Jonathan Haidt: How to Save Our Children from Smart Phones and Social Media

Jonathan Haidt: The combination of social media plus smart phones is irreparably damaging grade schoolers and middle schoolers. He offers this advice:

1. No smart phones before high school, when they are 14 (only flip phones)

2. No social media until age 16.

3. Phone free schools. No phones even in backpack. They must be kept in a locker.

4. Far more free play and unsupervised play to develop childhood independence.

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Anthony Fauci’s Support and Denial of Gain of Function Research

How is it that the same man who actively funded gain of function research actively denied funding it?  The answer, according to reporter David Zweig, is the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Here's an excerpt from Zweig's story at The Free Press:

During his decades as head of NIAID, Fauci oversaw the distribution of billions of dollars each year in research grants and contracts, some of which were awarded explicitly for what is commonly referred to as “gain-of-function research of concern.” This research involves manipulating viruses to become more transmissible and/or deadly in humans, with the hope that doing so might help advance development of vaccines and therapeutics against threats that don’t exist but theoretically might in the future.

As I previously reported in The Free Press, it is an intensely controversialpractice, with many scientists vehemently opposed to it. Kevin M. Esvelt, an evolutionary and ecological engineer at MIT, wrote in a 2021 opinion piece: “I implore every scientist, funder, and nation working in this field: Please stop.” Purposefully creating a pathogen that could wipe out millions of people—regardless of its hoped-for benefit—is “insanity,” global security and biodefense expert Dr. Laura Kahn told me.

Fauci has long been a vocal advocate for this type of research. And, despite pleas for it to stop, for at least a decade this dangerous research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health and NIAID. This connection was affirmed by Fauci, and is documented in published papers: NIH and NIAID are listed as financiers of the project in the acknowledgements of the most infamous gain-of-function study in history.

And I have documented that at least several NIH/NIAID-funded studies were involved in potentially creating more deadly coronaviruses.

There is no ambiguity: the NIH and NIAID have funded and supported this work. Yet Fauci, and his then-boss Collins, during the Covid years, repeatedly obscured and even outright denied their involvement.

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Suicidal Class War

Is suicide a major casualty of American class war? Yascha Monk interviews Angus Eaton at Persuasion:

Yascha Mounk: . . . What helps to explain why it is that, for centuries, life expectancy went up in the United States and now, suddenly, we're seeing this really quite striking aberration from that?

Angus Deaton: . . .We don't really know why life expectancy improved so much for so long. But if you go into that literature, it's amazingly diverse and controversial. Was it nutrition? Was it drugs? . . . A lot of what Anne [Case] and I have done is just to document this fact that there's three years in a row when overall life expectancy fell: you've obviously got what happened during COVID (which doesn't require a lot of explanation by itself) and also these horrible deaths of despair, which are suicides, drug overdoses, and alcoholism—a huge increase during the pandemic of deaths from alcoholism.

Suicides have always been a big clue in this story, because of Durkheim and the story that when society is really not working for people, that's when you begin to get suicides. Suicide is just an indicator that something is gone terribly wrong. But I think it’s getting almost no attention among policymakers and very little in the press that the increase in deaths during this period is almost entirely among people who don't have a four-year college degree. For the third of the popular adult population that has a four-year college degree, they're pretty much exempt from all these horrors. And in fact, if you look at life expectancy at age 25 for people with a college degree, it's like the best out of all the other rich countries in the world; it looks like Japan or Switzerland. What's pulling us all down—and making us, really, the sick man of all the rich countries—is this increasing mortality among, if you like, the working class, and I think that cuts across race. This is not a black–white issue, not a poor–rich issue, but an issue between people who have a college degree and people who don't.

There's something gone wrong with working class America. And it's not hard to list a bunch of things. Democracy is not working very well for them. The neoliberal consensus wasn't good for them. The share of profits in GDP is rising at the expense of working people. It's sort of like an old fashioned class war.

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