A Student's Perspective on Book Banning

From By Sungjoo Yoon, "I’m a High School Junior. Let’s Talk About ‘Huckleberry Finn’ and ‘Mockingbird":

BURBANK, Calif. — In late 2020, when the Burbank Unified School District removed five classic novels from mandatory reading lists in my city’s classrooms, I started a petition to protest the decision. The petition, which is still open, has more than 5,000 signatures.

I was a sophomore at Burbank High School at the time, and had read four of the five books in school — “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain; “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry” by Mildred D. Taylor; “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee; and “The Cay” by Theodore Taylor. The fifth, “Of Mice and Men” by John Steinbeck, I read on my own a few years earlier.

The books were being removed from the core curriculum, according to Matt Hill, the superintendent of the Burbank Unified district, after complaints from students and parents that the depictions of racism and language in these works — particularly the use of the N-word — caused harm to Black students.

My position was this: I acknowledged that Black students were being marginalized in our classrooms (I was sympathetic, too; I am all too familiar with the demeaning nature of racism) — but did not think that it was the fault of these books or their content. I believed, and still believe, that the solution was not to remove the books, but to add more books written by people of color, and to better train teachers to teach these books sensitively to students.

As the petition attracted signatures, I spoke at several school board meetings on the issue. I recall one meeting in particular. I had prepared to talk about how these novels helped shape me both as a student and as a human being. I spoke briefly about how reading the story of a Black family in the Deep South in “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry,” under the guidance of a caring teacher, had moved me to tears and to a commitment to learn more about the resilience and resistance of the people upon whose backs this country was built. I explained how these class experiences helped move me and some fellow students from complacent private citizens to people who today are deeply involved in the fight for social justice.

There was more I could have said: How Atticus Finch’s defense of Tom Robinson in “To Kill a Mockingbird” taught me the danger of complacency; how the unlikely friendships of Huckleberry Finn and Jim in “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” or Phillip Enright and Timothy in “The Cay” taught me that love transcends any and all differences.

But standing on the boardroom floor as comments from others in the meeting began, I witnessed the public forum — made up mostly of parents, administrators and educators — devolve into tribalist dissension. The meeting quickly became a two-sided shouting match pitting supposed “freedoms” against purported “justice.” There was plenty of arguing, but little or no meaningful discussion on why those novels were in question, or what students would lose or gain by a ban against them.

At that moment, I had a long-overdue realization: How we as Americans approach restrictions on literature curriculums is not only flawed but also wholly reactionary. My experience at that meeting and others convinced me that the problem is not that we disagree, but how. We need to shift focus away from reflexive outrage about restrictions and bans, and toward actual discussions of the merits and drawbacks of the individual books...

Keep reading.

 

The Bible Is Constroversial

Of course it is, but I don't normally think about it.

But Alley Beth Stuckey, our Twitter theologian, has thoughts:

Surprised Christians are confused by this. Yes, the resurrection is offensive to the world, just like the cross is folly to the world (1 Cor 1:18). The gospel, which rests on the resurrection of Christ, is offensive. If Google is offended by it, that’s because they should be.

— Allie Beth Stuckey (@conservmillen) April 17, 2022

Russia's Easter Offensive

From, Timothy Snyder, on Substack, "Jesus in east European political thought":

Today Easter is celebrated by western Christians; a week from now it will be celebrated by the Orthodox and Greek Catholics in Ukraine, and by the Orthodox in Russia. By then, Russian troops will be engaged in their Easter Offensive, a new Russian attack on Ukraine in the Donbas.

The coincidence of the most important holiday in the Christian tradition with a war of atrocity gives an occasion to think about what Easter means, and how the life and death of Jesus has been interpreted.

One way of thinking about the life and death of Jesus is to connect them. Jesus of Nazareth took risks in life. He had things he needed to say about love and truth, but he did not deliberately provoke the state. That he died for his convictions adds an unforgettable dimension to them.

On such an interpretation of Easter, Jesus would be exemplary as an ethicist and truthteller who understood that commitments involve risks. His example would not be one of seeking death, or seeking meaning in death. The instruction would be to accept that some risk of death follows, in certain circumstances, from commitments to values such as love and truth.

“Love and truth.” Once, after a debate in 2009 in Bratislava, I looked over at the notes that the Czech thinker (and by then former president) Václav Havel had been keeping for himself. He had written "love and truth" on a sheet of paper, and then doodled flowers around it.

Havel was the author of a famous secular east European statement about risk in politics. He wrote "Power of the Powerless" in communist Czechoslovakia, three decades before that debate, under the shadow of the death of the philosopher Jan Patocka, who had died after police interrogation. In that essay, Havel maintained that one takes risks for one's own truths, not because punishment brings some meaning, but because risk inheres in truth. To "live in truth" means accepting a measure of existential danger.

The Soviet Ukrainian dissident Myroslav Marynovych, who admired Havel, said something similar. The risks that he and others took as human rights activists in the Soviet Ukraine of the 1970s were not a deliberate provocation of the state. They were just an inseparable element of what Myronovych called a "normal Ukrainian life." In the Soviet Union, one could be punished for singing Ukrainian songs or speaking of Ukrainian history. One should do such normal things not to court punishment, but rather because not doing so would compromise the self.

Both Havel (who was secular) and Marynovych (who experienced an epiphany under interrogation) were part of an international human rights movement that saw its main activity as the chronicle. A prominent form of resistance to communism was the attempt to record arrests, trials, deportations, sentences, and abuses. "Human rights" meant telling the truth about a moment when a life was interrupted. This tradition was continued after the end of the Soviet Union by investigative reporters who took risks to write about post-communist oligarchy and war.

I was reminded of that truthtelling tradition this Easter week when I read Nataliya Gumenyuk's reporting from Ukrainian territories from which Russian troops have withdrawn. Gumenyuk is one of an admirable group of Ukrainian reporters who have taken their share of risks reporting the inequality and conflict of the twenty-first century. (Russian reporters, such as those working for Novaya Gazeta and Ekho Moskvy belong to this tradition as well. These media have been forced to shut down by the Russian government.)

During the war in Ukraine, Russian occupation practice has been to execute Ukrainian local elites. Russian soldiers shoot Ukrainian civilians in the head for having taken some responsibility for local affairs. In the telling of survivors, these local elites were not seeking some heroic end. They simply could not bring themselves to collaborate with a Russian occupation regime. "They were killed for us," says a Ukrainian survivor to Gumenyuk, in an article published on western-rite Good Friday. What is meant is that they died because of how they lived, as servants of their communities. The point, though, was not that their death was redemptive. The murder was a horror.

I also hear something of an older east European tradition in the way that Volodymyr Zelens'kyi addresses Ukrainian losses. In an interview also published on Good Friday, Zelens'kyi speaks of suffering and death involved in resistance to invasion as a result of a risk that had to be taken to preserve the life of a society. Zelens'kyi does not glamorize combat or death. He gave a speech the other day which recalled Havel: he defined living in a lie as the source of Putin's aggression, and spoke of truth as a form of courage.

That is one broad way of thinking about politics suggested by Easter: the values of life are affirmed by a risk of death. Life is full of values, but attached to each one is risk. The risk is attendant upon the value. If the risk is realized in death, the value is affirmed. But death is not the point.

In a rival interpretation of the death of Jesus, to which Christians are vulnerable, death is the point. It is the suffering and the dying, rather that the acting and the living, that creates the meaning.

In such thinking about Easter, the significance of the dying can crowd out the living message of love and truth. The Polish Romanticism of the nineteenth century veered in this direction. The vision of Poland as a "Christ of Nations" was less about Christian comportment and more about the willingness to die for a cause. A century later, Romanian fascists identified strongly with Christianity (Eastern Orthodoxy), and had an exuberant cult of death and martyrdom.

A certain kind of focus on the death of Jesus has a way, in politics at least, of dissolving responsibility for action. One convenient interpretation of Jesus dying for our sins is that we are innocent. And then the question arises as to who "we" are. Those within our group can be seen as free of sin, regardless of what we do, whereas the others can be seen as sinners, regardless of what they do.

The Russian thinker Ivan Ilyin, a Christian (Orthodox) fascist, advanced such a doctrine of national innocence. Ilyin's view was that Christ's teachings about truth and love were to be understood in a particular way, with respect to a particular nation. The world was broken, and could only be healed by Russians, and in particular by a fascist Russian leader. That was the truth that mattered. Only Russia had the chance to become a Christian nation, and that was by way of a totalitarianism that eliminated the differences between people and ruler. A restored Russia that could lead humanity would be without national minorities and without Ukraine, which Ilyin claimed did not exist. Christ commanded the love of God and the love of neighbor, but this meant for Ilyin the hatred of the Godless, which is to say those who did not understand Russia’s destiny.

On Ilyin's view, anything a Russian leader did to create a fascist, imperial Russia was by definition innocent of sin, since it was a step towards the redemption of the entire world. There is nothing wrong with lying and killing in a flawed world. Indeed, lying and killing are good when done by a Russian leader on a crusade to restore wholeness to the world.

The last time Russia invaded Ukraine, in 2014, Putin was in the habit of citing Ilyin to legitimate Russian empire. And to justify that war, a living Russian fascist, Alexander Dugin, supplied the image of Russia as a crucified boy (in “news” about an event that never took place).

Putin’s rhetoric about this war make sense within such a framework. In a rally, Putin quoted the Bible to celebrate the death of Russians in battle. He said that their death had made the nation more unified than ever before...

Still more.

 

Exterminate God?

That seems to be the objective.

See, at Pajamas, "New York Times Takes a Swing at God, Misses Wildly.

The essay of ire is, Shalom Auslander, at the New York Times' opinion pages, "In This Time of War, I Propose We Give Up God."

Charles Murray, Human Diversity

At Amazon, Charles Murray, Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class.

Melissa Stark Hired to Replace Michele Tafoya on NBC's Sunday Night Football

I remember Ms. Melissa from back in the day, when she did sideline reporting for Monday Night Football on ABC, from 2000-2003.

An absolutely lovely and awesome replacement for her predecessor, (conservative) Michele Tafoya, who's now gone into politics.

At the New York Post, "Melissa Stark hired to replace Michele Tafoya in ‘Sunday Night Football’ surprise."

How Feminism Got Hijacked

From Zoe Strimpel, at Bari Weiss's Common Sense, "The movement that once declared 'I am woman, hear me roar' can no longer define what a woman is. What happened?":

“Pregnant people at much higher risk of breakthrough Covid,” The Washington Post recently declared. This was in keeping with the newspaper’s official new language policy: “If we say pregnant women, we exclude those who are transgender and nonbinary.”

“I’m not a biologist,” Ketanji Brown Jackson, the next Supreme Court justice and a formerly pregnant person herself, told her Senate inquisitors while trying to explain why she couldn’t define “woman.”

“It’s a very contested space at the moment,” explained Australian Health Secretary Brendan Murphy—a nephrologist, a doctor of medicine—when he was asked the same question at a hearing in Melbourne. “We’re happy to provide our working definition.”

The meaning of “woman,” the Labor Party’s Anneliese Dodds, in Britain, observed, “depended on context.” (Never mind that Dodds oversees the party’s women’s agenda.)

“I think people get themselves down rabbit holes on this one,” Labor’s Yvette Cooper added the next day, March 8, International Women’s Day. She declined to follow suit.

What were normal people—those who did not have any trouble defining woman, those who found talk of “pregnant people” and “contested spaces” and “rabbit holes” baffling—to make of this obvious discomfort with “women”? Jackson, Dodds and Cooper—and, no doubt, every individual formerly or currently capable of becoming pregnant on the masthead at The Washington Post—would call themselves feminists. Champions of women’s rights. (So, too, one imagines, would Dr. Murphy.) Once upon a time, it was women like them who proudly declared, I am woman, hear me roar. It was women like them who stood up for women and womanhood.

But now these exemplars of female empowerment—educated, sophisticated, wielding enormous influence—seemed to have forgotten what “woman” meant. Or whether it was okay to say “woman.” Or whether “woman” was a dirty word.

It wasn’t simply about language. It was about how we think about and treat women. For nearly 2,500 years—from Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata” to Seneca Falls to Anita Hill to #MeToo—women had been fighting, clawing their way out of an ancient, deeply repressive, often violent misogyny. But now that they were finally on the cusp of the Promised Land, they were turning their backs on all that progress. They were erasing themselves.

How we got from there to here is the story of an unbelievable hijacking. Two, actually.

It was only five decades ago, in the 1970s, that women—mostly white, middle-class and from places like New York, Boston and north London, and fed up with being sidelined by their comrades on the left—forged a new movement. They called it Women’s Liberation.

At the start, Women’s Liberation was seen as the domain of women with money—like Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem and, in the United Kingdom, Germaine Greer and Rosie Boycott. But soon it became the movement of everyday mothers, daughters, wives, working women, poor women, and women regularly beaten up by their boyfriends and husbands.

They embodied a politics of action: protesting, writing, lobbying, setting up shelters. They formed sprawling, nationwide organizations like the National Organization of Women, the National Abortion Campaign and the National Coalition Against Sexual Assault.

And at the center of their politics was an awareness of their physicality, a keen understanding that the challenges women faced were bound up with the bodies they had been born into. Exploitation at home and at work, the threat of sexual violence, unequal pay—all that was a function of their sex. Nothing better summed up the ethos of Women’s Liberation than “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” which was published in 1973 by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective. Every feminist had a copy or had read one. It sold something like four million copies. It was a bible. That’s because “Our Bodies, Ourselves” rejected the old, Puritan discomforts with female sexuality that, feminists argued, had prevented women from realizing themselves, and empowered women by educating them about their own bodies.

By the 1980s, women had won several key victories. Equal pay was the law (if not always the reality). No-fault divorce was widespread. Abortion was safe and legal. Women were now going to college, getting mortgages, playing competitive sports and having casual sex. In the United States, they were running for president, and they were getting elected to the House and Senate in record numbers. In Britain, Margaret Thatcher was prime minister.

In the wake of all these breakthroughs, the movement began to lose steam. It contracted, then it splintered, and a vacuum opened up. Academics took over—hijacked—the cause. There was an obvious irony: It was women’s liberationists who had successfully made women a topic worthy of academic scholarship. But now that the feminist professoriat had the luxury of not worrying about the very concrete issues the older feminists had fought for, feminist professors spent their days reflecting on their feminism—exploring, reimagining and rejecting old orthodoxies.

“As soon as the academics got hold of feminism, they ruined it,” said Kathleen Stock, a feminist philosophy professor formerly of the University of Sussex and the author of “Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism.” “It should be and is a grassroots movement about women and their interests. Academics just took it away from them.”

It wasn’t just that these academics took it upon themselves to develop fiendishly complex theories about women, dressed up in a fiendishly complex language. It was that this hyper-intellectualized feminism, by embracing this hyper-intellectualized language, excluded most women. It transformed feminism from activism to theory, from the concrete to the abstract, from a movement that sought to liberate women from the discriminations imposed on them by their sex to a school of thought that was less interested in sex than gender...

Still more.

 

Biden Administration to Open Public Land for Drilling (VIDEO)

At the video, in California alone this would bring roughly 3,000 high-paying jobs and $600 in tax revenue.

And at the New York Times, "Biden Plans to Open More Public Land to Drilling":

The president is under pressure to bring down gas prices, but any new drilling would be years away. The fees that companies pay would rise sharply.

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration announced on Friday that it would resume selling leases for new oil and gas drilling on public lands, but would also raise the federal royalties that companies must pay to drill, the first increase in those fees in more than a century.

The Interior Department said in a statement that it planned next week to auction off leases to drill on 145,000 acres of public lands in nine states. They would be the first new fossil fuel leases to be offered on public lands since President Biden took office.

The move comes as President Biden seeks to show voters that he is working to increase the domestic oil supply as prices surge in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But it also violates a signature campaign pledge made by Mr. Biden as he sought to assure climate activists that he would prioritize reducing the use of fossil fuels.

“And by the way, no more drilling on federal lands, period. Period, period, period,” Mr. Biden told voters in New Hampshire in February 2020.

In opening new land for drilling, while at the same time requiring companies to pay more to drill, Mr. Biden appears to be trying to walk a line between trying to both lower gas prices and fight climate change. While Mr. Biden came into office with the most ambitious climate change agenda of any president in history, his climate policies have been largely stalled, stymied by inaction in Congress.

Upon taking office, Mr. Biden issued an executive order calling for a temporary ban on new oil and gas leasing on public lands, which was to remain in place while the Interior Department produced a comprehensive report on the state of the federal oil and gas drilling programs. That report, issued in November, recommended an overhaul of the rents and royalty fees charged for drilling both on land and offshore. The report noted one estimate that the government had lost up to $12.4 billion in revenue from drilling on federal lands from 2010 through 2019 because royalty rates have been frozen for a century.

In opening up the new public lands for oil and gas permitting, the Interior Department will raise the royalty rates that companies must pay to the federal government to 18.75 percent of their revenues from 12.5 percent, an increase that could bring in billions of dollars for the federal government. Even at current levels, the royalties are a major source of revenue. Last year, the federal government collected $5.5 billion from drilling on public lands.

“For too long, the federal oil and gas leasing programs have prioritized the wants of extractive industries above local communities, the natural environment, the impact on our air and water, the needs of tribal nations, and, moreover, other uses of our shared public lands,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said. “Today, we begin to reset how and what we consider to be the highest and best use of Americans’ resources for the benefit of all current and future generations.”

The new lease sales mark the second major step the Biden administration has taken to open up public lands and waters for drilling.

Anike Ekina

Amazing woman, a German actress, music/fitness/lifestyle influencer, not to mention OnlyFans star, on Instagram.

Attacks Rock Ukrainian Cities, as Mariupol Nears Full Russian Control

At the Washington Post, "The port city’s fate hung in the balance after weeks of bombardment and siege by Russian forces":

MUKACHEVO, Ukraine — Deadly attacks rocked numerous cities and leveled buildings across Ukraine on Saturday, serving as ominous signals of how close destruction remains even in areas where Russian forces have recently pulled out.

Russia moved ever closer to controlling the already devastated port city of Mariupol as its invasion of Ukraine continued into its eighth week. In Russian-occupied Kherson, satellite imagery that showed the digging of hundreds of fresh grave plots held haunting symbolism of the fate of civilians there.

U.S. officials and military experts are expecting that in the next phase of the war, Russian forces will concentrate their might on capturing the eastern region known as Donbas and the southern cities that provide crucial access to the Black Sea and beyond. But the latest barrage demonstrated that Russia is still capable of wreaking destruction well beyond where its forces are situated or have recently vacated, such as the capital of Kyiv and its suburbs.

Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer, who met with Russian President Vladimir Putin this week, said in an interview to air on Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that Putin “believes he is winning” the war.

“We have to look him in his eyes and we have to confront him with what we see in Ukraine,” Nehammer said, according to a transcript of the interview.

One person was killed as a result of a rocket strike near Kyiv, and several injured were taken to a hospital in the capital, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said Saturday. The mayor urged residents of Kyiv who are away from the city not to return at present but to “stay in safer places.”

Blasts were also reported outside Kyiv on Friday. Russia said in a statement on Friday that its forces fired missiles at a suburban factory that produces Ukrainian weapons, in retaliation for what it claimed were attempted Ukrainian assaults on border towns inside Russia.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said a military plant was destroyed in the Kyiv attack, one of 16 targets hit in cities including Odessa, Poltava and Mykolaiv. The ministry claimed a repair shop for military equipment in Mykolaiv was destroyed.

In Lviv, an air raid lasting more than an hour was carried out by Russian Su-35 planes, the country’s more advanced fighter jets, according to regional governor Maksym Kozytskyy. Four guided missiles were destroyed by antiaircraft defenses, he added.

In Ukraine’s northeast, one person was killed and 18 were injured after a rocket strike in Kharkiv on Saturday, according to the provincial governor. Images captured after the attack showed Ukrainian servicemen walking amid the rubble, firefighters trying to extinguish multiple fires, and emergency workers treating an injured woman.

The governor of the Kharkiv region, Oleh Synyehubov, said on the Telegram messaging app that a rocket fired by Russian forces “hit one of the central districts of Kharkiv again” early Saturday. He pleaded with residents to be “extremely careful” at a time when Russian forces “continue to terrorize the civilian population of Kharkiv and the region.”

Russia appeared to be on the verge of capturing the devastated port city of Mariupol, which a regional leader mourned had been “wiped off the face of the earth.” According to a top Russian military official, the only remaining area under Ukrainian forces was the Azovstal steel plant, one of the largest metallurgical factories in Europe.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky seemed to acknowledge as much on Saturday. In an address to the nation, a translation of which was posted on an official government website, Zelensky said that “the situation in Mariupol remains as severe as possible. Just inhuman.”

He said that Ukraine had continually sought military and diplomatic solutions since the blockade of Mariupol began, but that finding one had been extremely difficult.

Zelensky added: “Russia is deliberately trying to destroy everyone who is there in Mariupol.” On Saturday, Russia gave a deadline for surrender in Mariupol of 6 a.m. Moscow time on Sunday (11 p.m. Eastern time on Saturday), Russian state news reported.

Zelensky told Ukrainian media outlets that negotiations between Ukraine and Russia could end if Russian forces killed all of the Ukrainians defending the city. He noted that the situation in Mariupol is “very difficult,” acknowledging that “many people have disappeared” from the city. He reiterated that the wounded who remained blocked from leaving Mariupol needed to get out.

Mariupol has been under weeks of heavy bombardment and siege by Russian forces, and analysts are predicting it will be the first major Ukrainian city to fall in the coming days. Control of the Sea of Azov hub is strategically important to the Kremlin because it would connect Russian-annexed Crimea with Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region.

Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said nine humanitarian corridors were to have been open Saturday, linking urban areas in the country’s south and east to relatively safer areas deeper inland in the north and west.

More than 1,400 people were evacuated through humanitarian corridors on Saturday despite persistent Russian shelling that made it difficult to carry out efforts in various parts of Ukraine, Vereshchuk said.

Those seeking to flee shelling in Mariupol and other cities had to use their own transportation because bad weather is preventing the use of evacuation buses. Parts of the roads leading to Zaporizhzhia, a city farther up the Dnieper River, have been washed out, she said.

Zaporizhzhia received nearly 1,400 people from hard-hit areas of the southeast who traveled in their own vehicles, Vereshchuk said through Telegram.

Advertisement Nearly 70 people were evacuated from the eastern region of Luhansk in the face of Russian shelling. Vereshchuk said the density of shelling prevented the evacuation of people from the eastern city of Lysychansk.

The United Nations has renewed calls for safe passage out of Mariupol, which the U.N. undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs, Martin Griffiths, called “an epicenter of horror.” As many as 100,000 people are believed to still be in the city, which had a population of roughly 450,000 before the war began.

In Kherson, a city that was quickly seized by Russian forces during the first week of the invasion of Ukraine, recent satellite imagery showed that at least 824 grave plots were dug between Feb. 28 and April 15, according to an analysis by the Center for Information Resilience, a London-based nonprofit. The burial site is on the city’s outskirts, just east of the airport.

Advertisement Kherson is about 400 miles south of Kyiv and is home to a port on the Dnieper River close to the Black Sea, making it a strategically important site in the conflict.

Many of Kherson’s 280,000 residents have fled the city since the invasion. But the occupying Russian forces have also faced resistance and civilian protests in the city and appeared to have lost control of part of it late last month, according to the U.S. Defense Department, which said Kherson had become contested territory.

In areas that Russian forces have withdrawn from, a gruesome portrait has emerged of the horrors that residents faced...

 

Richard J. Evans, The Hitler Conspiracies

At Amazon, Richard J. Evans, The Hitler Conspiracies: The Protocols - The Stab in the Back - The Reichstag Fire - Rudolf Hess - The Escape from the Bunker.

Several Million U.S. Workers Seen Staying Out of Labor Force Indefinitely

Well that's no good, sheesh.

At the Wall Street Journal, "Survey shows many labor-force dropouts plan to maintain social distancing after pandemic, raising implications for economy":

Several million workers who dropped out of the U.S. workforce during the Covid-19 pandemic plan to stay out indefinitely because of persistent illness fears or physical impairments, potentially exacerbating the labor shortage for years, new research shows.

About three million workforce dropouts say they don’t plan to return to pre-Covid activities—whether that includes going to work, shopping in person or dining out—even after the pandemic ends, according to a monthly survey conducted over the past year by a team of researchers. The workforce dropouts tend to be women, lack a college degree and have worked in low-paying fields.

The research team has named this phenomenon “long social distancing” and believes it will be one of the lasting scars of the Covid-19 pandemic.

“Our evidence is the labor force isn’t going to magically bounce back,” said Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford University economist who oversees the survey along with José María Barrero of Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México and Steven J. Davis of the University of Chicago. “We still don’t see any change in these long social distancing numbers, which suggests this drop in labor-force participation may be quite enduring.”

Should the researchers’ predictions turn out to be true—that the labor force will be depressed for potentially years after the pandemic recedes—the implications for the world’s largest economy and the Federal Reserve are substantial. A sharp drop in the labor force at the pandemic’s start led to shortages of workers and products that have frustrated households, restrained economic growth and helped push inflation to a 40-year high.

The labor force has recovered significant ground since March and April 2020, when the pandemic put about 22 million people out of work and the labor force—consisting of both employed workers and job seekers age 16 or older—fell by 8.2 million workers, or 5%.

The ranks of employed workers as of this March were 1.2 million shy of their prepandemic level, recovering faster than economists predicted two years ago. The labor force grew to 164.4 million workers, down just 174,000 from its prepandemic level. The rebound has been particularly sharp in recent months as the winter outbreak of the Omicron variant of Covid-19 faded.

Even with those gains, the U.S. is still missing about 3.5 million workers, by the team’s calculations. That figure represents the difference between the number of workers in March and how many there would be if the labor force had continued to grow at the pace it did from 2015 to 2019, absent the pandemic.

And their research suggests progress could soon stall. If so, the labor force would remain depressed for longer than the Fed anticipates, potentially helping to keep inflation high.

Chuck Lage, 63 years old, is among those who lost their jobs in the first two months of the pandemic in spring 2020. The Landenberg, Pa., resident was laid off from his position as a director of business planning for a nonprofit professional association.

Mr. Lage has common variable immunodeficiency, or CVID, a genetic condition that prevents his body from producing antibodies to fight illnesses. Worried about getting sick, he retired early and has avoided almost all of his prepandemic activities such as going out to eat and socializing. He plans to continue doing so for the foreseeable future.

Through a Facebook group for people with his condition, he learned that there are many people like him. One recent member posted a picture of a zebra—an animal that people with CVID have adopted as a sort of mascot—sitting in a car looking out the window.

“The world is moving on,” Mr. Lage said. “We’re not able to yet.”

The fate of people such as Mr. Lage is at the heart of one of the economy’s biggest puzzles: whether certain adults will re-enter the labor market as the pandemic fades. Employers have struggled to find workers to meet strong consumer demand and have bid up workers’ wages as a result, one of several factors that pushed inflation to a four-decade high of 8.5% in March.

For each month over the past year, the team has anonymously surveyed 5,000 people—not always the same ones—age 20 to 64 who earned at least $10,000 in the prior year. The survey asked whether they plan a full, partial or no return to normal activities after the pandemic. Consistently, 1 in 10 have said they plan no return. In the early months of this year, when the Omicron variant was surging, that share rose to 13%.

After controlling for work status—some of those people were working remotely—and other variables such as age and gender, the team concluded that roughly three million people are staying out of the workforce to remain socially distant. The team didn’t ask health details such as whether those people have “long Covid,” to avoid health-privacy concerns.

Other data suggest that fear of Covid remains an issue for some workers but has fallen from higher levels earlier in the pandemic.

The Census Bureau has surveyed adults throughout the pandemic, asking among other questions whether they didn’t work in the past week because they were afraid of getting Covid or spreading it.

That figure peaked at above six million early in the pandemic, fell sharply a year ago after vaccines became widely available and remained around three million for much of 2021. In mid-March 2022, the figure fell to 2.3 million from three million in February....

 Very sad, actually.

#Noam

Noam Chomsky is trending on Twitter, over this (below). 

Glenn Greenwald has more.

No Easter Metaphors

It's (the freakin' smart) Ally Beth Stuckey, on Twitter.

The Resurrection is not a metaphor. It’s not a symbol for us overcoming our obstacles or for God doing the unexpected in our lives. It’s Jesus rising from the dead, defeating sin & death forever. That’s powerful & applicable as is. Forgo cleverness & stick with the gospel.

— Allie Beth Stuckey (@conservmillen) April 16, 2022

Newport University or Christopher Newport University?

They don't say, on Twitter. 

But who cares where this woman attends, damn?!!

Not a 'Kitchen Table Issue,' Jen Psaki? (VIDEO)

From Abigail Shrier, "Actually, Our Kids Are All We're Thinking About":

Yesterday, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki accused Republican lawmakers of “engaging in a disturbing, cynical trend of attacking vulnerable transgender kids,” and exploiting them. “Instead of focusing on critical kitchen table issues like the economy, COVID, or addressing the country’s mental health crisis,” she said, “Republican lawmakers are currently debating legislation that, among many things, would target transgender youth with tactics that threaten to put pediatricians in prison if they provide medically necessary, life-saving care for the kids they serve.”

Life-saving care? Surely she must mean insulin or antibiotics?

No, she means “gender affirming care” that devilish euphemism for puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and experimental surgeries whose benefits are unproven, but whose risks—permanent sexual dysfunction, infertility, cardiac event and endometrial cancer are a few—ought to nudge any doctor toward soul searching. As I’ve written many times, these treatments are often recklessly administered, of questionable benefit to children, and attended by forbidding risks.

For these reasons, in the last two years, national gender clinics in France, the UK, Sweden and Finland have all reevaluated or curtailed their use. But as Psaki made clear, any legislator who tries to follow suit will face double-barreled legal opposition from the current Administration. Psaki said:

Legislators who are contemplating these discriminatory bills have been put on notice by the Department of Justice and the Department of Health and Human Services that laws and policies preventing care that health care professionals recommend for transgender minors may violate the Constitution and federal law. To be clear, every major medical association agrees that gender-affirming health care for transgender kids is a best practice and potentially life-saving.

There is, in fact, no proof that “affirmative care” improves the mental health of gender dysphoric youth long-term—much less that its interventions are “life-saving.” An outstanding recent paper in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy is only the latest to expose the poor empirical basis for these treatments with minors. It’s a must-read paper for any policy maker, parent, or psychologist grappling with this fraught question.

The authors state, as if with a sigh: “The evidence underlying the practice of pediatric gender transition is widely recognized to be of very low quality.”

Activists often exaggerate the suicide risk to gender dysphoric minors—as well as the mental health efficacy of these treatments—in order to coerce parents into acceding to the interventions. But as the authors point out: “The ‘transition or suicide’ narrative falsely implies that transition will prevent suicides. [N]either hormones nor surgeries have been shown to reduce suicidality in the long-term.”

That the Biden administration would peddle an activist talking point with no solid factual basis signals how desperate it is to please the radical flank of its supporters. That is too bad. Leaders who mollycoddle the activists quietly corrupting nearly every institution of American life fool themselves that they are merely paying a tax. They don’t realize it’s a ransom, and that those who demand it will never be satisfied until they have despoiled every American institution. And much worse in this case: they encourage irreversible harm to children.

In an address chock-a-block with fictions, perhaps Psaki’s most surprising was the notion that unlike the “economy, COVID” and the “country’s mental health crisis,” the risks gender activists now pose to our children is not a “kitchen table issue.” It is - she means - the sort of thing that excites Twitter, not normal Americans.

In Psaki’s worldview, then, Americans are not shaking their heads at their talented daughters, wondering if they ought to bother helping them train in a sport. Nor does she think Americans are desperately worried about what radical teachers are pushing on their kids at school—from racial essentialism and division to phony gender science about their bodies and identities.

But in the real world, Americans are very, very worried about these things. I’ve been privileged with a special window into their terror: an inbox full of thousands of desperate parents who write me daily of their teen daughters caught in the grips of a sudden transgender epiphany. And Ms. Psaki, I can promise you this: given the widespread availability of medical gender treatments, on demand, without therapist oversight and often without requiring parental consent - that is not merely one of that family’s concerns. It is all that family is thinking about. Every minute of every day—dear God, how can I save my little girl from doing harm to herself?

America has essentially become an unlocked medicine cabinet for gender medicine seekers as young as 15. As a result, any family with a kid who announces she is trans —whether encouraged by peers or social media or an activist educator, or accompanied by serious mental health co-morbidities—is hurled into crisis. The only thing parents know for certain is that a quick medical transition will be encouraged by virtually every adult she encounters. Far less certain is whether the family can do anything to stop it...

Still more.

 

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The Fast-Gathering Storm

From Andrew Sullivan, at the Weekly Dish, "How close are we getting to a full-on war between Russia and the West?":

“The beginning of every war is like opening the door into a dark room. One never knows what is hidden in the darkness,” opined a certain Austrian maniac. And what we are discovering about Putin’s Russia as this brutal war continues, is something extremely dark.

The rhetoric in Moscow is now outright eliminationist toward not just Ukraine, but Ukrainians as a people. The more bogged down the Russian military, the more intense the “de-Nazification” memes. With each defeat, from the failure to take Kyiv to the sinking of the Mockva, the sense of humiliation and anger grows. In the words of one Kremlin propagandist: “It’s no accident we call them Nazis. What makes you a Nazi is your bestial nature, your bestial hatred and your bestial willingness to tear out the eyes of children on the basis of nationality.” Ukrainians are being dehumanized — deemed not just victims of a “Nazi” regime but somehow Nazis themselves. It’s hard not to recall Aleksandr Dugin’s 2014 remark when asked his view of Ukraine: “Kill! Kill! Kill! There can be no other discussion. This is my opinion as a professor.”

The rhetoric on Russian TV is about ending Ukrainian identity, as well as Ukraine, altogether. “Ukrainianism, fueled by anti-Russian poison and all-consuming lies about its identity, is one big fake,” pronounced Dmitry Medvedev, Putin’s mini-me. And the tactics — mass rapes, wholesale flattening of cities such as Mariupol, profligate torture, mass-murder of civilians — are those of a country seeking some kind of psychic purge of its ungrateful and traitorous Ukrainian subjects. The removal of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians to Russia proper is yet another sign of Putin’s genocidal mania.

As this sinks in, Europe is instinctually, understandably rallying to support Ukraine. Because Europe proper is next in line for Russia’s aggression if Ukraine loses. Boris Johnson has grasped the crisis as a way to play FDR (BoJo) to Churchill (Zelensky), sending arms to Ukraine, arriving in Kyiv for a photo-op with Zelensky, with whom he seems to have bonded. The UK alone has sent 4,000 anti-tank weapons, including Next-generation Light Anti-tank Weapons, or NLAWs, and Javelin missiles. More are on the way. They have had a real effect.

And the EU is now doing something no one expected only a couple of weeks ago: considering a ban on Russian oil imports. Finland and Sweden may join NATO in a matter of weeks. The US is now funneling arms and training to Ukraine, as Russia menaces from the east: “The training will focus on using 155mm howitzer cannons, counter-artillery radar and Sentinel air defense radars, and will take a few days each.” This comes after years of NATO training of Ukrainian armed forces, which helps explain their remarkable early success in nimbly thwarting Russia’s onslaught.

The emergency spending from Congress a month ago for military and other foreign aid to Ukraine amounted to $13.6 billion. The aid is a culmination of deep support from the US since 2014. It’s getting more and more aggressive. Just this week, the Biden administration offered another “$800 million in additional security assistance for Ukraine, including artillery, armored personnel carriers, and Humvees ... The new package includes heavier weaponry than the U.S. previously had provided and — for the first time — American-made artillery pieces.”

But the demand for this sum to grow even further is becoming the conventional wisdom in DC. Fareed Zakaria explains why: “the world is expected to pay $320 billion to Russia this year for its energy.” $16 billion doesn’t seem so impressive. Fareed also notes what is evident: the Russians are doing far better in the south than in the north, and could throttle Ukraine if they manage to capture Odessa. So what should the West do?

[NATO] should enforce an embargo around those waters, preventing Russian troops from entering to attack Ukraine’s cities or resupply Russian forces. NATO ships would operate from international waters, issuing any approaching ships a “notice to mariners” that NATO forces are active in the area and warning them not to enter.

No risk elevation there!

Let’s be real: This is a Europe-wide war, fast becoming a global one. And as Putin gets more isolated, and his war drags on without a breakthrough, Russia is upping the ante too. The CIA director, Nicholas Burns, just worried out loud about Putin’s possible reach for chemical or nuclear weapons: “His risk appetite has grown as his grip on Russia has tightened … Given the potential desperation of President Putin and the Russian leadership, given the setbacks that they’ve faced so far, militarily, none of us can take lightly the threat posed by a potential resort to tactical nuclear weapons or low-yield nuclear weapons.”

If and when Russia begins a new onslaught on eastern and southern Ukraine, with the potential for Grozny-like devastation and war crimes, the pressure on all these countries to keep Ukraine free will get even more intense. Russia will be sorely tempted to prevent these huge military transfers by attacking supply lines from the west. Medvedev has warned of an end to a nuclear-free Baltic zone if Finland and Sweden join NATO. Putin cannot lose this war in the eyes of the Russian public — and has far, far more invested in Ukraine than the West does, as Barack Obama once reminded us.

And while support for the war remains solid in the US, it is not uppermost in voters’ minds, as they cope with raging inflation and rising crime. In France, a candidate who would oppose a EU oil embargo and who’s been chummy with Putin in the past, Marine Le Pen, is polling far better than expected. The Germans remain the most reluctant anti-Putin country in Europe, and if their economy goes into the shitter this fall with spiraling energy costs, who knows how long their will to fight back will last? Much of the developing world is ambivalent but leery of the US. And all this Western mobilization gives credence to Putin’s propaganda, does it not? It’s simply true that Ukraine, while not in NATO, is essentially a NATO outpost, using NATO weapons, to defend their country.

If and when Russia begins a new onslaught on eastern and southern Ukraine, with the potential for Grozny-like devastation and war crimes, the pressure on all these countries to keep Ukraine free will get even more intense. Russia will be sorely tempted to prevent these huge military transfers by attacking supply lines from the west. Medvedev has warned of an end to a nuclear-free Baltic zone if Finland and Sweden join NATO. Putin cannot lose this war in the eyes of the Russian public — and has far, far more invested in Ukraine than the West does, as Barack Obama once reminded us.

And while support for the war remains solid in the US, it is not uppermost in voters’ minds, as they cope with raging inflation and rising crime. In France, a candidate who would oppose a EU oil embargo and who’s been chummy with Putin in the past, Marine Le Pen, is polling far better than expected. The Germans remain the most reluctant anti-Putin country in Europe, and if their economy goes into the shitter this fall with spiraling energy costs, who knows how long their will to fight back will last? Much of the developing world is ambivalent but leery of the US. And all this Western mobilization gives credence to Putin’s propaganda, does it not? It’s simply true that Ukraine, while not in NATO, is essentially a NATO outpost, using NATO weapons, to defend their country...

 

Giles Tremlett, The International Brigades

See, Giles Tremlett, The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War.