CharonY

Here is a (I think) a good article which echoes many of the frustrations on that matter. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/01/opinion/covid-pandemic-global-economy-politics.html As a side point, it has also shown how much many European Health agencies often look toward the US CDC for guidance before getting into gear.

In the US, apparently there is a new tactic in place to restrict or even abolish abortions. In a way it is a clever way to skirt litigation and basically banning abortion by threatening folks performing it, rather than banning the procedure itself. https://www.vox.com/2021/8/31/22650303/supreme-court-abortion-texas-sb8-jackson-roe-wade-greg-abbott

A very good paper regarding long-term COVID symptoms in larger cohort: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)32656-8/fulltext

I think you are conflating mask use in a controlled manner (e.g. hospital, labs) where folks are trained and follow protocol for mas use. Unfortunately that is not the case with the broader population and it has been shown how masks of different materials have different levels of theoretical protection. That being said wearing any mask is better than not wearing. To look at the effectiveness of masks to prevent infected persons to infect others is based on simple maths. In a situation where an unmasked person is present the room can fill up with infectious particles, if even one badly masked or unmasked person comes in (or takes their mask off) there is a high risk of infection. If conversely the infected wears a mask (source control as described in the link you provided) the risk for the badly or unmasked person drops. In a controlled situation you can ensure that everyone wears PPE properly. In a public space situation, you generally cannot control that and it really just takes a few minutes in any space to identify a few who do not wear masks properly (if at all, given lifting of masking mandates).

It depends on which time frame and implementation we look at. Theoretically vaccines also are likely to provide transient protection and only reduce spread but do not prevent it entirely. The point is that added habitual measures (e.g. masking even if you only suspect you might have been exposed) and especially use at onsets of case increases (as models with influenza suggest in the past) help to mitigate spike heights (though with Delta, it is unlikely to curb entirely). For the most part surges can only entirely be prevented by behavioral measures, but those are difficult to keep up for indefinite times. What we are talking about are really just layers of protection that can chip away at the infection rates.

That is a big topic and it all depends on which slaves are and time frame you are looking at. However, chattle slavery was, as the name implies, certainly not a voluntary emigration process (there are folks that try to frame it that way, but that is basically insane). Edit to add: I think the Spanish had some theoretical protections for the indigenous in place, including banishing their enslavement sometime in the 16th or so century. But instead they had "coerced labour" which basically was mandatory unpaid labor with dubious benefits like converting them to Christianity. I suspect that what you have in mind is the trans-Atlantic slave trade which roughly happened between ~ 16th and 19th century. Considering the huge time span the details of the trade have changed quite a bit as has the volume throughout the periods. Also, the how slaves were viewed. increasingly as commodity has changed somewhat over the centuries. Partially because initially slavery was not something associated with a specific population (but rather with bouts of misfortune, such as losing a conflict) and often routes of freedom were built into the system to some degree. That at some point vanished for the victims of the trans-Atlantic trade. One other thing to keep in mind is that Africa as a whole was not just an assembly of primitive tribe, as it is often present in the European imagination. Rather there were different kingdoms and empires present who had their own history of conflict. I.e. African history is not just one of white conquest, though especially in the years of colonization the influence of Europeans at some point became a dominant shaping force. Some of earliest reports involve maritime raiding, where a Portuguese Captain (Gonçalvez) kidnapped Berbers, and negotiated their freedom in exchanged for slaves. Around the same time, the church basically sanctioned slavery of "pagans". While the Portuguese conducted raids in West Africa, it was replaced mostly (I think) by a trade network involving African nobility. The slaves were baptized and transported to Portugal but were later also sold to Spain for their colonies There is a huge amount of literature in this area and my knowledge is basically non-existent. However, I think the first step is to acknowledge that the history of slavery is complex (as is basically everything) and that there are no simple narratives that would do the subject justice. One would need to dissect what is happening in a given time frame. As a kind of overarching narrative one could haphazardly argue that what initial started as "normal" European customs with regard to slavery (which tapered out by the mid 16th century) grew over time to a quite different system, driven by the demands of the new colonies and the profitability of the trade. But again, the details are quite complex and I am not sure whether they can be properly answered in a short post format (perhaps an expert could).

I found that this is a general issue throughout the pandemic. Media and the broader population tend not to check definitions (it is down to individual journalists and I have quite mixed experiences) and often if we explain it, it sometimes to get cut to the juiciest soundbites. Sometimes they do interview medical experts who explain things in more depth, but those bits rarely reach a broad audience it seems. But serious illness almost always translates to hospitalization, whereas symptomatic can range from cough to debilitating joint pain (but no need for hospitalization). The are qualifiers such as "mild" to "severe" symptoms but I admit, it can be confusing and certain points such as the difference between infections and illness can be easily lost. To me, a big question still is long-term effects. There is a recent study in the Lance, which is quite interesting in that regard https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)01755-4/fulltext However, they focused on hospitalized cases and other studies which were using more indirect methods (e.g. insurance claims) still found that a sizeable proportion of non-hospitalized COVID-19 patients who appear to suffer from long-term negative effects. What I mean is that instead of thinking binary about the situation (e.g. hospitalization , death etc.) we need at some point start shifting toward understanding overall health burden. I.e. how much quality of life do we risk when getting infected even with vaccination, for example. That being said, considering the state of the world priority still must be vaccination.

As a single measure, sure. However, especially spread of infection can be improved by additional measures. I.e. vaccination should be the baseline, but we can add layers of additional protection. In a range of regions with Delta dominant and at least decent vaccination rates we do see an increase in cases once restrictions end and often spikes associated with large events. Of course vaccinations are the main tool and especially for prevention severe disease it is excellent. The main question here is whether we also want to keep infections low and what we need to do to achieve that.

One interesting point that has come up in a roundtable discussion that some folks are more willing to take treatments, even experimental ones, rather than getting vaccinated. It does point to the fact that a proportion of the broader public makes a fundamental distinction between chemicals given as part of a treatment (say antibodies) and those given as part of a vaccine, even if the former are known to have adverse reactions. Edit: I should add that some also object to the vaccine because they think they are made with material from aborted fetuses, which is another surprisingly common misconception.

Here is an interesting take from the viewpoint of the Afghan forces https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/25/opinion/afghanistan-taliban-army.html The author (Commander in the Afghan National Army) counters the narrative of the Afghan unwillingness to fight. The author highlights three factors resulting in the collapse: The article is worth a read and provides an interesting perspective.

That is to be expected. As I outlined in OP the vaccines do not fully protect from infection. As such, big unmasked gatherings without social distancing will further the spread of the virus even in a vaccinated population. They are, however, protecting from serious illness, which is the major goal of vaccines. A big issue is that for some folks this distinction is lost and sometimes poorly communicated. Immediately lifting restrictions once a certain vaccination threshold has been reached is, in my opinion, premature, as we do not have all the data in yet for proper risk assessment related to health burden in vaccinated folks. Fundamentally we are looking at balancing various risks and they require somewhat different approaches. The most critical one is reducing critical illness and death. For now, the mRNA vaccines seem to be the most effective measure to prevent these events. Challenges are unvaccinated folks who are at higher risk. Additional management is done by a variety of treatment options to reduce severity, though obviously those are less effective than vaccinations. A second challenge is to minimize infections (or conversely, thinking about how much infection we are comfortable with). The reason why we want that is to reduce the rate of new variants but also because even in a largely vaccinated population some folks may still become ill (though again, unvaccinated folks are at a vastly higher risk). This is much harder to achieve at this point, given that vaccinations are much less effective in preventing infections as they are in preventing disease. Here, additional measures, including isolation and masking are needed in addition to vaccines. Then there is the big unknown of long-term COVID-19 symptoms, and how protective vaccines are against them. At one point or another we need to figure out what the overall risks of opening, unmasking etc. are given a particular achievable vaccination rate (and potential availability of new, potential seasonal vaccines). But until then it is IMO a mistake to assume that we can just pretend that the virus is gone. Edit: that is actually also a very local perspective as globally we are still looking at a relatively poor vaccination rate, meaning we do have a large potential reservoir for the virus and the rise of new variants.

As noted before, the vast majority of the trillions went to military/police and related expenses. It was clear that rebuilding seemed a bit of an afterthought if at all. Moreover, as some outlets reported, those few initiatives could fall under infrastructure or other forms of rebuilding were often not properly supervised and often fell prey to corruption. Which further supports the notion that these initiatives were more window dressing compared to the military project, where the big bucks were. Moreover, it appears that the military contracts were also not done with sustainability in mind, where US soldiers, companies and contractors ran most of the show (and consumed the money).

I don't think that this is correct for rice. The water efficiency of a crop can be measured by the crop water productivity (CWP) which is given in kg/m3. A quick search for global CWPs indiate that the CWP is highly site-specific but for countries like USA, China and Philippines rice has a CWPs that are similar (and in some areas higher) than wheat but often lower than corn. I.e. it is at least somewhat comparable to the other main crops. I doubt similar data exist for cattails.

! Moderator Note Does not seem like it is news and seems more conducive to a discussion in the Lobby section.

Actually I would like to add that Biden (and the whole senate at that time) voted for the invasion. While it is possible that he and other lawmakers where misled by the respective administrations (one of which he was part of as vice-president), it only highlights that seemingly no one really knew what was going on, or particularly cared about it, either. It was rather clear that whoever does anything, would make it fall apart.

Well, that was later after the Nazis got to power. Before, they were considered a loud, belligerent but controllable fringe. Especially in the early days, Nazi rhetoric was dominated by anti-establishment (including anti-business themes, which were very popular among the workign class) rhetoric, which, after they got closer to the established right-wing parties got increasingly dominated by anti-semitic and anti-Marxist rhetoric. That all being said, I think it goes a tad off-topic here.

Another good article from the Atlantic focusing in saving US allies. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/08/america-afghanistan-allies/619784/ A huge issue is that the US has stated repeatedly that they did not had an interest in nation-building (as MigL mentioned) and Afghanistan was a mostly self-serving endeavor, which barely involved Afghan interest. It was an attempt to graft an American model on Afghanistan. It was not just bad intelligence, but just overall poor knowledge of the society (because frankly, no one really cared, there was money to be made).

There is a bit of lit out there but most is still exploratory. A somewhat outdated but well-written review is Baeck and Hanssons Nat Rev. Cardiol. 12, 199-211 (2015). I would agree that for the most part there is insufficient data for either assertion. And again, at this point I think that there is more of an interaction which makes causal (rather than correlative) conclusions difficult. That is not to say that the paper is not interesting, quite the contrary, and there are things that I would be interested in looking into eventually. Another fundamental issue is that mice models only work moderately well compared when it comes to inflammation responses (and the ldl mutant commonly used as a athersclerosis mutant has also issues, but that is a whole other discussion). In short, it is intriguing but IMO more data is required to decipher the underlying mechanisms.

Another possible (or additional) route is the reduction of overall inflammation. The atherosclerotic formation is characterized by local inflammatory responses and it has been shown that certain microbiota compositions are associated with reduced inflammatory responses. The cause-effect relationship is a bit unclear, i.e. whether inflammation changes the microbiota or whether certain gut composition increases inflammation. My gut feeling (heh) is that it is an interaction between these effects and e.g. a pro-inflammatory life style can allow a microbiota to form that in turn increases pro-inflammatory markers. That interaction would explain why fecal transplantation often has relative short term effects. That being said, both vitamins are involved in suppression of immune responses so the interesting question becomes where it is indeed the main mechanism, and/or part of a more complex network.

! Moderator Note Most likely you mean IgA (immunoglobulin A). However, no one on this site is qualified to provide medical advice. Please seek a physician to discuss the results of these tests.

Uh, that is getting off-topic but I doubt that is true for much of Europe. Of course there are very divergent systems, so a sweeping statement is going to be close to impossible. However, in Germany the auto industry is notoriously powerful. I think something around 20% of the industrial revenue is automobiles and three of the ten largest companies in Germany are car manufacturers. I think part of the big difference is that cities in Europe are old- they were not built with cars in mind and many of the suburbanization and related consequences did not happen in the same degree in many European countries, compared to the Americas, at least. Though with increasing housing prices, commutes did increase.

It make quite some waves when it came out (I do not have access anymore), and there is a book on this matter titled "The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War". A couple of excerpts and comments from reviews:

I think it is worthwhile mentioning this article again: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/afghanistan-war-confidential-documents/

There is another aspect to to the whole issue, with is urban planning in much of the US cities are built around cars, Canada tends to be a bit better, though weather in many parts (except for the coasts) have their own challenges. Barcelona has started to build superblocks which reduces traffic and increases areas where walking and bicycling becomes more feasible. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/11/barcelona-launches-10-year-plan-to-reclaim-city-streets-from-cars If planned strategically, public transit and and on-demand cars could become quite a bit more efficient.

Yes, unfortunately that is what the current pandemic has exposed. In fact, many countries struggled with figuring out coherent strategies within their borders. Part of my disappointment is that it does not seem that we are learning and/or developing better strategies to prepare us for the future. Instead, it feels like much more energy is being invested in finger pointing as if that would change reality somehow.