According to The Newberg Graphic, a special education assistant at Mabel Rush Elementary School in Newberg, Oregon, showed up on campus last Friday wearing blackface. Yes. That is still happening. The reason? According to an anonymous staff member, she was protesting a vaccine mandate and used iodine to darken her skin. This move was going to somehow compare Rosa Parks’ fight for civil rights with this person’s disregard for public health protocols. The Daily Beast has confirmed that an employee had worn blackface on campus, with school officials calling it “unacceptable.”

In a statement, Newberg Public Schools wrote that “The employee was removed from the location, and HR has placed the employee on administrative leave. The administration of Newberg Public Schools condemns all expressions of racism.” This is the third controversy surrounding the Newberg school system’s problems with racism and bigotry. Just last week Newberg High school was investigating a student who reportedly posted super-racist social media content to a Snapchat group called “Slave Trade.”

Of that incident, Superintendent Dr. Joe Morelock wrote:

“With regard to the social media incident that involved students at Newberg High School, I want to make it clear that racist and bullying behavior has no place in our schools or community. We are grateful to students and others who reported the incident. As Principal Erion wrote yesterday, we are taking this matter extremely seriously — we will investigate all involved and follow our policies for any disciplinary action. (By law and for student privacy, we cannot share the results of any disciplinary action taken.) We also are utilizing our systems of support for all students negatively affected by this and other bullying behavior. Thank you to our high school administration and counseling staff who are taking the lead, and to staff in all our schools.”

Of course, that comes about one month after the Newberg School Board voted 4-3 to ban “divisive” “political” signage like Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ+ flags and … I guess swastikas? That led to Superintendent Morelock writing:

“With regard to the published statements of a staff member that is making the news, we cannot comment on personnel matters. We have reminded our entire staff of the state law requiring flags in classrooms, have taken actions to check each classroom across the district, and are committed to abiding by the law as a district.”

Tai Harden-Moore, a Black mother with kids in the district, told The Graphic that this wasn’t surprising, as conservatives keep attempting to pretend public health mandates are the equivalent of white supremacist and anti-constitutional post-slavery segregation laws. “This makes sense only because we have our county commissioner, Mary Starrett, who drew that line between vaccine mandates and Jim Crow. That was only a couple months ago. Our county leadership is saying basic public health measures are akin to Jim Crow. There is a line between our political leadership and something like this happening. Our leadership matters."

The disappearance and presumed death of travel blogger Gabby Petito as she road-tripped with her fiance has drawn massive attention—and with it, provided a glaring example of the disparities between media attention to missing white women and missing Black and Latina and Native women.

Petito’s fiance, Brian Laundrie, has fled after returning from their road trip without her and refusing to speak to Petito’s family or the police. Human remains “consistent with the description of” Petito have been discovered in Wyoming and are being autopsied Tuesday.

And it's all receiving wall-to-wall media coverage, in a classic case of Missing White Woman Syndrome. In Wyoming, where Petito—white, blonde, thin, and very online—disappeared, 710 Indigenous people went missing between 2011 and 2020, of which 57% are female and 85% are children. Hundreds of Native women remain missing, and no one even knows how many Indigenous women are murdered each year. While Dateline NBC recently featured coverage of missing Indigenous women, that was a special case. None of them have become household names with constant breathless cable news updates.

It’s not just Native women who get overlooked. In May, a report found there were 50 missing Black girls in New York and New Jersey. None of them have become household names. In July, reporter Steph Amaya Mora traced out decades of missing Latinas being overshadowed by missing white women, with similar crimes drawing starkly different levels of coverage and notoriety based on the victim's race.

According to the Black & Missing Foundation, in 2020, 543,018 people were reported missing in the United States, 37% of them categorized as “minority.” 

There’s another strand, too. More than half of homicides of women are related to intimate partner violence, the CDC reported in 2017. Black and indigenous women are victims of homicide at higher rates than women of other racial backgrounds, and Hispanic women are the most likely to be victims of intimate partner violence.

Police concluded Petito was the aggressor in potential violence when they stopped the couple on August 12, but a recently released 911 call from the same day shows a bystander saying, “A gentleman was slapping the girl.” Many observers have noted that, in the police stop, Petito was crying uncontrollably while Laundrie was calm—and that it is not uncommon for abusers to be calm and able to convince onlookers that their upset or scared partners are unstable and at fault for any conflict.

It seems clear that even if the remains found in Wyoming are not hers, whatever happened to Gabby Petito wasn’t good. But bad things happen to women all the time, and few of them draw any national coverage, let alone the volume dedicated to Petito. It’s fine to talk about her and worry about her, but we should also be talking about and worrying about the structural factors here, from intimate partner violence to the racial disparities in whose disappearances get media and law enforcement attention.

[It's the one amicus brief supporting Mississippi's abortion restriction that takes a wrecking ball to the Supreme Court's fundamental-rights precedents]

In an earlier post, I noted that the vast majority of the 81 briefs in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health supporting Mississippi's 15-week abortion ban were mum about Obergefell v. Hodges, which held same-sex couples have a fundamental right to marry under the 14th Amendment's Due Process Clause. My review also indicates that most of them have relatively little to say explicitly about any of the other substantive due process precedents–preferring to treat Roe and Casey like tumors that can be excised without affecting the rest of the body. This silence may be strategic, but it's nonetheless notable.

The main exception is the amicus brief filed on behalf of Texas Right to Life (TRL), written by Jonathan Mitchell and Adam Mortara. Mitchell was "the conceptual force behind" SB8, the Texas "Heartbeat Bill," which effectively bans abortions after six weeks of pregnancy and authorizes "any person" to seek an injunction and award of at least $10,000 against those who assist women obtaining such abortions. Mitchell was a clerk for the late Justice Scalia and is a former Solicitor General of Texas.  Mortara was a clerk for Justice Thomas and is a lead lawyer in the challenge against Harvard's affirmative action program, seeking to have the Court overrule its landmark 2003 decision upholding race-conscious admissions policies. Both have sterling credentials within the conservative legal movement. Their brief will be closely read in the Justices' chambers.

The TRL brief maintains that the constitutional right to abortion declared in Roe and reaffirmed in Casey has no basis in constitutional text or history and that stare decisis should not prevent them from being overruled. So far, so expected.

But there are many other decisions that similarly lack any constitutional grounding, the brief says. Among these is Loving v. Virginia, which struck down a state anti-miscegenation law in part on substantive due process grounds.

Supporters of Roe have correctly observed that this Court has recognized and enforced other supposed constitutional "rights" that have no basis in constitutional text or historical practice. The Casey plurality opinion, for example, noted that right [sic] to interracial marriage from Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1, 12 (1967), has no textual or historical pedigree, much like the right to abortion that this Court invented in Roe v. Wade. . .  To be sure, the rationale of Loving purported to invoke the doctrine of substantive due process and a supposed constitutional "freedom to marry," which is nowhere to be found in the language of the Constitution.  (pp. 22-23)

The conclusion that the constitutional right to marry is baseless follows from a larger critique of substantive due process common within conservative legal circles, including among some Justices. But few publicly acknowledge the full implications of the argument for the unenumerated substantive-due-process right to marry, much less specifically for the right to marry a person of a different race. Give Mitchell and Mortara credit for candor.

Still, a Supreme Court advocate cannot be heard to question the outcome in Loving. So while rejecting the substantive due process holding, the TRL brief attempts to reach the same result by asserting that "the Civil Rights Act of 1866 provides all the authority needed to set aside a state's anti-miscegenation law." That's because the 1866 Act prohibits racial discrimination under state law in making and enforcing contracts and, the authors assert, marriage is a contract subject to this statute. "So Loving remains good law regardless of whether the Constitution's text or historical practice can support a right to interracial marriage," the brief concludes.

This analysis is curious in several ways. First, the TRL brief is essentially saying that marriage rights for interracial couples are secure only by congressional grace, not by fundamental constitutional law. Congress would be free to revoke that protection (though it assuredly would not do so these days). Second, the argument suggests that in 1967 bans on interracial marriage had already been illegal under federal law for more than a century. That certainly would have been news to the 16 states that still had such laws. Indeed, historically, all but nine states enacted anti-miscegenation laws at some point. Third, the TRL brief ignores the independent holding of Loving that bans on interracial marriages are unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause. Is there no textual or historical basis for that holding? Fourth, the TRL brief characterizes the issue as involving "a right to interracial marriage" rather than as involving "a right to marriage" that interracial couples must be allowed to exercise.

In places, the brief reads like a progressive parody of the conservative critique of unenumerated constitutional rights–conceiving rights in the narrowest way and then, so conceived, finding no constitutional support for them. But at least TRL finds a way to conclude that states must allow interracial marriages.

According to TRL, however, "the news is not as good for those who hope to preserve the court-invented rights to homosexual behavior and same-sex marriage." The rights announced in Lawrence and Obergefell "are judicial concoctions, and there is no other source of law that can be invoked to salvage their existence." While "far less hazardous to human life," they are just "as lawless as Roe."

Here the brief specifically rejects Mississippi's view that Obergefell might survive in a post-Roe world.

Mississippi suggests that Obergefell could be defended by invoking the "fundamental right to marry" which is "'fundamental as a matter of history and tradition.'" Pet. Br. at 13 (quoting Obergefell, 576 U.S. at 671). But a "fundamental right" must be defined with specificity before assessing whether that right is "deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition."See Washington v. Glucksberg, 521 U.S. 702, 721 (1997) (requiring federal courts to employ a "careful description" of conduct or behavior that a litigant alleges to be protected by the Constitution, and forbidding resort to generalizations and abstractions). Otherwise long-prohibited conduct can be made into a "fundamental right" that is "deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition," so long as a litigant is creative enough to define the "right" at a high enough level of abstraction. The right to marry an opposite-sex spouse spouse is "deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition"; the right to marry a same-sex spouse obviously is not.

Like the "right to interracial marriage," according to TRL, the "right to same-sex marriage" is nowhere to be found in the Constitution. There is no right to marriage in the text, so there is of course no right to marriage that same-sex couples must be allowed to exercise. Further, TRL says, states must even be allowed to criminalize sexual intimacy in the privacy of gay couples' homes.

What's notable about this line of argument is how unremarkable it is in mainstream conservative legal critiques of substantive due process, Obergefell, and Lawrence. It's a critique some of the Justices endorse. No doubt many of Mississippi's amici also share it, although they are not as forthcoming.

In the end, Mitchell and Mortara say they are not necessarily asking the Court to overrule Obergefell and Lawrence right now, but they believe it would be nice if the Court wrote "an opinion that leaves those decisions hanging by a thread."

There are many ways to distinguish abortion from gay marriage, some of which are relevant to constitutional law. Among other things, both equal protection and stare decisis will figure differently in these contexts. But if the influential architect of SB8 and his widely respected co-author somehow persuade a majority of the Justices to write an opinion eviscerating substantive due process, one thread supporting Obergefell will be a lot easier to cut.

 

 

PayPal has been talking about its "super app" plans for some time, having recently told investors its upcoming digital wallet and payments app had been given a go for launch. Today, the first version of that app is officially being introduced, offering a combination of financial tools including direct deposit, bill pay, a digital wallet, peer-to-peer payments, shopping tools, crypto capabilities and more. From a report: The company is also announcing its partnership with Synchrony Bank for its new high-yield savings account, PayPal Savings. These changes shift PayPal from being largely a payments utility that's tacked on other offerings here and there, to being a more fully fleshed out finance app. Though PayPal itself doesn't aim to be a "bank," the new app offers a range of competitive features for those considering shifting their finances to neobanks, like Chime or Varo, as it will now also include support for paycheck Direct Deposits through PayPal's bank partners with two-day early access, bill pay and more.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The madness of reconciliation is proof: If you don't believe in reforming the filibuster, you can't call yourself a real Democrat.

The true "realists" in this debate have been the progressives, not the centrists.

Web sleuthing was a tricky true crime hobby. Then Gabby Petito went missing.

The entire internet was looking for her.

In the days before FBI officials on Sunday announced — and on Tuesday confirmed — that the body of 22-year-old Instagrammer Gabby Petito had been found near Grand Teton in Wyoming, her status as a missing person had gone massively viral. For the past week, the story of Petito and her boyfriend Brian Laundrie, 23 — who had returned home from a heavily chronicled #VanLife road trip without her — dominated social media, mesmerized true crime communities, and led the nightly news around the country. When news broke that Laundrie, amid intense public scrutiny, had fled authorities and gone on the run, the saga became one of the most viral news stories of 2021.

A coroner for Teton County in Wyoming confirmed after an autopsy conducted on Tuesday that Petito’s cause of death was homicide. Currently, Laundrie is the only known person of interest in the case.

On one level, Petito’s case is typical of true crime cases where a victim of alleged domestic violence goes missing. Too often the partner simply clams up, as Laundrie did, impeding investigation into the person’s disappearance. But the case of Petito and Laundrie garnered so much attention so rapidly that an extraordinary amount of public effort went into finding her — with the internet and social media platforms from TikTok to YouTube playing a major role in the search efforts.

Because of these many factors and national attention, Petito’s case has become a flash point for discussions regarding domestic violence issues, the racial dynamics of missing persons investigations in the US, and the positives and negatives of “web sleuthing.”

In the middle of it all, we’re still learning new information about Petito, her life, and her death. And with Laundrie still missing, this story is not over yet.

The timeline of Petito’s journey — and her abrupt disappearance

Natalie Behring/Getty Images

Petito, a former pharmacy technician, met Laundrie at Bayport-Blue Point High School on Long Island. The couple began traveling around the western US in a small van in June, chronicling their journey on Petito’s Instagram account using the popular hashtag #VanLife. The tag unites nomadic communities around the globe — wanderers who live out of their vans while documenting their travels on social media. (Petito also has a YouTube page, though the account has just one video from the trip.)

In their social media content, the couple looked as though they were enjoying a blissful summer road trip and camping out under the stars. But in late August, Petito’s regular social media updates stopped abruptly and her family lost communication with her — and on September 1, Laundrie returned to his family’s home in North Port, Florida, alone.

Petito’s family reported her missing on September 11, and the ensuing search to find her garnered widespread public and media attention. Amateur internet detectives publicized her case over the last week, leading to an unusually intense nationwide search that focused primarily on the vast stretches of wilderness between Petito’s last known whereabouts, Yellowstone, and Grand Teton National Park, where she and Laundrie were believed to have been heading before his sudden return to Florida.

As interest in the case grew and spread, so did the flood of information that emerged about Petito and Laundrie’s relationship, along with a deluge of tips from people who had learned about the case online. Although other missing persons cases have gotten significant public and media attention well after the fact, Petito’s case seemed to be unfolding in real time, with an unprecedented number of eyes on the ground trying to locate her.

Among the many tips that came in to authorities was one that may have been crucial: A couple driving through Grand Teton National Park on August 27 — two days after Petito’s mother last spoke to her — captured video footage of a van quickly identified as that of Petito and Laundrie. The footage provided a major clue that may have helped authorities narrow down a search area that otherwise would have been impossibly large.

On September 18, news broke that Laundrie had apparently fled police and gone on the run. The next day, the FBI announced that authorities had located a body “consistent with the description of” Petito, reportedly very close to the location in Grand Teton where her van had been caught on video in August before Laundrie drove it home alone. Authorities continued to search for Laundrie, who remained missing as of Tuesday.

Police body cam footage of Petito and Laundrie prompted viral discussions about the case

On September 16, authorities from the Grand County Sheriff’s Office in Moab, Utah, released over an hour of body cam footage of police responding to a 911 call in Moab on August 12. (The 911 call was later released on September 20.)

The 911 caller reported seeing a man, later identified as Laundrie, slapping a woman repeatedly, as well as chasing her down and hitting her. The caller was extremely concerned for the safety of the woman, later identified as Petito, and described the scene as a “domestic dispute.”

As seen in the body cam footage, police who responded to the incident worked to separate the couple and successfully convinced them to spend the night apart. But in one portion of the video, which has since been heavily criticized by the public, the officers seemed to bond with Laundrie, at one point explicitly joking with him about histrionic women and identifying him as “the victim.” They ultimately took no further action, reporting that “insufficient evidence existed to justify criminal charges.”

The footage spread across social media, showing up in Instagram stories and TikToks where every second was duly analyzed for clues to the couple’s relationship and Petito’s mental state leading up to her disappearance. The attention helped boost broader public awareness of Petito’s case, and made an already viral sensation even bigger. The social media response to the body cam footage was threefold, with users joining in a discussion about the warning signs of toxic abuse, gaslighting, and coercive control that the cops apparently missed. Still others argued that the discussion was missing the real point: that we should be teaching boys and men not to abuse women.

Some have used Petito’s case to discuss the phenomenon of “missing white woman syndrome,” in which young, white women — particularly middle- and upper-class white women — receive lots of media attention and publicity when they go missing, compared with less publicized cases of poorer, nonwhite women who vanish.

Another common adjacent topic within the true crime community is the phenomenon of “missing and murdered Indigenous women,” a collective term created to emphasize the highly marginalized status of these victims. Among them are more than 700 missing Indigenous people, mostly girls and women, who have vanished over the past decade in Wyoming, the same state where the body matching Petito’s description was recovered.

The fact that this high number of victims isn’t more widely known has been an unsettling part of the Petito case, and the ensuing discussion has drawn attention to other missing persons cases and murders, including the double homicide of newly married couple Crystal Turner and Kylen Schulte just days before Petito was last spotted in Moab. That case is so far unsolved and is apparently unrelated to Petito’s disappearance.

While most true crime communities gather on localized internet forums or subreddits like r/UnresolvedMysteries, the Petito case is notable for its multiplatform spread, especially across TikTok, where many burgeoning web sleuths flooded the site with updates and speculation about the case. Other amateur investigators built on one another’s information, tried to create working timelines based on eyewitness sightings, and shared detailed photos of both Laundrie and Petito for identification purposes, leading to backlash and satirical responses about the true crime community’s overreach:

As helpful as some of this information seems to have been in finding Petito, much of it was a deterrent. The same online activity that turned the case into a media sensation has also prompted ongoing discussion about whether internet sleuthing is ultimately a help or a hindrance.

This case may be unusual, but it’s part of an online sleuthing trend

Over the past two decades, missing persons cases have slowly become a major staple of internet “web sleuthing,” where amateur online detectives congregate and try to solve cases or assist in police investigations. If there is one case associated with web sleuthing’s rise, it’s arguably that of college student Maura Murray, who went missing in New Hampshire in 2004.

Murray’s disappearance slowly became a subsequent true crime phenomenon, as more people learned about her disappearance and became curious about her case. Though Murray has not been found, her case is still a touchstone for viral true crime cases in which entire communities join together in sustained efforts to solve the mystery.

Many similar incidents have become major cases for web sleuths, from viral missing persons cases (Lauren Spierer, Asha Degree, Brian Shaffer, Brandon Lawson, and countless others) to the infamous Delphi murders in 2017. While each of these cases has attracted plenty of social media attention, they don’t seem to have garnered the same intense interest that the Petito case has received in a relatively short period.

Part of the urgency around Petito’s disappearance stemmed from the possibility that she was lost alone in a vast wilderness and in need of help. Petito’s family “implore[d] Brian to come forward and at least tell us if we are looking in the right area” in the early stages of the investigation. But given that many missing persons cases have involved people in similar potential danger that receives very little attention, that’s likely not the only factor involved.

Another aspect concerned the transparency of the event and Petito’s social media presence. Like the 2018 murders of Shanann Watts, her two daughters, and her unborn son, Petito’s case had an undeniable hook due to her use of social media to present a carefully curated, positive image of her life, one that turned out to be an illusion. In fact, some people have been quick to draw comparisons between Brian Laundrie and Chris Watts, who appeared to be an attentive husband and partner, until he wasn’t. (Chris Watts later pleaded guilty to murdering Shanann and her children.)

Petito’s social media presence drove other users’ interest in the case, but much of the information coming from social media was predictably confusing or misleading. Many social media users claimed to have seen the couple in a variety of disparate locations, while others — including a couple who said they gave him a ride and a chef who thought he talked to him — claimed to have interacted with Laundrie while he was alone.

Possible witnesses also claimed to have seen Laundrie walking near his house on September 17, days after his parents said they had last seen him. That same night, a large public protest took place outside the Laundrie family home, where attendees called Petito “America’s daughter” as police pleaded for them to disperse. The protest was livestreamed.

It’s unusual for a missing persons case to generate so much emotional intensity that it results in not only the more typical candlelight vigils but also an outright protest against a person of interest. And as alarming as that might be, the situation continues to get thornier; a conspiracy theory has surfaced claiming that Laundrie is actually not in his early 20s, though his yearbook photos have reportedly confirmed he is, and Laundrie “age truthers” seem to be spreading the debunked theory wherever they can. This is the kind of internet activity that can hamstring a police investigation, especially in a case receiving so much media attention.

Petito’s case has generated disinformation and misinformation, but it also seems to have benefited from the millions of eyes scouring the countryside for Petito. Without the uncovered footage of her van parked on the side of the road in August, it ostensibly would have been difficult to pinpoint a reasonable search area. And had news of Petito’s disappearance not been so widespread, the couple who shot the footage might never have noticed the evidence they had inadvertently captured.

This is the kind of thing that changes the role of internet sleuthing. Some have accused true crime sleuths of capitalizing on cases for clout, overriding the wishes of victims’ families, and treating tragedies as public spectacles, all while potentially hampering investigations. (“We’re not characters in a story,” Maura Murray’s sister Julie Murray commented recently when the case once again made headlines following the discovery of human remains near where Maura went missing.)

Yet in the years since web sleuthing first began — arguably around the time the Websleuths forum was created in 1999 — this same brand of amateur sleuthing has played a major role in solving, or helping to solve, numerous crimes and missing persons cases. Among these sleuths are trained forensic artists who have assisted police in successfully identifying John and Jane Does around the globe. In recent years, “crowdsolving” has been floated by some investigators as a positive collective resource.

Just as the capture of the Golden State Killer served as a major tipping point for the use of ancestry websites and familial DNA in criminal cases, Petito’s case could become the tipping point for reframing web sleuthing, often seen as an obstruction and a nuisance in solving cases, as a potentially crucial public resource waiting to be used in similar cases in the future. Even now, other viral true crimes, most notably the labyrinthine saga of the Murdaugh family in South Carolina, are vying for the public’s attention and attracting new eyes to the case.

With Laundrie still missing — the search for him has focused on wetlands in southern Florida, as well as his family home — this case isn’t over yet. What remains to be seen is what role, if any, the internet will play in its conclusion.

Correction, September 21: An earlier version of this article misstated a connection between false internet rumors about the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing and a man’s death by suicide.

Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

If ever there was a clear-cut demonstration of why the response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been such a catastrophic failure in so many U.S. states, the county council of Elkhart County, Indiana, just provided a good example. This week the northern Indiana county voted to reject $3 million in federal funds requested by its own health department after local residents deluged the council with conspiracy theories about COVID-19 and the federal government’s supposedly sinister role in combating and containing it.

As reported by the Associated Press:

The Elkhart County health department had sought the grant to hire staff members to provide education on chronic diseases to Black, Hispanic and Amish residents over a three-year period. The county council’s 6-0 vote on Sept. 11 against accepting the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention grant, however, had some health leaders saying the council was swayed by what they view as false information and conspiracy theories.

The money sought by the health department was intended to pay for the hiring of six badly needed new health care staff and was solicited in direct response to a health needs survey of the county’s two major hospitals, which had found the county’s Black, Hispanic, and Amish residents weren’t getting enough information relating to preventable health conditions such as diabetes, cancer, and heart disease. The survey determined that due to this lack of outreach, the county’s hospitals were filling up with patients unnecessarily, so the new staffers were sought to reach out into local communities to provide more education.

As explained by Roger Schneider, reporting for the Goshen News, in addition to paying for these new hires, the grant funding would have encompassed “mental health [treatment] with a need for a mobile response unit, co-morbidities, and treatment of chronic disease” within these communities. The grant request also had the strong backing of local mayors within the county. All in all, it seemed like a smart move to improve the health of the county’s citizens and relieve overstressed local hospitals.

But the health of their community was the last thing on the minds of several residents who showed up at the county’s council meeting on Sept. 11. Instead, the focus of these residents was on conspiracy theories, expressed in paranoiac rants about the federal government’s role in addressing the COVID-19 pandemic. The catalyst for this bizarre performance was apparently a single line in the federal grant application that stipulated local health officials agree to work with the CDC to track the number of local COVID-19 infections and assist their efforts to contact trace and quarantine infected residents.

This boilerplate contractual provision apparently smacked of sheer “government tyranny” and overreach to many of these folks, who had obviously absorbed all of their knowledge about COVID-19 from Fox News and inflammatory right-wing social media postings.

One resident, Alison Gingerich, was typical, weighing in with her deeply-felt “concerns:”

“I have to believe this grant has a lot to do with COVID,” she said. “We are tired of being educated on COVID. We have had two years of education on COVID. Two years of contract tracing with COVID. Any more education stands for threat, coercion, bullying and virtue signaling. And we are done with it. If we have $3 million to throw around let’s throw it around somewhere else. We are tired of masking our children.

“We are tired of being forced to get vaccines. And quite frankly, yesterday or the day before President Biden declared civil war on the country. And that is why we are here. We are very concerned. We are concerned our freedoms are being taken way and by perpetuating this crisis that is not a crisis, you can look at the numbers, we are not tripping over dead bodies in the streets. So, we are tired of the fear and tired of it being continued.”

As noted above, the grant itself had nothing to do with COVID-19 and nothing to do with vaccines, despite Gingerich’s rambling speech. It was intended to bolster the local health department’s dwindling resources to improve the community's overall health. According to Dr. Daniel Nafziger, a former county health official interviewed for the Goshen News article, the county’s hospitals are on the verge of being overwhelmed due to the influx of COVID-19 patients. He compared the county’s situation to that of Idaho (which recently implemented a policy of rationing care), saying that the county’s health system is close to “breaking.” But as this council meeting showed, once this right-wing, paranoid framing of everything COVID-related becomes entrenched in people’s minds it’s next to impossible to talk any sense to them.

This is particularly the case when elected community leaders opt to grandstand rather than do the harder work of explaining issues to an ignorant, uninformed public. Explaining why he would vote against the grant request, council member Adam Bujalski cited a single sentence in the grant application and flatly declared, “That one sentence is my no … I refuse to say that whatever the federal government tells me I have to do I have to do. I will never say that.” All told, over 20 people spoke out against receiving this free money from the federal government, many wearing “Vote NO” stickers and sporting T-shirts with American flags and words like “JESUS” emblazoned on them.

In the end, the vote was not close, and there was no dissent: the county voted unanimously to reject the grant request sought by its own health department.

Of course, since some of this grant money would have improved the health and lives of people of color, there was probably an element of racism underlying this strange disregard of free federal funds. Photos of the meeting show a nearly all-white audience in attendance, and the council itself is made up almost entirely of white men. The county is strongly Republican, and many of the constituents who benefited directly from the grant were ostensibly within its Democratic demographic. Had the express purpose of this grant been something other than shoring up the health of the county’s minority populations, the result may have been different.

But the county’s willingness to forego money their federal taxes had paid for in the face of these ranting, deluded constituents spouting conspiracy nonsense speaks volumes about just how dysfunctional the response to this pandemic has become, particularly in staunchly “red” areas of the country such as this. According to the AP article, Elkhart County, just east of South Bend, “saw severe COVID-19 outbreaks earlier in the year and was under a county health department-issued mask mandate for months until county commissioners refused in May to extend it under a new Republican-backed state law that required elected officials to approve such requirements.” 

That means that these residents’ so-called concerns about federal overreach are entirely meritless. The CDC has no power in Elkhart county to “enforce” the kind of mandates these people were ranting about, nor do they have the ability to “force” the vaccines on anyone or “quarantine” anyone. The provision requiring that local health departments cooperate with the federal government is simply a reiteration of the CDC’s position since the pandemic started. The coordination of COVID-19 infection data with the federal government provides the means for the CDC to determine where the virus is progressing and where it is on the wane so that federal resources can be appropriately allocated.

That’s how the government goes about combating the pandemic to save as many lives as possible. At the risk of stating the obvious, all those efforts are intended to keep people like Gingerich and her ilk alive and out of the county’s few remaining ICUs. They’re not part of some government conspiracy to take away anyone’s “freedoms.” Former Goshen mayor Allan Kauffman, who was interviewed for the Associated Press article, was left shaking his head in dismay after the council’s vote rejecting the grant:

“Never have I seen something like this before, ever. And I never thought I ever would. It’s craziness,” Kauffman said. “What news do these people read, for God’s sakes? ... They want to believe these conspiracy theories.”

The brainwashing and manipulation of entire regions of this country by Fox News and right-wing media have now reached its apotheosis. Local governments are now willing to cut off their noses to spite their faces, rather than support the national effort to contain the virus’ spread. The irony is that many of the attendees at that Elkhart county council meeting will be the same ones who end up in the hospital, loudly demanding their “freedoms,” right up to the point when the ventilator tubes are pushed down their throats.

ytene writes: Danika Fears over at The Daily Beast carries some pretty explosive reporting, describing how Peter Thiel -- of Palantir infamy -- claims in a new biography by Max Chafkin that Mark Zuckerberg agreed to push "State-Sanctioned Conservatism" in return for the Trump administration steering clear of any "heavy-handed regulations." This could well be one of those situations where it doesn't matter if the core claim is true or false -- because either way this is going to get ugly. The claims were made in the book "The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power." Zuckerberg denied the existence of a deal, saying that was "pretty ridiculous."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As the fight to end Texas’ new restrictive abortion ban continues, a Texas doctor revealed Saturday that he violated the law by performing an abortion days after the law went into effect. The San Antonio doctor, identified as Dr. Alan Braid, shared his story in an op-ed published in The Washington Post titled “Why I violated Texas’s extreme abortion ban." In it, he revealed that he’d given an abortion to a woman in her first trimester on Sept. 6. Texas’ restrictive Senate Bill 8, which went into effect Sept. 1, bans abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, before most people even know they’re pregnant.

Braid noted he purposely conducted the abortion because he “had a duty of care to this patient” and that the patient had a “fundamental right” to an abortion. “I fully understood that there could be legal consequences — but I wanted to make sure that Texas didn’t get away with its bid to prevent this blatantly unconstitutional law from being tested,” Braid said. “I have daughters, granddaughters, and nieces. I believe abortion is an essential part of health care.”

“I can’t just sit back and watch us return to 1972,” he said. The Supreme Court legalized abortion nationwide in 1973 through the landmark decision of Roe v. Wade. Braid shared that he started his obstetrics and gynecology residency at a San Antonio hospital before then in 1972.

“At the time, abortion was effectively illegal in Texas — unless a psychiatrist certified a woman was suicidal. If the woman had money, we’d refer her to clinics in Colorado, California or New York. The rest were on their own,” Braid said in the op-ed. He continued that the Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling “enabled me to do the job I was trained to do.”  Braid shared that “80 percent of the abortion services we provide” were shut down when Texas’ law passed and while he understood “that by providing an abortion beyond the new legal limit, I am taking a personal risk, but it’s something I believe in strongly.”​​

Under Texas’ new abortion ban, ordinary people can file suit against anyone who helps someone they know to get an abortion, whether that be the clinic itself or those who transported a person to the clinic or doctor, Daily Kos reported.

Instead of leaving enforcement up to government officials like other states, Texas has prohibited officials from enforcing the law and has given the power to anyone, including people outside of the state, to sue those who violate it. As a result, anyone can sue anyone who even helped someone get an abortion after the limit and can claim financial damages of at least $10,000 per defendant. The law makes no exceptions for incest or rape.

Like advocates against the law, Braid also noted that the Texas law disproportionately affects low-income Texas residents and people of color. To emphasize this point, he shared a conversation he had with a woman who was seeking an abortion in his clinic. After advising her to go to another state, she told him that even if he got her a private jet to travel, she would not be able to travel. “Who’s going to take care of my kids?” she asked him. “What about my job? I can’t miss work.”

Braid connected this with the memories of treating patients who underwent unsafe abortions in 1972. He said he saw three teenagers die as a result of illegal abortions that year, including one who died of massive organ failure caused by a septic infection.

After Braid’s op-ed went viral, multiple organizations for abortion rights spoke up in support of his courage to stand up against the unconstitutional law, despite knowing the consequences.

“We stand ready to defend him against the vigilante lawsuits that S.B. 8 threatens to unleash against those providing or supporting access to constitutionally protected abortion care,” said Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights. “For more than two weeks this unconscionable law has been in effect, harming numerous Texans, and falling hardest on those struggling to make ends meet and people of color, who already face barriers to health care.”

Braid’s op-ed is the latest pushback against the Texas law, the most restrictive abortion law in the country.  While it is not uncommon for abortion providers to experience harassment and violence, researchers have noticed a spike since 2019, according to the National Abortion Federation. Last year, the FBI found that this is due to a "recent rise in state legislative activities related to abortion services and access."

A hearing to have enforcement of the law is scheduled for Oct. 1 after the U.S. Justice Department sued Texas this month, arguing that the law violates the Constitution and filing a motion asking a federal judge to temporarily block it last week, NBC News reported. 

Policies that ban or limit abortion do not decrease the number of abortions, as some GOP officials believe. Instead, they restrict a woman’s right to her bodily autonomy and increase the number of unsafe abortions and maternal health problems that occur.

Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Horrific images and video continue to surface as dozens of lawmakers call on the Biden administration to immediately halt mass deportations to Haiti. According to Daily Kos, the Biden administration’s sudden escalation in deportation flights to Haiti is in response to up to 10,000 asylum-seekers and other migrants, many of them Haitian, stranded alongside a Mexican border town.  In the past few months alone, Haiti has endured a horrific 7.2 earthquake and the assassination of its president, resulting in an increase in asylum-seekers and refugees.

As these Haitian refugees look to the U.S. for safety, they are met with all kinds of abuse, including border agents using whips against them. Images of families, including those with toddlers, are being shared in which Border Patrol agents on horseback are not only screaming at them but chasing them with violence in Del Rio, Texas.

“This is why your country’s shit, because you use your women for this,” one officer on horseback can be heard shouting at a group of Haitian women who were crossing the Rio Grande with bags of food, according to a video shared by Al Jazeera.  

Border Patrol agents are attacking Haitian migrants wading across the Rio Grande River to shore in Texas—where thousands of migrants have assembled under Del Rio International Bridge in a makeshift camp.

According to The Washington Post, photos captured by photographer Paul Ratje, now available through Getty, Border Patrol agents with evident anger on their faces mounted on horseback are grabbing Haitian migrants by their shirts. Many of the images depict migrants with food in their hands.

“They had gotten a lot of people to start leaving the banks, but then people just kept coming across the river,” Ratje said, according to the Post. “There was a continuous flow and [the agents] were like, ‘No, you can’t come in, go back to Mexico.’ But people were like: ‘But my family’s over there.’” He said that agents used the horses to block migrants from entering until multiple people tried to pass the horses at once. “That’s when one of the agents grabbed a guy and kind of swung him around,” Ratje said.

Martha Pskowski of the El Paso Times also described her view of the interactions—which evoked horrific historical comparisons to white enslavers hunting down enslaved Blacks on social media. While it is unclear what the agents had in their hands, both Ratje and Pskowski described the items as whips.

Others noted that, given how the agents are generally outfitted, it may have been a riding crop or the horse’s reins since using an actual whip would most likely not be authorized. 

“As the Haitians tried to climb onto the U.S. side of the river Sunday afternoon, the agent shouted: ‘Let’s go! Get out now! Back to Mexico!’ ” Pskoswki said. “The agent swung his whip menacingly, charging his horse toward the men in the river who were trying to return to an encampment under the international bridge in Del Rio after buying food and water in Ciudad Acuña, Mexico.”

“One migrant fell as he tried to dodge; others shielded their heads with their hands,”  Pskoswki added.

Captions provided by Getty Images claimed the Border Patrol agents were rounding up the Haitian migrants in advance of the U.S. government’s planned mass expulsion to return them to Haiti.

According to the Post, mass expulsions began on Sunday, and at least one group of Haitian migrants removed from Del Rio were not told they were returning to Haiti.

“They did not even tell us what they were doing,” a woman told the Post in tears, noting that she felt like she had been “kidnapped.”

Many families were allegedly told they were being transferred to another detention center in Florida.

 “They said our names, and they said they are bringing us somewhere else. We did not know we were going back to Haiti. Nobody told us we were going back to Haiti. We need to go back to Chile, but now we have no money left and no home. What will become of my children?”

When asked about the difference in treating Afghan refugees while deporting Haitians, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas defended the treatment of the Haitians in an interview with CNN.

“Those two processes are quite different. We are bringing in Afghan nationals by air after they have been screened and vetted. That is a safe, orderly, and humane process,” Mayorkas said. “That is quite different than illegal entry in between ports of entry in a time of pandemic when we have been quite clear, explicit, for months now that that is not the way to reach the United States,” he continued. “And it will not succeed.”

As always, this proves why today is a great day to abolish ICE and end CBP’s cruel vein.

Everyone is acting like there will be some terrible political price to pay for raising it. There won't.

The average American's workweek has gotten 10% longer during the pandemic, according to a new Microsoft study published in Nature Human Behaviour. From a report: These longer hours are a key part of the pandemic-induced crisis of burnout at U.S. firms -- and workers are quitting in droves. Microsoft calculated the length of the workday based on the time between Teams users' first email, message or work call and their last. So the longer workweeks don't necessarily mean we're working more, the study says. People may be spending more time logged on because they are distracted with other obligations while working from home and so are less productive. This contributes to burnout because the lines between work life and home life are increasingly blurred, experts say. Further reading: Study of 61,000 Microsoft Employees Finds Remote Work Threatened Productivity and Innovation.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
Right before you die we're also going to steal from you to feed the hungry.

Today's News:

Just 70 hours to buy!

Apple today released iOS 15 and iPadOS 15, the newest operating system updates designed for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. From a report: As with all of Apple's software updates, iOS and iPadOS 15 can be downloaded at no cost. iOS 15 is available on the iPhone 6s and later while iPadOS 15 is available on the iPad Air 2 and later. The new software can be downloaded on eligible devices over-the-air by going to Settings - General - Software Update. It may take a few minutes for the updates to propagate to all users due to high demand. A new Focus mode cuts down on distractions by limiting what's accessible and who can contact you, and notifications can now be grouped up in daily summaries. There's an option for a new Safari design that moves the tab bar to the bottom of the interface, and Tab Groups keep all of your tabs organized. Maps has been overhauled with even more detail, a 3D view in major cities, a globe view, improved transit, a close-up driving view when navigating complicated routes, and AR walking directions. Across the operating system, there's a new Live Text feature that detects text in any image and lets you copy, paste, and translate it, plus there's a system-wide translation feature. In Photos, plants, pets, landmarks, and more can be identified, and there's a system-wide translation feature that goes well with Live Text. iCloud+ with iCloud Private Relay protects your IP address and obscures your location to prevent websites from tracking you, and a Hide My Email feature lets you create temporary email addresses. You can even use your personal domain with iCloud in iOS 15. Further reading: 19 Things You Can Do in iOS 15 That You Couldn't Do Before.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

You know how conservatives claim to be “the party of personal responsibility”? Obviously, it’s a crock. But at the very least, it’s fun to see the extremes they go to in refusing responsibility for their own actions. 

As you are likely aware, conservatives are killing themselves off in frightening numbers by refusing to vaccinate and take the COVID vaccine seriously. I have a whole series on the topic. And it’s not just anecdotal. The evidence is clear. 

In short, the redder the county, the higher the death toll. At this point, it’s intuitive and common sense—the people who refuse to accept the pandemic reality are the same people doing the dying. Now imagine places like Florida, suffering around 2,500 dead per week, and how that might impact the state’s historically tight elections? The official margin in the 2000 presidential election was 537 votes, statewide. In the 2018 governor’s race, Gov. Ron DeSantis, merchant of death, won by just 32,463 votes. In that same year’s Senate race, Sen. Rick Scott won by just 10,033. 

Republicans are literally murdering their margin of victory. 

So if you’re a conservative and maybe don’t want your people to extinguish themselves—not because it’s the human thing to do, but because it might affect you electorally—what do you do? Well, you can’t look in the mirror or to Donald Trump, Fox News, OANN, Newsmax, the entire AM talk radio sphere, and a vast online network of misinformation and disinformation sites peddling the anti-vaxx gospel. Nah, that would be too much like “taking personal responsibility.” 

It’s much easier to blame the liberals. 

Breitbart’s John Nolte has just given us what might be peak conservative blame shifting. 

In a country where elections are decided on razor-thin margins, does it not benefit one side if their opponents simply drop dead?  

If I wanted to use reverse psychology to convince people not to get a life-saving vaccination, I would do exactly what [Howard] Stern and the left are doing… I would bully and taunt and mock and ridicule you for not getting vaccinated, knowing the human response would be, Hey, fuck you, I’m never getting vaccinated!  

And why is that a perfectly human response? Because no one ever wants to feel like they are being bullied or ridiculed or mocked or pushed into doing anything.

In another piece, he writes this:

The organized left is deliberately putting unvaccinated Trump supporters in an impossible position where they can either NOT get a life-saving vaccine or CAN feel like cucks caving to the ugliest, smuggest bullies in the world.

In other words, I sincerely believe the organized left is doing everything in its power to convince Trump supporters NOT to get the life-saving Trump vaccine. I’m sorry, but people willing to drone strike seven children and who are eager to unleash terrorists like Antifa and Black Lives Matter into our cities are sociopaths. The left’s morality is guided only by that which furthers their fascist agenda, and so using reverse psychology to trick Trump supporters NOT to get a life-saving vaccine is, to them, a moral good. The more of us who die, the better.

I’ll give Nolte credit for one thing: He is a rare conservative voice that gets the dangers posed by COVID and is trying to get his tribe to take it seriously, and stop dying.

But he’s a conservative, an “editor-at-large” at Breitbart, which has conditioned its readers to distrust pretty much anything that doesn’t come out of Donald Trump’s mouth. These are people that have decided that everything that doesn’t conform to some predetermined world view is “liberal” or untrustworthy. So Nolte can’t share the latest CDC data with them, or talk about peer-reviewed studies. He knows Breitbart readers will reject that information outright and maybe even brand him the enemy, part of their “deep state” conspiracy. 

There is no reason or logic that will appeal to that crowd. They respond to one thing: raw, ugly, emotion. And thus, suicide by COVID isn’t the fault of a vast conservative movement and a former president that created the conditions for vaccine skepticism to rise. Instead, it’s the fault of those dastardly liberals. 

Why, liberals know that conservatives will always do the opposite of what they say! If a liberal said, “please conservative friend, get chemotherapy to try and beat this cancer,” the conservative would immediately sniff out the trickery! “Aha! Nice try, liberal fiend! I will not get chemotherapy!” 

So while liberals desperately clamored to get the life-saving jab (because being in the hospital on life support for an avoidable disease is stupid, and dying even more so), conservatives saw all of that—and smelled a rat. 

Why, those liberals want to drone strike children! As if we weren’t the ones arguing against invading Afghanistan (and every other place) in the first place. Liberals are unleashing antifa and Black people into cities! As if the only terrorists we really need to deal with are those who invaded the Capitol on Jan. 6. But perhaps we can laugh that off as Nolte’s pathetic efforts to shore up his crazy conservative bona fides. “Guys, I want you to take a vaccine, but I’m still one of you, I promise!” But his core argument betrays so much of what modern conservatism is all about: 

The organized left is deliberately putting unvaccinated Trump supporters in an impossible position where they can either NOT get a life-saving vaccine or CAN feel like cucks caving to the ugliest, smuggest bullies in the world.

Read that carefully. Because his argument is explicitly that conservatives don’t want to feel something. He admits this isn’t about logic or even a human’s basic instinct for survival. The core of the conservative movement is based on how it feels.

It doesn’t want to feel like a “cuck.” 

It doesn’t want to feel like it’s “caving” to liberals. 

Why, they’d rather be owning the libs! Rolling coal around Priuses and cyclists. Wearing MAGA hats. Serving Papa John’s pizza at weddings. Everything Marjorie Taylor-Green does. The antics of James O’Keefe. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy reading Green Eggs and Ham. That’s the stuff that gets them excited, not a treatise on economics from the Heritage Foundation. In a piece aptly titled “Hatred of liberals is all that’s left of conservatism,” Paul Waldman wrote, “the one thing that unites the right and drives the GOP is hatred of liberals. That hatred has consumed every policy goal, every ideological principle and even every ounce of commitment to country.”

Hate is a feeling. It’s literally all they have left. 

So let’s examine this Nolte passage again:

If I wanted to use reverse psychology to convince people not to get a life-saving vaccination, I would do exactly what [Howard] Stern and the left are doing… I would bully and taunt and mock and ridicule you for not getting vaccinated, knowing the human response would be, Hey, fuck you, I’m never getting vaccinated!  

And why is that a perfectly human response? Because no one ever wants to feel like they are being bullied or ridiculed or mocked or pushed into doing anything.

Vaccines came out early this year. No one was bullying or taunting or ridiculing anyone. We were all too busy refreshing vaccination site websites, desperate to score our jab appointments. The science was in, the results were available, and millions were getting vaccinated on a daily basis if anyone wanted to take a “wait and see” attitude before taking their own plunge. 

Yet when the dust settled, vaccination rates trailed off, and we got to look at who was left, it turns out it was conservatives. And so everyone asked them nicely. Heck, even Donald F’n Trump asked them. And they booed him. And now we have our third wave, and it’s conservatives doing the dying, and we’re like, “Can you please freakin’ vaccinate?” And we’re asking them to vaccinate because we’re not monsters, but also because the longer this virus circulates, the more chances it has to mutate and negate our own vaccines. There is real liberal self-interest in getting everyone (conservatives included!) to vaccinate, if you want to truly believe that liberals are monsters who want conservatives dead. 

But no, it’s the liberals fault because Howard Stern said something. That’s the only reason. 

Conservatives have no agency. They have no ability to think for themselves. They are driven by “feelings” of being mocked or ridiculed. They are so weak that they would rather die than listen to sage medical advice. 

Nolte may not mean to make such a ridiculous argument,and make such a stark admission about his own people, but that’s the end result. 

Conservatives are so weak that they would rather die than to feel like a liberal “cucked” them. 

I didn’t realize we had that massive power, to exterminate an entire political movement by simply asking them to not die. 

In any case, among his own crowd, Nolte’s arguments are falling on deaf ears. The comments to those stories are riddled by the same idiocy we’ve seen in the Anti-vaxx Chronicles. Because, it turns out, it’s not liberals who have willfully conned conservatives into killing themselves, but the very kind of “conservative” bullshit that tries to argue that liberals are “willing to drone strike seven children.”

Once you sever your readers’ link to reality, it gets a lot harder to bring them back. 

Forget about abstract numbers; the time to choose your real priorities has come.

"A CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology that has shown promise in clearing HIV from mice is headed into human testing," reports Fierce Biotech: We don't like to throw the word "cure" around here. But Excision BioTherapeutics thinks the therapy could replace standard-of-care retroviral therapy, which keeps HIV from replicating but does not remove it from the body. That means patients stay on the treatment, which can cause serious side effects and affect quality of life. Now with the start of human testing, the real path to see if this new and lauded tech can accomplish this really begins. HIV integrates its genetic material into the genome of a host cell, meaning available therapies just can't remove it. A team of scientists at Temple University and the University of Nebraska Medical Center managed to remove the virus completely from mice during preclinical testing using a combination of CRISPR and antiretroviral therapy. They also found no adverse events that could be linked to the therapy in the study, published back in 2019... EBT-101 has since been tested in nonhuman primates, which showed it reached every tissue in the body where HIV reservoirs reside. Excision licensed the therapy from the universities with a goal of moving it into clinical trials. Now, the FDA is on board. The biotech plans to initiate a phase 1/2 clinical trial later this year, according to the statement. The technology used by Excision was licensed from the lab of famed CRISPR pioneer Jennifer Doudna. The company is also working on similar treatments for other viruses, including herpes and hepatitis B.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This week the Wall Street Journal reported that a 2018 algorithm change at Facebook "rewarded outrage," according to Facebook's own internal memos. But the Journal says the memos showed "that CEO Mark Zuckerberg resisted proposed fixes," and that the memos "offer an unparalleled look at how much Facebook knows about the flaws in its platform and how it often lacks the will or the ability to address them." In the fall of 2018, Jonah Peretti, chief executive of online publisher BuzzFeed, emailed a top official at Facebook Inc. The most divisive content that publishers produced was going viral on the platform, he said, creating an incentive to produce more of it... Mr. Peretti blamed a major overhaul Facebook had given to its News Feed algorithm earlier that year to boost "meaningful social interactions," or MSI, between friends and family, according to internal Facebook documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal that quote the email... Facebook's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, said the aim of the algorithm change was to strengthen bonds between users and to improve their well-being. Facebook would encourage people to interact more with friends and family and spend less time passively consuming professionally produced content, which research suggested was harmful to their mental health. Within the company, though, staffers warned the change was having the opposite effect, the documents show. It was making Facebook's platform an angrier place. Company researchers discovered that publishers and political parties were reorienting their posts toward outrage and sensationalism. That tactic produced high levels of comments and reactions that translated into success on Facebook. "Our approach has had unhealthy side effects on important slices of public content, such as politics and news," wrote a team of data scientists, flagging Mr. Peretti's complaints, in a memo reviewed by the Journal... They concluded that the new algorithm's heavy weighting of reshared material in its News Feed made the angry voices louder. "Misinformation, toxicity, and violent content are inordinately prevalent among reshares," researchers noted in internal memos. Some political parties in Europe told Facebook the algorithm had made them shift their policy positions so they resonated more on the platform, according to the documents. "Many parties, including those that have shifted to the negative, worry about the long term effects on democracy," read one internal Facebook report, which didn't name specific parties... Mr. Zuckerberg resisted some of the proposed fixes, the documents show, because he was worried they might hurt the company's other objective — making users engage more with Facebook.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

By Cezary Jan Strusiewicz Published: September 18th, 2021

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
If you think this is bad you should see the library of literary references. Also the well-populated shelf about sasquatch and aliens.

Today's News:

College presidents fighting Covid-19 outbreaks in many Republican-controlled states are pushing to enact campus vaccine mandates but are running into a problem: lawmaker resistance.

School leaders in states like Florida, Arizona, Texas and Tennessee hoped to bring life back to their dorms and lecture halls this fall as the pandemic appeared to wane earlier this year and vaccinations were on the rise. Instead, they’re in the throes of combating the highly contagious Delta variant and vaccine resistance, scrambling their defenses and pleading with GOP lawmakers who left them to fight the disease without strong safety protocols.

"They are handcuffing these institutions in their ability to mitigate Covid ... It's just bad health policy," said Anita Barkin, co-chair of the American College Health Association’s Covid-19 task force. "I'm concerned we're on a very bad trajectory with what's happening here."

Following advice from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, college presidents have been pushing students and staff to wear masks and enticed students with prizes if they get inoculated against Covid-19. But unlike schools in many blue states, several institutions in conservative regions lack the stick that might nudge holdouts, which in some cases represent 40 percent or more of the student body. Some university leaders are publicly battling mask and vaccine bans; others are taking a quieter approach and speaking with government officials who have significant sway over the budgets and operations of public universities. None of the leaders have successfully moved the needle for rescinding standing laws.

In Tennessee, which is leading the nation in new Covid-19 cases per capita, the University of Memphis requested Republican Gov. Bill Lee use a workaround to the standing vaccine mandate ban: add the vaccine to the list of other required vaccines for state university students.

"I hope you will give serious consideration to this request, as I firmly believe it an essential step in protecting the safety and well-being of all those on college and university campuses in Tennessee," University of Memphis President M. David Rudd wrote in an August letter to the governor. "It has never been more important for us to follow the medical advice from credible authorities we have trusted for decades."

The governor's office did not respond to the university's request.

In Arizona, where under 60 percent of people have gotten one dose of the vaccine, Republican Gov. Doug Ducey and other GOP lawmakers have stood firm in banning vaccine mandates — even after colleges requested mandating shots and testing requirements for the unvaccinated.

"We are certainly not anti-vaccine," a spokesperson for Ducey's office said in an interview. "We are anti-mandate."

Arizona State University, which has not pursued a vaccine mandate, announced in June that unvaccinated students would have to wear masks where social distancing isn't possible and be tested weekly, but the governor and state lawmakers blocked those policies. Now, to comply with the law, all students must follow the masking rules that were once just for unvaccinated students. The testing requirement for unvaccinated students was dropped.

The University of Arizona publicly said it would enact a vaccine mandate if not against state law. But lawmakers haven't budged.

"There are many different vaccines that have saved needless suffering and death, and they're safe and proven," said Robert Robbins, the University of Arizona's president and previous chair of the Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery at Stanford University School of Medicine, in an interview. "I'm obviously an advocate for vaccinating everyone."

Some universities have tried to implement stricter Covid-19 precautions but quickly backed down once they realized the political consequences.

"We took some bullets, politically," said an official from one university that tried to implement a mandate in a Republican state. "It was like we were poking the governor and state legislature in the eye."

But schools that require vaccines have a distinct advantage over those that don't, Barkin said.

"Ultimately, there is a business cost to be paid here," she said. "The human health side of it, of course, is the most important to us in university public health, but there is an economic risk as well."

University officials worry that college enrollment, and tuition dollars, are at risk the longer the pandemic continues.

Robbins, from the University of Arizona, emphasized that Arizona's governor has been a great partner through the pandemic, but said politics and disinformation sometimes get in the way of good public health policy.

"Our hands are so tied," one University of Arizona spokesperson told POLITICO.

The University of Arizona still communicates with the state government about Covid-19 every day, but Robbins said he doesn't anticipate the Covid vaccines being required alongside measles, mumps and rubella vaccines anytime soon.

Some colleges want the option of implementing a vaccine or mask mandate after seeing counterparts in other states report a bump in vaccination once they started to punish the unvaccinated. In Pennsylvania, the state system of higher education has argued that it cannot mandate vaccines, even as university officials say they want them. But neighboring states Maryland and New York have allowed state colleges and universities to have vaccine and mask mandates since the spring. Nearby Ohio — with a Republican trifecta controlling the state government — allowed mandates once the Pfizer vaccine was fully approved by the FDA.

"We would seriously consider a change in policy if the legal situation changed," said Lynn Schoenberg, dean of students at Stetson University in Florida, where mask and vaccine mandates in schools and colleges are banned.

Before the fall semester began, Stetson used the strongest language it could legally muster on its website, saying the university "expects" students and faculty to get vaccinated.

Stetson University and the University of Arizona have not yet had major outbreaks that overwhelm their mitigation strategies, and other schools in states with vaccine mandate bans are also finding some success containing the spread.

Still, university leaders are concerned about how the virus will affect campuses in the coming months.

Young people in the ICU for Covid-19 often say they wish they had gotten the vaccine, Robbins said. "I don't want that to happen to anybody. So we'll continue to do everything we can to keep the university open, make it as safe as we possibly can," he said.

How keeping the filibuster makes a future stolen presidential election more likely.

America’s broken hiring system, explained.

Patrick Healy says he did everything right in his job search. After being laid off as a designer early on in the pandemic, Healy, 36, tried his hand at a couple of entrepreneurial ventures before looking for a new full-time position at the start of 2021. He estimates he applied for hundreds of positions, relying on nearly a dozen jobs boards, researching potential employers, and writing personalized cover letters to accompany his résumé.

For the most part, he heard nothing back, regardless of how qualified he was.

“You get no feedback. I was still trying to experiment with what I was doing, but I just had no idea what was happening, why I wasn’t moving forward,” Healy said. “That was both stressful financially and heartbreaking psychologically.”

It took nearly six months for Healy, who has a decade of experience in industrial design, to find a new job. Meanwhile, headlines touted a record number of job openings, and many employers said they were doing everything in their power to entice potential employees.

For Healy and many others, the situation just doesn’t make sense — there’s an incongruity between what they are hearing about jobs and what is actually happening.

For some of the jobs available, people don’t have the right skills, or at least the skills employers say they’re looking for. Other jobs are undesirable — they offer bad pay or an unpredictable schedule, or just don’t feel worth it to unemployed workers, many of whom are rethinking their priorities. In some cases, there are a host of perfectly acceptable candidates and jobs out there, but for a multitude of reasons, they’re just not being matched.

There are also workers who are hesitant to go back — they’re nervous about Covid-19 or they have care responsibilities or something else is holding them back.

The result is a disconnected environment that doesn’t add up, though it feels like it should. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says there are 8.4 million potential workers who are unemployed, but it also says there are a record 10.9 million jobs open. The rate at which unemployed people are getting jobs is lower than it was pre-pandemic, and it’s taking longer to hire people. Meanwhile, job seekers say employers are unresponsive.

There’s no single party to blame here. Corporate hiring practices can be convoluted and too reliant on machines, and many applicants aren’t being realistic or strategic enough in their work search efforts. For employers, job seekers, and the American economy in general, it’s worth figuring out what’s going on and addressing it. Because although these trends have been exacerbated by the pandemic, many of them pre-date it, and they’re not going away.

The difficult, undesirable job market

Essentially anywhere you go in the United States right now, you’re going to encounter “help wanted” signs. But just because a bar or restaurant or gas station wants a worker doesn’t mean a worker wants to work for them. The millions of jobs available aren’t necessarily millions of jobs people want.

“A lot of what people are seeing are low-paying jobs with unpredictable or not-worker-friendly scheduling practices, that don’t come with benefits, don’t come with long-term stability,” Shelly Steward, director of the Future of Work Initiative at the Aspen Institute, told Recode. “And those are not the types of jobs that any worker is eager to take on.”

A survey of workers actively searching for a job on FlexJobs, a jobs website that focuses on remote and flexible work, found that about half of job seekers said they were not finding the right jobs to apply for. Some 46 percent of respondents said they were only finding jobs that are low-paying, while 41 percent said there weren’t enough openings in their preferred profession.

Arlethia Washington, who worked as a legal secretary in New York for 40 years, took an exit package from her job early in the pandemic and, given her experience, assumed she’d be able to easily find a new position after things reopened. Instead, she found herself in a maze: It was hard to tell if recruiters who reached out about jobs were serious. For a lot of positions, she just didn’t hear back, or somewhere in the process, she’d be screened out.

Washington, 68, chalks it up to a combination of age discrimination and not having a college degree, which many positions were requiring even when it didn’t seem necessary. When she did get replies, jobs would offer her much less than what she was paid before, sometimes even less than what was advertised. Or, they would offer to pay her requested hourly rate — but only for part-time work. “It was a grand opportunity to push the secretarial opportunities and incomes back,” she said.

Tim Brackney, president and COO of management consulting firm RGP, refers to the current situation as the “great mismatch.” That mismatch refers to a number of things, including desires, experience, and skills. And part of the reason is that the skills necessary for a given job are changing faster than ever, as companies more frequently adopt new software.

“Twenty years ago, if I had 10 years experience as a warehouse manager, the likelihood that my skills would be pretty relevant and it wouldn’t take me that long to get up to speed was pretty good,” Joseph Fuller, a management professor at Harvard Business School and co-author of a recent paper on the disconnect between employers and employees, said. “The shelf life of people’s skills for a lot of decent-paying jobs has been shortening.”

That’s especially the case if someone gets laid off or is otherwise out of the workforce for any period of time — say, during a pandemic. The pricing tool or order entry software necessary for logistics workers to perform their jobs, for example, will likely be different one year to the next.

The pandemic has also made the specter of in-person work less attractive — if not dangerous — so many people are now looking for jobs where they can work from home. The vast majority of workers, regardless of industry, say they want to work from home at least some of the time. While the number of remote jobs has certainly risen, they still only represent 16 percent of job listings on LinkedIn, though they receive two and a half times as many applications as non-remote work.

The problem, however, may not only be on the hiring side. The pandemic has made people rethink their lives and their work, and some individual job seekers may be applying for jobs they want but aren’t suitable for. About half of the FlexJobs respondents searched for jobs outside their current field.

“A lot of reasons that job searches fail is people want to go from unemployment to the next job they would have had if they kept their old job,” Fuller said. “You know, ‘I’m going to not only get a new position, but I’m going to get promoted to boot.’”

Hiring lacks a human touch — sometimes literally

As much as employers say they’re looking hard for employees, they’re often not looking in the right places or in the right ways. HR departments are leaning too heavily on technology to weed out candidates, or they’re just not being creative enough in terms of how they consider applications and what types of people could be the right fit.

Hiring software and the proliferation of platforms like Indeed, LinkedIn, and ZipRecruiter have made it super easy for employers to list countless positions and for jobseekers to send in countless résumés. The problem is, they’ve also made it super easy for those résumés to never be seen. Artificial intelligence-powered software scans résumés for certain keywords and criteria. If it can’t find them, the software just filters those people out.

“We think that we made it easier 20-something years ago when Monster started posting jobs. It makes it easier for the employer, it doesn’t make it easier for the job seeker,” said J.T. O’Donnell, the founder and CEO of career coaching platform Work It Daily, who runs a popular TikTok account with work advice. “You’re not getting rejected, you’re just never getting past the technology.”

Sometimes, what the software is scanning for doesn’t even make sense — as the Wall Street Journal recently noted, it will look for registered nurses who also know computer programming when really they just need data entry.

“Applicants think they’re talking to another human being when they write a description of their experiences,” Fuller said. “If they start explaining something at length or describe it the way they imagined it that doesn’t fit with what the system is trawling for, you have a possibility for a disconnect, literally because of word choice.”

Making things worse, companies have the tendency to add to job descriptions rather than subtract from them, meaning job requirements have ballooned beyond people’s ability to actually meet them.

The increasingly AI-focused application process makes it even harder for applicants to be assessed by a human being. According to Glassdoor, the average number of applications for a job at a publicly traded company is about 250; the average number of people interviewed is five.

There’s a lack of imagination on the employer side. They assume that what people are doing is what they are qualified for, even if that current job is unsuitable for them. Say a person is working part time as a shift manager but wants to be a full-time sales manager — doing the first job might harm their chances of getting that other job.

“What they’re doing is building a résumé that says to the next hirer, ‘This person is a shift manager, that’s what they do. We’re looking for a sales manager, why would we hire them?’” Fuller said.

This system is also not good at understanding what a person might have the potential to do. Fuller gave the example of a former Army Corps of Engineers employee applying for a job as a cable technician, which increasingly requires workers to not only hook up people’s cable but also to upsell them on cable packages. While the engineer would be perfectly capable of doing the technical part of the job, if she didn’t have sales experience, she might be overlooked, even if she’d actually make a good saleswoman as well.

Part of the issue is a lack in the amount of on-the-job training that employers offer. Steward blames declines in unions that would fight for such perks and an ongoing shift of risks and responsibilities — including career development — from employers to employees.

“People are expected to come onto the job and have the experience, have the skills, have everything, and few people do,” Steward, from the Aspen Institute, said.

The endless quest to make hiring efficient has rendered it inefficient. Candidates who are great fits for 90 percent of the job are screened out because they’re not perfect for the other 10 percent. Recruiters are so inundated with résumés flowing in online that they only look at the first few, hiring the people they can get the fastest instead of the people who are the best fit.

Meanwhile, for candidates, the entire process is a black box. Healy, the designer, ended up getting two job offers in less than a week after not hearing anything for months. He still has no idea why.

As for Washington, the legal secretary, she says she finally “released herself” from her job search on LinkedIn after months of trying. She decided to switch gears and pursue a different line of work. In the spring of this year, she moved to Florida, where her son lives, and after tweaking her résumé, she got a job working in customer service for a pharmacy. The pay is much less than what she’s used to — around $17.50 an hour — but she’s able to work from home, and her cost of living is lower now, too.

“I turned the page,” she said.

The White House has a new headache as it struggles to get its multitrillion-dollar party-line spending bill passed: Sen. Kyrsten Sinema's objections to drug pricing reforms that are already struggling to make it through the House.

The Arizona Democrat is opposed to the current prescription drug pricing proposals in both the House and Senate bills, two sources familiar with her thinking said. They added that, at this point, she also doesn’t support a pared-back alternative being pitched by House Democratic centrists that would limit the drugs subject to Medicare negotiation.

Sinema met with President Joe Biden on Sept. 15 to discuss the social spending package, in which party leaders hope to include the Medicare prescription drug pricing proposal. Sinema has made her resistance to the current House prescription drug negotiation proposal clear to the White House, according to one of the sources, but it’s unclear if she’s completely immovable.

Both she and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), who met with the president the same day, delivered what one source described as a sobering message for the White House about the fate of the reconciliation bill and its $3.5 trillion price tag, which they both say is too high. The social spending plan is designed to pass without GOP votes through budget reconciliation, meaning that Biden will need to win all 50 Senate Democratic votes to secure its passage.

“As she committed, Kyrsten is working directly in good faith with her colleagues and President Biden on the proposed budget reconciliation package,” said John LaBombard, a Sinema spokesperson, who declined to discuss the prescription drug measure. “Given the size and scope of the proposal, while those discussions are ongoing we are not offering detailed comment on any one proposed piece of the package.”

Sinema’s concerns about the prescription drug component combined with Manchin’s more publicly stated opposition to the current reconciliation bill cast significant doubt on Biden’s ability to get the votes to pass his signature domestic initiative.

Biden and Manchin left their Wednesday meeting in a stalemate, according to two sources briefed on the conversation. The West Virginia Democrat said he couldn’t support a $3.5 trillion package, a detail first reported by Axios. But the disagreements between the two went beyond that. When discussing the size of the bill, Biden cited the need to win progressive votes as well, implying that any significant modifications could cost him support on the left.

Manchin also pressed Biden about moving the Senate-passed bipartisan infrastructure bill first as they figured out an agreement on the reconciliation package, according to the two sources. Biden said it was a no-go, telling Manchin the infrastructure bill couldn’t advance further without some commitment from Manchin to move forward on reconciliation. Manchin didn’t offer that commitment, the two sources said, describing the back-and-forth as respectful but direct.

Sam Runyon, a spokesperson for Manchin said, “Senator Manchin does not disclose the details of his private meetings.”

Though both Manchin and Sinema have made clear, publicly and privately, that they are willing to negotiate on the party-line social spending proposal, their opposition to the current version has irritated fellow Democrats who see a unique opportunity to muscle through major domestic legislation. The reconciliation bill would boost child care, paid family leave and expand Medicare while spending potentially historic sums to combat climate change.

“The last two miles of the marathon are always the toughest, but there remains strong conviction and unity to finish this thing and do something historic,” said John Podesta, former counselor to President Barack Obama and one of the most prominent advocates for aggressive climate action through the reconciliation bill. “I think the real question is how big, not whether.”

The drug price negotiation changes that Sinema is coming out against are a major component of the bill’s envisioned financing. Democrats are counting on them to raise as much as $700 billion over 10 years to pay for the party-line bill’s ambitious programs. Axing it could imperil the health care reform components in the social spending plan, such as a proposal from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and supported by Biden, that would expand Medicare coverage to hearing, dental and vision.

The prescription-drug pricing measure is also one of the biggest elements championed by the White House. In speeches this summer, Biden highlighted the proposal as popular across the electorate.

“The President, his Cabinet, and White House senior staff are continuously engaged in discussions with a wide spectrum of members about the Build Back Better agenda,” said Andrew Bates, a White House spokesperson. “And good progress is being made. We urgently need to cut taxes for working families and reduce the cost of prescription drugs, education, health care, child care, and care for older Americans; and pay for it by restoring fairness to our tax code.”

Sinema ranks as one of Congress’ leading recipients of pharmaceutical industry donations, according to an analysis by Kaiser Health News. The Arizona Senator is not the only Democrat expressing concerns with the party’s approach to drug negotiation. A trio of centrist House lawmakers voted against the measure in the Energy and Commerce Committee this week and a fourth voted against it in the Ways and Means Committee.

Rep. Kathleen Rice (D-N.Y.) was one of those centrists. In a letter sent to the Alliance for Retired Americans advocacy group two days after the vote, the congresswoman said she supported “the goals” of the Democratic bill to allow Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices. Unlike her past votes in favor of it, however, Rice wrote, her committee vote was not on a “clean, stand-alone bill.”

“Instead, the H.R. 3 drug pricing language was being used as a tool to offset the cost of a $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill,” Rice wrote in the letter, obtained by POLITICO. “That bill has no chance to become a law, as Democrats in the Senate have stated that a bill with such a price tag will not have the votes to pass in their chamber.”

Rice’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Democratic leadership is under a tight, self-imposed deadline to resolve these differences. House leaders have promised to hold a vote on the Senate infrastructure bill by Sept. 27, which is designed to happen in tandem with the reconciliation package. But with progressives threatening to withhold their votes if the party-line package remains uncertain, it’s unclear if the infrastructure bill can pass. Centrists in the House and Senate expect the total $3.5 trillion price tag for the package to shrink. They’re also unhappy with the pace set by the White House and Democratic leaders.

“The way we're moving this along so quickly puts the House in a position where individual members of the House really won't be involved in making the choices about what we fund,” said Rep. Scott Peters (D-Calif.), one of the four House Democrats to vote against the prescription drug pricing measure considered in two committees this week. “The bipartisan bill took five and a half months; we're trying to do a bigger bill — a 3 1/2 trillion-dollar bill — in five weeks.”

Peters argued his proposal was better suited to win widespread support. It would limit the number of drugs that Medicare would be able to negotiate over, provide a $50 monthly cap on insulin costs, and generate lower out-of-pocket costs for seniors most in need. But progressives have lambasted the centrists for seeking major changes to a critical pillar of the package, saying it is both less ambitious and threatens all of the other health care reforms.

“There should be some accountability mechanisms here against people who step out of line at this juncture on such a core issue that nets 80 to 90 percent approval in a lot of these districts,” said Faiz Shakir, a political adviser to Sanders. “All three of these candidates should get primary challenges.”

Peters responded that he’ll “focus on the campaign next year. Right now, we’re focused on lowering prescription drug prices.”

Marianne LeVine and Natasha Korecki contributed to this report.

When it comes to Florida making headlines in recent months, it’s more often than not because Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and fellow GOP lackeys in the state are leading residents into disarray because of poor pandemic management. COVID-19 cases and deaths have surged in the state on more than one occasion, and we’ve covered instances of people absolutely losing it over mask requirements. We’ve also seen how huge theme parks like Disney and Universal have reacted to the pandemic, with varying risk levels and responsibility to patrons and workers.

With all of this said, Santiago Alvarez, a landlord who oversees more than 1,000 apartments in South Florida, has people talking about the state for a different reason, as reported by the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. As of August, Alvarez requires his tenants over 18 to be vaccinated against the virus to live on his property. The policy applies to renters who are renewing their leases, as well as any new tenants. The vaccine requirement also extends to his employees. Important context? 80-year-old Alvarez told The Washington Post that twelve of his tenants have already died from the virus, and he has already caught and survived the virus. 

One tenant, 28-year-old Jasmine Irby, complained to the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services to protest Alvarez's new policy, arguing she should be able to renew her lease "without having to disclose my personal health information," The Post reported. Irby, a security guard who does not plan on getting vaccinated, ultimately moved out of her two-bedroom apartment when her lease ended in late August. Irby, who moved in with her brother, told the outlet that “no one wants to live where they are not wanted.” 

Of Alvarez’s 70 employees, he says only two refused to get vaccinated and decided instead to walk away from the job. Alvarez, who owns eight apartment buildings, has said he’s willing to make exemptions for people who have medical and religious barriers to getting the vaccine.

Christina Pushaw, press secretary for DeSantis, argued that this policy violates the state’s ban on requiring “vaccine passports.” Pushaw said business owners—including landlords—can’t require “vaccine passports” as a requirement of entry and that each violation of the law can result in a $5,000 fine. She argued that vaccine passports are “unscientific” and won’t result in a drop in cases. 

Juan C. Zorrilla, an attorney representing Alvarez, told The Post that his client is, technically, not violating the governor’s order because tenants are not “customers or patrons,” as Alvarez isn’t providing a service. His attorney also argues that Alvarez isn’t violating any other county or state laws or ordinances.

It’s well understood that Facebook and other social media sites have transformed millions of ordinary Americans into newly minted internet virologists and microbiologists, furiously digging through memes and videos—most of highly dubious origin—to find any justification for their preexisting, often politically inspired rationales for refusing the COVID-19 vaccines. Now that thousands of employers are imposing strict workplace policies requiring employees to either be vaccinated or submit to regular testing for the virus, one of the more common excuses they see is the so-called religious exemption, which typically involves an attempt to equate the vaccines with aborted fetuses.

Although such moral arbiters as the Vatican, for example, have debunked attempts to associate the vaccines with cells of human fetuses, vaccine refuseniks have seized upon the developmental phase of the current vaccines, which relied in part on the use of fetal cell lines descended from such cells (originally obtained in the 1970s and ‘80s) and regenerated in laboratories over hundreds of cellular generations for continued use in medical and scientific research. As explained by Nebraska Medicine, for example, “[u]sing fetal cell lines to test the effectiveness and safety of medications is common practice, because they provide a consistent and well-documented standard.” In other words, they are often the best way to test and ensure that vaccines are safe and reliable, or, as in the case of the Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca vaccines, to create an adenovirus vector that makes them effective against COVID-19. They don’t become “part” of the actual vaccine itself. As pointed out by Reuters, such fetal cell lines “have been used since the 1960s to develop vaccines such as chickenpox, hepatitis A, shingles and rubella, as well as drugs for diseases like cystic fibrosis, hemophilia, and rheumatoid arthritis.”

Still, for many Americans informed solely by their social media research, the attenuated relationship between vaccines and these derivative cell lines used in their developmental and production phases is beside the point: having heard the magic words “fetal cell,” their thirst for knowledge suddenly dries up, and their resolve to refuse the vaccine hardens into a pseudo-religious conviction, creating a dilemma for their employers who want to maintain a safe workplace. Faced with such tactics among some members of its staff refusing to be vaccinated, one hospital system has decided to simply embrace these vaccine refusers’ arguments by taking them a step further to their logical conclusion, Beth Mole reports for ArsTechnica:

A hospital system in Arkansas is making it a bit more difficult for staff to receive a religious exemption from its COVID-19 vaccine mandate. The hospital is now requiring staff to also swear off extremely common medicines, such as Tylenol, Tums, and even Preparation H, to get the exemption.

The move was prompted when Conway Regional Health System noted an unusual uptick in vaccine exemption requests that cited the use of fetal cell lines in the development and testing of the vaccines.

The list of common over-the-counter medications (as well as commonly prescribed drugs) which were developed, produced, or tested in manners similar to the developmental COVID-19 vaccines, using descendant lines from old fetal cells encompasses just about anything you would commonly turn to for headache, allergy, or indigestion relief:

The list includes Tylenol, Pepto Bismol, aspirin, Tums, Lipitor, Senokot, Motrin, ibuprofen, Maalox, Ex-Lax, Benadryl, Sudafed, albuterol, Preparation H, MMR vaccine, Claritin, Zoloft, Prilosec OTC, and azithromycin.

Under Conway Regional’s procedure, an employee seeking a “religious exemption” must also swear off these medicines, whose historical development, pre- and post-production testing or production processes involved using fetal cell lines in the same manner as that of the COVID-19 vaccines. As Mole reports, if the employee refuses to sign an attestation swearing that they will not consume these common medicines “and any others like them,” they are granted only a temporary exemption from the vaccination policy, presumably to give them enough time to find another job. The attestation itself notes that they will again be asked to either sign it or get vaccinated under potential penalty of termination or other disciplinary action.

As Conway Regional CEO Matt Troup puts it in an interview for Becker’s Hospital Review, the intent of this attestation is twofold:

"The intent of the religious attestation form is twofold: to ensure staff requesting exemption are sincere in their beliefs and to educate staff who might have requested an exemption without understanding the full scope of how fetal cells are used in testing and development in common medicines."

According to Troup, only about 5% of its approximately 1,830 employees have requested such a “religious exemption.” As reported by KARK 4 News, the attestation required by Conway has made its way onto social media, where it has been criticized as “condescending:”

Troup noted that he is aware the form has started making the rounds on social media put pushed back on the idea held by critics that it took a condescending tone, saying he did not think that to be the case and noting that talking down to staffers was not what they are trying to do.

“We really have no interest in, no intent of being disrespectful here,” he said. “That’s not what this is about. This is a lightning rod issue, and we have no interest in trying to incite more anger and frustration.”

In other words, anti-vaxxers shouldn’t take any of this personally. It’s strictly business.

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
If you enjoyed this comic, I just slightly murdered you.

Today's News: