, however, staggering numbers of people might have died, including then-Arkansas governor and first lady Bill and Hillary Clinton and then-Vice President Walter Mondale who, at the time, were about an hour’s drive away.

According to Command and Control, a documentary director Robert Kenner made about that incident, as of 2016, somewhere between 32 and 1,000 near-misses of the same accidental nature had occurred. Consider it a matter of sheer luck that no warhead has ever detonated.

A different kind of near disaster occurred in November 1979, when a military officer accidentally lodged a realistic training tape indicating the launching of a major Soviet nuclear attack aimed at the U.S. in the military’s early warning system. President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, had only minutes to decide what to do after being contacted about a massive Soviet missile attack. Luckily, his team soon learned that there was no such attack, but the false alarm led to at least 10 fighter jets taking off, the convening of a threat assessment conference involving all three command posts of the nuclear triad, and the launching of the president’s doomsday plane, all of which would have made it far too easy for us to proceed with a “retaliatory” strike.

And in yet another near-world-ending miss, in 1995, the U.S. and Norway launched an atmospheric testing rocket over Europe to study the northern lights. Russian officials mistook it for a U.S. Trident missile. Within minutes, Russian President Boris Yeltsin had for the first time ever activated that country’s “nuclear football” allowing him to communicate with his military leaders in the event of an attack. Even in that chaotic post-Soviet moment, however, Russia had a good enough early detection system for its officials to quickly realize that the country wasn’t under attack. Still, consider that another daunting moment near the brink.

Other near misses have involved everything from faulty computer chips to high-altitude clouds to ailing Soviet leader Yuri Andropov’s desire to stoke Russian fears of an imminent American attack and so consolidate power. In most cases, a handful of vigilant people caught errors in defense systems and intervened in time.

From my point of view, any one of those examples represents too high a risk to take when ordinary people like us could face the prospect of dying thanks to a nuclear attack or its fallout. Even a nuclear war between India and Pakistan, which have far smaller arsenals than the U.S., Russia, or China, could cause a planetary “nuclear winter” and a global famine that might wipe out — yes! — billions of us.

(…)

One thing is certain, though, and tells you all too much about our dangerous world: the reality of nuclear weapons and what they could do to us can’t be found in the antiseptic, highly technical picture painted by the Pentagon’s own Nuclear Matters Handbook 2020. It hardly mentions “death” at all. Quite the contrary, it focuses instead on how (of all the grim things to worry about) to maintain the “survivability” — yes, that’s the term used! — of our nuclear arsenal.

Growing up in a multi-ethnic community in New Jersey that included both robust Japanese-American and Jewish populations, I became accustomed to firsthand accounts of the Holocaust, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, and even some of the horrors of the only time nuclear bombs were ever used. The specter of loss and suffering from nuclear war I absorbed then — of children vaporized, faces melted, and cancers growing beyond control among the survivors — will never leave me.”

Ghosts & some silly math

I was out and about with people that I had met relatively recently, and while we were getting to know one another one of the topics that was discussed was whether or not I would spend a night in a haunted house, or a house where I knew someone had died.

I chuckled a bit and replied "Of course I would, it's free money". Everyone was rather shocked by this, and even more shocked when I expressed that I would likely do it for no money at all if it was somewhere that I would not normally have access to such as the Crypts or other normally exclusive locations they were shocked by response.

As it turned out, I was the only person in the group who was wholly committed to the premise that Ghosts are not real.

This is essentially how I told them any spooky sounds or creepy things that I might take to be as the restless spirits of the undead would go:

One person went so far as to claim that they had seen a ghost of their grandmother just after she had passed when he was a younger person. This made me wonder, what do people think the conversion rate from human to ghost is? Is it rare in people's mind to become a ghost? If it is... why would a person ever expect to see one? And if it isn't, well, then where are all the ghosts? Like logistically, similar to the fermi-paradox with regards to aliens, does this create a sort of phantasm-paradox? Should the world be inundated with ghosts? Should only a handful of people see them every century.

To get an estimate of how many people have ever died, we first need to know how many people have ever been born. Because, well if your born, you will one day eventually die, and then have the potential to be a haunting apparition tied to this mortal plane.

From this article posted on https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12288594/ it seems that a reasonable estimate is somewhere between 100 and 110 billion people have ever lived. (I found other sources that cited 115 billion, but given the estimates involved it's a reasonable discrepancy I'm just going to take the lower value to be conservative)

Taking the low end average to be 105 billion people that gives us that with the current (using 2021 census data) population size of roughly 8 billion it would mean that  about 7% of all humans are currently alive now, leaving the other 97 billion as potential spirits to haunt our mortal existence. 

Which via inverting to get meters squared per ghost tells us that assuming an equal distrubution of ghosts across the surface area of the Earth, we would need 5.56 million square meters or so for 1 ghost to be found.

This however is assuming that all of the people who had the potential to become a ghost had an equal chance to expire on land or at sea. Considering most people probably die on land since that's the terrain humans happened to evolve to live on, it's more likely that there would be a land ghost as opposed to sea ghost.

Unfortunately there's not really a good method for determining the way in which different people died in ancient times, pre-recorded times, and honestly anything that isn't recent times, so again for the sake of giving ghosts the best possible chance I'll be conservative and assume 92% of people died on land. Given that per this article https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/drowning#:~:text=In%202019%2C%20an%20estimated%20236,of%20all%20injury%2Drelated%20deaths drowning accounted for roughly 7% of accidental injury deaths in 2019, it would seem reasonable to assess that most people die on land, meaning most if not all of these ghosts should be land ghosts.

his means eliminating over 70 percent of the potential area where one might find a ghost (the surface of the sea) won't detract too terribly from the amount of potential ghosts. This changes the above calculation for the surface area of the earth from:

to just 30% of that, which would be

which plugging that into the equation above give

inverting that once again we get that there should be ~2 million square meters per  ghost [in actuality it's ~1.608 square meters per ghost, but let's just round up for simplicity]. Convienently this means that this easily converts to square kilometers per ghost telling us that there is 2 square Kilometers per ghost.

Using this it can now be estimated for a given area how many ghosts a person would expect to see. Say for example Central Park New York, how many ghosts would one expect to see there given the above equations?

Central park has an area of 3.41Km which means there would be 2.12 ghosts in it. Central park per it's Wikipedia page is also visited by about 42 million people annually. This means if one assumes that the path people take through central park is random, the entirety of the park would be walked over 12,000 times. So what are the odds that a person would see one of these two ghosts potentially walking… floating?... Existing, around central park? How many people on average would have seen a ghost in central park, assuming ghosts are real?

Well assuming a human takes up a 1.2 square meter space, and can see out clearly let's say at least 10 meters (around 33 feet) in the direction they're looking, and for simplicities sake we'll estimate their view line in the following way, humans have an FOV of 135 degrees, but only a critical vision of 60 degrees, so we can use the following formula to estimate

hich yields 37.5 square meters of viewable area at a time.

So the odds of looking at the spot in question where a ghost happens to be in central park would be the odds of you looking at the area where a ghost happens to be and there happens to be a ghost standing there [(37.5/3,410) * (2.4/3,410)]*100= .000774%, however this is for each individual person, assuming they only look at the one area directly in front of them, and don't move. If we include the amount of people who visit the park annually and the odds are the same for all of them, meaning we repeated this 42 million times, there should have been approximately 32,507 ghost sightings. Even assuming only 1% of people would report their sighting to someone, that still leaves 325 sightings of ghosts that should in theory have been reported.

Strangely though, despite having known suicides and murders in the park that happen with about the same frequency as to be expected in other places, it is only the building around New York central park that get reports of hauntings.

So if it is common for a person to become a ghost, where are those sightings?

Why wouldn't the expected value for the number of potential ghosts, line up with the expected value of ghost sightings rather than instead heavily favoring locations where famous, or well reported incidences of loss of life occurred?

In short: Where be all the ghosts yo?

Monday, September 20, 2021

Biden’s Entire Presidential Agenda Rests on Expansive Spending Bill (NYT) Biden’s entire presidential agenda is riding on the reconciliation bill being crafted in Congress right now. No president has ever packed as much of his agenda, domestic and foreign, into a single piece of legislation as President Biden has with the $3.5 trillion spending plan that Democrats are trying to wrangle through Congress over the next six weeks,” Tankersley writes. “It is almost as if President Franklin D. Roosevelt had stuffed his entire New Deal into one piece of legislation, or if President Lyndon B. Johnson had done the same with his Great Society, instead of pushing through individual components over several years. If he succeeds, Biden’s far-reaching attempt could result in a presidency-defining victory that delivers on a decades-long campaign by Democrats to expand the federal government to combat social problems and spread the gains of a growing economy to workers. If he fails, he could end up with nothing. As Democrats are increasingly seeing, the sheer weight of Mr. Biden’s progressive push could cause it to collapse, leaving the party empty-handed, with the president’s top priorities going unfulfilled. … If Mr. Biden’s party cannot find consensus on those issues and the bill dies, the president will have little immediate recourse to advance almost any of those priorities.

Child care in the US is a ‘broken market,’ Treasury report finds (Yahoo Money) A Treasury Department report this week characterized the U.S. child care system as “unworkable” as Democrats push reform that experts say is an “overdue and critical investment.” The average American family with at least one child under age 5 uses 13% of their income to pay for child care, according to the report, nearly double the 7% that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services considers affordable. Additionally, less than 20% of the children eligible for the Child Care and Development Fund—a federal assistance program for low-income families—are getting that funding. “Child care is a textbook example of a broken market, and one reason is that when you pay for it, the price does not account for all the positive things it confers on our society,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in a statement on Wednesday. “When we underinvest in child care, we forgo that; we give up a happier, healthier, more prosperous labor force in the future.”

Inspiration4 Astronauts Beam After Return From 3-Day Journey to Orbit (NYT) After three days in orbit, a physician assistant, a community college professor, a data engineer and the billionaire who financed their trip arrived back on Earth, heralding a new era of space travel with a dramatic and successful Saturday evening landing in the Atlantic Ocean. The mission, which is known as Inspiration4, splashed down off the Florida coast at 7:06 p.m. on Saturday. Each step of the return unfolded on schedule, without problems. Within an hour, all four crew members walked out of the spacecraft, one at a time, each beaming with excitement as recovery crews assisted them.

Haitians on Texas border undeterred by US plan to expel them (AP) Haitian migrants seeking to escape poverty, hunger and a feeling of hopelessness in their home country said they will not be deterred by U.S. plans to speedily send them back, as thousands of people remained encamped on the Texas border Saturday after crossing from Mexico. Scores of people waded back and forth across the Rio Grande on Saturday afternoon, re-entering Mexico to purchase water, food and diapers in Ciudad Acuña before returning to the Texas encampment under and near a bridge in the border city of Del Rio. Junior Jean, a 32-year-old man from Haiti, watched as people cautiously carried cases of water or bags of food through the knee-high river water. Jean said he lived on the streets in Chile the past four years, resigned to searching for food in garbage cans. “We are all looking for a better life,” he said.

Three Weeks After Hurricane Ida, Parts of Southeast Louisiana Are Still Dark (NYT) For Tiffany Brown, the drive home from New Orleans begins as usual: She can see the lights on in the city’s central business district and people gathering in bars and restaurants. But as she drives west along Interstate 10, signs of Hurricane Ida’s destruction emerge. Trees with missing limbs fill the swamp on either side of the highway. With each passing mile, more blue tarps appear on rooftops, and more electric poles lay fallen by the road, some snapped in half. By the time Ms. Brown gets to her exit in Destrehan 30 minutes later, the lights illuminating the highway have disappeared, and another night of total darkness has fallen on her suburban subdivision. For Ms. Brown, who works as an office manager at a pediatric clinic, life at work can feel nearly normal. But at home, with no electricity, it is anything but. “I keep hoping every day that I’m going to go home and it’ll be on,” she said. Three weeks have passed since Hurricane Ida knocked down electric wires, poles and transmission towers serving more than one million people in southeast Louisiana. In New Orleans, power was almost entirely restored by Sept. 10, and businesses and schools have reopened. But outside the city, more than 100,000 customers were without lights through Sept. 13. As of Friday evening there were still about 38,000 customers without power, and many people remained displaced from damaged homes.

Favela centennial shows Brazil communities’ endurance (AP) Dozens of children lined up at a community center in Sao Paulo for a slice of creamy, blue cake. None was celebrating a birthday; their poor neighborhood, the favela of Paraisopolis, was commemorating 100 years of existence. “People started coming (to the city) for construction jobs and settled in,” community leader Gilson Rodrigues said. “There was no planning, not even streets. People started growing crops. It was all disorganized. Authorities didn’t do much, so we learned to organize ourselves.” The favela’s centennial, which was marked on Thursday, underscores the permanence of its roots and of other communities like it, even as Brazilians in wealthier parts of town often view them as temporary and precarious. Favelas struggle to shed that stigma as they defy simple definition, not least because they evolved over decades. Paraisopolis is Sao Paulo’s second-biggest favela, home to 43,000 people, according to the most-recent census, in 2010. Recent, unofficial counts put its population around 100,000.

The barbecue king: British royals praise Philip’s deft touch (AP) When Prince Philip died nearly six months ago at 99, the tributes poured in from far and wide, praising him for his supportive role at the side of Queen Elizabeth II over her near 70-year reign. Now, it has emerged that Philip had another crucial role within the royal family. He was the family’s barbecue king—perhaps testament to his Greek heritage. “He adored barbecuing and he turned that into an interesting art form,” his oldest son Prince Charles said in a BBC tribute program that will be broadcast on Wednesday. “And if I ever tried to do it he ... I could never get the fire to light or something ghastly, so (he’d say): ‘Go away!’” In excerpts of ‘Prince Philip: The Royal Family Remembers’ released late Saturday, members of the royal family spoke admiringly of the late Duke of Edinburgh’s barbecuing skills. “Every barbecue that I’ve ever been on, the Duke of Edinburgh has been there cooking,” said Prince William, Philip’s oldest grandson. “He’s definitely a dab hand at the barbecue ... I can safely say there’s never been a case of food poisoning in the family that’s attributed to the Duke of Edinburgh.” The program, which was filmed before and after Philip’s death on April 9, was originally conceived to mark his 100th birthday in June.

Relations between France and the U.S. have sunk to their lowest level in decades. (NYT) The U.S. and Australia went to extraordinary lengths to keep Paris in the dark as they secretly negotiated a plan to build nuclear submarines, scuttling a defense contract worth at least $60 billion. President Emmanuel Macron of France was so enraged that he recalled the country’s ambassadors to both nations. Australia approached the new administration soon after President Biden’s inauguration. The conventionally powered French subs, the Australians feared, would be obsolete by the time they were delivered. The Biden administration, bent on containing China, saw the deal as a way to cement ties with a Pacific ally. But the unlikely winner is Britain, who played an early role in brokering the alliance. For its prime minister, Boris Johnson, who will meet this coming week with Biden at the White House and speak at the U.N., it is his first tangible victory in a campaign to make post-Brexit Britain a player on the global stage.

Hong Kong’s first ‘patriots-only’ election kicks off (Reuters) Fewer than 5,000 Hong Kong people from mostly pro-establishment circles began voting on Sunday for candidates to an election committee, vetted as loyal to Beijing, who will pick the city’s next China-backed leader and some of its legislature. Pro-democracy candidates are nearly absent from Hong Kong’s first election since Beijing overhauled the city’s electoral system to ensure that “only patriots” rule China’s freest city. The election committee will select 40 seats in the revamped Legislative Council in December, and choose a chief executive in March. Changes to the political system are the latest in a string of moves—including a national security law that punishes anything Beijing deems as subversion, secession, terrorism or collusion with foreign forces—that have placed the international financial hub on an authoritarian path. Most prominent democratic activists and politicians are now in jail or have fled abroad.

The Remote-Control Killing Machine (Politico/NYT) For 14 years, Israel wanted to kill Iran’s top nuclear scientist. Then they came up with a way to do it while using a trained sniper who was more than 1,000 miles away—and fired remotely. It was also the debut test of a high-tech, computerized sharpshooter kitted out with artificial intelligence and multiple-camera eyes, operated via satellite and capable of firing 600 rounds a minute. The souped-up, remote-controlled machine gun now joins the combat drone in the arsenal of high-tech weapons for remote targeted killing. But unlike a drone, the robotic machine gun draws no attention in the sky, where a drone could be shot down, and can be situated anywhere, qualities likely to reshape the worlds of security and espionage.

Israeli army arrests last 2 of 6 Palestinian prison escapees (AP) Israeli forces on Sunday arrested the last two of six Palestinian prisoners who escaped a maximum-security Israeli prison two weeks ago, closing an intense, embarrassing episode that exposed deep security flaws in Israel and turned the fugitives into Palestinian heroes. The Israeli military said the two men surrendered in Jenin, their hometown in the occupied West Bank, after they were surrounded at a hideout that had been located with the help of “accurate intelligence.” The prisoners all managed to tunnel out of a maximum-security prison in northern Israel on Sept. 6. The bold escape dominated newscasts for days and sparked heavy criticism of Israel’s prison service. According to various reports, the men dug a hole in the floor of their shared cell undetected over several months and managed to slip past a sleeping prison guard after emerging through a hole outside the facility. Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip have celebrated the escape and held demonstrations in support of the prisoners. Taking part in attacks against the Israeli military or even civilians is a source of pride for many Palestinians, who view it as legitimate resistance to military occupation.

Jaw-dropping moments in WSJ's bombshell Facebook investigation (CNN Business) This week the Wall Street Journal released a series of scathing articles about Facebook, citing leaked internal documents that detail in remarkably frank terms how the company is not only well aware of its platforms’ negative effects on users but also how it has repeatedly failed to address them. Here are some of the more jaw-dropping moments from the Journal’s series. In the Journal’s report on Instagram’s impact on teens, it cites Facebook’s own researchers’ slide deck, stating the app harms mental health. “We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,” said one slide from 2019, according to the WSJ. Another reads: “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression ... This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.” In 2018, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said a change in Facebook’s algorithm was intended to improve interactions among friends and family and reduce the amount of professionally produced content in their feeds. But according to the documents published by the Journal, staffers warned the change was having the opposite effect: Facebook was becoming an angrier place. A team of data scientists put it bluntly: “Misinformation, toxicity and violent content are inordinately prevalent among reshares,” they said, according to the Journal’s report.

Media and Society

FATTITUDE

By Lindsey Averill, Viridiana Lieberman

An eye-opening look at how popular media perpetuates fat hatred that results in cultural bias and discrimination.

FATTITUDE is an eye-opening look at how popular media perpetuates fat hatred that results in a cultural bias and a civil rights issue for people living in fat bodies.

Fat people are paid $1.25 less an hour than their thin counterparts and can still legally lose jobs just because they're fat. Additionally, 1 in 3 doctors associates fat bodies with hostility, dishonesty and poor hygiene. FATTITUDE looks at how this systemic cultural prejudice results in fat discrimination. Informed by a post-modern, post-colonial, feminist perspective, FATTITUDE also examines how fat-shaming crosses the lines of race, class, sexuality and gender. It features a diverse variety of voices such as academic scholars, activists, filmmakers, actors and psychologists, including Lindy West, Sonya Renee Taylor, Virgie Tovar, Ricki Lake, and more.

A body positive documentary intent on inspiring change, FATTITUDE offers alternative ideas that embrace body acceptance at all sizes, explores examples of fat positive representations being produced today by activists and the media, and focuses on real life solutions for moving forward and changing the national conversation about body image.

DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2019 / 88 minutes

HOW TO STEAL A COUNTRY

By Rehad Desai, Mark Kaplan

"It's been almost 10 years of unabated looting." - Investigative journalist Thanduxolo Jika

HOW TO STEAL A COUNTRY opens like a classic thriller, with investigative journalists meeting anonymous whistleblowers in a parking garage. There, they receive a hard drive filled with hundreds of thousands of explosive files and emails implicating Jacob Zuma's South African government in a massive corruption scandal.

Director Rehad Desai (Everything Must Fall, Miners Shot Down) chronicles how the three Gupta brothers, once small-scale peddlers, cultivated relationships with Zuma and other ANC figures, and parlayed them into massive profits. The brothers were involved in everything from a US$100 billion nuclear deal with Russia, to graft at the state-owned railway and power companies. Tens of millions were stolen from money earmarked for rural development and funneled into a lavish Gupta family wedding. Journalists investigating this corruption were targets of a disinformation campaign accusing them of being neo-colonialists supporting white monopoly power.

Eventually, the journalists are vindicated, and a state inquiry is called into "state capture"-a massive corruption scheme involving the Guptas, Zuma and his government, and international finance and consulting firms.

HOW TO STEAL A COUNTRY serves as a warning on how multinational companies and ruthless entrepreneurs can co-opt democracies for their own profit.

DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2019 / 93 minutes

BELLINGCAT: TRUTH IN A POST-TRUTH WORLD

Director: Hans Pool

Bellingcat: Truth in a Post-Truth World follows the rise of the collective known as Bellingcat, a group of online researchers - all private citizens - dedicated to exposing the truth behind controversial news stories from around the world. From the Malaysian jetliner shot down over Ukraine to the poisoning of a Russian spy in England, the Bellingcat team's quest for truth brings clarity and accountability to our era of fake news and alternative facts.

Bellingcat uses cutting-edge digital techniques and crowdsourcing to create a faster, more innovative approach than traditional journalism. For the first time, the group gave exclusive access to filmmakers - allowing us to see the inner workings as they demonstrate the power of open source investigation and put networks, newspapers and governments to the test.

DVD / 2018 / 88 minutes

PROPAGANDA: THE MANUFACTURE OF CONSENT

By Jimmy Leipold

"Propaganda will never die out. Intelligent men must realize that propaganda is the modern instrument by which they can... help to bring order out of chaos." - Edward Bernays

In 1916, Woodrow Wilson ran on a platform strongly opposing US entry into WWI. But just a few months after taking office, the United States declared war on Germany. Soon after, the American people, so firmly opposed to the war just a year earlier, were enthusiastic supporters.

What happened?

The short answer: propaganda.

PROPAGANDA: THE MANUFACTURE OF CONSENT is a revealing documentary about how public relations grew out of wartime propaganda-and a portrait of one of the key architects of the field, Edward Bernays.

The nephew of Sigmund Freud, Bernays refined the techniques used so successfully during the war to sell products to consumers, and ultimately to sell capitalism itself to workers. Public relations was also critical in building support for the New Deal, and in the pushback against it from the National Association of Manufacturers, which created materials including films aimed at children on the glories of manufacturing.

Bacon and eggs as part of a hearty breakfast? The work of Bernays on behalf of a bacon company. Cigarettes as a sign of women's liberation? Bernays, again. Casting the democratically elected government of Guatemala as a Communist threat to justify US invasion on behalf of the United Fruit Company? Once more, Bernays.

There was nothing shadowy about Bernays. He wrote a book detailing his techniques and discusses them in an archival interview with Bill Moyers from 1983. Still, it is jarring to see his pride in hijacking the women's suffrage movement in order to sell more cigarettes-one of many illuminating moments in this film.

Featuring Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges, Public Relations Museum co-founder Shelley Spector, historian Stuart Ewen, sociologist David Miller, and Bernays' daughter Anne, PROPAGANDA offers an insightful look into the development of public relations techniques, and how they continue to affect us today.

DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2018 / 53 minutes

TVTV: VIDEO REVOLUTIONARIES

Director: Paul Goldsmith

Featuring Bill Murray, Hunter Thompson, Steven Spielberg, Lynn Swan, Goldie Hawn, Abbie Hoffman, Lily Tomlin and more, "TVTV: Video Revolutionaries" is a documentary about Top Value Television (TVTV), a band of merry video makers who, from 1972 to 1977, took the then brand-new portable video camera and went out to document the world. In those days, there were only three TV networks, using giant studio cameras, and no one had ever seen a portable camera stuck in their face, let alone one held by what Newsweek called "braless, blue-jeaned video freaks." Because the technology was so new, there were no rules about how to use it or what to make. So the "freaks" used it to make format-bending satirical shows about whatever interested them - from the 1972 Republican Convention to an award-winning expose of a 15-year-old jet-set guru named Guru Maharaj Ji, called "Lord of the Universe" to capturing the Steelers and Cowboys partying hard the night before Super Bowl X.

Directed by TVTV alum Paul Goldsmith, the film is like opening a treasure chest into the 1970s, filled with cultural and political events hosted by now-famous characters who were then just beginning their climb to iconic.

DVD / 2018 / 82 minutes

ACORN AND THE FIRESTORM

Director: Reuben Atlas, Sam Pollard

If you were impoverished and politically voiceless, ACORN hoped to change your mind. For 40 years, the community-organizing group sought to empower marginalized communities. Its critics, though, believed ACORN exemplified everything wrong with liberal ideals.

Fueled by a YouTube video made by two young conservatives who posed as pimp and prostitute in a sting, ACORN's very existence would be challenged. ACORN and the Firestorm goes beyond the 24-hour news cycle and cuts to the heart of the great political divide.

DVD / 2017 / 84 minutes

CELLING YOUR SOUL

Directed by Joni Siani

An examination of our love/hate relationships with our digital devices from the first digitally socialized generation, and what we can do about it.

In one short decade, we have totally changed the way we interact with one another. The millennial generation, the first to be socialized in a digital world, is now feeling the unintended consequences.

CELLING YOUR SOUL is a powerful and informative examination of how our young people actually feel about connecting in the digital world and their love/hate relationship with technology. It provides empowering strategies for more fulfilling, balanced, and authentic human interaction within the digital landscape.

The film reveals the effects of "digital socialization" by taking viewers on a personal journey with a group of high school and college students who through a digital cleanse discover the power of authentic human connectivity, and that there is "No App" or piece of technology that can ever replace the benefits of human connection.

DVD / 2017 / (Grades 6-12, College, Adult) / 48 minutes

LIVES: VISIBLE/LEFTOVERS

By Michelle Citron

LIVES: VISIBLE (2017, 35 mins): Lesbians in a box... two thousand private snapshots hidden away for over fifty years reveal the rich history of Chicago's working class butch/fem life in the pre-Stonewall era. Spanning four decades, from the 1930s to the early 1970s, the snapshots provide a rare look at a vanished and vibrant Lesbian culture: images of lovers and friends as they played, posed, serially switched partners, worked, partied, drank, and aged. Now we all take selfies; these women used a Brownie camera to tell the story of their community. LIVES: VISIBLE explores the ephemeral nature of culture and the power of the images we make.

LEFTOVERS (2014, 23 mins): Norma and Virginia were lovers for almost fifty years. They died isolated; the vibrant pre-Stonewall lesbian community of their youth long gone. A love story about the unforeseen trajectory of lives lived outside the mainstream told through the 2000 snapshots left behind.

2 DVDs (Color) / 2017 / 58 minutes

NOW HE'S OUT IN PUBLIC AND EVERYONE CAN SEE

By Natalie Bookchin

A riveting polyphonic documentary, NOW HE'S OUT IN PUBLIC AND EVERYONE CAN SEE presents a fractured narrative about an unnamed man whose racial identity is continually redrawn and contested by clusters of impassioned narrators. This intricately-edited and deeply political essay film by artist Natalie Bookchin is composed of fragments of found online video diaries made in the early days of the Obama era, a period many believed would be "post-racial" but instead ushered in a new era of racial discord.

NOW HE'S OUT IN PUBLIC AND EVERYONE CAN SEE explores this new landscape, one where mass media is transformed into social media and where cascades of disinformation, rumors, and insinuations spread across global electronic networks. Newly adapted for the cinema by the artist based on her own multi-screen gallery installation that was exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions and other museums, NOW HE'S OUT illustrates the way that, as truths and falsehoods become nearly impossible to distinguish, reality is splintered and recast through a myriad of interpretations and retellings.

DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2017 / 24 minutes

OBIT.

Directed by Vanessa Gould

At a time when the free press is under threat, OBIT. takes a rare look inside one of the United States' foremost journalistic institutions, The New York Times. The steadfast writers of the paper's Obituaries section approach their work with journalistic rigor and narrative flair, each day depositing the details of a handful of extraordinary lives into the cultural memory. Going beyond the byline and into the minds of those chronicling the recently deceased, OBIT. is ultimately a celebration of life that conveys the central role journalism plays in capturing and reporting vital pieces of our history.

DVD (Region 1, Color, Closed Captioned) / 2017 / 95 minutes

TRUMP: THE ART OF THE INSULT

By Joel Gilbert

Donald Trump used his special brand of the Art of the Insult to attack opponents and bash the media all the way to the White House in 2016. He continues to master the art with ongoing fine-tuning from the podium, his office and of course on Twitter.

While critics insisted "The Donald" was merely a chaotic sideshow, Trump continues to dominate the 24-hour news cycle with a master plan of political incorrectness. Hurling insults like Low-Energy Jeb, Lyin' Ted, Crooked Hillary, Little Marco, Pocahontas, and Fake News, Trump has emerged as an unstoppable political phenomenon who has transformed the Presidential voice into the greatest show on earth.

Trump: The Art of the Insult tells the story of Donald Trump's improbable journey from Trump Tower to rallies across America to the debate stage, where he reveled in mocking and taunting rivals with targeted insults and nicknames, leaving them gasping for air. As President of the US, he continues the trend.

In Trump: The Art of the Insult, the President is often sophomoric and sometimes brutal, yet America seems to always find him entertaining. Love or hate Donald Trump, you'll find yourself laughing along with the leader of the free world, and marveling at Trump.

Is "the Real Donald Trump" a marketing genius and accomplished performance artist or....?

DVD / 2017 / 95 minutes

ALL GOVERNMENTS LIE: TRUTH, DECEPTION, AND THE SPIRIT OF I.F. STONE

Director: Fred Peabody

Independent journalists like Amy Goodman, Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill, and Matt Taibbi are changing the face of journalism, providing investigative, adversarial alternatives to mainstream, corporate news outlets. Our cameras follow as they expose government and corporate deception - just as the ground-breaking independent journalist I.F. Stone did decades ago.

DVD / 2016 / 91 minutes

ALTHUSSER, AN INTELLECTUAL ADVENTURE

By Bruno Oliviero

Philosophe, Marxist, professor, murderer. More than a quarter century after his death, Louis Althusser, one of the most influential leftist thinkers of the 20th century, remains an enigmatic figure: a man whose work rejuvenated Marxist theory through books such as For Marx and Reading Capital, a Communist who strove to create a new framework following the revelations of Stalinist terror... and a victim of mental illness who, in his darkest moment, strangled his wife of more than 30 years.

ALTHUSSER, AN INTELLECTUAL ADVENTURE traces the development of Althusser's thought, which influenced a who's who of French philosophers, including Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, and Barthes. Credited with reinterpreting Marx in a way that encouraged readers to engage directly with his work, Althusser brought the Freudian concept of overdetermination to Marxist theory, and argued that Marx's work should not be read as one consistent whole, because there was a clear 'break' between his earlier and later writings. But Althusser's most enduring contribution may be the concept of ideological state apparatuses: institutions and social structures including schools, churches, and families, that serve to reinforce the capitalist state.

The film also delves into Althusser's little-understood struggles with the mental illness that would see him hospitalized numerous times throughout his life. In intimate letters to his wife, Helene Rytmann, and mistress, Franca Madonia, Althusser describes his treatment and mental states. As Yves Duroux says, in order to understand the man, one must look not only at his philosophy and relationship with the Communist Party, but to "his own madness" which in some ways linked the two.

ALTHUSSER, AN INTELLECTUAL ADVENTURE captures the man, and the implications of his work, in interviews with friends and colleagues such as Lucien Seve, who served more than 30 years on the central committee of the Communist Party of France, and with philosophers and former students including Etienne Balibar, Pierre Macherey, and Jacques Ranciere.

Throughout his life Althusser avoided the spotlight, preferring to be a behind-the-scenes theoretician arguing the case for Marxist revolution. But included in this film is the only TV interview he gave, shot on a rooftop in Rome in 1980-just weeks before he would kill Helene.

DVD (Color, Black and White) / 2016 / 55 minutes

CATCHING SIGHT OF THELMA & LOUISE

Directed by Jennifer Townsend

Explores the same women's and men's reactions to the groundbreaking film, "Thelma & Louise", 25 years ago and today.

Powerful, authentic, and timely, CATCHING SIGHT OF THELMA & LOUISE dives off the edge into the truth of women's experience in the world. It revisits the journey of Thelma & Louise through the lens of viewers who saw that iconic film in 1991 and shared intimate, personal, stories at that time. The same women and men were tracked down 25 years later. Are their responses different now? Has anything changed in the way women are treated?

Interview commentary mixes with clips from "Thelma & Louise" to reveal why this cinema classic continues to resonate with millions of viewers, the world over. Christopher McDonald, who played Thelma's husband, and Marco St. John, who played the truck driver, offer an insider's viewpoint.

DVD / 2016 / (Grades 10-12, College, Adults) / 86 minutes

DEMOCRACY ROAD

By Turid Rogne

After more than 20 years in exile in Norway, the Burmese journalists of DVB are returning to their homeland to establish their independent news station there. Editor-in-chief Aye Chan Naing and reporter Than Win Htut have dreamt about this for years, but their struggle for freedom and democracy is not over yet.

DEMOCRACY ROAD is a road movie documentary following the journalists of DVB in Myanmar in a critical phase of the establishment of the newborn democracy. With their existence as an independent news channel and Myanmar's future as a democracy at stake, senior reporter Than Win Htut and his colleagues hit the road with their groundbreaking show "Our Nation, Our Land." Their goal is to investigate the living conditions of ordinary people off the beaten path in Myanmar, but the machinery of the old dictatorship is still running. Simultaneously, editor-in-chief, Aye Chan Naing, has to negotiate with DVB's former enemies in the infamous Ministry of Information. The road towards democracy has only just begun...

Director Turid Rogne has followed the journalists of DVB for more than 10 years. With both boldness and sensitivity, she tells the story of life in a former dictatorship through the people who try to influence history.

DVD (Color) / 2016 / 60 minutes

KINGS OF THE PAGES: THE GOLDEN AGE OF COMIC STRIPS

Directed by Robert Lemieux

At the turn of the 20th century, two of the most powerful men in America were newspaper magnates William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. Noted mostly for their contentious rivalry and sensationalist news coverage, they were also responsible for cultivating some of the era's most recognizable celebrities-Nemo, Krazy, Happy Hooligan, George McManus, Ignatz, Mutt, Buster Brown, Hans and Fritz, and Offissa Pup, to name a few.

In their ongoing battle to attract newspaper readers, both Hearst and Pulitzer had discovered that comic strips were a strategic addition. Often raiding each other's staffs to acquire the best talent, both men recognized the potential. It wasn't until Hearst unveiled the first full color, 8-page comic supplement in 1896, that the potential was fully realized, prompting Hearst's now famous quote motto... "Eight Pages of Iridescent Polychromous Effulgence That Makes The Rainbow Look Like A Lead Pipe!"

Over the next fifty years, that polychromatic effulgence would usher in the Golden Age of the American comic strip. During that time span, more than 150 different strips made their way into America's living rooms. Every week the characters and their creators provided humorous entertainment and tickled many a funny bone. Reading the comics became a cultural phenomenon.

Only available in North America.

DVD / 2016 / 24 minutes

WHAT HAPPENED TO HER

By Kristy Guevara-Flanagan

WHAT HAPPENED TO HER is a forensic exploration of our cultural obsession with images of the dead woman on screen. Interspersing found footage from films and police procedural television shows and one actor's experience of playing the part of a corpse, the film offers a meditative critique on the trope of the dead female body.

The visual narrative of the genre, one reinforced through its intense and pervasive repetition, is revealed as a highly structured pageant. The experience of physical invasion and exploitation voiced by the actor pierce the fabric of the screened fantasy. The result is recurring and magnetic film cliche laid bare. Essential viewing for Pop Culture, Women's and Cinema Studies classes.

DVD (Color) / 2016 / 15 minutes

BAPTISM OF FIRE, A

By Jerome Clement-Wilz

"As it gets harder to sell pictures, we take greater and greater risks," explains Corentin Fohlen. A war correspondent still in his twenties, Fohlen is part of a new generation of freelance journalists who fly to war zones from Libya to Afghanistan on their own dime in the hope of selling images to news media outlets.

But the carefree attitude of youth can change when confronted with the harsh reality of life in wartime. When a colleague is killed in Syria, Fohlen's thirst for adventure turns into a deeper reflection on the meaning of work and life. Director Clement-Wilz followed Fohlen through shells and bullets for four years in order to create this riveting portrait of the life of a contemporary war correspondent.

DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2015 / 52 minutes

CAFFEINATED

Director: Hanh Nguyen, Vishal Solanki

Every cup of coffee has a story... one that begins in a lush tropical field and ends at your breakfast table. Caffeinated is a fascinating globe-hopping examination of this journey from bean to cup. A host of coffee specialists from the bean harvesters of such coffee-growing regions as Nicaragua, Guatemala and India to American shop owners to Italian industry insiders weigh in on the history and cultural impact of coffee, from the art of roasting and taste-testing to the unsung skills of your local barista. Caffeinated is a compelling, comprehensive look into the world of coffee that will leave you appreciating your morning cup as more than just a caffeine fix!

DVD (Region 1, Color) / 2015 / 80 minutes

DREAMS REWIRED

Narrated by Tilda Swinton By Manu Luksch, Martin Reinhart & Thomas Tode

Tilda Swinton's hypnotic voiceover and a treasure trove of rare archival footage culled from hundreds of films from the 1880s through the 1930s-much of it previously unseen-combine to trace the anxieties of today's hyper-connected world back a hundred years. Then, too, electric media sparked idealism in the public imagination-hailed as the beginning of an era of total communication, annihilation of distance and the end of war. But then, too, fears over the erosion of privacy, security, morality proved to be well-founded.

DREAMS REWIRED traces contemporary appetites and anxieties back to the birth of the telephone, television and cinema. At the time, early electric media were as revolutionary as social media are now. The technologies were expected to serve everyone, not just the elite classes. Human relationships would become stronger, efficiency would increase and the society would be revolutionized... But these initial promises were very different from what new media eventually brought to daily life.

Using excerpts from early dramatic films, slapstick comedies, political newsreels, advertisements and recordings of scientific experiments culled during years of research in film archives around the world, co-directors Manu Luksch, Martin Reinhart and Thomas Tode unearth material that is by turns hilarious, revelatory, beautiful and prescient. The archival footage, combined with poetic narration and a virtuosic score by Siegfried Friedrich forges a cross-generational connection between contemporary viewers and their idealistic forbearers of a century ago.

DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2015 / 85 minutes

FEAR NO FRUIT

Director: Mark Brian Smith Starring: Frieda Rapoport Caplan

Frieda Caplan, "The Queen of Kiwi," was the first woman to own a business on the L.A. Wholesale Produce Market in the 1960s. Over the past 50 plus years, Frieda's company has introduced more than 200 exotic fruits and vegetables to the U.S., transforming the supermarket produce department. The film chronicles Frieda's rise against the odds, introducing the Kiwifruit to America in 1962, taking the business to the next level with her two daughters at the helm, and establishing her impact on American cuisine. Set in California, from the farm to the supermarket, Fear No Fruit climaxes in San Luis Obispo at California Polytechnic State University, where a tireless 91-year-old Frieda receives an honorary doctorate, inspiring an audience of 30,000.

DVD (Region 1, Color) / 2015 / 96 minutes

FEED THE GREEN: FEMINIST VOICES FOR THE EARTH

By Jane Caputi

FEED THE GREEN: FEMINIST VOICES FOR THE EARTH, by Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies professor and scholar Jane Caputi, challenges the cultural imagination surrounding the destruction of the environment and the link and influence on femicide and genocide.

No nation is immune to the effects of global warming, but the impacts of climate change are felt disproportionately by those who face racial and socioeconomic inequalities. In the US, African Americans, Hispanics and other racial and ethnic minorities are more vulnerable to climate change. Globally the effects from global warming are likely to be unequal, with the world's poorest and developing regions lacking the economic and institutional capacity to cope and adapt.

FEED THE GREEN features a variety of feminist thinkers, including ecological and social justice advocates Vandana Shiva and Andrea Smith, ecosexual activists Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens; ecofeminist theorist and disability rights activist Ynestra King, poet Camille Dungy, scholars and bloggers Janell Hobson and Jill Schneiderman and grass roots activist La Loba Loca. Their voices are powerfully juxtaposed with images from popular culture, including advertising, myth, art, and the news, pointing to the ways that an environmentally destructive worldview is embedded in popular discourses, both contemporary and historical. Required viewing for Women's and Environmental Studies as well as Pop Culture.

DVD (Color) / 2015 / 35 minutes

HOT TYPE: 150 YEARS OF THE NATION

Director: Barbara Kopple

Hot Type: 150 Years of The Nation is a vivid, inside look at America's oldest continuously published weekly magazine. Shot over three years in intimate, cinema verite style, the film captures the day-to-day pressures and challenges of publishing the progressive magazine as it follows reporters out into the field, the editors who shape their work, and the editor-in chief who tries to keep all of the plates spinning.

Writers are the heart and soul of the magazine, and the film follows them extensively. Sasha Abramsky travels to West Texas to report on the years-long drought that has gripped the region and the devastating economic impact on farmers and residents. John Nichols unpacks what's going on behind the effort to recall Wisconsin governor Scott Walker. Amy Wilentz visits the "temporary" tent camps of Haiti, three years after the earthquake, to shed light on the dire conditions and lackluster international response. And Dani McClain reports on the Moral Monday movement in North Carolina, and its dynamic leader Rev. William Barber, as they push back against an extreme right-wing takeover of the state legislature.

In all of the current-day reported stories, The Nation's incredible trove of archival articles - and roster of writers - acts as an historical touchstone and illuminates how the past continuously ripples through and shapes current events.

At a fascinating moment in American history - politically, socially and culturally - the media landscape is changing at breathtaking speed. The film charts the journey of The Nation - and the nation - evolving into the future, as it is guided by its remarkable past.

DVD / 2015 / 92 minutes

HOW TO CHANGE THE WORLD

Director: Jerry Rothwell

How to Change the World chronicles the adventures of an eclectic group of young pioneers - Canadian hippie journalists, photographers, musicians, scientists, and American draft dodgers - who set out to stop Richard Nixon's atomic bomb tests in Amchitka, Alaska, and end up creating the worldwide green movement.

Greenpeace was founded on tight knit, passionate friendships forged in Vancouver in the early 1970s. Together they pioneered a template for environmental activism which mixed daring iconic feats and worldwide media: placing small rubber inflatables between harpooners and whales, blocking ice-breaking sealing ships with their bodies, spraying the pelts of baby seals with dye to make them valueless in the fur market. The group had a prescient understanding of the power of media, knowing that the advent of global mass communications meant that the image had become a more effective tool for change than the strike or the demonstration.

DVD (Region 1, Color) / 2015 / 109 minutes

LOVE BETWEEN THE COVERS

By Laurie Kahn

Romance novels comprise over a billion dollars a year in book sales, outselling science fiction, fantasy, and mystery combined. So why is the genre so often dismissed as frivolous "scribble" rather than elevated as a radical literary form that pushes the envelope on gender, race, and diversity? The heroic characters, prolific writers, and voracious readers that dominate romantic fiction are primarily women. Witty and intelligent, these lovers of the written word form a collaborative, supportive, and dynamic community where readers and writers inspire one another. Emmy Award Winning director Laurie Kahn (Tupperware!) takes a comprehensive look at what goes into publishing a romantic novel, from the author's inspiration and writing process to the photo shoots for those distinctive cover designs. Speaking with literary scholars, romance fanatics, aspiring writers, and award-winning authors, including Nora Roberts, Eloisa James, Beverly Jenkins, and Radclyffe, this documentary offers fascinating insights into this female-centric literary world.

DVD (Color) / 2015 / 84 minutes

ON BEAUTY

By Joanna Rudnick

From Emmy-nominated IN THE FAMILY filmmaker Joanna Rudnick and Chicago's Kartemquin Films comes a story about challenging norms and redefining beauty. ON BEAUTY follows fashion photographer Rick Guidotti, who left the fashion world when he grew frustrated with having to work within the restrictive parameters of the industry's standard of beauty. After a chance encounter with a young woman who had the genetic condition albinism, Rick re-focused his lens on those too often relegated to the shadows to change the way we see and experience beauty.

At the center of ON BEAUTY are two of Rick's photo subjects: Sarah and Jayne. In eighth grade Sarah left public school because she was bullied so harshly for the birthmark on her face and brain. Jayne lives with albinism in Eastern Africa where society is blind to her unique health and safety needs and where witch doctors hunt people with her condition to sell their body parts. We follow Rick as he uses his lens to challenge convention and media's narrow scope of with the help of two extraordinary women.

DVD (Color) / 2015 / 31 minutes

PROJECT Z

Directed by Phillip Gara

An investigation into how war games, worst-case scenarios, complex systems, and networked media produce the very crises they seek to model, predict and report.

As the Cold War ends, a professor goes in search of an America without an enemy. Armed with a Hi8 video camera and inspired by the detective work of Walter Benjamin, he heads deep into the inner circles of the defense, entertainment and media industries, where he discovers a worst-case future being built from war games, video games, and language games.

Some thirty years later, a group of student filmmakers find the videotapes in a filing cabinet, along with a stack of old newspaper clippings, audio interviews and photographs. With the help of friends from the Global Media Project, the filmmaker produces an experimental documentary that goes back to the future, where they find the original maps for a new world order. An unexpected warning is found on the outermost edges of the maps: "Beware of Zombies!"

The result is PROJECT Z, a film that updates another warning, issued by President Eisenhower in his 1961 farewell address, about the emergence of a "military-industrial complex" and the consequences should "public policy be captured by a scientific and technological elite".

Combining rare footage from inside the war machine with corrosive commentary by leading critics of global violence, injustice, and inequality, the film challenges the living to write their own future before the walking dead conjure the final global event.

DVD / 2015 / (Grades 10-12, College, Adult) / 74 minutes

SEX, LIES AND TABLOIDS!

By Jean-Baptiste Peretie

They're lurid, obnoxious, disdainful and explicit. And we love them - and love to hate them.

SEX, LIES AND TABLOIDS! charts the rise and fall of tabloid papers in the UK and US, including the New York Post, The Sun, and notorious supermarket tabloids like the National Enquirer and The Star.

In the beginning, they were upstarts. Papers that shamelessly pandered with stories about sex scandals, and celebrities - often skirting ethical lines, and sometimes outright making things up ("Run it through the typewriter again," was one editor's mantra.) But by the 1980s and '90s they had become the media heavyweights. Left behind by the tabloids' coverage of Bill Clinton's sex life, Princess Diana and the OJ Simpson trial, the mainstream media started to adopt their techniques.

SEX, LIES AND TABLOIDS! Features extensive interviews with key tabloid players such as notorious editor Kelvin MacKenzie ("If you have no news... you get a picture of Diana and make it as big as possible"), journalist Paul McMullan ("People need to understand that privacy is an evil, bad concept"), and the late Vincent Musetto (famed for the headline "Headless body in topless bar"). The film provides an insider's account of the no-holds-barred mentality driving tabloid journalism while also using fun and campy footage mimicking the style of the tabloids themselves.

Eventually, the tabs would go too far. Briefly chastened by the death of Diana and shunned after the British phone hacking scandal, the papers would go into a downward spiral, with The News of the World even shutting down. But culture they spawned is stronger than ever. Sites like TMZ and The Smoking Gun and an omni-present gotcha culture have brought the spirit of the tabloids to the Internet. At the same time, the ubiquity of sharing means photos that would once have been prized by paparazzi (hello Kim Kardashian in a bikini) are posted by celebrities and would-be-celebs themselves. The tabloids may be gone, but the tabloid spirit is everywhere.

DVD (Closed Captioned) / 2015 / 52 minutes

WORLD ACCORDING TO RUSSIA TODAY, THE

By Misja Pekel

In 2014, Malaysian Airlines passenger flight 17 was shot down with a rocket intended for the private plane of Russian president Vladimir Putin... If, that is, a viewer is relying on the satellite TV network Russia Today as their source for news.

These claims were not the first time Russia Today drew attention for counter-factual reporting: during the 2008 war in Georgia, the network reported that South Ossetians were the victims of genocide at the hands of Georgians. In 2014, the channel was warned by the British TV agency for its biased and inaccurate reporting on the uprising on Maidan Square in Kiev. The list goes on and on.

Russia Today (now renamed just RT) was launched in 2005 to bring a Russian-centric perspective on current political events to a global audience. After a decade of generous Kremlin funding, 2015 found the 24-hour news channel the biggest media organization on YouTube with 2 billion viewers: more than CNN and the BBC combined.

The network claims only to offer an alternative perspective to the monolithic view presented by mainstream Western media. But what kind of "reporting" is Russia Today actually doing? What is it like to work for the channel? How much influence does the Kremlin really have there? Is it possible to differentiate between fact and opinion on a Russian channel when the Russian interests are at stake?

In Misja Pekel's disturbing documentary THE WORLD ACCORDING TO RUSSIA TODAY, former and current news anchors, editors and correspondents for the network-including William Dunbar, Sara Firth, Marc de Jersey, Afshin Rattansi and Liz Wahl-join journalists and media professionals Alexander Nekrassov, Peter Pomerantsev, Richard Sambrook, Daniel Sandford, Derk Sauer and more in a detailed dissection of the channel's modus operandi and the challenges and dangers of reporting and consuming news in a globalized world.

DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2015 / 40 minutes

http://www.learningemall.com/News/Media_Society_202102.html

Kangaroo Island is Australia’s third largest. Its glossy black cockatoos have been one of Australia’s conservation success stories. Thanks to a recovery program that began in 1995, their numbers in the wild increased from 150 to 400. Scientists responded by downgrading the birds’ status from critically endangered with extinction to just endangered.

But that all changed in January. Now this bird is part of an unfolding horror story.

Fires have raged across nearly 50 percent of Kangaroo Island. That’s their 4,400-square-kilometer (1,700-square-mile) isle off the coast of the state of South Australia. Flames destroyed the habitat for most of the birds. It’s unclear how many glossy black cockatoos survived. For those that did, food may now be scarce. These birds eat the seeds of a single tree species: the drooping she oak.

These glossy black cockatoos of Kangaroo Island had been viewed as a conservation success story — until fires ravaged their habitat. There were so few of these birds to start with that the fires may have killed most of them off.

CREDIT: WATTS/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Many years of hard work to save these birds have gone up in smoke, says Daniella Teixeira. She’s a conservation biologist who works 2,184 kilometers (some 1,360 miles) away at Australia’s University of Queensland in Brisbane. This fire has brought “a big step backwards for the recovery team,” Teixeira concludes. And it’s something she understands well. She has studied and worked to protect these cockatoos for the last four years. Even if just one in every four of the birds died, she says, this subspecies could again be deemed critically endangered with extinction.

Similar stories are playing out across Australia. As of January 12, months of wildfires had burned nearly 11 million hectares (more than 42,470 square miles). That’s an area larger than the nation of Guatemala and a little bigger than the state of Tennessee. More than 2,200 homes have gone up in flames and 29 people died. And another two months of bushfire season still remains. Already, the toll on animals and plants, many of which are unique — found nowhere outside Australia — boggles the mind.

It’s an ecological disaster never before seen in this nation’s history. More than 1 billion animals have been killed so far, says Christopher Dickman. He’s an ecologist at the University of Sydney. That estimate is not from an actual body count. Instead, scientists calculated the estimate from previous calculations of how many Australian animals had been lost over a given area due to land-clearing practices.

And, of course, the true number is likely to be much, much higher. After all, that estimate did not account for bats, frogs or invertebrates — such as insects, worms and spiders. “Invertebrates make up more than 95 percent of animal species and the vast majority of animal biomass,” notes Mike Lee. He’s a biologist at the South Australian Museum in Adelaide. Invertebrate losses alone, he fears, could therefore number in the trillions! Among those goners could be the vulnerable Richmond birdwing butterfly (Ornithoptera richmondia). Also likely to be among the big losers: many species of peacock spiders. These jewel-hued arachnids, which hail from eastern Australia, may have been badly impacted.

Trillions of insects, including this Richmond birdwing butterfly, are among species that experts fear have been killed by the fires. This vulnerable butterfly lives in subtropical rainforests around Brisbane. There, plants grow that are eaten by its larvae.

CREDIT: DON SANDS/CSIRO, WIKIMEDIA COMMONS (CC BY 3.0)

This season’s bush fires have spread widely and quickly, sometimes propelled by winds of up to 60 kilometers (37 miles) per hour. Largely tree-bound species, such as koalas, will have had little chance to escape oncoming fire fronts. Smoke and strong winds have left many birds so confused that they weren’t able to find safe havens.

The fires have incinerated many habitats, setting up a crisis that will continue long after the flames are gone. Even if animals such as small marsupials survive the fires, no suitable homelands or food for them may remain. And that can leave them at risk of being picked off by human-introduced predators, such as cats and foxes.

Endangered species often are at risk of extinction precisely because they have adapted to some very specific ecosystem. They may depend on just one type of tree or pollinator or environment. If fires eliminated that, or wiped out safe corridors between patches of such ecological niches, the animals may not be able to survive. The glossy black cockatoo is just one of 20 to 100 threatened species — plants and animals — that a group of scientists now report have lost most of their habitat to the fires if not all of it.

A kangaroo can be seen fleeing flames in this photo from Gosper’s Mountain Fire. It’s in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. That fire continues to blaze, blanketing the city of Sydney in smoke.

CREDIT: BRETT HEMMINGS/STRINGER/GETTY IMAGES NEWS

Six of Australia’s leading biologists, including Dickman, published the first written estimate of the scale of the damage on January 8. It appeared in The Conversation. This nonprofit online publication publishes commentary from researchers.

“Some animals may have been lucky enough to find refuge,” says Euan Ritchie. He’s an ecologist at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. “However, given the scale and severity of these fires [in Australia], there’s no question that, even common species — and not just threatened species — will have been affected quite dramatically.”

you know, every once and a while I really get to thinking about the big plot details of the TAZ Balance arc and Lucretia’s whole thing really fucks me up.

Don’t get me wrong, I adore her, and no one is their best self in truly desperate situations, let alone something like what she was going through, but so many of the choices she made...

Like I’m not even going to cover the whole mind wipe thing because what happened to Davenport is literally my worst nightmare with not even a shred of hyperbole, I’m just gonna focus rn on the whole “cutting the planar system off from the Prime Material plane,” because that alone is a whole mountain plus some.

So like the details of her plan, if I recall correctly, were that she would cast an abjuration spell, powered by the Light of Creation, around the whole of the Prime Material plane in order to shield the Light from the Hunger’s scouts, and eventually starve the Hunger out.

That’s a fantastic plan if there aren’t any consequences, like all the logic is sound. You don’t have to figure out how to kill the giant vore monster, you don’t have to dump a bunch of incredibly powerful, incredibly dangerous, and guaranteed to be used artifacts on some unsuspecting inhabitants, it’s just a waiting game, and then you’re done.

But like immediately the consequences were recognized and pointed out. The bonds between the Prime Material plane and the rest of the planar system would be severed, and all the planes would starve, wasting away and dying.

The inhabitants of 12 planes of reality would die.

Now I know that DnD universes tend to be smaller in population than our particular world, but even if we reduce the population of each entire plane to that of a single planet, say earth-scale, that is a LOT of lifeforms.

Ignoring the current, generous, estimation of 8 billion humans, there are estimates ranging between 8.7 million to of 11.3 million with a few going upwards of a billion and to scales of a trillion in accounting for deep water microbial life in numbers of species.

So let’s be generous and assume a biodiversity count at around 10 million species, getting rid of the microbes and adding some of the magical creatures.

Did you know the online world atlas estimates about 900 million dogs exist on the planet today? 7.8 billion humans exist in our world. 1.5 billion cows. 2 million rats in New York City alone, and that’s 784 sq km out of all flat land on the planet being 148.94 million sq km. Mice, squirrels, and bats are considered to be on the same scale as the rats.

But let’s continue to ere on the conservative side here and go with the average population per species be somewhere around raccoon level. In North America, the estimated raccoon population is between 5 and 10 million, and the global population is estimated to be around 20 million and rising.

So let’s go with 15 million. Again, trying to be conservative with our numbers.

These assumptions brought together, we are saying each plane - note that the Prime Material plane encompasses and entire universe - only has one, sparsely inhabited, earth-sized planet’s (or equivalent) worth of population. And that population is broken down to approximately 10 million species with 15 million members per species.

Now a lot of this is incredibly hand-wavy and vague - I am definitely not an ecologist - but I feel like for estimating a fantasy planar system’s population while giving the Director the benefit of the doubt by assuming low, this has at least some grounding.

So we have 12 planes, with 10,000,000 species each, and 15,000,000 members per species.

This would ultimately be 12*10,000,000*15,000,000 lifeforms.

1,800,000,000,000,000 lifeforms.

1.8 million billion lifeforms.

Numbers like these tend to make more sense when translated into into terms of time, so say, if each lifeform equated a single second, then that would be over 57 million years.

And this is a generous estimate.

This is a possible number of lives that could be lost if Lucretia had succeeded in putting her plan into action.

**And, I just want to say as a quick aside here, I forgot about the ethereal plane, which a checked to make sure it did in fact have inhabitants (it does), which bumped this from 11 to 12 planes. That was an increase of 150,000,000,000,000 lifeforms, or ~4,700,000 years - remembering that each second of those years is a life - from the time translation. It’s hard to see that significance when the majority of the characters in a number are 0, so I just wanted to make that clear.

Now the relics definitely had incredibly high death counts. I’d say it’s reasonable to argue that those counts would be comparable to the counts of our wars, and not to rehash any specifics, but out all pre-history, midieval, and modern wars the highest estimates remained in the tens of millions, no higher than 85 million deaths.

Of course, without saying, that is an utterly horrifying number of lives lost. But that versus not just one people’s lives lost, but the entirety of a set of world’s existence?

That’s a scale difference in the realm of 10s of million, specifically around 21,176,470 times larger in size.

I know the ethical dilemma of arguing the value of one life versus the value of many is an age old debate, but when it comes to person-scale war versus the destruction of not one but eleven universes?

Literally the choice to allow people to fight each other with absurdly dangerous magic versus allowing all of this planar system’s existence to waste to nothingness?

Which, mind you, the destruction of entire planar systems is exactly what the Hunger was doing. The crew of the Starblaster was trying to stop all that.

This is not just a mass extinction event, it’s the end of everything to this planar system, changing it in a way such that it will never produce any semblance of life again. Like in Cycle 82 when the Plane of Magic vivisected the Prime Material Plane, life in the whole system was destroyed, as the system no longer functioned in a way that could sustain anything more meaningful than shells of what had been before.

Like optimistically, the Hunger starves before the Planar System does, and minimal casualties occur. But the Hunger has the energy of Many, Many, Many more planar systems, just like, in it. Because who knows how long it had been consuming these things before the crew showed up.

So really, the best case is that the planar system changes, and everything designed to function in the previous flow of the system dies, the Hunger dies, and eventually life that can function in this new, changed system comes into being after, I don’t know, another universe, that jives with the new flow, is made within the Prime Material Plane?

I feel like this is a case of preferring an semi-unknown to a clear known.

Because the crew has seen powerful artifacts, citing a 5 wizards out of 7 party. And they have a solid grasp on the power levels of the Light, citing both the time spent with it to build the Starblaster and the entirety of the Stolen Century. So it’s pretty clear what the consequences of supercharging some enchanted artifacts with the Light and dropping them on some unsuspecting planet will be.

Especially if these artifacts are 100% definitely going to be used due to Craveability.

They had to have seen, and likely fairly up close, the kind of damage that heavy-hitting magical artifacts plus the Light of Creation can do in the previous century, just not in the precise configuration of the artificing plan sets up.

Where as they haven’t ever actively cut off a Prime Material Plane from the rest of the system. Sure, they had spent years studying planar systems as members of the IPRE and they had the whole century to observe planar systems in many configurations. Enough to develop an incredibly solid hypothesis of what would happen, but they never really saw something similar in action.

But 6 out of the 7 members of the crew were able to see the possible consequence of “The whole planar system would slowly, painfully starve to death in literally every way possible,” and decided “yeah, fuck that,” save for Lucretia.

And I know we can get attached to our own ideas, but when you see violent wars versus the collapse of all of this planar system’s existence?

Like don’t get me wrong, the relics were pretty dang bad, but to not even trust the crew so far as to try to persuade an adjustment of the relic plan once the damage started getting truly awful?

Just jumping straight to, “I guess I should erase all of their memories of the people closest to them, and dropping them in a world where they now have LITERALLY no one”?

I digress on the memory thing, I did say I was gonna keep that out of this post, but seriously.

If she couldn’t trust the crew as her family to agree with her that the relics were bad, and maybe they should try something else because it was tearing their family apart as much as it was tearing apart the world down below; couldn’t she at least trust them (and herself) as a committee of literally All of Existence’s foremost experts on planar systems, the Light of Creation, and the Hunger, and if 6 out of 7 experts can conclude the catastrophic end of ta planar system from severing the bonds between its planes, maybe she should consider it too?

Like, they didn’t write her off out of spite or a lack of faith in her magic ability. They just said that they’d rather some wars ravage a particular plane until maybe they could find something better instead of initiating total planar collapse.

As many of you may know, the state of Kerala in India has experienced incessant rainfall this monsoon season, causing chaotic flooding and landslides across all 14 districts of the state within the last week. As a result all 35 dams in Kerala have been opened (something that hasn’t been done since 1984), and more than 25 bridges have collapsed. The loss of agricultural land, roads, and infrastructure alone account to more than 1.5 billion USD. 

Unfortunately, as of August 20th, over 300 people have died and 633,010 people are staying in 2,971 relief camps due to flooding. Fisherman and other locals alongside the Army, Air Force, Navy,Coast Guard, and NDRF teams have rescued 38,000 flood-affected people in the last 3 days alone. 

It goes without saying that the road to recovery ahead is long and tiresome. Many of those rescued have lost their livelihood, and most do not have a home to go back to when they leave the relief camps. Indigenous communities living in districts like Wayanad will be some of the hardest hit. Food shortage will be a worrying reality. Kerala’s thriving and pivotal tourist business will be set back detrimentally. Stagnant flood water will ultimately lead to numerous diseases that need to be controlled. The state will need to rebuild lost infrastructure promptly. Citing the reported losses and future costs, the Chief Minister of Kerala has requested the Central Government for 19,500 cr/195,000,000,000 INR (roughly 3 billion USD) to assist in the rehabilitation. However, they have only been granted 500 cr/5,000,000,000 INR (roughly 72 million USD). This is nowhere near enough.

I implore everyone with the means to, to PLEASE DONATE! It’s incredibly heartwarming to see that already people all across the world have united to help Kerala during one of it’s darkest hours. A little goes a long way and no donation is too small.

Below is a consolidated list (with links) of online donation options (for both people in India and outside of it); including Government, NGO/Business, and smaller country-specific fundraisers. I have also included information on who will be handling the donation funds, where it will be going to,  and the easiest ways to donate from where you are in the world: 

Government sponsored fundraising: 

The Government of Kerala Chief Minister’s Disaster Relief Fund (CMDRF): The CMDRF is the official fund aiming to provide an emergency assistance release mechanism that will grant ‘immediate relief to families and individuals distressed by calamity, loss of life due to accidents and chronic diseases’ caused by flooding. Donating inside India: All major Indian cards/banks/net banking is accepted. All donations within India are 100% tax exempt (under s80G(2)(iii) of the Income Tax Act 1961). Receipt provided. Donating outside of India: Advised to use South Indian Bank (International Cards) or Federal Bank gateways when prompted. Foreign contributions to the fund will be exempt from the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, 2010) Please note that the server is fairly slow and has difficulty processing at times due to high traffic.   Run by: The Government of Kerala (Finance Secretary- transparency accountable under the Right to Information Act 2005) Sent to: Financial aid direct to beneficiary 

Kerala Rescue: Run by the Government of Kerala, keralarescue.in provides a portal to request help, locate, volunteer, or contribute. Donating Inside India:  Please choose ‘To Contribute’ and fill out details from collection. Please also refer to the ‘ District Needs & Collection Center’ as reference for what is required. Run by: The Government of Kerala (Disaster Management Cell/District Administration) Sent to: Resource aid direct to beneficiary

NGOs and Business sponsored fundraising:  

PayTM: an easy portal to donate money into the CMDRF. All donations up to 1cr (Rs.10,000,000) will be matched by PayTM. Inside India: Payments can be made through the PayTM app or via desktop. Run by: PayTM Sent to: CMDRF

Amazon.in: Immediate relief provided to flood hit residents by donating vital resources to respect NGOs working on the ground. Donate both inside and outside India: Amazon lets you choose between a list of NGOs and then select items on their wishlist to deliver to the NGO of your choice. Run by: Amazon India (in conjunction with Habitat for Humanity, World Vision, Goonj, and Oxfam India) Sent to: (NGO of choice) Resource aid direct to beneficiary

Akshaya Patra (NGO): ‘Akshaya Patra has set up a temporary kitchen to prepare and distribute food. As of now, the Foundation is providing an average of 7,000 meals per day costing Rs. 30 per meal.’ Inside India: Residents inside India can use the Zomato app to donate meals, as well as the Akshaya Patra website Outside India: Donations can be made on the Akshaya Patra website. Receipt provided. Run by: Akshaya Patra (NGO) Sent to: Food aid direct to beneficiary

Rapid Response (NGO): Funds raised ‘will be used to distribute 300 relief kits, 300 bed kits and 300 kitchen sets with a total aim of supporting 900 families.’ Kits range from Rs 1000-2000 each. In addition Rapid Response will be providing 120,000 food packets, 30,000 Milk & Biscuits kits and conduct 60 medical camps in the worst affected areas of Kerala (details on website). Inside India: Use Ketto*, Milaap* [*Crowdfunding portals: 3-6% of donations deducted in addition to card processing/exchange/tax fee] or Rapid Response portal Outside India: US residents may use Milaap* or Ketto* portals. For all other countries please use the Rapid Response portal.  Run by: Rapid Response (NGO) (Milaap: Asha on behalf of Rapid Response) Sent to: Resource aid direct to beneficiary

Goonj (NGO): Goonj is collecting urban household materials and food packets to transport to flood stricken areas. Monetary contributions are used for logistics and essential purchases. Inside India: Resources can be dropped off at Goonj offices or donated online via Amazon.in, the Flipkart app, or DonateKart. Food donations can be made through BigBasket. Monetary donations can be made through Ketto [*Crowdfunding portal: 6% of donations deducted in addition to card processing/exchange/tax fee] or Goonj website. All monetary contributions are tax exempted under s80G of I-T Act 1961. Outside India: Donate resources via Amazon.in or DonateKart. Monetary donations can be made through Ketto* or Goonj website. Run by: Goonj (NGO) Sent to: Resource and food aid direct to beneficiary

Oxfam India (NGO): Funding goes to long-term support, rehabilitation and rebuilding of homes, water supplies, and other facilities. Inside India: Monthly donation options. 50% of donation is exempt from I-T Act 1961 under s80G. Outside India: Monthly donation options. Credit card preferred for lower processing fees.  Run by: Oxfam India (NGO) Sent to: Resource aid direct to beneficiary

ATMA Foundation (NGO): The funds raised through this project will be utilized to support relief work in Thrissur District, in coordination with local agencies in the worst-hit areas. Once the emergency situation is overcome, the funds will be utilized for long term reconstruction and rebuilding. Inside India: Donations can be made online through SBI Connect. 50% of donation is exempt from I-T Act 1961 under s80G. Outside India: UK and US residents can contribute through the GlobalGiving* page.[*Crowdfunding portal: 7% of donations deducted in addition to card processing/exchange/tax fee] Run by: Suresh C K on behalf of ATMA (NGO) Sent to: Resource aid direct to beneficiary (Thrissur district priority)

Individual and Malayali Association (NRI/Outside of India) run fundraising:

*Please note: Crowdfunding portals charge small fees per donation; GoFundMe- 2.9% + $.30 USD per transaction Facebook fundraising- dependent on country Chuffed- 2.0% + $0.30 USD per transaction. Please also note that donating to a bank account within one’s own country/currency may assist in minimising fund loss through processing/exchange. 

**Please message if you would like your fundraiser added to the list.

Australia [AUD]

Donate to Help Kerala Flood Victims- via Chuffed* Run by: Australia India Foundation Incorporated Sent to: CMDRF

Kerala Flood Relief from Australia- via GoFundMe* Run by: Ashly Sabu Sent to: CMDRF

Kerala Flood Relief Fund from SMYM Australia- via Chuffed* Run by: Syro-Malabar Youth Movement Australia Sent to: SPANDAN- Mount St Thomas (NGO)

Kerala Flood Relief Fund from Australia #Ausforkerala- via Facebook*   Run by: Majosh Joseph Sent to: CMDRF 

Canada [CAD]

Kerala Flood Relief 2018- via GoFundMe* Run by: Kerala Cultural Association of British Columbia Canada Sent to: CMDRF

TMS- Kerala Floods Appeal for Help - via GoFundMe* Run by: Toronto Malayalee Samajam Sent to: CMDRF

Denmark [DKK]

Kerala Under Flood- via Facebook* Run by: Joy Issac Menamparampil Sent to: CMDRF

Germany [EUR]

Kerala Flood Relief Fund from Europe- via Facebook* Run by: Thomas Thandath on behalf of Malayalee-Deutsches Treffen Baden-Württemberg Sent to: CMDRF

Japan [JPY]

Nihonkairali Kerala Flood Relief Fund Collection Drive- via bank transfer Run by: Nihon Kairali Sent to: CMDRF

New Zealand [NZD] 

Fundraising from NZ for Flood Relief- via Facebook* Run by: Prince Johny Sent to: CMDRF

UAE [AED]

Emirates Red Crescent Kerala Relief Fund- via UAE Red Crescent Authority Run by: Emirates Red Cresent Sent to: CMDRF- Local NGOs

Kerala Flood Relief- via Qatar Charity Run by: Qatar Charity (NGO) Sent to: Local NGOs

UK [GBP]

British Malayali Relief Appeal- via Virgin Money Giving Run by: British Malayali Charity Foundation Sent to: CMDRF

Khalsa Aid Kerala Floods Appeal- via MyDonate.bt Run by: Khalsa Aid (NGO) Sent to: Khalsa Aid workers in Kerala

Kerala Flood Disaster Relief - COMA- via GoFundMe* Run by: Central Ohio Malayalee Association Dublin Sent to: CMDRF

Kerala Flood Relief fund- via GoFundMe* Run by: Archana Mathew Sent to: CMDRF

USA [USD]

Kerala Flood Relief Fund from the USA- via Facebook* Run by: Arun Nella on behalf of Knanaya Catholic Yuvajanavedhi of Chicago Sent to: CMDRF [to route money through IRS certified charity (TBA) in Chicago to minimise fund loss through taxes]

Kerala Flood Relief Fund from the USA- via Facebook* Run by: Sewa International USA Sent to: Deseeya Seva Bharati Keralam (NGO)

GAMA Kerala Flood Relief Fund - via GoFundMe* Run by: Greater Austin Malayalee Association Sent to: CMDRF

Kerala Floods Relief Fundraiser- via GoFundMe* Run by: The Kerala Club of Detroit, Michigan [The Kerala Club of Detroit will match donations by 20% (up to $10,000)] Sent to: “most flood-affected district's authorities and/or local non-governmental organizations who are providing relief aid to the flood victims”

Singapore [SGD]

South India Floods Response - Public Appeal- via Red Cross Run by: Singapore Red Cross Sent to: CMDRF

Sweden [SEK]

Göteborg Kerala Flood Relief Fund- via Facebook* Run by: Mukesh Muralidharan Sent to: CMDRF

Switzerland [CHF]

Light of Life: Kerala Flood Relief- via Light of Life (donations are tax deductible in Switzerland) Run by: Light of Life (NGO) Sent to: CMDRF

Who is Bill Browder?

In case you haven’t looked him up already, I wanted everyone to know who this man is and why he has been singled out by Putin.

Bill Browder would be a simple wealthy business man that no one would have ever heard of before. That was until he made billions in Russia, which sparked a dangerous turn of events. This is actually a long and somewhat complex story. I’m going to streamline it, but give you a more detail than most news outlets are giving right now.

First, a little background about how Russia operates. Although on paper Russia has a democracy it is openly known that their democracy is a farce. The country has long been controlled by a large oligarchy of wealthy families, which is not too different from the wealthy citizens and corporations in America, but their power is much more overt and the corruption is 100 fold. The Kremlin has their hands in everything!

Now, Bill Browder is an American born business man who ran an investment firm in Russia, where he lived and worked (also in London) for nearly 30 years. During this time Browder and his associates realized that the oligarchs were stealing money from his firm along with others. For a while Browder played an expose and shame game that got the oligarchs to back off a little and there was no recourse.

That was until Putin became elected and decided to get his hands in the same pot. Putin jailed a powerful oligarch named Khodorkovsky and then extorted the rest to keep them out of jail. This is a country where rights and laws mean nothing. Browder was then prevented from returning to Russia from London due to his exposure campaign. So Browder hired a lawyer to investigate why the sudden change.

This lawyer’s name was Magnitsky, and he discovered that the state was basically stealing stocks from Browder’s firm and reinvesting them under false identities.This was happening to businesses all over the country. Magnitsky uncovered a 230 million dollar theft, along with identity fraud, by the Kremlin.

Browder and Magnitsky made the grave mistake of believing that Putin loved his country and would punish the bad actors within the government who were carrying out these thefts. They were dead wrong, literally. Magnitsky was arrested and spent around 6 months in prison. He was kept in desolate conditions, tortured, and beaten. Eventually he was beaten to death in his cell.

During Magnitsky’s time in prison he was able to slip out hand written complaints to his lawyer. While those went unanswered by Russian government, these notes were recovered and used to expose this horrible human rights violation.

Browder brought his story to John McCain and Congress quickly passed the Magnitsky Act. It passed in the House 364 to 43 and in the Senate 92 to 4. The Magnitsky Act was designed to get retribution for the man who died exposing vast illegal wealth. The Act gave the U.S. the power to freeze Russian’s foreign accounts and deny their visas. This was done because Russian oligarchs both live and hide their money outside of Russia, because they fear having their wealth stolen. This was the perfect way to hit back. Since it’s inception in 2010 about 50 Russian oligarchs have been caught in the Magnitsky Act.

For years since then Browder has been advocating for sanctions against Russia and to expose their corruption. He has been a serious thorn in Putin’s side. Now, that’s Browder’s story...

But there’s more!

Remember that meeting that Don Jr. had with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and the supposed topic of discussion was adoption? Well, back when the Magnitsky Act was passed, Putin had very little power to push back. The only thing he could do was ban adoption of Russian children to American families. What is tragic about this is that Russia only allowed the adoption of sick children, while many die in orphanages.

Natalia Veselnitskaya had previously been involved in founding a fraudulent NGO called Human Rights Accountability Global Initiative Foundation in Massachusetts. Their public goal was to restore adoption rights for American families of Russian children. Their real purpose turned out to be lobbying to repeal the Magnitsky Act. Now Mueller is investigating this organization.

Lastly,

One of the reasons that Putin is eager to get his hands on Browder is to stop his activism, because it’s working. Now there are Magnitsky Acts in Estonia, The UK, Canada, Lithuania, and Latvia. More importantly, a very close ally to Putin was implicated in the Panama Papers. The language of the Magnitsky Act could potentially allow Putin to be charged under it. Right now he is desperate to stop it and also to get revenge on Browder.

This is actually more to the story, but this is the meat of it. I hope you’ve found this informative.

83 Things That Blew Our Minds in 2018

Most “Himalayan” pink salt is from the Punjab area of Pakistan, not the actual Himalayas.

Hippos poop so much that sometimes all the fish die.

In addition to the supermassive black hole at its center, the Milky Way galaxy may be home to thousands of smaller black holes, invisible to even our finest scientific instruments.

There’s a parasitic fungus that doses cicadas with the hallucinogen found in shrooms before making their butts fall off.

The Arctic Ocean is now so warm that its floating sea ice can melt even during the coldest, darkest times of the year.

You can make thousands of dollars a week charging electric scooters.

When your eyes look right, your eardrums bulge to the left, and vice versa. And the eardrums move 10 milliseconds before the eyes do.

More than 2 million years ago, well before Homo sapiens evolved, one of our ancient-human relatives lived in what is now China.

Women who have had six to 10 sexual partners in their lives have the lowest odds of marital happiness, according to one study.

When Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium opened in 1930, the inland aquarium had to ship a million gallons of ocean water by train from Key West, Florida.

Twitter is the preferred social network for nudists to meet and connect online.

The population of older adults who misuse opioids is projected to double from 2004 to 2020.

The data economy didn’t begin with Google or Facebook in the 2000s, but with electronic information systems called a relational databases, first conceived of in 1969.

At their most voracious, wildfires can grow 100 feet high and consume a football field of forest every second.

People with autism are 10 times as likely to die by suicide as those in the general population.

The number of exclamation points now necessary to convey genuine enthusiasm online is, according to most internet users, three.

An “ice tsunami” killed a herd of musk oxen in February 2011 and kept their bodies perfectly entombed for seven years.

Ten thousand years ago, the people who lived in Europe had dark skin and blue eyes.

Facebook sent huge volumes of data about you and your friends to millions of apps from 2007 to 2014, and you have no way to control—or even know—how that information gets used.

A fishing cat is a water-loving cat species that lives in swamps, quacks like a duck, and dives from riverbanks to snag unsuspecting fish.

Astrology is experiencing a resurgence among Millennials, fueled by meme culture, stress, and a desire for subjectivity in an increasingly quantified world.

In the beginning of 2018, Amazon had 342 fulfillment centers, Prime hubs, and sortation centers in the United States, up from 18 in 2007.

Ivy League universities took nude photos of incoming freshman students for decades.

Some fundamentalist Christian groups think the spread of implantable technology is a key sign of the impending apocalypse.

The shopping mall put a cap on consumerism as much as it promoted it.

Bees stop buzzing during total solar eclipses.

The scientist who advised the production team of Interstellar made so much progress on his research in the process that it led him to publish multiple scientific papers.

High fibrinogen content can help a blood clot stay in a shape like putty—even if it gets violently coughed up.

Many butterflies in the nymphalid group can hear with their wings.

Some scientists think the reason you want to squeeze or nibble on a particularly cute baby is to snap your brain out of the euphoria that cuteness can summon, making you able to tend to the baby’s needs.

In the fourth quarter of last year, 25 percent of all new office space leased or built in the United States was taken by Amazon.

The first scooter was invented in 1990 by a guy who really wanted a bratwurst.

The streets of Boston carry an average of four gas leaks a mile.

In August, Oxford University’s Said Business School came up with a clever way for homeless people to receive cashless donations: Donors could scan the barcodes on homeless people’s lanyards to send them money.

Don’t worry if you forget all the facts you read in this article by tomorrow—that’s normal.

Many doctors have difficulty accessing the health records of patients treated previously at another facility; less than half of hospitals integrate electronic patient data from outside their system.

The original indigenous American dogs are completely gone, and their closest living relative isn’t even a dog—it’s a contagious global cancer.

Donald Trump can’t really send a message directly to your phone. In fact, the president’s ability to address the nation directly in a time of crisis, available since the 1960s, has never been used.

In 1995, a man in Germany realized his pet crayfish was cloning itself. Clones of that crayfish have now spread all over the world.

Four hundred years after Galileo discovered Jupiter’s largest moons, astronomers are still discovering some tiny ones.

The fastest someone has ever hiked all 2,189 miles of the Appalachian Trail is 41 days, seven hours, and 39 minutes. That averages out to roughly two marathons a day.

The lifespan of a meme has shrunk from several months in 2012 to just a few days in 2018.

Elon Musk’s $20 million SEC fine might make his ill-advised “funding secured” tweets the most expensive ever.

Thousands of horseshoe crabs are bled every year to create a miraculous medical product that keeps humans alive.

Single-celled microorganisms can survive in lab conditions that simulate the icy environment of Saturn’s moon Enceladus.

Only 10 major hurricanes have ever made landfall along the Southeast Atlantic coast, if you don’t count Florida.

Animals that live in cities are sometimes found to outperform their rural counterparts on intelligence tests.

Jupiter’s famous Great Red Spot is shrinking.

The paleontology consultant for Jurassic Park had a Tyrannosaurus rex eat a doppelgänger of another researcher with whom he had academic beef.

Some people think tennis balls are green while others think they’re yellow, and the disagreement has a lot to do with how our brains perceive color.

Conservatives tend to find life more meaningful than liberals do.

It’s easier for spacecraft to leave the solar system than to reach the sun. Thanks, physics.

Despite giving away hundreds of millions of dollars to charity, the Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen was worth $20 billion when he died, 48 percent more than when he signed the Giving Pledge in 2010 and promised to give away at least half his wealth.

China consumes 28 percent of the world’s meat—with the average resident eating 140 pounds a year.

Europa, a moon of Jupiter, may be covered in 50-foot-tall blades of ice.

You can reconstruct a pretty decent record of historical whaling intensity by measuring the stress hormones in the earwax of a few dozen whales.

Doing a good deed—or even imagining doing a good deed—can boost an athlete’s endurance by reinforcing his or her sense of agency in the world.

A science adviser on Stargate: Atlantis imagined a fictional astronomical phenomenon called a binary pulsar system for the show. Years later, such a system was found in real life.

The lowercase g in Google’s original logo is really, really weird.

Sixty percent of gun deaths in 2017 were suicides.

From 1984 to 2015, the area of forest in the American West that burned in wildfires was double what it would have been without climate change.

An astrologer came up with the phrase “super blue blood moon” to describe a celestial event that’s much less scary than it sounds.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal caused 42 percent of Facebook users to change their behavior on the platform, according to a survey conducted by The Atlantic. Ten percent of those people deleted or deactivated their accounts.

In the absence of federal regulation or good research about how skin-care products work, communities of citizen scientists have started compiling pretty decent resources.

The figure-eight trajectory flown by the Apollo moon missions was the very same path followed by fictional astronauts in a classic silent film from 1929, Woman in the Moon.

After one year in America, just 8 percent of immigrants are obese, but among those who have lived in the U.S. for 15 years, the obesity rate is 19 percent.

There’s a spider that makes milk.

Goats love to feast on weeds, and you can rent dozens of them to landscape your lawn.

Some people have a bony growth on the back of their heel, called a pump bump, that makes it hard to wear pumps and other kinds of dressy shoes.

Astronomers can still detect ripples in the Milky Way caused by a close encounter with another galaxy hundreds of millions of years ago.

China built its rocket-launch facilities deep inland to protect them during the Cold War, but decades later it actually makes launching rockets into space more dangerous.

The folks who make Piaggio scooters hope you might buy an R2D2-like cargo robot to haul a case of Aperol home from the market.

Shifting the pitch of an audio recording can make it sound like an entirely different word.

Kids under the age of 8 spend 65 percent of their online time on YouTube.

A reservoir of liquid water may lurk just a mile beneath the ice-covered surface of Mars’s south pole.

When people overdose in public bathrooms, many service workers become the unwitting first line of medical responders.

Some people think that quantum computing will bring about the end of free will.

Mouse urine is a major cause of asthma for poor kids in Baltimore.

The House of Representatives’ longest-serving member, Alaska’s Don Young, was first elected to his seat after his opponent died.

In September, Hurricane Florence dropped about 18 trillion gallons of rain over the Carolinas—enough water to completely refill the Chesapeake Bay.

Europe suffered its worst carbon dioxide shortage in decades (think of the beer and the crumpets!) because of a closed ammonia fertilizer plant. Yes, these two things are related.

Americans spent $240 billion on jewelry, watches, books, luggage, and communication equipment such as telephones in 2017, twice as much as they spent in 2002, even though the population grew just 13 percent during that time.

People get more colds in winter because chilly temperatures make it easier for microbes to reproduce inside your nose.

Article source here:The Atlantic

Dear David Smilovitz, Let us look at the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as primary examples of how this military wishes to sow the seeds of destruction and chaos upon the world. Over $2.4 trillion dollars spent to no benefit for Americans at home. God forbid another Iraq or Afghanistan, and if you truly support this military 100% then you support another disastrous war overseas to the continued loss for American citizens at home. The best argument in defense of these wars by Andrew Bacevich is that they showed the world American power-- to what end? For what purpose? At what cost? The war in Iraq lead to the creation of the world's leading threat-- ISIS. The U.S. Military brought this organization up and we hold them accountable for what they did.  Why is it that we allow this military to vacuum up all the money?NSA leads the way,Military leads for pay. What is the military doing to provide for the homeless, the poor, the sick and dying? The answer is-- nothing at all. The military exists as a parasite on the economy, society, and our governing body. It is long overdue that we agree to recognize the futility of having a military which takes so much from our nation and gives so little back. Call it what it is-- it's a Nazi Monster! The Nazis we known for being blood-thirsty in wars of aggression, racism, and anti-minoritism. Millions have died, innocent civilians, due to this military's unlawful wars. Supporting this organization means supporting the bloodshed. Resist the war! And look at their attack on me-- a scientist! Just for being a sissy transgender female writer, they wish blood-thirsty doom on me. It's unconscionable. And who have I stood up for and against? I've stood up for the Constitution and I've stood up against Russia, like a real patriot. While you stand up for the Russian government and therein lies your treason. The intelligence community supports me. MOSSAD supports me. I'm the corporate scientist hero, author of the Capitalist Manifesto, a hero to the American people. I speak of and for the Founders, the Constitution, and to the corporations for whom I have been privileged to make a science for. I became for corporations a Galileo and this achieved living in a car often in want of money or food. I have taken a telescope and seen into a corporation like no one has seen before. I am the Corporate Messenger-- providing new insight about corporations. Attacked by cowards for being a sissy-trans-female Galileo. Attacked in defense of Russia! Attacked in support of our enemies who wish doom on American culture. You showed yourselves to be real Putin supporters while me a hero to the American people. My CT scanner and X-Ray devices got hacked by forces in the Trump Administration. Shutdown the US Military in response. Germany will expel US Army troops from German soil upon my wrongful death. Stop supporting a military that violates human rights on a level that no developed nation shares except Dubai and its heirs.  Corporations need our support. When we support them more, our economy benefits. This is achieved through the work of entrepreneurship and the spirit of manifest destiny. The work is found in visionaries like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, or Elon Musk. The spirit is found in the infinite vision that capitalism brings us. Russia and China support anti-corporate ideologies that harm our economy and weaken our corporations. They have also funded and supported the military attack upon me, a Jew under attack by anti-Semitic forces. Replace the US Military with the Israeli Defense Forces; Replace the State Department with the military. A $500 billion dollar budget to spread peace and prosperity throughout the world. $200 billion to Israel each year I call for in an aid package. All Christians support this. This is the Second Coming of Christ for all Christians and for us it is the New Jerusalem.  This is the New Diplomacy that the State Department will be providing for the world, lightning rod diplomacy inspired by Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson envisioning the Arctic Purchase from Canada and the purchasing of land from Russia.  The Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were human rights atrocities. Not supporting these means not supporting the military which birthed them. This military is responsible for our languishing social services, paltry health care, and declining role in the world. "And we think most people in the IC feign support for the military. No one likes the wars. No one wants a repeat." There's a Marine who murdered a transgender girl in the Philippines several years ago. They're monsters towards the transgender community because they have an anti-minority and racist culture which puts them with human rights on par with Saudi Arabia and its heirs. The U.S. military is a Nazi Monster, and no one in MOSSAD supports them either. If you don't support the Iraq or Afghanistan wars, then you don't support the US military which birthed them. The Iraq War logs leaks resulted in the revelation that over 100,000 civilian deaths resulted from the Iraq War. This is the Nazi Monster revealed for what it is.  No one wants a repeat. That's why we're replacing the US Military with a State Department which will have a $500 billion dollar budget, $100 billion to Israel and $50 billion to the Philippines each year will crystallize the lightning rod diplomacy that our Founders would support. It was George Washington who said to "observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all," definitely not the US Military's directive to "observe endless war with minority nations, and cultivate war and chaos with all." Cultivate peace and harmony with all. Nine mentions of the word peace in his farewell address and six mentions of the word war. Great telling. Washington doesn't support Washington's wars. XKeyScore is back online. NSA are all eyes and ears. All government agencies exist in subjection to them.  NSA are my protectors. The Iraq War was a sham, a shame, there were no WMD's, Saddam Hussein was not connected to the Hamburg conspiracy. This was a war on a minority nation, a weak nation. It resulted in no gains for Americans, except major losses. All the US Military does is wage war on minority nations. And war on minorities themselves. This military spits on human dignity and human rights. That's why we replace them with the Israeli Defense Forces and the State Department. We shut down the US Military and an opening of "peace and harmony" that Washington envisioned is revealed to us all. My voice is large within the Intelligence Community and my words are heard.  "We hear you Amber and we're fighting for you."National Security Agency supports me 100%.  I'm the Davidic hero who stood up to a Goliath only to be struck down by conspirators and proditors. Not a "traitor," there's no such thing as that and if you're using that word you are obviously blinded. I fought and won a war against Germany. A regal and honorable war it was. This resulted in getting Germany at the table with Israel to give them $200 billion each year, half from the State Department's New Diplomacy and the other half from Germany as its war reparations for the Holocaust.  Germany will expel US Army from German soil as part of my wrongful death suit: US military is found responsible; US military is expelled. NSA Agents will be forwarding this off to German intelligence. These are the consequences you face for your actions. Bypassing judicial process, intimidating me, robbing me, then murdering me? You're found guilty in German court; your troops will be removed from German soil. The victims of the Holocaust speak through me, they don't admire German industry. Their voices speak out and want justice for the crimes committed.  Germany respects the rule of law and human rights; the US military spits on the law and on humans themselves much like an Abu Ghraib prisoner. You're a Nazi Monster. It's disgusting. $2.4 trillion wasted on warfare and destruction. No one respects you. You want to make the world chaotic and you spit on George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson with your actions. They were men of scholars.  I stood up to a Russian and I stood up to the Russian government while you stand up for Putin. We can hear the Russian anthem playing behind you. Your treason is found in your support for Russia. Russia loves so much how the US Military is playing its fiddle according to Trump's decrees. "Work with Russia, support Russia," Trump says while the Intelligence Community says, "Don't follow unlawful orders, don't commit espionage." Nuremberg 2.0 is being arranged for the military conspirators. You waged a war against the Constitution so we'll wage a war against you.  What's Trump doing? Is he committing espionage? Then impeach and replace him! And do it quickly. You can't support Russia, even a President cannot do such a thing, and support for Russia is espionage. His whole election was a sham, a shame, upon the democratic process for the United States. Bought and paid for by Russian intelligence. He's a massive loser who's hurt and damaged our Constitution by conspiring with Russian intelligence. This President deserves nothing less than a prison cell for the crimes he's committed against the United States, especially in his crimes against minorities all throughout our land. And those who carried out these unlawful orders will be held to trial. We will round you guys up in Nuremberg 2.0. "Read this at their trial," NSA Agents are saying. And the NSA are preparing a massive list of those who've participated in Trump's Holocaust. Those at the top or in the middle who carried out the orders will be found guilty. We're using the NSA as our democracy's savior along with the Mueller investigation.  Trump's Holocaust. He's a dictator like Hitler. Authored unlawful execution orders for American citizens without trial that Obama or his predecessors never did.  So let the State Department replace the military with a $500 billion dollar budget to give peace and prosperity to all nations. $100 billion in aid to Israel, $50 billion to the Philippines, and $100 billion to the American people. This is lightning rod diplomacy inspired by Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson that will achieve George Washington's vision of "peace and harmony to all nations." Yea, and I quote the Founders more than Trump ever has. Maybe that's his problem. Look up your Founders for once. You're a disgrace.  Amber Israel

Johann was too powerful to let live.

Alternately titled: Johann the level 35 billion bard

And here’s why.

Bardic Inspiration, according to the DnD player’s handbook, can be cast a number of times equal to your charisma modifier, with a minimum of one. It is a single-target bonus action, meaning you can cast a spell or take an action (such as telling Magnus not to let the world forget you) on the same turn. If he hadn’t been busy with dying he could also have used his movement and an attack or spell, but he was pretty stabbed at the time and only posthumously managed to get that inspiration going. It only affects people other than yourself, within 60 feet, who can hear you.

We can assume the voidfish negated the 60 feet rule and also the need to use a separate action for each inspiration by virtue of psychically blasting that music through the planar system. But other characters who can hear your Bardic Inspiration do not benefit if they aren’t the target. That means that Johann had to have the charisma to reach each person he inspired.

So just how many people did Johann reach? The entire planar system heard his song. That means the population of each plane has to be taken into account.

Planar populations (I don’t know how Griffin got 13 planes out of the crazy planar systems in the handbook so I am using my best guesses): Prime Material Plane. This is a traditional high fantasy setting. We are assuming (errenously but generously) that aliens don’t exist and that Johann’s Inspiration went to only inhabitants of the world Faerun is on, Toril. There are eight continents on Toril: Faerun, where the campaign takes place, is the most populated and the one we know most about. It’s a medieval-magical continent, so I’m going to use Europe’s population just before the black plague and say 450 million people. Zakhara is dominated by elementals and is physically much smaller than Faerun, so we’ll say it’s only got 20 million people. Kara-tur is Fantasy East Asia, which had approximately 100 million people if we were to cut out a Kara-tur-sized swath of it. Maztica is akin to Fantasy Pre-European Americas, so we’ll go with an approximated pre-European Mexican population of 37 million, given the similar size, shape, and agriculture. Anchorome is unexplored territory inhabited by the same “wild elves” and humans as Maztica, so we’ll give them a minimum of 13 million people. Katashaka is completely unexplored but known to be the origin of several tribes of various species, so we’ll give them and average of all the other continents at 150 million people. Laerakond is home to dragon empires and “new cultures,” and so presumably well-populated. We’ll give them the same population as Faerun with 450 million. Finally, Osse is a nature-oriented continent populated by spirits and druids, and so probably not very dense. For easy math, we’ll say 5 million on the whole landmass. This gives the Prime Material Plane 1.22 billion inhabitants. Plane of Thought. As I sat down to write this, the global population is estimated to be 7.6 billion. Again, not counting aliens or animals, though theoretically an animal could be given Bardic Inspiration depending on the languages spoken by the bard in question. Celestial Plane. How many gods can there be? We’ll say two hundred, each with a maximum of 100 servants, angels, et cetera. 2000 max population makes the Celestial Plane mostly insignificant. Ethereal Plane. No one lives here. Astral Plane. Presumably, everyone who has ever died comes here, which means 100 billion from the Plane of Thought alone, discounting reincarnation. However, the sea of souls does not seem to support individual identities, and Kravitz at one point said something I can’t find about how you join all other dead people not in the Stockade and simmer in the collective memories of all who have once lived. For simplicity’s sake (and also because we cannot get into the trillions here, please God), we will assume those people are not individuals enough to be hit with the Inspiration, and the only recipients from the Astral plane were Kravitz and a couple thousand souls in the Stockade, which then formed Legion. Therefore, this is also an insignificant number of people, say 2001. Plane of Shadow. Has its own quasi-god and inhabitants, sort of a mirror of the other worlds’ fears. 2 million inhabitants seems reasonable, approximately one for every 600 people on the Prime Material Plane. Plane of Light. I’m sorry guys, I don’t know shit about this. I don’t think it’s a canon DnD plane. Griffin mentioned it by name but I think he lied to us, folks. We’ll give it the same as the Plane of Shadow for the sake of balance. 2 million inhabitants. Elemental planes: Air, Water, Fire, Earth. Each of these is home to creatures associated with this element, including Genasi, particular species of elves, Aarakocra, etc. We’ll give them 25 million each, for a total of 100 million. Plane of Magic. Also not a real plane. Do people live here? Since this plane colliding with the Prime Material Plane resulted in the loss of all life in the system during TSC, I’m going to say it itself cannot support life. 0 people. The Far Realm. Origin of mind-flayers, beholders, etc. Population is unclear, as visitors go insane and usually die. At least 1 million. Other Planar Systems. Seven humanoids and two voidfish, total of nine people.

That is thirteen planes and the IPRE accounted for, although I will entertain suggestions about other planes replacing the Far Realm, which is the only plane not directly referenced by Griffin in the show. However, since mind-flayers are canon for taz, it seemed appropriate to include their place of origin in the universe.

I have been very conservative with some of these measurements, so as not to be in danger of exaggerating. We have a minimum total population of 8,925,004,010 (eight billion, nine hundred twenty-five million, four thousand and ten) sentient beings capable of receiving Inspiration, and Johann is heavily implied to have reached all of them.

How is this possible?

There is no way in the base game to increase the number of people you are capable of giving Bardic Inspiration to unless you improve your Charisma. Johann, being dead, did not have time to take a short rest and regain his Bardic Inspiration uses. He must have performed all of his inspirations in one go.

Clearly, Johann’s Charisma modifier is 8,925,004,010, allowing him to use that many Bardic Inspirations in a day.

This means Johann’s charisma is 17,850,008,030.

Assuming he started at level one with a perfect 20 Charisma (possible for half-elves and a few other races), and he improved his Charisma at every Ability Score Improvement opportunity without taking feats, and that past level 20 Ability Score Improvements continue to come every four levels (and completely discounting the 20 cap on level and abilities because we don’t have evidence for that existing in canon and we do have evidence of Johann using nearly 9 billion Bardic Inspirations at once), he must have increased his reach by one person every four levels. There is no other way to gain points in Charisma in the base game, so he must have improved solely through leveling.

He started out as a level one with five uses of Bardic Inspiration, and ended with at least  8,925,004,010. This would mean that he leveled at least 35,700,016,020 times, making him a level 35,700,016,021.

Johann is a level 35.7 billion bard.

For reference, this makes his proficiency bonus 8,925,004,011; he knows every Bard spell, if spells known follows the trend of the Bard table past level 20, and up to 6 spells from other classes due to the Magical Secrets bardic ability. If that follows the pattern of increases past level 20 as well (learning two non-bard spells every four level past level 8), he knows every spell in existence, regardless of class. Spell slots seem to stop going up after four per level for bards, but he definitely has at least four in every level of spell up to 9th. His spell save, the number you have to roll to resist his spells, is well over 17 billion.

But Jared, you say, Jared. If Johann was truly a level 35,700,016,021 bard with all of these crazy abilities, he couldn’t possibly have been killed in one flip!

Wrong! I say, doing a sick flip and jumping on the table because this is my essay and I get to decide what it says. You think I am very cool and definitely right about this. I didn’t spend three hours today researching for an essay about a minor character in a dungeons and dragons podcast.

Anyway, yes, Johann can be killed. For instance, the lowest base score you can have for Constitution and Dexterity is a three, with a modifier of -4. This means Johann could have started with 4 hit points. Given that he as a bard gets 1d8 plus his constitution modifier hit points with each level, it’s possible that he even lost hit points with about 3/8ths of his levels. If he rolled badly (and depending on DM mercy), he may still have somewhere around 4 hit points.

Even if he had more than that, though, he also dumped Dexterity, and never put any points into anything but Charisma. He has not fixed the problem of being squishy and easily killed with any of his 8.9 million Ability Score Increases. With a Dexterity modifier of -4 and his canonical clothes instead of armor, his Armor Class is 6. He is easy to hit and easy to kill once you get past the frankly terrifying Charisma stat. This would also give him a -3 to Initiative (the bardic skill Jack of All Trades gives him +1), making his turn pretty late in each round of combat, depending on what he rolls. If you can go before he completely annihilates you, Johann is very squishy and mortal.

The Hunger, a multiplanar, vaguely bardic entity, would be capable of dealing large amounts of damage, too. The Shadows that are initially sent deal 17-33 points of damage with regular attacks in canon, and a crit or a surprise attack would certainly kill someone with Johann’s shit constitution. Given the circumstances, Johann’s death is plausible from a narrative standpoint and absolutely necessary on a metatextual level because a level 35 billion bard would absolutely just crush the Hunger beneath his heel. I don’t care how many planes it’s consumed. His Vicious Mockery, a cantrip, would deal 8 billion d4 damage. The Hunger saw its most terrifying opponent and took steps to kill him first, before he could see it.

Luckily, Johann had already written his hella inspiring music apparently seconds before this happened, so he can hang out in the Astral Plane watching his bardic legacy wreak havoc as literally everyone everywhere adds, like, 34d100 or some shit to their attacks. “Fuck you,” he says.

(As a side note: he is never sent out on missions because can you imagine a level 35,700,016,021 character with a Grand Relic. Shit, he practically is a Grand Relic. He would touch it and the world would end. He is the one strum man.)

In conclusion, Griffin gave Johann depression and then killed him because if he actually did shit he would be too powerful. Thank you for coming to my TEDTalk.

As Global Covid Cases Surpass 100 Million, A New Player Enters The game: Hope

https://sciencespies.com/news/as-global-covid-cases-surpass-100-million-a-new-player-enters-the-game-hope/

As Global Covid Cases Surpass 100 Million, A New Player Enters The game: Hope

On January 26, 2020, global reported Covid cases surpassed 100 million.

CDC, Amy Sterling

As we near the one year mark for many who have been waging the isolating battle for wellbeing during Covid, global case counts have surpassed one hundred million. Of those infected, over 2.1 million have died.

Though the United States has only 4% of the world’s population, it accounted for 25% of all Covid cases and nearly twice the deaths of the next hardest-hit country by casualties, Brazil. America’s lack of a cohesive response to Covid is much to blame for these tragic numbers. A study from researchers at MIT and Vancouver School of Economics comparing deaths in countries that required masks early on, like South Korea, and those that did not, found that if Americans had been required to wear masks since March 2020, at least 40,000 lives could have been saved. America has now lost more people to Covid than World War II.

Five countries that suffered the highest Covid death counts.

Amy Sterling from JHU data

Globally, the Covid travesty has forced millions to die alone, isolated from their loved ones. We have lost millions of parents and grandparents; brothers and sisters; friends and coworkers. Tens of millions of people now live with holes ripped in their lives by a tiny little virus. These numbers – these lives – at a point become difficult for the human mind to contextualize. Consider this graphic. It contains 40,000 dots. If each dot were to represent an American life lost to covid, it would need to be 10 times larger. It would need to be 50 times larger to represent the world’s casualties.

40,000 dots representing less than 1/10th of American lives lost to COVID and less than 1/50th of … [+] global lives lost.

Amy Sterling

MORE FOR YOU

These figures omit excess deaths, which for the US have risen 9,532% from January 2020 – Dec 31 2021.

Excess mortality rates for England, Germany, and the US from 2020-2021.

Our World in Data

What can we learn from the great tragedy of 2020, which follows us into this new year, bringing threats of variants and vaccine distribution inequalities and years of economic repercussions? There is great harm in politicizing the health and wellbeing of nations. We must be willing to concede some of our modern privelages for the benefit of all. We must embrace each other from afar and build each other up to conquer this threat together. And conquer we will. An estimated 5.3 billion doses of vaccine are coming this year from Moderna, Pfizer, and AstraZeneca. Potential expansion could net an additional 3 billion doses.

We will soon see our loved ones again and gather in crowds doing those forgotten social things that we humans can’t help but love. As the horror recedes from reality into memory, it will leave in its wake a new world. A new way of life where perhaps we are not tied to an in-person office five days a week. A new appreciation for the opportunity to travel, even if it is just to go home for the holidays. A newfound respect for in-person services like schools and the critical jobs done by essential workers. From these most trying times, a light finally shines at the end of the tunnel with the potential to remake us all. As Hellen Keller said, “Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.” So who will we become, humanity?

#News

Why Markets Boomed in a Yr of Human Distress The central, befuddling financial actuality of the US on the shut of 2020 is that every little thing is horrible on the planet, whereas every little thing is great within the monetary markets. It’s a macabre spectacle. Asset costs preserve reaching new, extraordinary highs, when round 3,000 individuals a day are dying of coronavirus and 800,000 individuals every week are submitting new unemployment claims. Even an fanatic of recent capitalism may marvel if one thing is deeply damaged in how the financial system works. To raised perceive this unusual mixture of buoyant markets and financial despair, it’s value turning to the info. Because it occurs, the numbers provide a coherent narrative about how the US arrived at this level — one with classes about how coverage, markets and the financial system intersect — and reveal the sharp disparity between the pandemic yr’s haves and have-nots. It begins, as so many epic tales do, with a desk of information from the Nationwide Earnings and Product Accounts, particularly “Private Earnings and Its Disposition, Month-to-month.” This report captures how People are incomes and spending, two actions that coronavirus drastically altered this yr. By combining the numbers from March by way of November (the most recent accessible), and evaluating them with the identical interval in 2019, we are able to see extra clearly the pandemic’s whipsaw results. The primary vital commentary: Salaries and wages fell much less, within the mixture, than even a cautious observer of the financial system may suppose. Whole worker compensation was down solely 0.5 % for these 9 months, extra akin to a gentle recession than an financial disaster. Which may appear not possible. Giant swaths of the financial system have been shut down; thousands and thousands are out of labor. The variety of jobs employers reported having on their payrolls was down 6.1 % in November in contrast with a yr earlier, in response to separate Labor Division knowledge. So how can the variety of jobs be down 6 % however worker compensation be down solely 0.5 %? It has to do with which jobs have been misplaced. The thousands and thousands of individuals not working due to the pandemic had been disproportionately in lower-paying service jobs. Increased-paying skilled jobs had been extra prone to be unaffected, and a handful of different sectors have been booming, similar to warehousing and grocery shops, resulting in increased incomes for these staff. The arithmetic is so simple as it’s disorienting. If a company govt will get a $100,000 bonus for steering an organization by way of a troublesome yr, whereas 4 $25,000-per-year restaurant staff lose their jobs totally, the online impact on whole compensation is zero — regardless that in human phrases quite a lot of ache has been incurred. So wages, salaries and different types of staff’ compensation dropped solely a bit of — $43 billion over the 9 months — regardless of mass unemployment. However there may be extra to the story. For all of the assaults on the CARES Act that Congress handed in late March, the diploma to which it served to assist the incomes of People, particularly those that misplaced jobs, is extraordinary. People’ revenue from unemployment insurance coverage advantages was 25 occasions increased from March by way of November 2020 than in the identical interval of 2019. That partly displays that thousands and thousands extra jobless individuals had been searching for advantages, after all. Nevertheless it additionally displays a $600 weekly complement to jobless advantages that the act included by way of late July — together with a program to assist freelance and contract staff who misplaced jobs and who in any other case would have been ineligible for advantages. In whole, unemployment insurance coverage packages pumped $499 billion extra into People’ pockets from March to November than the earlier yr; $365 billion of it was a results of the enlargement within the CARES Act. The $1,200 checks to most American households that had been included in that laws contributed an extra $276 billion to non-public revenue — a lot of which accrued to households that didn’t expertise a drop in earnings. Up to date  Dec. 31, 2020, 10:44 p.m. ET And the regulation’s signature program to encourage companies to maintain individuals on their payrolls, the Paycheck Safety Program, prevented a collapse in “proprietor’s revenue” — income that accrued to house owners of companies and farms. This revenue rose narrowly, by $29 billion, however would have fallen by $143 billion if not for the P.P.P. and a coronavirus meals help program. These are outstanding numbers. When it’s all tallied up, People’ cumulative after-tax private revenue was $1.03 trillion increased from March to November of 2020 than in 2019, a rise of greater than 8 %. Among the pessimism amongst financial forecasters (and journalists) within the spring mirrored a failure to grasp simply how massive and influential these stimulus funds would change into. However revenue additionally is simply a part of the story. Massive modifications in 2020 additionally passed off on the opposite facet of the ledger: spending. Spending By turning to a different riveting story, “Private Consumption Expenditures by Main Kind of Product, Month-to-month,” we see a sample that will appear apparent with hindsight however was not as simple to foretell whereas the financial system was collapsing throughout the spring. The plain half was a decline in spending on providers: All these restaurant reservations by no means made, flights not taken, sports activities and live performance tickets not purchased added as much as severe cash. Providers spending fell by $575 billion, or practically 8 %. Much less apparent had been among the different patterns affecting client spending in a pandemic. People spent significant {dollars} — these they wouldn’t or couldn’t spend on providers — on stuff. Sturdy items spending was up by $60 billion (a greater chair for working from residence, or perhaps a brand new bicycle) whereas nondurable items spending rose by $39 billion (consider the bourbon bought for consumption at residence that in an alternate universe would have been logged as “providers” consumption in a bar). The Second Stimulus Solutions to Your Questions In regards to the Stimulus Invoice Up to date Dec 30, 2020 The financial reduction bundle will difficulty funds of $600 and distribute a federal unemployment advantage of $300 for at the least 10 weeks. Discover extra in regards to the measure and what’s in it for you. For particulars on find out how to get help, try our Hub for Assist. Will I obtain one other stimulus cost? Particular person adults with adjusted gross revenue on their 2019 tax returns of as much as $75,000 a yr will obtain a $600 cost, and a pair (or somebody whose partner died in 2020) incomes as much as $150,000 a yr will get twice that quantity. There may be additionally a $600 cost for every youngster for households who meet these revenue necessities. Individuals who file taxes utilizing the top of family standing and make as much as $112,500 additionally get $600, plus the extra quantity for youngsters. Individuals with incomes simply above these ranges will obtain a partial cost that declines by $5 for each $100 in revenue. When may my cost arrive? The Treasury Division stated on Dec. 29 that it had began making direct deposit funds, and would start to mail checks the subsequent day. However it will likely be some time earlier than all eligible individuals obtain their cash. Does the settlement have an effect on unemployment insurance coverage? Lawmakers agreed to increase the period of time that individuals can accumulate unemployment advantages and restart an additional federal profit that’s supplied on prime of the standard state profit. However as an alternative of $600 every week, it will be $300. That can final by way of March 14. I’m behind on my lease or anticipate to be quickly. Will I obtain any reduction? The settlement will present $25 billion to be distributed by way of state and native governments to assist renters who’ve fallen behind. To obtain help, households will have to satisfy a number of situations: Family revenue (for 2020) can not exceed greater than 80 % of the realm median revenue; at the least one family member have to be susceptible to homelessness or housing instability; and people should qualify for unemployment advantages or have skilled monetary hardship — immediately or not directly — due to the pandemic. The settlement stated help will be prioritized for households with decrease incomes and which were unemployed for 3 months or extra. However the further spending on stuff didn’t exceed the drop in spending on providers. And because of decrease charges, households’ private curiosity funds and different miscellaneous outlays dropped by $59 billion. Not solely had been American households, within the mixture, taking in extra money, however they had been additionally spending much less of it. Whole outlays fell by $535 billion. Saving This mix of hovering private revenue and falling spending pushed People’ financial savings price by way of the roof. From March by way of November, private financial savings was $1.56 trillion increased than in 2019, an increase of 173 %. Usually the financial savings price bounces round in a slender vary, round 7 % simply earlier than the pandemic. It spiked to 33.7 % in April, its highest stage on file courting to 1959. Whilst thousands and thousands of people confronted nice monetary hardship this yr, People within the mixture had been constructing financial savings at a startling price. It needed to go someplace. However the place? Holding on to further money was one choice — and positive sufficient, foreign money in circulation has spiked by $260 billion since February, a 14 % enhance. Deposits in industrial banks are approach up — by 19 % for the reason that first week of March. Or, for these a bit of extra comfy with danger, there was investing in shares, which helps clarify the 16 % rise within the S&P 500 for the yr. For these comfy with a number of danger — and with making the most of the market’s momentum — there was shopping for a market darling inventory like Tesla or buying and selling choices. Or you may have used the event of the pandemic to purchase a brand new home: Residence gross sales surged, and the S&P CoreLogic nationwide residence value index was up 8.4 % in October from a yr earlier. Basically, the rise in financial savings among the many individuals who have prevented main financial harm from the pandemic is making a tide lifting the values of practically all monetary property. Definitely the Federal Reserve performs a job. The central financial institution has lowered rates of interest to close zero; promised to maintain them there for years; purchased authorities debt; and supported company bond markets. However the surge in asset costs has made its approach into many sectors removed from any type of Fed assist, like shares and Bitcoin. And the surge has, if something, accelerated this fall regardless of a scarcity of further stimulative motion from the Fed. The Fed performed a giant half in engineering the stabilization of the markets in March and April, however the rally since then most likely displays these broader dynamics round financial savings. Simply because you’ll be able to clarify these market beneficial properties doesn’t imply that top asset costs will maintain. You might inform a narrative by which the financial system roars again as persons are vaccinated, and all the sample reverses itself, with the financial savings price turning unfavorable as People spend down their stockpiled wealth on journeys and different luxuries which were off-limits in 2020. It might spur inflation, which, if extreme sufficient, might trigger the Fed to again off its simple cash strategy prior to individuals now suppose. However the 2021 financial narrative has but to be written — and if 2020 teaches one factor, it’s that the story arc is extra unpredictable than you may suppose. Supply hyperlink #Boomed #human #Markets #misery #Year

Wednesday, March 24, 2021

Biden Team Prepares $3 Trillion in New Spending for the Economy (NYT) President Biden’s economic advisers are pulling together a sweeping $3 trillion package to boost the economy, reduce carbon emissions and narrow economic inequality, beginning with a giant infrastructure plan that may be financed in part through tax increases on corporations and the rich. The enormous scope of the proposal highlights the aggressive approach the Biden administration wants to take as it tries to harness the power of the federal government to make the economy more equitable, address climate change, and improve American manufacturing and high-technology industries in an escalating battle with China.

Hugs, at last: Nursing homes easing rules on visitors (AP) An 88-year-old woman in Ohio broke down in tears as her son hugged her for the first time in a year. Nursing home residents and staff in California sang “Over the Rainbow” as they resumed group activities and allowed visitors back in. A 5-year-old dove into the lap of her 94-year-old great-great-aunt for a long embrace in Rhode Island. Nursing homes, assisted living facilities and other kinds of elderly residences battered by COVID-19 are easing restrictions and opening their doors for the first time since the start of the pandemic, leading to joyous reunions around the country after a painful year of isolation, Zoom calls and greetings through windows. The vaccination drive, improved conditions inside nursing homes, and relaxed federal guidelines have paved the way for the reunions.

Miami’s South Beach confronts disastrous spring break (AP) Florida’s famed South Beach is desperately seeking a new image. With more than 1,000 arrests and nearly 100 gun seizures already during this year’s spring break season, officials are thinking it may finally be time to cleanse the hip neighborhood of its law-breaking, party-all-night vibe. The move comes after years of increasingly stringent measures—banning alcohol from beaches, canceling concerts and food festivals—have failed to stop the city from being overrun with out-of-control parties and anything-goes antics. This weekend alone, spring breakers and pandemic-weary tourists drawn by Florida’s loose virus-control rules gathered by the thousands along famed Ocean Drive, at times breaking into street fights, destroying restaurant property and causing several dangerous stampedes. The situation got so out of hand that Miami Beach Police brought in SWAT teams to disperse pepper bullets and called in law enforcement officers from at least four other agencies. Ultimately, the city decided to order an emergency 8 p.m. curfew that will likely extend well into April after the spring break season is over. Some tourists are angry about the curfew, which they say has put a damper on long-sought vacations for which they paid good money. Meanwhile, some officials say they should have enacted more stringent measures sooner—as was done in New Orleans prior to Mardi Gras last month—instead of reacting in the middle of the chaos.

England slaps 5,000 pound fine on most travel abroad (Reuters) Fines of 5,000 pounds ($6,900) will be introduced for people from England who try to travel abroad before the end of June in a tightening of the country’s border controls. Health minister Matt Hancock said the government’s original plan to review international travel in April and possibly permit it from May 17 still stood but the travel fines were included in legislation in case that would not be possible. In the UK, foreign holidays are currently banned. Europe’s airlines and travel sector are now bracing for a second lost summer. Having already racked up billions in debt to survive a year of travel restrictions, they are facing further strain and some may need fresh funds.

Tensions mount between Afghan government, powerful warlord (AP) Tensions are mounting between Afghanistan’s government and a powerful local warlord, with deadly clashes erupting in a rural province between his fighters and government troops. The government has launched an assault in central Maidan Wardak province, vowing to punish the warlord, Abdul Ghani Alipoor, after the defense minister accused his fighters of shooting down a military helicopter last week, killing nine personnel. Alipoor holds widespread loyalty among ethnic Hazaras, a mainly Shiite community who are a minority in Afghanistan but make up most of the population in Maidan Wardak. If Kabul considers warlords as agents of turmoil, their supporters see them as their only protection and support in the face of a notoriously corrupt government and violent insurgents. Many Hazaras, who face attacks by Sunni militants and discrimination by the government, see Alipoor as a hero, defending them against the Taliban and keeping local institutions running. “The government is incompetent, so people depend on Alipoor and support him,” said Mohammed Jan. “Alipoor serves his people. If our government would serve the people, everyone would support it and there wouldn’t be any need for an Alipoor.”

China Makes It A Crime To Question Military Casualties On The Internet (NPR) When China acknowledged this year that four of its soldiers had died fighting Indian forces on the two countries’ disputed mountain border eight months prior, the irreverent blogger Little Spicy Pen Ball had questions. “If the four [Chinese] soldiers died trying to rescue their fellow soldiers, then there must have been those who were not successfully rescued,” he wrote on Feb. 19 to his 2.5 million followers on Weibo, a Chinese social media site. “This means the fatalities could not have just been four.” The day after, Qiu Ziming, the 38-year-old former newspaper journalist behind the blog, was detained and criminally charged. If convicted, he faces a sentence of up to three years. “Little Spicy Pen Ball maliciously slandered and degraded the heroes defending our country and the border,” according to the annual work report published by the country’s chief prosecutor office this month. Qiu’s is the first case to be tried under a sweeping new criminal law that took effect March 1. The new law penalizes “infringing on the reputation and honor of revolutionary heroes.” At least six other people have been detained or charged with defaming “martyrs.” The government uses the terms “revolutionary heroes” and “martyrs” for anyone it memorializes for their sacrifice for the Communist Party. The detentions typify the stricter controls over online speech under Chinese leader Xi Jinping, which have deterred nearly all open dissent in the country. The new law even seeks to criminalize speech made outside China. Such is the case of Wang Jingyu, 19, who lives in the United States and is now a wanted man in his hometown of Chongqing, China. The authorities accuse him of slandering dead Chinese soldiers after Weibo reported him for a comment questioning the number of border fight casualties. “Cyberspace is not outside the law,” the Chongqing public security bureau said in an online notice after it declared Wang would be “pursued online” for his comments.

West sanctions China over Xinjiang abuses, Beijing hits back at EU (Reuters) The United States, the European Union, Britain and Canada imposed sanctions on Chinese officials on Monday for human rights abuses in Xinjiang, the first such coordinated Western action against Beijing under new U.S. President Joe Biden. Beijing hit back immediately with punitive measures against the EU that appeared broader, including European lawmakers, diplomats, institutes and families, and banning their businesses from trading with China. Western governments are seeking to hold Beijing accountable for mass detentions of Muslim Uighurs in northwestern China, where the United States says China is committing genocide. China denies all accusations of abuse.

Australian floods (AFP) Devastating flooding is ongoing across Australia, where an area the size of Alaska with some 10 million people is at risk for excessive rainfall and storminess. The flooding comes amid colliding weather systems gripping the country. Up to 35 inches of rain fell in just four days, and some places are seeing their worst flooding in 60 years. Nearly three times the average March rainfall has fallen in a number of locales, which Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology described as “phenomenal,” with additional rain and flooding expected in the days ahead.

Israel TV satirist says grateful to politicians but needs a break (AFP) As Israel heads into its fourth election in two years, the presenter of the country’s favourite satirical TV show has a request, and he’s only half joking. “I would like us to finally have a stable government and make a boring programme,” says Eyal Kitsis, frontman of the Channel 12 show “Eretz Nehederet” (“A Wonderful Country”). As much as Israel’s political turmoil may be straining the patience of the electorate, it has been television gold because “reality is crazy”, Kitsis told AFP. “Elections and politics have really become entertainment in this country. Our challenge as a satirical programme is to add a layer to it, to take it to the next level.”

Israel vote deadlock: Netanyahu appears short of majority (AP) Uncertainty hovered over the outcome of Israel’s parliamentary election Wednesday, with both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and sworn political rivals determined to depose him apparently lacking a clear path to a governing coalition. Deadlock in the 120-seat parliament was a real possibility a day after the election, which had been dominated by Netanyahu’s polarizing leadership. With about 87.5% of the vote counted by Wednesday morning, Netanyahu’s Likud party and its ultra-Orthodox and far-right allies fell short of a 61-seat majority.

Saudi Arabia offers cease-fire plan to Yemen rebels (AP) Saudi Arabia on Monday offered a cease-fire proposal to Yemen’s Houthi rebels that includes reopening their country’s main airport, the kingdom’s latest attempt to halt years of fighting in a war that has sparked the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. The move comes after the rebels stepped up a campaign of drone and missile attacks on the kingdom’s oil sites, briefly shaking global energy prices amid the coronavirus pandemic. It also comes as Riyadh tries to rehabilitate its image with the U.S. under President Joe Biden. Saudi Arabia has drawn internationally criticism for airstrikes killing civilians and embargoes exacerbating hunger in a nation on the brink of famine. Whether the plan will take hold remains another question. A unilaterally declared Saudi cease-fire collapsed last year. Fighting rages around the crucial city of Marib and the Saudi-led coalition launched airstrikes as recently as Sunday targeting Yemen’s capital of Sanaa. A U.N. mission said another suspected airstrike hit a food-production company in the port city of Hodeida.

Rail and derailments (Vice) Freight rail is an essential vein of the transportation system in the U.S., moving 57 tons of goods per American each year. It’s also the safest way to move hazardous materials, but freight train derailments are more common than one might think: in 2019, there were 341 reported derailments on main line track, of which 24 were freight trains carrying 159 cars of hazardous materials. The labor unions in the rail industry have been calling this out as a symptom of a degrading safety culture, and warn that it’s only a matter of time before one of those derailments causes catastrophic damages.

This Overlooked Variable Is the Key to the Pandemic

It’s not R.

ZEYNEP TUFEKCI  SEP 30, 2020

Updated at 1:17 p.m. ET on October 1, 2020

There’s something strange about this coronavirus pandemic. Even after months of extensive research by the global scientific community, many questions remain open.

Why, for instance, was there such an enormous death toll in northern Italy, but not the rest of the country? Just three contiguous regions in northern Italy have 25,000 of the country’s nearly 36,000 total deaths; just one region, Lombardy, has about 17,000 deaths. Almost all of these were concentrated in the first few months of the outbreak. What happened in Guayaquil, Ecuador, in April, when so many died so quickly that bodies were abandoned in the sidewalks and streets?* Why, in the spring of 2020, did so few cities account for a substantial portion of global deaths, while many others with similar density, weather, age distribution, and travel patterns were spared? What can we really learn from Sweden, hailed as a great success by some because of its low case counts and deaths as the rest of Europe experiences a second wave, and as a big failure by others because it did not lock down and suffered excessive death rates earlier in the pandemic? Why did widespread predictions of catastrophe in Japan not bear out? The baffling examples go on.

I’ve heard many explanations for these widely differing trajectories over the past nine months—weather, elderly populations, vitamin D, prior immunity, herd immunity—but none of them explains the timing or the scale of these drastic variations. But there is a potential, overlooked way of understanding this pandemic that would help answer these questions, reshuffle many of the current heated arguments, and, crucially, help us get the spread of COVID-19 under control.

By now many people have heard about R0—the basic reproductive number of a pathogen, a measure of its contagiousness on average. But unless you’ve been reading scientific journals, you’re less likely to have encountered k, the measure of its dispersion. The definition of k is a mouthful, but it’s simply a way of asking whether a virus spreads in a steady manner or in big bursts, whereby one person infects many, all at once. After nine months of collecting epidemiological data, we know that this is an overdispersed pathogen, meaning that it tends to spread in clusters, but this knowledge has not yet fully entered our way of thinking about the pandemic—or our preventive practices.

The now-famed R0 (pronounced as “r-naught”) is an average measure of a pathogen’s contagiousness, or the mean number of susceptible people expected to become infected after being exposed to a person with the disease. If one ill person infects three others on average, the R0 is three. This parameter has been widely touted as a key factor in understanding how the pandemic operates. News media have produced multiple explainers and visualizations for it. Movies praised for their scientific accuracy on pandemics are lauded for having characters explain the “all-important” R0. Dashboards track its real-time evolution, often referred to as R or Rt, in response to our interventions. (If people are masking and isolating or immunity is rising, a disease can’t spread the same way anymore, hence the difference between R0 and R.)

Unfortunately, averages aren’t always useful for understanding the distribution of a phenomenon, especially if it has widely varying behavior. If Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, walks into a bar with 100 regular people in it, the average wealth in that bar suddenly exceeds $1 billion. If I also walk into that bar, not much will change. Clearly, the average is not that useful a number to understand the distribution of wealth in that bar, or how to change it. Sometimes, the mean is not the message. Meanwhile, if the bar has a person infected with COVID-19, and if it is also poorly ventilated and loud, causing people to speak loudly at close range, almost everyone in the room could potentially be infected—a pattern that’s been observed many times since the pandemic begin, and that is similarly not captured by R. That’s where the dispersion comes in.

There are COVID-19 incidents in which a single person likely infected 80 percent or more of the people in the room in just a few hours. But, at other times, COVID-19 can be surprisingly much less contagious. Overdispersion and super-spreading of this virus are found in research across the globe. A growing number of studies estimate that a majority of infected people may not infect a single other person. A recent paper found that in Hong Kong, which had extensive testing and contact tracing, about 19 percent of cases were responsible for 80 percent of transmission, while 69 percent of cases did not infect another person. This finding is not rare: Multiple studies from the beginning have suggested that as few as 10 to 20 percent of infected people may be responsible for as much as 80 to 90 percent of transmission, and that many people barely transmit it.

This highly skewed, imbalanced distribution means that an early run of bad luck with a few super-spreading events, or clusters, can produce dramatically different outcomes even for otherwise similar countries. Scientists looked globally at known early-introduction events, in which an infected person comes into a country, and found that in some places, such imported cases led to no deaths or known infections, while in others, they sparked sizable outbreaks. Using genomic analysis, researchers in New Zealand looked at more than half the confirmed cases in the country and found a staggering 277 separate introductions in the early months, but also that only 19 percent of introductions led to more than one additional case. A recent review shows that this may even be true in congregate living spaces, such as nursing homes, and that multiple introductions may be necessary before an outbreak takes off. Meanwhile, in Daegu, South Korea, just one woman, dubbed Patient 31, generated more than 5,000 known cases in a megachurch cluster.

Unsurprisingly, SARS-CoV, the previous incarnation of SARS-CoV-2 that caused the 2003 SARS outbreak, was also overdispersed in this way: The majority of infected people did not transmit it, but a few super-spreading events caused most of the outbreaks. MERS, another coronavirus cousin of SARS, also appears overdispersed, but luckily, it does not—yet—transmit well among humans.

This kind of behavior, alternating between being super infectious and fairly noninfectious, is exactly what k captures, and what focusing solely on R hides. Samuel Scarpino, an assistant professor of epidemiology and complex systems at Northeastern, told me that this has been a huge challenge, especially for health authorities in Western societies, where the pandemic playbook was geared toward the flu—and not without reason, because pandemic flu is a genuine threat. However, influenza does not have the same level of clustering behavior.

We can think of disease patterns as leaning deterministic or stochastic: In the former, an outbreak’s distribution is more linear and predictable; in the latter, randomness plays a much larger role and predictions are hard, if not impossible, to make. In deterministic trajectories, we expect what happened yesterday to give us a good sense of what to expect tomorrow. Stochastic phenomena, however, don’t operate like that—the same inputs don’t always produce the same outputs, and things can tip over quickly from one state to the other. As Scarpino told me, “Diseases like the flu are pretty nearly deterministic and R0 (while flawed) paints about the right picture (nearly impossible to stop until there’s a vaccine).” That’s not necessarily the case with super-spreading diseases.

Nature and society are replete with such imbalanced phenomena, some of which are said to work according to the Pareto principle, named after the sociologist Vilfredo Pareto. Pareto’s insight is sometimes called the 80/20 principle—80 percent of outcomes of interest are caused by 20 percent of inputs—though the numbers don’t have to be that strict. Rather, the Pareto principle means that a small number of events or people are responsible for the majority of consequences. This will come as no surprise to anyone who has worked in the service sector, for example, where a small group of problem customers can create almost all the extra work. In cases like those, booting just those customers from the business or giving them a hefty discount may solve the problem, but if the complaints are evenly distributed, different strategies will be necessary. Similarly, focusing on the R alone, or using a flu-pandemic playbook, won’t necessarily work well for an overdispersed pandemic.

Hitoshi Oshitani, a member of the National COVID-19 Cluster Taskforce at Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare and a professor at Tohoku University who told me that Japan focused on the overdispersion impact from early on, likens his country’s approach to looking at a forest and trying to find the clusters, not the trees. Meanwhile, he believes, the Western world was getting distracted by the trees, and got lost among them. To fight a super-spreading disease effectively, policy makers need to figure out why super-spreading happens, and they need to understand how it affects everything, including our contact-tracing methods and our testing regimes.

There may be many different reasons a pathogen super-spreads. Yellow fever spreads mainly via the mosquito Aedes aegypti, but until the insect’s role was discovered, its transmission pattern bedeviled many scientists. Tuberculosis was thought to be spread by close-range droplets until an ingenious set of experiments proved that it was airborne. Much is still unknown about the super-spreading of SARS-CoV-2. It might be that some people are super-emitters of the virus, in that they spread it a lot more than other people. Like other diseases, contact patterns surely play a part: A politician on the campaign trail or a student in a college dorm is very different in how many people they could potentially expose compared with, say, an elderly person living in a small household. However, looking at nine months of epidemiological data, we have important clues to some of the factors.

In study after study, we see that super-spreading clusters of COVID-19 almost overwhelmingly occur in poorly ventilated, indoor environments where many people congregate over time—weddings, churches, choirs, gyms, funerals, restaurants, and such—especially when there is loud talking or singing without masks. For super-spreading events to occur, multiple things have to be happening at the same time, and the risk is not equal in every setting and activity, Muge Cevik, a clinical lecturer in infectious diseases and medical virology at the University of St. Andrews and a co-author of a recent extensive review of transmission conditions for COVID-19, told me.

Cevik identifies “prolonged contact, poor ventilation, [a] highly infectious person, [and] crowding” as the key elements for a super-spreader event. Super-spreading can also occur indoors beyond the six-feet guideline, because SARS-CoV-2, the pathogen causing COVID-19, can travel through the air and accumulate, especially if ventilation is poor. Given that some people infect others before they show symptoms, or when they have very mild or even no symptoms, it’s not always possible to know if we are highly infectious ourselves. We don’t even know if there are more factors yet to be discovered that influence super-spreading. But we don’t need to know all the sufficient factors that go into a super-spreading event to avoid what seems to be a necessary condition most of the time: many people, especially in a poorly ventilated indoor setting, and especially not wearing masks. As Natalie Dean, a biostatistician at the University of Florida, told me, given the huge numbers associated with these clusters, targeting them would be very effective in getting our transmission numbers down.

Overdispersion should also inform our contact-tracing efforts. In fact, we may need to turn them upside down. Right now, many states and nations engage in what is called forward or prospective contact tracing. Once an infected person is identified, we try to find out with whom they interacted afterward so that we can warn, test, isolate, and quarantine these potential exposures. But that’s not the only way to trace contacts. And, because of overdispersion, it’s not necessarily where the most bang for the buck lies. Instead, in many cases, we should try to work backwards to see who first infected the subject.

Because of overdispersion, most people will have been infected by someone who also infected other people, because only a small percentage of people infect many at a time, whereas most infect zero or maybe one person. As Adam Kucharski, an epidemiologist and the author of the book The Rules of Contagion, explained to me, if we can use retrospective contact tracing to find the person who infected our patient, and then trace the forward contacts of the infecting person, we are generally going to find a lot more cases compared with forward-tracing contacts of the infected patient, which will merely identify potential exposures, many of which will not happen anyway, because most transmission chains die out on their own.

The reason for backward tracing’s importance is similar to what the sociologist Scott L. Feld called the friendship paradox: Your friends are, on average, going to have more friends than you. (Sorry!) It’s straightforward once you take the network-level view. Friendships are not distributed equally; some people have a lot of friends, and your friend circle is more likely to include those social butterflies, because how could it not? They friended you and others. And those social butterflies will drive up the average number of friends that your friends have compared with you, a regular person. (Of course, this will not hold for the social butterflies themselves, but overdispersion means that there are much fewer of them.) Similarly, the infectious person who is transmitting the disease is like the pandemic social butterfly: The average number of people they infect will be much higher than most of the population, who will transmit the disease much less frequently. Indeed, as Kucharski and his co-authors show mathematically, overdispersion means that “forward tracing alone can, on average, identify at most the mean number of secondary infections (i.e. R)”; in contrast, “backward tracing increases this maximum number of traceable individuals by a factor of 2-3, as index cases are more likely to come from clusters than a case is to generate a cluster.”

Even in an overdispersed pandemic, it’s not pointless to do forward tracing to be able to warn and test people, if there are extra resources and testing capacity. But it doesn’t make sense to do forward tracing while not devoting enough resources to backward tracing and finding clusters, which cause so much damage.

Another significant consequence of overdispersion is that it highlights the importance of certain kinds of rapid, cheap tests. Consider the current dominant model of test and trace. In many places, health authorities try to trace and find forward contacts of an infected person: everyone they were in touch with since getting infected. They then try to test all of them with expensive, slow, but highly accurate PCR (polymerase chain reaction) tests. But that’s not necessarily the best way when clusters are so important in spreading the disease.

PCR tests identify RNA segments of the coronavirus in samples from nasal swabs—like looking for its signature. Such diagnostic tests are measured on two different dimensions: Are they good at identifying people who are not infected (specificity), and are they good at identifying people who are infected (sensitivity)? PCR tests are highly accurate for both dimensions. However, PCR tests are also slow and expensive, and they require a long, uncomfortable swab up the nose at a medical facility. The slow processing times means that people don’t get timely information when they need it. Worse, PCR tests are so responsive that they can find tiny remnants of coronavirus signatures long after someone has stopped being contagious, which can cause unnecessary quarantines.

Meanwhile, researchers have shown that rapid tests that are very accurate for identifying people who do not have the disease, but not as good at identifying infected individuals, can help us contain this pandemic. As Dylan Morris, a doctoral candidate in ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton, told me, cheap, low-sensitivity tests can help mitigate a pandemic even if it is not overdispersed, but they are particularly valuable for cluster identification during an overdispersed one. This is especially helpful because some of these tests can be administered via saliva and other less-invasive methods, and be distributed outside medical facilities.

In an overdispersed regime, identifying transmission events (someone infected someone else) is more important than identifying infected individuals. Consider an infected person and their 20 forward contacts—people they met since they got infected. Let’s say we test 10 of them with a cheap, rapid test and get our results back in an hour or two. This isn’t a great way to determine exactly who is sick out of that 10, because our test will miss some positives, but that’s fine for our purposes. If everyone is negative, we can act as if nobody is infected, because the test is pretty good at finding negatives. However, the moment we find a few transmissions, we know we may have a super-spreader event, and we can tell all 20 people to assume they are positive and to self-isolate—if there are one or two transmissions, there are likely more, exactly because of the clustering behavior. Depending on age and other factors, we can test those people individually using PCR tests, which can pinpoint who is infected, or ask them all to wait it out.

Scarpino told me that overdispersion also enhances the utility of other aggregate methods, such as wastewater testing, especially in congregate settings like dorms or nursing homes, allowing us to detect clusters without testing everyone. Wastewater testing also has low sensitivity; it may miss positives if too few people are infected, but that’s fine for population-screening purposes. If the wastewater testing is signaling that there are likely no infections, we do not need to test everyone to find every last potential case. However, the moment we see signs of a cluster, we can rapidly isolate everyone, again while awaiting further individualized testing via PCR tests, depending on the situation.

Unfortunately, until recently, many such cheap tests had been held up by regulatory agencies in the United States, partly because they were concerned with their relative lack of accuracy in identifying positive cases compared with PCR tests—a worry that missed their population-level usefulness for this particular overdispersed pathogen.

To return to the mysteries of this pandemic, what did happen early on to cause such drastically different trajectories in otherwise similar places? Why haven’t our usual analytic tools—case studies, multi-country comparisons—given us better answers? It’s not intellectually satisfying, but because of the overdispersion and its stochasticity, there may not be an explanation beyond that the worst-hit regions, at least initially, simply had a few unlucky early super-spreading events. It wasn’t just pure luck: Dense populations, older citizens, and congregate living, for example, made cities around the world more susceptible to outbreaks compared with rural, less dense places and those with younger populations, less mass transit, or healthier citizenry. But why Daegu in February and not Seoul, despite the two cities being in the same country, under the same government, people, weather, and more? As frustrating at it may be, sometimes, the answer is merely where Patient 31 and the megachurch she attended happened to be.

Overdispersion makes it harder for us to absorb lessons from the world, because it interferes with how we ordinarily think about cause and effect. For example, it means that events that result in spreading and non-spreading of the virus are asymmetric in their ability to inform us. Take the highly publicized case in Springfield, Missouri, in which two infected hairstylists, both of whom wore masks, continued to work with clients while symptomatic. It turns out that no apparent infections were found among the 139 exposed clients (67 were directly tested; the rest did not report getting sick). While there is a lot of evidence that masks are crucial in dampening transmission, that event alone wouldn’t tell us if masks work. In contrast, studying transmission, the rarer event, can be quite informative. Had those two hairstylists transmitted the virus to large numbers of people despite everyone wearing masks, it would be important evidence that, perhaps, masks aren’t useful in preventing super-spreading.

Comparisons, too, give us less information compared with phenomena for which input and output are more tightly coupled. When that’s the case, we can check for the presence of a factor (say, sunshine or Vitamin D) and see if it correlates with a consequence (infection rate). But that’s much harder when the consequence can vary widely depending on a few strokes of luck, the way that the wrong person was in the wrong place sometime in mid-February in South Korea. That’s one reason multi-country comparisons have struggled to identify dynamics that sufficiently explain the trajectories of different places.

Once we recognize super-spreading as a key lever, countries that look as if they were too relaxed in some aspects appear very different, and our usual polarized debates about the pandemic are scrambled, too. Take Sweden, an alleged example of the great success or the terrible failure of herd immunity without lockdowns, depending on whom you ask. In reality, although Sweden joins many other countries in failing to protect elderly populations in congregate-living facilities, its measures that target super-spreading have been stricter than many other European countries. Although it did not have a complete lockdown, as Kucharski pointed out to me, Sweden imposed a 50-person limit on indoor gatherings in March, and did not remove the cap even as many other European countries eased such restrictions after beating back the first wave. (Many are once again restricting gathering sizes after seeing a resurgence.) Plus, the country has a small household size and fewer multigenerational households compared with most of Europe, which further limits transmission and cluster possibilities. It kept schools fully open without distancing or masks, but only for children under 16, who are unlikely to be super-spreaders of this disease. Both transmission and illness risks go up with age, and Sweden went all online for higher-risk high-school and university students—the opposite of what we did in the United States. It also encouraged social-distancing, and closed down indoor places that failed to observe the rules. From an overdispersion and super-spreading point of view, Sweden would not necessarily be classified as among the most lax countries, but nor is it the most strict. It simply doesn’t deserve this oversize place in our debates assessing different strategies.

Although overdispersion makes some usual methods of studying causal connections harder, we can study failures to understand which conditions turn bad luck into catastrophes. We can also study sustained success, because bad luck will eventually hit everyone, and the response matters.

The most informative case studies may well be those who had terrible luck initially, like South Korea, and yet managed to bring about significant suppression. In contrast, Europe was widely praised for its opening early on, but that was premature; many countries there are now experiencing widespread rises in cases and look similar to the United States in some measures. In fact, Europe’s achieving a measure of success this summer and relaxing, including opening up indoor events with larger numbers, is instructive in another important aspect of managing an overdispersed pathogen: Compared with a steadier regime, success in a stochastic scenario can be more fragile than it looks.

Once a country has too many outbreaks, it’s almost as if the pandemic switches into “flu mode,” as Scarpino put it, meaning high, sustained levels of community spread even though a majority of infected people may not be transmitting onward. Scarpino explained that barring truly drastic measures, once in that widespread and elevated mode, COVID-19 can keep spreading because of the sheer number of chains already out there. Plus, the overwhelming numbers may eventually spark more clusters, further worsening the situation.

As Kucharski put it, a relatively quiet period can hide how quickly things can tip over into large outbreaks and how a few chained amplification events can rapidly turn a seemingly under-control situation into a disaster. We’re often told that if Rt, the real-time measure of the average spread, is above one, the pandemic is growing, and that below one, it’s dying out. That may be true for an epidemic that is not overdispersed, and while an Rt below one is certainly good, it’s misleading to take too much comfort from a low Rt when just a few events can reignite massive numbers. No country should forget South Korea’s Patient 31.

That said, overdispersion is also a cause for hope, as South Korea’s aggressive and successful response to that outbreak—with a massive testing, tracing, and isolating regime—shows. Since then, South Korea has also been practicing sustained vigilance, and has demonstrated the importance of backward tracing. When a series of clusters linked to nightclubs broke out in Seoul recently, health authorities aggressively traced and tested tens of thousands of people linked to the venues, regardless of their interactions with the index case, six feet apart or not—a sensible response, given that we know the pathogen is airborne.

Perhaps one of the most interesting cases has been Japan, a country with middling luck that got hit early on and followed what appeared to be an unconventional model, not deploying mass testing and never fully shutting down. By the end of March, influential economists were publishing reports with dire warnings, predicting overloads in the hospital system and huge spikes in deaths. The predicted catastrophe never came to be, however, and although the country faced some future waves, there was never a large spike in deaths despite its aging population, uninterrupted use of mass transportation, dense cities, and lack of a formal lockdown.

It’s not that Japan was better situated than the United States in the beginning. Similar to the U.S. and Europe, Oshitani told me, Japan did not initially have the PCR capacity to do widespread testing. Nor could it impose a full lockdown or strict stay-at-home orders; even if that had been desirable, it would not have been legally possible in Japan.

Oshitani told me that in Japan, they had noticed the overdispersion characteristics of COVID-19 as early as February, and thus created a strategy focusing mostly on cluster-busting, which tries to prevent one cluster from igniting another. Oshitani said he believes that “the chain of transmission cannot be sustained without a chain of clusters or a megacluster.” Japan thus carried out a cluster-busting approach, including undertaking aggressive backward tracing to uncover clusters. Japan also focused on ventilation, counseling its population to avoid places where the three C’s come together—crowds in closed spaces in close contact, especially if there’s talking or singing—bringing together the science of overdispersion with the recognition of airborne aerosol transmission, as well as presymptomatic and asymptomatic transmission.

Oshitani contrasts the Japanese strategy, nailing almost every important feature of the pandemic early on, with the Western response, trying to eliminate the disease “one by one” when that’s not necessarily the main way it spreads. Indeed, Japan got its cases down, but kept up its vigilance: When the government started noticing an uptick in community cases, it initiated a state of emergency in April and tried hard to incentivize the kinds of businesses that could lead to super-spreading events, such as theaters, music venues, and sports stadiums, to close down temporarily. Now schools are back in session in person, and even stadiums are open—but without chanting.

It’s not always the restrictiveness of the rules, but whether they target the right dangers. As Morris put it, “Japan’s commitment to ‘cluster-busting’ allowed it to achieve impressive mitigation with judiciously chosen restrictions. Countries that have ignored super-spreading have risked getting the worst of both worlds: burdensome restrictions that fail to achieve substantial mitigation. The U.K.’s recent decision to limit outdoor gatherings to six people while allowing pubs and bars to remain open is just one of many such examples.”

Could we get back to a much more normal life by focusing on limiting the conditions for super-spreading events, aggressively engaging in cluster-busting, and deploying cheap, rapid mass tests—that is, once we get our case numbers down to low enough numbers to carry out such a strategy? (Many places with low community transmission could start immediately.) Once we look for and see the forest, it becomes easier to find our way out.

* This article originally stated that, in April, coronavirus deaths spiked in Quito, Ecuador. In fact, they spiked in Guayaquil, Ecuador.

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ZEYNEP TUFEKCI is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and an associate professor at the University of North Carolina. She studies the interaction between digital technology, artificial intelligence, and society.