#research data on substack

[mehmetyildizmelbourne-blog]

Substack Mastery Book: Chapter 6

This chapter is about How to Configure and Maintain Privacy of Substack Publications with Compelling Reasons

How to Configure and Maintain Privacy of Substack Publications with Compelling Reasons Dear beta readers, Thank you for your invaluable feedback, which is helping refine this book and enhance it as a valuable resource for fellow writers. I’ve covered five critical aspects that have already helped many readers jumpstart their Substack journey. Just yesterday, the discussion on editorial…

[bitbybitwrites]

ShadowDragon sells a tool called SocialNet that streamlines the process of pulling public data from various sites, apps, and services. Marketing material available online says SocialNet can “follow the breadcrumbs of your target’s digital life and find hidden correlations in your research.” In one promotional video, ShadowDragon says users can enter “an email, an alias, a name, a phone number, a variety of different things, and immediately have information on your target. We can see interests, we can see who friends are, pictures, videos.”

The leaked list of targeted sites include ones from major tech companies, communication tools, sites focused around certain hobbies and interests, payment services, social networks, and more. The 30 companies the Mozilla Foundation is asking to block ShadowDragon scrapers are ​​Amazon, Apple, BabyCentre, BlueSky, Discord, Duolingo, Etsy, Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, FlightAware, Github, Glassdoor, GoFundMe, Google, LinkedIn, Nextdoor, OnlyFans, Pinterest, Reddit, Snapchat, Strava, Substack, TikTok, Tinder, TripAdvisor, Twitch, Twitter, WhatsApp, Xbox, Yelp, and YouTube.

[darkmaga-returns]

By Frank Bergman April 30, 2025

A chilling warning has been issued after traces of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s HIV vaccine-derived sequences were found in Moderna’s Covid mRNA injections.

The discovery was made by independent researcher Kevin McKernan, who is now sounding the alarm over the findings.

McKernan details the findings in a post on his Substack.

In the article, McKernan cites publicly available RNA-sequencing data from a newly published Nature study by Krawczyk et al.

McKernan explains that a fragment aligning with a gp120-like sequence from a 2020 NIH–Moderna HIV vaccine patent was detected in the livers of mice injected with Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine.

The HIV vaccine was co-invented by researchers, including Dr. Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

The Nature paper is titled “Re-adenylation by TENT5A enhances efficacy of SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccines.”

[why-animals-do-the-thing]

I just wanted to drop a note to thank everyone who has supported the Patreon over the years, or signs up for things like my (free) Substack. It really means a lot.

I update both of those platforms infrequently. I’ve tried to build better habits about that over the years and continually run into the same problem: I don’t want to post anything about what I’m working on unless I’m 110% sure my opinions is informed as possible and I am not sharing anything erroneous. There is so much misinformation out there regarding animals in general and zoos and exotic animal politics especially that I absolutely do not want to add to it.

What that means in practice is that topics often take months to years to research, and big projects need multiple years to end up with something I’m comfortable publishing. (That accreditation reporting writeup was an idea I chewed over for easily two years prior to starting work; then it took spent six months to researching write it up). I have one project in the wings where I can’t even start a major part until Feb 2024, because data collection has to happen after the implementation of a new set of federal regulations. These things are great for creating quality work, but less good for providing people who are supporting your work with something tangible on a reasonably frequent basis.

Also, at this point? Most of my current big projects are so complex - and such novel things to study about the zoo industry - that I’m taking the extra time to really cross every t and dot every i with the research, and then get them peer-reviewed through credible academic journals. I think there’s four or five different projects that will be papers I’m working on simultaneously (and sporadically) right now. And as many of you know, this is a hobby, not a paying profession.

So. Thank you for sticking around through the long silences and the intermittent publications. I have so much I want to talk about, but it has to wait until I can do it right. I have so many cool things planned (like, multiple interactive websites) for once everything is finished and published. Whether or not you’re on the Patreon or just awaiting infrequent Substack updates, I really appreciate all of it.

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this Conservation Works blog on Substack:

Michael Soulé, the founder of conservation biology, used to say that one of the most important pieces of advice he got as a young scientist was “when in doubt, count.” Monitoring — counting or otherwise measuring organisms in the same place over time — is the foundation of conservation biology, and in many ways it’s the foundation of conservation, too. Unless someone counts how many lizards, salmon, ferns, or species of butterflies live in a certain place, and repeats the count at regular intervals, that group of organisms can decline or even die out unnoticed. Before an organism can be conserved, it has to be counted.

But what’s the point of counting organisms that seem doomed to extinction? That’s the question tropical biologist Peter Edmunds addresses in a recent BioScience essay titled “Why keep monitoring coral reefs?”

For nearly four decades, Edmunds has been monitoring coral reefs at two locations in the U.S. Virgin Islands, using annual photographs to measure changes in the relative extent of coral and algae. He started the project in 1987, less than a year before the first known Caribbean-wide coral bleaching event; since then, coral extent at one of his sites has shrunk by 92 percent and at the other by 52 percent. Both reefs used to be dominated by boulder star coral, a large, stony species that provides structure to Caribbean reefs and protects the region’s coastlines from erosion. Now, they are dominated by fast-growing “weedy” corals and algae. Given that climate change continues to drive up water temperatures and increase the frequency and intensity of hurricanes, writes Edmunds, “the prospects for community recovery are bleak.”

Yet he argues that monitoring matters, and will continue to matter. The series of photographs Edmunds and his colleagues have accumulated, for instance, suggests that acute disturbances such as hurricanes and major bleaching events cause less damage over time than the everyday stress of rising water temperatures. Moreover, as he writes drily, “the past is an imperfect predictor of the future, ensuring that old data can never fully take the place of new information.” Even a grievously altered system such as the Virgin Islands reefs will continue to change in different ways for different reasons, and understanding those changes will be essential to protecting the life that persists — both at sea and on land.

I was reminded of Edmunds’ argument earlier this month, when I attended the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem Biennial Scientific Conference, held this year in Big Sky, Montana. One of the speakers was Tom Olliff, an ecologist who, like Edmunds, has dedicated himself to one ecosystem: he spent 32 years living and working in Yellowstone National Park, eventually directing its Science and Resource Management Division.

Olliff noted the remarkable changes in and around Yellowstone during the course of his career, including the reintroduction of wolves, the recovery of grizzly bears, the boom in visitor numbers, and the excruciating and still-growing development pressure on private lands. He called on his listeners, who included many colleagues and friends, to undertake “audacious acts of conservation,” projects that take a long time to realize and may face determined opposition.

Olliff named some headline-grabbing audacious acts, like wolf reintroduction and dam removal. But he ended his talk with a quieter example. In his current position as a regional research manager for the National Park Service, he has been working with wildlife biologist Don Swann on the long-term monitoring of saguaro cacti in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona and Mexico. Though adult saguaros are still common, young saguaros are struggling to survive as temperatures rise. How long should scientists plan to monitor the population? Four decades from now, a report on the saguaro population might be as grim as Edmunds’ assessment of the Virgin Islands reefs.

[noodledesk]

my goals for the year :)

This will most definitely change. But directionally, here's what we've got:

🌻 Create a garden on my balcony: I've been thinking of growing tomato plants on my south-facing balcony for a couple years now. I've been aspiring towards working with plants. Now I need to go beyond watering a houseplant and wringing my hands when they start killing themselves and dying.

🎨 Paint my coffee table and decorate it: I really enjoyed painting my "community chairs" with my friends last year and they've become one of my favourite things in the apartment. Let's keep going; I got a coffee table off Facebook Marketplace for $25.

📖 Start and finish the Artist's Way: I'd like to get to a point where drawing and writing feel very natural, very joyful, and feels more honest. I'm very used to trying to operationalize my creative process. This probably needs the sort of spiritual healing that people seem to get from Julia Cameron's Artist's Way.

🫂 Make intergenerational friends: I don't hang out with enough babies and I don't hang out with enough grannies. That's a lot of joy and wisdom I'm missing out on! Not to mention delicious food. Plus my skill in being able to connect devices to Wi-Fi is most appreciated by this demographic.

🧘 Find better ways to release stress that actually release stress: I do a lot of activities that are supposed to release stress. But I am still a very stressed person, so I think I'm probably not doing the right things.

✌️Maintain my emotional vibe: Basically regulating my emotions better. Get in tune with urge surfing. But also if I'm feeling joyful, to share it with other people and worry less about its appropriateness.

🦜 Talk to more people whose work I find interesting: I'm shy to talk to people about their work but I want to know what possibilities are out there beyond making slide decks that are marginally interesting and poorly researched lol.

🎹 Pick up music again with guitar or with jamming with my band: I miss that spiky, focused feeling of jamming with other people. I'd also like to do some structured learning of an instrument. Probably piano or guitar.

✏️ Write my blog posts with less polish, more curiosity: More rigor on research, more googling, more interesting examples. Spend more time digging around instead of stuck wondering how to phrase something. Focus less on voice and style. This will come naturally with reading more and taking walks and talking to interesting people.

📚 Study more: I need to read up. I am foolish and not proud of it! I'd like to read more, engage with what I'm reading more, and take some classes. Probably about data analysis and design.

💡Try new things in my career: Writing this blog has been really fun and rewarding, but I think experimenting with other mediums will also be fruitful. Maybe trying out YouTube again or reviving the poetry podcast, or drawing on greeting cards; I just want to try something that I can fuck up and then learn from. I'm also thinking about how my 9-5 job shapes all of this exploration.

🥕 Figure out a food system: Get better at managing the admin / planning side of cooking: groceries, ingredient prep, meal planning, nutrition planning. I feel like I can reduce a lot of my food-related stress by planning more effectively.

I wrote more about this on my substack. And if you'd like to see how I'm keeping track you can check out my Notion template :)

[mariacallous]

Arvind Narayanan, a computer science professor at Princeton University, is best known for calling out the hype surrounding artificial intelligence in his Substack, AI Snake Oil, written with PhD candidate Sayash Kapoor. The two authors recently released a book based on their popular newsletter about AI’s shortcomings.

But don’t get it twisted—they aren’t against using new technology. “It's easy to misconstrue our message as saying that all of AI is harmful or dubious,” Narayanan says. He makes clear, during a conversation with WIRED, that his rebuke is not aimed at the software per say, but rather the culprits who continue to spread misleading claims about artificial intelligence.

In AI Snake Oil, those guilty of perpetuating the current hype cycle are divided into three core groups: the companies selling AI, researchers studying AI, and journalists covering AI.

Hype Super-Spreaders

Companies claiming to predict the future using algorithms are positioned as potentially the most fraudulent. “When predictive AI systems are deployed, the first people they harm are often minorities and those already in poverty,” Narayanan and Kapoor write in the book. For example, an algorithm previously used in the Netherlands by a local government to predict who may commit welfare fraud wrongly targeted women and immigrants who didn’t speak Dutch.

The authors turn a skeptical eye as well toward companies mainly focused on existential risks, like artificial general intelligence, the concept of a super-powerful algorithm better than humans at performing labor. Though, they don’t scoff at the idea of AGI. “When I decided to become a computer scientist, the ability to contribute to AGI was a big part of my own identity and motivation,” says Narayanan. The misalignment comes from companies prioritizing long-term risk factors above the impact AI tools have on people right now, a common refrain I’ve heard from researchers.

Much of the hype and misunderstandings can also be blamed on shoddy, non-reproducible research, the authors claim. “We found that in a large number of fields, the issue of data leakage leads to overoptimistic claims about how well AI works,” says Kapoor. Data leakage is essentially when AI is tested using part of the model’s training data—similar to handing out the answers to students before conducting an exam.

While academics are portrayed in AI Snake Oil as making “textbook errors,” journalists are more maliciously motivated and knowingly in the wrong, according to the Princeton researchers: “Many articles are just reworded press releases laundered as news.” Reporters who sidestep honest reporting in favor of maintaining their relationships with big tech companies and protecting their access to the companies’ executives are noted as especially toxic.

I think the criticisms about access journalism are fair. In retrospect, I could have asked tougher or more savvy questions during some interviews with the stakeholders at the most important companies in AI. But the authors might be oversimplifying the matter here. The fact that big AI companies let me in the door doesn’t prevent me from writing skeptical articles about their technology, or working on investigative pieces I know will piss them off. (Yes, even if they make business deals, like OpenAI did, with the parent company of WIRED.)

And sensational news stories can be misleading about AI’s true capabilities. Narayanan and Kapoor highlight New York Times columnist Kevin Roose’s 2023 chatbot transcript interacting with Microsoft's tool headlined “Bing’s A.I. Chat: ‘I Want to Be Alive. 😈’” as an example of journalists sowing public confusion about sentient algorithms. “Roose was one of the people who wrote these articles,” says Kapoor. “But I think when you see headline after headline that's talking about chatbots wanting to come to life, it can be pretty impactful on the public psyche.” Kapoor mentions the ELIZA chatbot from the 1960s, whose users quickly anthropomorphized a crude AI tool, as a prime example of the lasting urge to project human qualities onto mere algorithms.

Roose declined to comment when reached via email and instead pointed me to a passage from his related column, published separately from the extensive chatbot transcript, where he explicitly states that he knows the AI is not sentient. The introduction to his chatbot transcript focuses on “its secret desire to be human” as well as “thoughts about its creators,” and the comment section is strewn with readers anxious about the chatbot’s power.

Images accompanying news articles are also called into question in AI Snake Oil. Publications often use clichéd visual metaphors, like photos of robots, at the top of a story to represent artificial intelligence features. Another common trope, an illustration of an altered human brain brimming with computer circuitry used to represent the AI’s neural network, irritates the authors. “We're not huge fans of circuit brain,” says Narayanan. “I think that metaphor is so problematic. It just comes out of this idea that intelligence is all about computation.” He suggests images of AI chips or graphics processing units should be used to visually represent reported pieces about artificial intelligence.

Education Is All You Need

The adamant admonishment of the AI hype cycle comes from the authors’ belief that large language models will actually continue to have a significant influence on society and should be discussed with more accuracy. “It's hard to overstate the impact LLMs might have in the next few decades,” says Kapoor. Even if an AI bubble does eventually pop, I agree that aspects of generative tools will be sticky enough to stay around in some form. And the proliferation of generative AI tools, which developers are currently pushing out to the public through smartphone apps and even formatting devices around it, just heightens the necessity for better education on what AI even is and its limitations.

The first step to understanding AI better is coming to terms with the vagueness of the term, which flattens an array of tools and areas of research, like natural language processing, into a tidy, marketable package. AI Snake Oil divides artificial intelligence into two subcategories: predictive AI, which uses data to assess future outcomes; and generative AI, which crafts probable answers to prompts based on past data.

It’s worth it for anyone who encounters AI tools, willingly or not, to spend at least a little time trying to better grasp key concepts, like machine learning and neural networks, to further demystify the technology and inoculate themselves from the bombardment of AI hype.

During my time covering AI for the past two years, I’ve learned that even if readers grasp a few of the limitations of generative tools, like inaccurate outputs or biased answers, many people are still hazy about all of its weaknesses. For example, in the upcoming season of AI Unlocked, my newsletter designed to help readers experiment with AI and understand it better, we included a whole lesson dedicated to examining whether ChatGPT can be trusted to dispense medical advice based on questions submitted by readers. (And whether it will keep your prompts about that weird toenail fungus private.)

A user may approach the AI’s outputs with more skepticism when they have a better understanding of where the model’s training data came from—often the depths of the internet or Reddit threads—and it may hamper their misplaced trust in the software.

Narayanan believes so strongly in the importance of quality education that he began teaching his children about the benefits and downsides of AI at a very young age. “I think it should start from elementary school,” he says. “As a parent, but also based on my understanding of the research, my approach to this is very tech-forward.”

Generative AI may now be able to write half-decent emails and help you communicate sometimes, but only well-informed humans have the power to correct breakdowns in understanding around this technology and craft a more accurate narrative moving forward.

[covid-safer-hotties]

Also presereved in our archive

By Sheena Cruickshank

A couple of years ago I wrote an article in The Conversation about the quiet removal of the offer to vaccinate primary age children to protect them against COVID-19 in England. The decision was that any child who turned five after August 2022 would not be eligible to receive a COVID vaccine until they are 12, unless they are in a higher-risk group. Vaccines for children under the age of 4 (from the age of 6 months), whilst approved for use on the UK, are not, nor have been, provided. This is very different to other countries including the USA which do offer vaccines to children from 6 months of age. What I want to do this with article is talk through some recent studies on paediatric infection and consider the potential implications of that, if any, on vaccine policy.

Why are most children not offered COVID-19 vaccines in the UK?

The reason for this is the idea that COVID is a less serious infection in young children than it is in adult. Whilst this can be true for many children, some do experience worse infections and a recent paper has looked at data in the UK regarding hospitalisations for COVID-19 across age groups. I also encourage you to read Christina Pagel’s excellent substack summarising the findings here.

The research analysis summarised in Professor Pagel’s substack showed that over 40% of all admissions in children between 2020 and 23 (under the age of 18) were in infants under the age of 1.

Vaccines and pregnancy.

Young infants are exceptionally vulnerable to COVID 19. The reason for this is that infants’ immune systems are still developing which makes them particularly vulnerable to any infection including COVID-19. The good news is that babies can be protected from COVID-19 in the first six months of life if the mum has been recently vaccinated. This is because if the mum is vaccinated she can pass on protective antibodies to the developing baby whilst pregnant. These will wane over time but if the mum is then able to breastfeed she can then top up the baby’s antibodies further by passing on antibodies that are found in breast milk.

Covid vaccines in pregnancy are recommended in the UK. These vaccines are recommended as the severity of COVID-19 is higher in unvaccinated than vaccinated women. Although the risk in the post-omicron era is lower, there is still a greater risk to the mum and baby from COVID-19. However, takeup of COVID-19 vaccines has not been great in pregnant women. For example, a study showed that only 1 in 3 pregnant women would have the COVID-19 vaccine during pregnancy. Younger women and people from socially economically deprived backgrounds were least likely to be vaccinated. Much more targeted work must be done to work with pregnant women and explain why these vaccines are both safe and important. Dr Viki Male maintains an excellent and up-to-date list of research on vaccines and COVID-19 in pregnancy so do look at her google document if you have further questions.

What are the risks of COVID-19 for older children?

Whilst I would personally advocate that infants and children would benefit from the offer of a vaccine between 6 months to 4 years of age to help develop their immunity so their first encounter with COVID-19 is helped and shaped by vaccine induced immunity, its unlikely the policy in the UK will change.

The current rationale influencing UK policy is that most children will be exposed to infection via school or nursery and that the risks of severe impacts of COVID are low. This is because most children with COVID-19 remain asymptomatic or develop mild disease, often with upper respiratory symptoms. The proportion of children over the age of 1 who get severe disease is still rare. Of those children that do get severe disease, it has been suggested that many children who require hospitalised with Covid have underlying health conditions. This thinking then influences the policy decisions. However, in older children (over the age of 1) this is true for around half of all hospitalisations though so that reasoning doesn’t quite chime. However, it is true that overall deaths from COVID in children DO remain rare which is very good news. The green book (which publishes data and recommendations for vaccines) cites a 2022 study which showed an infection fatality ratio of less than 1 in 100,000 infections in 0-19 year-olds. The risk is therefore considered low and decision makers have been concerned this risk is outweighed by the possible risk of acute resolving myocarditis from the vaccine in adolescent boys.

However, infection is NOT risk-free and some children do develop Long Covid (symptoms that last more than 4 weeks). We still do not understand why this happens and how we can better identify children who are most at risk. This is important so we can establish who falls into the more vulnerable groups that are currently eligible for vaccines. A recent scoping review was published investigating Long Covid in 659,286 children and adolescents under the age 21. A scoping review looks at the published literature and tries to build a consensus of what the research is telling us. The incidence of Long Covid was really variable in children so we need to better understand the true incidence- one study for example suggested 3.7% children developed Long Covid symptoms. Surprisingly, 80% of the cases of long Covid started with a mild infection. This suggests that severity might not be the best indicator of vaccine eligibility and must be followed up. Symptoms very hugely variable but many children described how this affected their day- to day lives a lot (see below). This must be absolutely devastating and we must understand why some children get Long Covid symptoms.

Many of the children identified in the scoping study had pre-existing conditions including a spectrum of allergic conditions (asthma, allergy, allergic rhinitis) and/or obesity. These are not necessarily all groups considered at risk and eligible for childhood vaccines in the UK. Of these criteria, only children with severe asthma that is poorly controlled are currently eligible. This scoping study needs following up but, as vaccination reduces the likelihood of developing post-Covid complications, it could suggest we may need to revise eligibility for the vaccines in children to further reduce the risk of Long Covid in children.

Other risks of infection should be evaluated. A recent paper showed the growing incidence of juvenile type II diabetes within 6 months of the diagnosis of COVID 19 in children between 10 and 19 years of age. Studies like this show the need to continue to assess the impacts of the infection in the un-vaccinated.

It is vital that we understand the scale of the risks, and who are most at risk so that if can ensure that decisions regarding vaccinating children are made in the light of all the most up to date evidence. Much more work is needed too to enhance vaccine information, address vaccine hesitancy and take-up in pregnant women so that babies can be best protected from COVID-19.

[reddanceragain]

Meidas has POWERFUL ANSWER to CBS…BYE BYE!!!

MeidasTouch Network Apr 24 By Ben Meiselas

Revenge is a dish best served cold…

CBS, let’s face it, your betrayal is unforgivable. The fact you compromised the independence of 60 Minutes and forced legendary Executive Producer Bill Owens to resign pissed me off.

Do you have any sense of the moment?!

Seriously, you are so damn greedy and want regulatory approval of the $8 billion merger between CBS parent company Paramount and Skydance that you’re willing to sell out our democracy? I hate to be crass, but you are pathetic.

Donald Trump is weaker than ever right now. His approval is plummeting. The recent Pew Research poll has Trump’s approval at 40 percent and his support among 18-29 year olds and Latinos in the 20 percent range. Even the Fox poll released yesterday has his approval at 44 percent, which is their lowest ranking by far of a president in modern history in the first 100 days. Now is the time to fight harder and not capitulate, CBS! Don’t you realize that Trump is an extortionist? The moment you give him an inch, he takes a foot, then an arm, and then your life.

You think he’ll stop at you settling some bogus lawsuit with him?

The moment he senses your weakness, he’s going to come back to the well and demand more from you until you look like some idiotic channel like Mike Lindell TV. How many times do I have to tell you?! You don’t obey in advance, and you don’t obey ever.

What does $8 billion mean if you lose your freedom and democracy—and eventually that $8 billion—to an authoritarian who takes and takes and takes?

CBS gave us all the middle finger, and we responded.

As I said at the outset of this post, revenge is a dish best served cold. I’m reminded of the ritzy event in Sun Valley, Idaho a few months back where Paramount head Shari Redstone and Warner Bros. head David Zaslav pranced around like giddy school kids reenacting a youth they never had, bragging about the “deregulatory environment” that would drench them in money under a Trump presidency.

Nope.

Now you’re drenched in your own vomit of greed, and independent media like us needs to stop you sickos from continuing to project that venomous slop on the rest of us.

Revenge is a dish best served cold.

So it’s fitting that as these oligarchs and agents of oligarchy like Redstone and Zaslav mock us all, laugh in our faces, and try to sell us out, we respond with force. And that we did!

After our post yesterday forcefully calling out CBS, we got some incredible news.

First, we found out from the top podcast data company Podscribe that The MeidasTouch Podcast came in first again in the charts for the third straight month in a row with 107.3 million downloads. This is more than Joe Rogan, Candace Owens, Ben Shapiro, and Charlie Kirk combined.

Second—and what’s more—we learned we get over 8 million more YouTube views per day than CBS News.

It’s a wipeout, CBS!

You gave us the middle finger. You cared so much about your $8 billion, and now you’ve been trounced by us with 8 million more views a day!

What CBS and Skydance can’t fathom is that the MeidasTouch Network crushes them—and we’ve grown thanks to our subscribers on this Substack.

They care so much about their $8 billion merger and their news assets that they’ve exposed themselves as gigantic orange-turd-enabling assholes. Excuse my language—I don’t like cursing—but I found that one funny and so true.

You’re supposed to be reporting on news. So report on it, damnit, or get out of the way!

Why don’t you sell Meidas 60 Minutes at this point since you apparently don’t care about the news?

By the way, we told Bill Owens in our post yesterday that he should join Meidas. We’ll see.

[spiderfreedom]

About this post, out of curiosity, when do you think it all started? Is there research on like how far back it goes? It obviously isn't inherent to human nature; I know it's not. Is it just one of those toxic things that started from the beginning of organized religion :( ?

There's research, but there's a lot of controversy on when/how patriarchy developed. The most important thing to note is that Greek/Roman/Chinese/Japanese style misogyny is not universal and has not always been the norm. Societies differed a lot in how much power and autonomy women had. At the same time, we must be conscious even the 'best' societies of the past still had faults surrounding women.

Some places to start are:

Alice Evans: Ten Thousand Years of Patriarchy: This article looks at it from an economic and cultural perspective. I strongly recommend reading her Substack, where she travels around the world interviewing Third World Women and Feminists to see why their women's liberation movements have succeeded or failed! From the linked article:

Our world is marked by the Great Gender Divergence. Objective data on employment, governance, laws, and violence shows that all societies are gender unequal, some more than others. In South Asia, North Africa and the Middle East, it is men who provide for their families and organise politically. Chinese women work but are still locked out of politics. Latin America has undergone radical transformation, staging massive rallies against male violence and nearly achieving gender parity in political representation. Scandinavia still comes closest to a feminist utopia, but for most of history Europe was far more patriarchal than matrilineal South East Asia and Southern Africa. [...] Why do some societies have a stronger preference for female cloistering? To answer that question, we must go back ten thousand years. Over the longue durée, there have been three major waves of patriarchy: the Neolithic Revolution, conquests, and Islam. These ancient ‘waves’ helped determine how gender relations in each region of the world would be transformed by the onset of modern economic growth.

Another thing to remember/consider when it comes to studying the past is how few resources we have. We only know so much about how pre-historical humans organized their societies. Colonialism destroyed evidence of other societies with different ways of approaching gender. Many of the great apes we study are endangered. And literate societies happened to be patriarchal societies (likely related to literacy going hand in hand with bureaucracy and agriculture and the development of a state?) so we don't know as much as we could about women in literate regions.

Organized religion definitely codified a lot about patriarchy, but the major religions (Christianity, Islam, Buddhism) arose in regions of the world that were already patriarchal. So it's kind of a chicken and the egg problem when it comes to patriarchy and religion. We know that religions that worshipped goddesses, like Greek and Roman paganism and Hinduism, can still coexist with sexist societies.

These aren't great answers, but it's a big question and there are a lot of people working on answering it! It ties back into the bigger question of what our human ancestors were like, and whether we're kind of doomed to violence and xenophobia or whether there are alternatives. Some other books I've read that may be useful reading on this front are:

The Dawn of Everything. A long book, but it's a tour of human history and different societies and ways of organizing society. One of the chapters is on women, if I recall correctly.

Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times. Women have been working with cloth for a very long time. In some societies, this allowed women a high degree of status (see the Minoans!) and in others, women were worked to the bone producing textiles (Ancient Egypt).

The book "Demonic Males" looks at the birth of patriarchy from a primatology perspective. Our ape ancestors show male-dominant behaviors and societies. It's controversial the extent this is directly responsible for misogyny and male violence, but I think it's likely that our ape inheritance influenced the structure of early humans - so we basically have a lot of baggage.

Broadly speaking, reading books on feminist anthropology will help you, because a lot of what we know about patriarchy is based on highly literate societies, which as we established, are also agricultural societies with bureaucracies and a hierarchical culture. That's hardly representative of the human condition. As an example, look at Inuit society - on the one hand, there is arranged marriage and all that it implies; on the other, we do not have the same ideals of silent women who stay at home - women are valued members of the society and their skills are explicitly recognized as necessary for survival. Compare Western cultures that view domestic tasks as "support" tasks while the "real" work is done by men.

Finally, this one is a bit old (1974), but it may give you a starting point for understanding feminist anthropology and the search for the origins of patriarchy: "Is Female to Nature as Male is to Culture". It can help us understand how female subordination manifests itself in different cultures, and to know what to look for.

I hope this has been helpful. If anyone can recommend good books on the origin of patriarchy/female subordination (especially for non-Western cultures), please feel free to add in the replies or reblogs!

[definitearticle]

Shared with permission:

What to do:

Choose your class - we have a big fight coming up, and we need everyone.

Artificers: It's time to make sure your 3D printers are working, and you are linked to a good maker group. Access to all healthcare, not just reproductive rights, will be at risk soon, which means we should have a good network for ensuring that people can access 3-D-printed prosthetics and accessibility equipment. https://3d.nih.gov/collections/prosthetics

Barbarians: protests are coming. We don’t even know what for yet, but if last time is any indication, there will be a lot. Check your boots/walking shoes. Make sure your go bag is packed for game day. https://www.law.nyu.edu/centers/race-inequality-law/protest-tips

Bards: I see you already. Posts are up, and videos are rolling. Ensure you’re formulating a good network of people you’re watching and promoting. Guild bards get more done. And the traditional media bards seem not to be getting the support or are being silenced, so let’s make our own. Support and promote Substacks and Patreons for creators and writers who may get silenced on other platforms soon.

Clerics: Open the sanctuary doors. Start placing the bookcase in front of the attic door now so it won’t raise any eyebrows when needed later.

Druids: Document everything. We’re about to lose a lot of our ability to monitor our natural resources, which means that science will have to look at the data you’re collecting in the areas you love to piece together what is happening to our world. Take daily pictures of the forest document, note the temperatures, and notice the movement of animals. Only time tells when things deviate from the norm, which means getting the data. (It's okay to buy a pretty notebook now)

Fighters: Honestly, it's a lot of the same stuff that I just told the Barbarians, except your go bag will have to be a lot more flexible: Bandanas, water bottles. Review the tapes of previous protests and see what was learned. https://www.law.nyu.edu/centers/race-inequality-law/protest-tips

Monks: Watch, be patient, and be prepared to move quickly and reorient an attacker's energy back at them. https://www.aclu.org/

Paladins: Remember you are strong both offensively and defensively and capable of healing and buffing allies, while also dealing significant damage to foes. But your powers are tied to your adherence to your moral code. So, know what that code is now. Know what your boundaries are. Write them out. Align yourself with missions where you can do the most good, not where you stand in your way. Remember that sometimes, you are at your strongest at just being the wall of moral good between evil and those that evil would hurt. You don’t have to look for the fight. Look for the person in pain. The fight has already come to them. https://transequality.org/

Rangers: Warriors of the wilderness. Defend the forests. Don’t let them come after the USFD again. https://www.fs.usda.gov/

Sorcerers: Look into getting an IUD or vasectomy or support a friend in doing so. Plan B lasts 4 years. Pick up some now. Pick up extra. Remember that Plan B’s efficacy diminishes by 14% for every 15 pounds above the recommended weight threshold, as stated by the manufacturer. Talk to a medical health professional now to know your dosage for the future.

Warlocks: Time to find a larger group or cause to team up with. https://www.aclu.org/campaigns-initiatives/project2025

Wizards: Start creating copies of valuable research now. Look at the government-run agencies and their websites before the turnover, before they are altered or shut down again. https://www.weather.gov/

[darkmaga-returns]

Those who had the Covid-19 booster jabs in 2023-2024 were more likely to get covid than those who were unvaccinated, according to a new study.

The study published by the Annals of Internal Medicine, was conducted through the U.S. Veterans Health Administration (VHA). Data from VHA’s comprehensive electronic health record system was analyzed to compare outcomes between people who had received the booster and those who hadn’t.

The Defender reports: The researchers found that vaccine efficacy against COVID-19 infection was -3.26%, indicating “a statistically significant higher infection rate in vaccinated individuals compared to the unvaccinated control group,” according to Nicolas Hulscher, who first reported the study on Substack.

They also found low and rapidly waning efficacy against hospitalization and death among those who had taken the vaccine.

“Our findings call for accelerated efforts to develop new vaccination strategies that could provide higher and more sustained protection in the current era of COVID-19,” the researchers concluded.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the boosters before clinical trials for efficacy were conducted The researchers said it is “impossible to conduct such trials and still make the vaccine available” in time for respiratory virus season when cases are likely to surge.

[vomitdodger]

Follow AJAC on just about any social media. He is by far the single best source of overall health and wellness I’ve ever come across. And he’s totally red-pilled so there’s that too.

The below is from his substack reference the cause of dementia which has for decades been thought to do with plague build up in the brain basically. In the last several years the research and data has shifted to aluminum buildup or exposure as the cause. The same aluminum used in vaccines but that’s another story. He discusses the “original” data (you know where this is going if you’ve been paying attention the last four years)

Link to the article he cites:

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from the substack, Heated World:

Substack colleague (and newsletter OG) Emily Atkin has set up a tip-line for federal government employees to report the ongoing attacks on science and common sense. 

Scientific integrity violations can come in many forms. They can come via direct order, like: Defunding programs, altering grant-making processes, censoring scientists, dismantling advisory committees, manipulating research that informs policy or regulatory decisions, overlooking peer-review processes, or removing data from public government websites. But scientific suppression can also take more passive forms, like creating a hostile work environment for federal scientists. This can lead to self-censorship, reductions in workforce, or staff burnout. We want to hear about it all—even if it’s something you believe is small. If you have doubt about whether your experience is important or not, we encourage erring on the side of disclosure. With enough sources, we hope to be able to identify patterns across agencies. You never know which snowflake will cause an avalanche.

[and-then-there-were-n0ne]

We launched the After Babel Substack eleven months ago, on Feb 1, 2023. We’ll have a post next February reflecting on our first year and looking ahead to our second. In this post, we highlight a few of our 31 posts that readers seemed to enjoy most, and that we believe are the most essential readings for those following this Substack. 

The central question animating the After Babel Substack is this: Why does it feel like everything has been going haywire since the early 2010s, and what role does digital technology play in causing this social and epistemic chaos? We explore the chaos in two primary domains: adolescent mental health (which has been our focus this year, as we worked on The Anxious Generation), and liberal democracy (which will become increasingly important in late 2024, as we begin to work on the second part of the Babel project, a book tentatively titled Life After Babel: Adapting to a world we can no longer share). 

The main line of our work so far can be summarized like this: We have shown that there is an adolescent mental health crisis and it was caused primarily by the rapid rewiring of childhood in the early 2010s, from play-based to phone-based. It hit many countries at the same time and it is hitting boys as well as girls, although with substantial gender differences.

Here is that main line in five posts, with a figure from each post:

Social Media is a Major Cause of the Mental Illness Epidemic. Here’s the Evidence. By Jon Haidt

This post frames the research debate and then summarizes the empirical evidence showing that heavy social media usage is a major cause, not just a correlate, of adolescent mental illness and suffering. (I also wrote a response to skeptics who critiqued this post.)

Figure 1. Percent of UK adolescents with “clinically relevant depressive symptoms” by hours per weekday of social media use. Haidt and Twenge created this graph from the data given in Table 2 of Kelly, Zilanawala, Booker, & Sacker (2019).

Here are 13 Other Explanations for the Adolescent Mental Health Crisis. None of them Work. By Jean Twenge 

Jean Twenge, who was among the first to diagnose the problem in 2017, raises 13 alternative theories that we often hear and shows why they don’t fit the facts. They certainly can’t explain why the crisis hit so many countries in the years around 2013. Figure 2 shows Twenge’s response to alternative #4, that it was caused by the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. It wasn’t:

Figure 2. Technology adoption, teen depression, and national unemployment, 2006-2019. Sources: National Survey of Drug Use and Health, Monitoring the Future, Pew Research Center, Bureau of Labor Statistics. See also Figure 6.39 in Generations.

The Teen Mental Illness Epidemic is International, Part 1: The Anglosphere. By Zach Rausch and Jon Haidt

This is Zach’s first post in a series exploring the crucial question: Did the adolescent mental health crisis just arise in the U.S., which would guide us to investigate causes within American society? Or did it happen in many other countries at the same time, which would point us to causes with transnational reach, such as digital technology? The answer so far: It hit big in countries that are wealthy and individualistic, such as all five Anglosphere nations. Part 2 shows the same trends in the five Nordic nations. A subsequent post shows that the international problems go beyond depression and anxiety—Gen Z girls’ suicide rates are up across the Anglosphere. (Zach is currently working on a post showing that the worsening trends are widespread across Western Europe).

Figure 3. Since 2010, rates of self-harm episodes have increased for adolescents in all five Anglosphere countries, especially for girls. For data on all sources, and larger versions of the graphs, see Rausch and Haidt (2023).

Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank First and Fastest. By Jon Haidt

This post picks up the analysis offered in The Coddling of the American Mind, whose subtitle is “How good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure.” The post shows how three very bad ideas were nurtured on Tumblr, around 2013, and then escaped into progressive online communities (and ultimately into progressive real-world communities such as university campuses), leading to a sharp rise in signs of depression, anxiety, and hopelessness that was most pronounced in young women on the left. Just as Greg Lukianoff had predicted, these ideas amounted to performing “reverse CBT” on those who embraced them.

Figure 4. Self-derogation scale, averaging four items from the Monitoring the Future study, e.g., “Sometimes I think I am no good at all,” and “I feel that my life is not very useful.” The scale runs from 1 (strongly disagree with each statement) to 5 (strongly agree). 

Why I am Increasingly Worried About Boys, Too. By Jon Haidt

If you only look at published studies on social media and mental health, you’ll conclude that this is mostly a girl problem. Girls use social media more than boys and are more affected by it. But as Zach assembled all the research we could find about boys’ mental health, we found that boys are suffering just as much as girls, though in different ways. Boys’ sense of meaning and purpose collapsed as they retreated from the ever less appealing real world into an ever more immersive and addictive virtual world of video games, porn, social media, and online forums.

Figure 5. Percent of U.S. 12th graders who agreed with the statement: “People like me don’t have much of a chance at a successful life.” Source: Monitoring the Future 1977-2021, 2-Year Buckets, Weighted).

[flyingcookierambles]

accidentally engaged with aphobic redditor lol im saving my comment here in case it gets removed by mods lolololololololol

Here are some links you can read with data to back up the claims about feeling excluded, harassment and corrective rape, and even conversion therapy: 2020, the Trevor Project - Asexual and Ace Spectrum Youth Also from this, "A larger proportion of asexual youth were transgender or nonbinary compared to the overall sample of LGBTQ youth." So asexuals are also probably experiencing transphobic discrimination as well. Il Grande Colibri - Aphobia: PRejudices and Discrimination again st asexuality Asexuality Handbook - Anti-asexual bias Stonewall - New research: shining a light on 'dehumanising' discrimination faced by ace people This one focuses more on aphobia in the UK. Forbes - Only 1 in 10 asexual people feel comfortable to be out at work Asexual Survivors - On Sexual Abuse, Repulsion, and Aversion in the Asexual Community This entire website is stories and resources by and for people on the asexual spectrum who have faced sexual harassment and/or corrective rape. Sadly, it seems to have not been updated in some time. [Maryland Coalition Against Sexual Assult (MCASA) - Sexual Violence against the Asexual Community, 2022)[https://mcasa.org/newsletters/article/sexual-violence-against-the-asexual-community] John Hopkins University Press Jan/Feb 2023 - Coercive Rape Tactics Perpetrated against Asexual College Students WomensLaw - What forms of abuse are unique to asexual victims? Buzzfeed News (this is from 2018 before Buzzfeed News got weird…) - When you're an asexual assault survivor, it's even harder to be heard Sociologist and Gender/Sexuality Researcher Canton Winer on Substack Much of his recent research is being done on the Asexual and Aromantic communities and he has interesting articles and twitter threads where ace/aro people share their stories of experiencing discrimination. He has a short article about asexuals facing conversion therapy. Slate Op-Ed - It's time to start treating asexual and aromantic people like the adults we are The Maroon Op-Ed (part of Loyola University) - Column: "A" stands for asexuals and not allies Everyday Feminism - Why we need mental healthcare without asexual erasure - and how to get there NLM - Asexual and Non-Asexual Respondents from a US population based study of Sexual Minorities Asexuals.net - Aphobia: understanding the discrimination, and prejudice against aspec individuals Advocate - #21AceStories: including the A in LGBTQIA Carolina Sexual Wellness Center Op-Ed - I am an ally, and it's not about me The Panoptic Op-Ed - A is not for Ally: Spare a thought for invisible identities this pride month The Cataount Op-Ed - A is not for Ally Human Rights Campaign - Understanding the Asexual Community I did also see a comment in this reddit thread asking if the A stands for Ally, that in 70's the A used to stand for ally. However, in the 90's and early 2000's, as more and more asexual and aromantic awareness increased, there was a push for the A to stand for asexual/aromantic and also sometimes agender (although agender also falls under the transgender umbrella). So, it used to be ally, but that is an outdated definition. And again, while cis-het people are appreciated for being allies, they do not and will likely never face the same discrimination and prejudice that people with LGBT+ identities do. They shouldn't be included for doing the bare minimum of human decency. It's like a weird participation trophy that also dilutes the meaning of being LGBT+. People who are questioning or still in the closet are welcome to use the Q as "questioning/queer" or be allies, but it still does not mean that the A is for allies.