Spanish authorities declare COVID-19 will become “endemic”

Alice Summers

Regional governments in Spain have declared that COVID-19 will become “endemic” in the population, in the latest escalation of the Socialist Party (PSOE)–Podemos government’s criminal campaign to abandon public health measures and force Spain’s inhabitants to “live with the virus.”

Epidemiologically, the term “endemic” describes the constant presence and prevalence of a disease within the population of a certain area. It refers to a state where a disease reaches such a level that most of the population has developed immunity. Viruses such as the common cold are considered endemic.

Regional premier of the Basque Country, Iñigo Urkullu (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

By declaring COVID-19 “endemic,” the Spanish ruling class is signaling its intention to allow the uninhibited spread of infection, and to permit seasonal surges that could strain hospitals to their breaking point. Far from being a response to the inevitable transmission of an undefeatable, if relatively benign, virus, it is a deliberate decision to let a deadly disease rip through the population, no matter the cost in health and lives.

Reporting the epidemiological situation in the northern region of Navarra, the Navarrese Institute of Public and Working Health (ISPLN) claimed the pandemic is practically over, but that the virus would continue to proliferate. “Unless new and unexpected factors emerge,” the report declared, “we could be at the end of the pandemic situation in Navarra. This doesn’t mean that COVID-19 is going to permanently stop circulating, but it will probably be incorporated into the list of infections which spread endemically or in seasonal epidemics.”

“It can’t be ruled out that COVID-19 could cause waves in autumn and winter,” the ISPLN document continued, “but they will probably have a progressively smaller health impact thanks to the high vaccination coverage and the application of other preventative measures by the population. In correctly-vaccinated people, the risk of COVID-19 is not more than that of other common diseases like flu.”

The claim that COVID-19 will naturally become less deadly and is “like flu” is a lie with no scientific basis. Further mutations made possible by the failure to contain and end the pandemic can produce yet more deadly strains, as the emergence of the much more transmissible and lethal Delta variant of the virus has shown.

Last Friday, the regional premier of the Basque Country, Iñigo Urkullu, also declared that the virus was becoming “endemic” in the region. Urkullu told the Advisory Commission of the LABI (Basque Civil Protection Plan) that “the Basque Country is moving from a pandemic situation to an endemic situation.”

“We can take a new step,” he stated, to allow the region to “move forward with the decree establishing the end of the health emergency” if the trajectory of the virus remains “positive.”

Speaking on the viral situation in the Basque Country, Urkullu stated: “It is a descending, stable and sustainable trajectory. We find ourselves in a different situation [than earlier in the pandemic] and therefore must have different responses.”

On Tuesday, the Basque government then proceeded to end the “Health Emergency” that had been in place in the region, lifting virtually all health-related restrictions other than the obligation to wear masks in crowded public spaces. It is Spain’s sixth region to remove the vast majority of measures, after Castilla-La Mancha, Castilla y León, Extremadura, Navarra and Madrid.

The announcements by the Navarrese and Basque governments exemplify the “herd immunity” policy pursued by the ruling class across Spain and internationally. It comes only a couple of weeks after Fernando Simón, director of the Centre for the Coordination of Health Alerts and Emergencies (CCAES), and one of the PSOE–Podemos government’s key advisors on the pandemic, called for the “normalisation” of the disease.

Speaking to a meeting of the Spanish Society of Epidemiology, Simón falsely presented COVID-19 as a fairly harmless disease and downplayed the risks associated with it, comparing Spain’s pandemic response to “shooting a fly with a bazooka.”

“It’s very likely that Spain will not have any more major epidemiological waves,” Simón claimed. “There could be a sixth, seventh, eighth or ninth wave, but they won’t be like the others.”

The current situation in Spain “has nothing in common with what we were seeing before,” Simón added. “There could be another ripple [of the pandemic] in some specific groups, but the situation in Spain, right now, is very favourable, making it possible, bit by bit, to normalise the situation.”

These calls to “normalise” COVID-19 or to allow it to become “endemic” come as several hundred people continue to die of the virus every week in Spain, and tens of thousands more are infected. Many thousands of these individuals will suffer from persistent symptoms of the coronavirus for many weeks or even months after infection, with serious potential long-term health consequences including multi-organ damage, cognitive impairment, severe fatigue and muscle pain.

These policies are justified with arguments that large-scale vaccination campaigns have fundamentally changed the pandemic situation—rendering the disease far less dangerous—and that it is impossible to completely eradicate the virus.

Both of these claims are lies. While immunisation is an invaluable tool in the fight against the pandemic, it is not alone sufficient to prevent serious illness, and must be combined with scientifically guided public health measures to suppress transmission.

Furthermore, the example of countries such as China—a society of more than 1.4 billion people—shows that an elimination strategy can be successfully pursued. Despite being the birthplace of the virus, China was rapidly able to bring the outbreak under control with a raft of public health measures, including widespread testing, contact tracing, safe isolation of infected patients, and strict travel restrictions.

These measures have kept deaths from the pandemic in China below 5,000—a tiny fraction of the total fatalities in Spain and in most other “advanced” capitalist countries. After eliminating the virus within its own borders, China has also fought off repeated outbreaks of the Delta variant imported via international travel.

Other countries such as New Zealand, which initially pursued a “Zero Covid” policy and had almost entirely suppressed viral transmission, have recently abandoned this strategy, turning towards the “herd immunity” policy pursued by the vast majority of capitalist governments across the world. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced on Monday that her government would be “transitioning to a new way of doing things,” arguing that the Delta variant is a “game-changer.”

There is nothing inevitable about continuing lethal waves of the pandemic in New Zealand, Spain or any other country. The successes achieved by China and a few other capitalist states show the pandemic can be fought. The potential exists to mobilise social resources to eradicate COVID-19. If measures were implemented in a globally coordinated manner across the world, the pandemic could rapidly be ended.

Spain’s PSOE–Podemos government has proven utterly hostile to a scientifically led policy to eliminate the pandemic and save lives. Like the ruling class across Europe, it has placed corporate profits and the wealth of a super-rich elite above all else, seeing over 100,000 deaths as simply the cost of doing business.

Deepening problems for Chinese economy

Nick Beams

The major economic and financial problems in the Chinese property development sector continue to mount with the announcement by Fantasia Holdings this week that it had failed to make a payment on a bond.

Just a few weeks ago, Fantasia issued an assurance that it had “no liquidity issue” but on Monday announced “that it did not make the payment” on a $206 million bond.

A man wearing a protective mask walks in front of an electronic display board in the lobby of the Shanghai Stock Exchange building in Shanghai, China, Friday, Feb. 14, 2020. (AP Photo)

Last month Evergrande, the most indebted property development company, missed a payment on a dollar-denominated bond, triggering a 30-day grace period before a default is declared.

The question being asked in Asian markets is how far the financial crisis will spread to other property developers, which account for a large portion of the high-yield or so-called junk bond market.

Dickie Wong, the head of research at the Hong-based Kingston Securities, told the Financial Times: “There’s nothing investors can do… the worst is yet to come.”

The rating agency Fitch said Fantasia has $1.9 billion due on offshore bond payments by the end of next year as well as 6.4 billion renminbi ($US992 billion) of onshore bond payments due in the same period.

The crisis goes far beyond real estate given the crucial role it has played in the 13 years since the global financial crisis in 2008 when the Chinese government turned increasingly towards property development as a central driver of economic growth.

Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf wrote yesterday that the most serious issue to arise from the crisis was that the economy’s dependence on demand from investment in real estate had to end. “That will impose a huge adjustment and create a big headache for authorities: what can replace property investment in creating demand?” he wrote.

Wolf cited statistics pointing to the fact that well before the Evergrande crisis, the Chinese growth model, based on high levels of investment, was running out of steam. Total fixed investment averaged around 43 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) between 2010 and 2019, five percentage points higher than between 2000 and 2019. But in the latter period GDP growth had started to fall, indicating a drop in investment returns so far as the overall economy is concerned.

At the same time, debt has been rising. Household debt jumped from 29 percent of GDP in 2010 to 61 percent in 2021, while non-financial corporate sector debt rose from 118 to 159 percent of GDP in the same period.

Wolf cited the finding from a 2020 paper by economists Kenneth Rogoff and Yuanchen Yang that when its flow-on effects are considered the Chinese property sector accounted for 29 percent of GDP in 2016.

He claimed that because the government controlled the Chinese financial system, a financial crisis could be averted—a position advanced by many others. But this supposition has yet to be tested by the events now unfolding.

The major impact, he said, was that property investment would collapse and this would have a “large negative effect on local government finances.” The taxing powers of local governments are restricted, and they depend on the flow of revenue from land sales to finance infrastructure projects.

According to the research by Rogoff and Yang, cited in the article, “a 20 percent fall in real estate activity could lead to a 5–10 percent fall in GDP, even without amplification from a banking crisis, or accounting for the importance of real estate as collateral.” And, according to Wolf, “it could be worse.”

He held out the prospect that growth could continue if there was a shift away from wasteful investment and increased consumption spending flowing from a redistribution of income towards poorer households. This would require “big reforms” combined with a shift away from property and a transition from high carbon emissions, also requiring “big policy changes.”

The model based on wasteful investment had reached its end and had to be replaced, he concluded.

But this fact has long been recognised by the Chinese regime and was the basis for the launching in 2015 of the Made in China 2025 plan that set out the need to develop hi-tech industries.

However, it has run into a major barrier—the domination of US imperialism over the world economy exercised through its design of vital computer chips and the pre-eminent position of the dollar in the international financial system.

The US is determined to crush Chinese high-tech development by all means necessary because it is seen as a threat both economically and militarily.

This policy, initiated under Trump, continued and deepened by the Biden administration, is exemplified most clearly in US actions against the Chinese high-tech telecommunications company, Huawei, regarded by the Xi Jinping regime as a vital component of the next stage of economic development.

Three years ago, Huawei, which had poured major investment into the development of communications technology, was on the edge of becoming the world’s leading developer of the global 5G phone infrastructure.

Last month Huawei chairman Eric Xu said the company’s revenue from the sale of smartphones will drop by $30 to $40 billion this year from the $136.7 billion of sales in 2020 with no prospect for recovering that money in the next few years. Earlier Xu had said the company’s goal was simply to survive.

The destruction of its smartphone business is seen in the fact that despite having made significant advances in the development of 5G infrastructure—many of the patents are held by Huawei—its latest smartphone will be only 4G.

The actions of US imperialism with regard to Huawei are emblematic of its position with regard to the Chinese economic development as whole—its reduction to what amounts to status of an economic semi-colony.

In the period when Chinese growth was dependent on the export of cheap consumer goods and low-tech industrial components, it was regarded by the US as a “strategic partner” summed up in the invention of the term Chimerica by the economic historian and media commentator Niall Ferguson.

Now China is a “strategic competitor.” The methods employed by the US against Huawei are a 21st century form of imperialist gangsterism. The phone company has been excluded from the development of telecommunications networks on the spurious grounds that it is a “security” threat.

US firms that supplied it with computer chips have now been banned from doing so. The ban has been extended to companies from other countries by threatening them with a cut-off of their own supplies from US firms if they continue to sell components to Huawei. And there is the ever-present threat that firms which defy US directives will be excluded from the global financial system because of the dollar’s pre-eminence.

With US firms banned from dealings with Huawei, Google stopped offering services such as Gmail, and YouTube to its phones. From a position where it was once the leading smartphone supplier in the world, Huawei has now dropped out of the top five.

The collapse of the old model of Chinese economic advance, based to a major extent on property development, and the barriers being erected by US imperialism to a model based on high-tech development contain the potential for a major economic crisis.

The perspective of the regime so-called “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” based on capitalism, has proven to be a chimera and the mounting economic problems will lead to the eruption of social and political struggles by the multi-million Chinese working class.

Nobel Prize in Physics awarded for pioneering research in climate change and chaos theory

Bryan Dyne

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics for work on Earth’s climate and the theory of chaos and disordered systems. The first half of the prize was given jointly to Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann for their foundational work on our atmosphere and how humanity changes it. The second half of the prize was granted to Giorgio Parisi for his contributions toward understanding chaos theory, the underlying laws governing seemingly random phenomena.

Nobel 2021 prize winners for physics Syukuru Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann and Giorgio Parisi (Screenshot from the Nobel Prize video presentation)

The connection between the two halves of the award is the “complexity of physical systems,” as explained in the prize’s scientific background. “[F]from the largest scales experienced by humans” down to “microscopic structure and dynamics,” there are many processes that have numerous interacting parts that have proven difficult to describe mathematically. This year’s Nobel celebrates key milestones in understanding such systems, including modeling the links between weather and climate and understanding the underlying patterns in disordered molecular structures.

The basic feature of complex systems is that even tiny changes in the initial conditions over time produce very different results. Small differences in the temperature, pressure or humidity, for example, can cause very different weather patterns to emerge. Early computer simulations that looked at this question were done in the 1960s by mathematician Edward Lorenz, who observed that weather models changed drastically when the initial conditions were rounded from 0.506127 to just 0.506. The results produced in each scenario were completely different.

Lorenz summarized this as, “Chaos: When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future.”

In popular culture, this is often referred to as the butterfly effect. The term was highlighted in a question asked by meteorologist Philip Merrilees in 1972, “Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?” Continuing the metaphor, is the tiny gust of wind from the flap of a butterfly’s wings one of the many interconnected events that ultimately leads to a tornado? Is the event part of a cascade that leads to large-scale alterations of a weather system? And if a tornado still formed without the wing flap, how would its trajectory change?

These experiments provided the backdrop for Manabe’s work. Manabe was born in 1931 and came of age during and in the aftermath of the devastation wreaked on Japan by the United States during World War II. After earning his doctorate at the University of Tokyo in 1958, he was hired by the General Circulation Research Section of the US Weather Bureau (now the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at NOAA). There, he began developing climate models studying how differences in amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere impacted global temperatures.

The very earliest climate model was developed by French physicist Joseph Fourier in the early 1800s, who studied the balance between the amount of solar radiation hitting the ground, the amount of energy reemitted by Earth’s surface, and how this balance determined the temperature of the atmosphere.

Further work was done by Svante Arrhenius in 1896, who showed that the amount of heat captured by the atmosphere is dependent on the gases present. He found that doubling the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere caused temperature changes of up to 6 degrees Celsius, an overestimate due to the accuracy of atmospheric measurements of the time. This process is now called the greenhouse effect.

Manabe built on this work by adding to Arrhenius’ model the vertical flow of air due to convection and the evaporation and condensation of water vapor. This involved solving the full equations for atmospheric heat, motion and radiation using a then state of the art computer that had a mere half a megabyte of RAM. This more complex but still relatively simple climate model confirmed that 1896 result, that an increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases the global average surface temperature. The more sophisticated calculations predicted a temperature change of between 2 and 3 degrees Celsius from doubling carbon dioxide.

The simulations further revealed that changing the levels of oxygen and nitrogen in the atmosphere, which comprise 99 percent of what we breath, produced negligible effects on the surface temperature. In addition, when the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases, while temperatures at the surface get warmer, temperatures in the upper atmosphere get colder, ruling out the hypothesis that increasing solar radiation causes increasing temperatures. Both these results decisively proved in 1967 that increased amounts of carbon dioxide cause increased temperatures at the Earth’s surface, what we today call global warming.

There still was not, however, a connection between rapidly changing weather conditions experienced every day to the more protracted changes to climate as a whole. In the mechanical formulation of the world’s physical laws set forth by Isaac Newton, one should be able to accurately predict both the climate and the weather. If one knows the position and momentum of every particle in the universe, according to Newton and later Pierre-Simon de Laplace, the world is linear and it should be possible to calculate exactly both what has happened and what will happen.

Yet one can at best predict the weather about ten days in advance, while changes in Earth’s climate can and have been accurately predicted for decades. There is of course the practical consideration that there is no way to know the air temperature, humidity, wind and pressure at every point. There is also a more fundamental issue, the butterfly effect described earlier: small and local changes in the atmosphere can domino into much larger changes. In mathematical parlance, the evolution of a weather system (and a great many other natural phenomena) is chaotic and nonlinear.

Klaus Hasselmann linked climate and weather by making an analogy to a signal and its noise. Hasselmann was born in 1931 in Hamburg, Germany, to a family which was politically active with the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). They fled to England in 1934 to escape the Nazi persecution of communists and social democrats, eventually settling in Welwyn Garden City, England. Hasselmann only returned to Hamburg in 1949, well after the defeat of the Nazis by the Soviet Union and other Allied powers. He completed his education at the University of Hamburg and has worked there and at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, which he founded, for most of his career.

Hasselmann’s early research was on the connection between small fluctuations on the ocean’s surface and larger waves and currents. Rather than trying to keep track of each ripple in the water, he observed that the deviations caused by these ripples, the “noise,” ultimately produced an average result for many large-scale oceanic properties, the “signal.” This stochastic (probabilistic) method was able to show that rapidly changing local conditions produce slow variations in the ocean as a whole.

He then generalized his results for climate as a whole. Instead of identifying small changes in the ocean, Hasselmann isolated changes in solar radiation, levels of greenhouse gases and other factors and treated them as noise that over time averaged out to changes in the climate as a whole. In doing so, he also provided a way to identify changes caused specifically by humans on the climate system. All subsequent climate research has used Hasselmann’s work to find many impacts of human agricultural and industrial activity on the climate through numerous independent observations.

The mathematics that connects weather to climate is not limited, however, to merely meteorological studies. They are subset of a much broader field of physics known as statistical mechanics and the mathematical studies of the disordered systems known as chaos theory.

Statistical mechanics was developed by James C. Maxwell, Ludwig Boltzmann and J. Willard Gibbs in the second half of the 19th century. They were driven by the inability of Newtonian mechanics to describe the motion of gases, liquids and any system that contained large numbers of particles. Rather than try to find the initial position and momentum of each particle, they treated the motion of each particle as random, and proceeded to calculate the average physical properties of the ensemble as a whole.

Temperature, for example, is a macroscopic property of a gas that can be calculated as the average energy of each microscopic gas particle. Pressure is the macroscopic property produced by the average force of numerous microscopic particles as they impact and bounce off a surface.

Chaos theory again confirms that underneath the apparent random motion of a complex system are underlying patterns and organization. It was initially largely developed by the great polymath Henri Poincaré, who showed the orbits of restricted classes of three or more planetary bodies can simultaneously constantly change in unstable ways, but within knowable bounds.

These two fields were used by Giorgio Parisi to solve the puzzle of materials known as spin glasses. Parisi was born in Rome in 1948 and received his doctorate in physics at the University of Rome La Sapienza in 1970. He has since worked as a researcher at the Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati, Columbia University and many others. He is currently a professor at the Sapienza University of Rome and is the president of one of the oldest European scientific organizations, the Accademia dei Lincei.

Parisi’s theoretical work with spin glasses made him internationally known. Consider a metal alloy of copper atoms with a few iron atoms randomly mixed in. Each iron atom acts like a small magnet, which prior physical theory suggested should align their orientation in the same direction. Iron atoms scattered throughout copper instead are frustrated—some point in one direction while others point in the opposite. Through the 1970s, while the material could be made and observed, there was no physical model that described how the orientation of the iron atoms could stay in a random stable state and not locally self-organize, as in ordinary magnets.

Parisi’s solution was simple and ingenious; rather than allow for only two states, up and down, he allowed for an infinite number of orientations of the iron atoms. And he found an ingenious mathematical simplification, known as the “replica trick,” that allowed the otherwise intractable problem to be easily solved. This technique has since been applied to many other fields of science, from quantum field theory to the development of machine-learning algorithms.

Another point arises from both statistical mechanics and chaos theory: by clearly defining the randomness and disorder of a system, one can predict certain broad outcomes of nonlinear systems. One can also measure with high precision when those predictions break down and need to be reexamined. In other words, the seemingly random evolution of and chaotic nature of matter still admits knowable properties.

This is a subtle point. These theories, and science in general, do not state that everything everywhere is known. Rather, every aspect of nature, no matter how complex, is governed by laws that can be used to understand and predict phenomena. Most importantly, these laws can be understood by human beings developing ever more correct approximations of reality, all of which have steadily increased our mastery over nature.

That nature is knowable also has social implications. The need to avert an ecological catastrophe induced by climate change is one example. The immense dangers presented by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic are another.

On the microscopic scale, the spread of the disease is governed broadly by its reproductive number, how many other people will be infected by a single person. The Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 is estimated to have an initial reproductive number of six. On the macroscopic scale, however, the fact that the deadly contagion persists nearly two years after it was first identified is bound up with the much more complex system of social ties governed by the division of the world into rival nation-states and the drive for the accumulation of private profit, capitalism.

A comment on the viral Tik Tok “Devious Licks” trend

Renae Cassimeda

“Devious Licks,” a recent trend on the social media platform Tik Tok, involves students in the US and elsewhere posting videos of either stolen school property or vandalized school bathrooms, or both. A “lick” in this context is another term for something stolen.

A view of the TikTok app logo. (AP Photo/Kiichiro Sato, File)

The phenomenon, a form of backward and anti-social protest, no doubt reflects the anger and confusion of a portion of young people under conditions of a deadly pandemic and general political instability and crisis.

The “Devious Licks” trend began in September as videos of students having stolen personal protective equipment ( PPE) from school—such as masks, hand sanitizer and tissues—were posted on social media. One student, for example, posted a video of himself unzipping his backpack and pulling out a hand sanitizer dispenser with the caption, “only a month into school and got this absolute devious lick.” In two days, the video was viewed over seven million times.

Hundreds of copycat Tik Tok videos were posted in response, many trying to outdo the previous ones. Videos of students having stolen a microscope, computer or school street signage each reached two to three million views in under 24 hours. In addition, there have been multiple videos of bathrooms vandalized, with stall doors, mirrors, soap dispensers, sinks, toilets or urinals removed, broken or thrown across the room.

The videos have generated an uproar in the media, cries for more severe punishment for those involved and the demand by politicians and school district officials that Tik Tok be “held accountable” and greater censorship imposed on the platform. School districts in nearly all 50 US states, plus locations in Canada and the UK, have reported being “hit” by the trend.

Districts have responded by suspending and expelling students and imposing heightened security measures, including closing public restrooms for days at a time, tracking and limiting student restroom breaks and installing more cameras on campuses, especially near bathroom entrances. In addition, authorities have fined and charged numerous students, with arrests coming in various parts of the country.

Students have also posted videos bringing to light the various security measures and responses by school officials. Videos on Tik Tok record angry messages from school administrators over loudspeakers threatening criminal charges or offering $100-$500 cash rewards to any student who turns informant. One student posted a video of a campus police officer entering a classroom to perform a random bag search to find any stolen items.

After two weeks of the trend gaining traction, Tik Tok responded in mid-September by deleting accounts and videos, as well as redirecting related hashtags to their community guidelines with the message, “We expect our community to create responsibly—online and IRL [in real life]. We’re removing content and redirecting hashtags and search results to our Community Guidelines to discourage such behavior. Please be kind to your schools and teachers.”

In mid-September, US Senator Richard Blumenthal (Connecticut from Democrat) wrote a letter to Tik Tok CEO Shou Zi Chew urging the platform to ban videos, users and hashtags related to the trend. Blumenthal, one of the richest individuals in Congress, has organized an upcoming hearing to discuss the impact of social media on youth.

There is nothing remotely progressive about the “Devious Licks” videos or the acts of theft and vandalism. This will not stop some on the pseudo-left from attempting to endow such activities with an incipient “anti-capitalist ethos.” In April, Protean, an online journal produced by a self-proclaimed “leftist media collective,” carried an article, “Shoplifting Communities: Sharing Tactics and Anti-Corporate Principles,” which noted that “Shoplifting has risen dramatically since the pandemic began.” The article points to one “decentralized anarchist collective” that promotes “scamming and shoplifting as a response to the injustices of capitalism.”

This is reactionary nonsense, which only plays into the hands of the authorities and the police.

The “Devious Licks” videos and the theft of PPE and other materials are not actions aimed at mobilizing students against the present conditions. On the contrary, they reflect to a considerable extent the pessimism and disorientation of those carrying out the various thefts. The actions may also express skepticism in regard to measures taken to mitigate the pandemic by those who have been influenced by the right-wing media campaign against lockdowns and masking, or by sentiments articulated by their parents.

There isn’t a hint in the “Devious Licks” trend of any political ideology. However, is there the possibility of anarchistic moods developing among the youth in the US? Absolutely, given the repulsive state of political life, dominated by two parties of big business, profits, greed and war. The official atmosphere communicates itself to young people, generating alienation, bitterness, anger and even individualistic, semi-terroristic moods.

Blumenthal’s actions reveal how the ruling elite will use such episodes to step up attacks on free speech and intensify the campaign for “law and order.” They equally reveal the extreme sensitivity of the ruling elite to these developments. It intensely fears the youth and anticipates social explosions. The powers that be will move swiftly to suppress any hint of opposition from young people.

The possibility of high school and college students and others utilizing social media to engage in mass opposition terrifies the establishment. The growing outrage of the youth is one of the most explosive components of the political situation in the US at present.

Young people have been immensely affected by the traumatic and bewildering events of the past year and a half—the disaster of the pandemic as a whole, including the deaths of relatives and friends; the quarantining and the recurring outbreaks; the back and forth between online and in-person instruction; the battles over masks and vaccines; the bombardment of poorly executed and inadequate mitigation measures; the lack of a scientific approach to containment. What long- and short-term impact is all this having?

In September the number of reported COVID cases among children 0-17 hit its peak at 251,781 in the week ending September 8. Since schools began reopening throughout the US in late July, more than 1,772,578 children have officially tested positive and 171 have died from COVID-19, while at least 5.8 million young people have been infected and 520 have died from the virus since the start of the pandemic, according to data from the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Despite such terrible numbers, the bipartisan, teachers union-backed campaign to reopen schools and keep them open continues unabated. Students have been thrown into the same crowded and dilapidated classrooms with poor ventilation as before the pandemic. Schools lack even adequate mitigation measures such as robust testing and contact tracing, low levels of community transmission, high-quality ventilation, social distancing, masks, etc.

Many youth must be asking, for what were all the sacrifices made? What is the purpose of PPE mandates as the virus continues to spread unchecked? They confront a torrent of contradictions and lies, COVID rules and expectations in school, as well as major disagreements in districts and broader communities over measures such as mask mandates and vaccination. Meanwhile the ruling class and its media outlets pour out claims to the effect that we must learn to live with the virus and accept hundreds of thousands more deaths.

School reopenings following limited lockdowns have resulted in more infections and death and have not eased the physical or psychological suffering. While anger among youth over the current conditions is widespread, the “Devious Licks” phenomenon on Tik Tok does not reflect the thoughts and feelings of the majority of students, who are appalled by the destruction of their schools and the thefts often directed at teachers. In fact, the majority of students are angry at the perpetrators who have caused a repressive backlash, the crackdown and the surveillance measures that have been unfairly imposed on entire student bodies. Additionally, many staff and students are upset about the increased workload and stress this has caused an already overworked and short-staffed custodial workforce.

Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme 2022/2023

Application Deadline: 1st December 2021 at Hong Kong Time 12:00:00

Offered Annually? Yes

About Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme: The Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme (HKPFS), established in 2009 by the Research Grants Council (RGC), aims at attracting the best and brightest students in the world to pursue their PhD programmes in Hong Kong’s institutions. About 300 PhD Fellowships will be awarded this academic year. For awardees who need more than three years to complete the PhD degree, additional support may be provided by the chosen institutions. The financial aid is available for any field of study.

Eligibility: Candidates who are seeking admission as new full time PhD students in the following eight institutions, irrespective of their country of origin, prior work experience, and ethnic background, should be eligible to apply.

• City University of Hong Kong
• Hong Kong Baptist University
• Lingnan University
• The Chinese University of Hong Kong
• The Education University of Hong Kong
• The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
• The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
• The University of Hong Kong

Applicants should demonstrate outstanding qualities of academic performance, research ability / potential, communication and interpersonal skills, and leadership abilities.

Selection Criteria: While candidates’ academic excellence is the primary consideration, the Selection Panels will take into account factors as follows:

• Academic excellence;
• Research ability and potential;
• Communication and interpersonal skills; and
• Leadership abilities.

Number of Awards: 300

Value of Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme: The Fellowship provides an annual stipend of HK$322,800 (approximately US$41,400) and a conference and research-related travel allowance of HK$13,500 (approximately US$1,730) per year for each awardee for a period up to three years. 300 PhD Fellowships will be awarded in the 2022/23 academic year*. For awardees who need more than three years to complete the PhD degree, additional support may be provided by the chosen universities. For details, please contact the universities concerned directly.

Selection Panel: Shortlisted applications, subject to their areas of studies, will be reviewed by one of the following two Selection Panels comprising experts in the relevant board areas:

• sciences, medicine, engineering and technology
• humanities, social sciences and business studies

Application Process for Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme:

• Eligible candidates should first make an Initial Application online through the Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme Electronic System (HKPFSES) to obtain an HKPFS Reference Number by 1 December 2021 at Hong Kong Time 12:00:00 before submitting applications for PhD admission to their desired universities.
• Applicants may choose up to two programmes / departments at one or two universities for PhD study under HKPFS 2022/23. They should comply with the admission requirements of their selected universities and programmes.
• As the deadlines for applications to some of the universities may immediately follow that of the Initial Application, candidates should submit initial applications as early as possible to ensure that they have sufficient time to submit applications to universities.

Visit Scholarship webpage for more details

The Ultimate Drug War Crackdown

Jacob Hornberger

Throughout the long sordid history of America’s war on drugs, drug-war proponents have claimed that if only government officials would really crack down on drug use and drug distribution, the decades-old war on drugs could finally — finally! — be won. 

But one big problem is that throughout the decades of drug warfare, there have been crackdowns — big crackdowns. 

Many federal judges, for example, some of whom have considered themselves to be fierce drug warriors, have long imposed maximum jail sentences on drug-law violators. 

Congress itself has gotten involved in drug-war crackdowns, for example by mandating that federal judges, some of whom weren’t proving tough enough, mete out “mandatory minimum sentences” for drug violators.

There is also the asset-forfeiture racket to consider, a program that entitles DEA officers and state and local cops to steal money from people who are suspected of violating drug laws. 

There has been the extradition of Latin American drug lords to the United States, followed by long jail sentences in American prisons.

And of course, there has been the racist component to the drug war, by which cops have used drug laws to stop, search, frame, and harass blacks. 

Obviously, those crackdowns didn’t end up winning the war on drugs. On the contrary, the war on drugs is as far away from being won as it’s ever been.

And then came Rodrigo Duterte, the elected dictator of the Philippines and an absolute favorite among American drug warriors. Having been elected in 2016, Duterte announced that he was going to win the war on drugs in the Philippines. 

Today, five years later, Duterte is under investigation by the International Criminal Court, which is alleging that Philippine police have killed 6,100 suspects in drug trafficking raids. 

Notice the operative word: “suspects.” None of these dead people ever had a trial. None of them were ever convicted. They were just killed.

Moreover, that 6,100 figure might be an extremely low estimate. According to an article in Laprensalatina.com, “Human rights groups speak of between 27,000 and 30,000 dead, mostly victims of alleged extrajudicial executions.” The article also points out that the “victims include 112 children, according to a report published in 2020 by the World Organization Against Torture.”

Duterte is claiming that he’s innocent, but if he isn’t, his system has to be considered the ultimate drug-war crackdown. Just think about it. No constitutional technicalities to follow. No reading of Miranda rights. No criminal defense attorneys. No due process of law. No jury trials.  

Just imagine U.S. officials establishing a system in which the cops are empowered to kill anyone they suspect is violating the drug laws. What could be better than that, at least from the perspective of a drug-war proponent, right?

Well, except for one thing. They still haven’t won the drug war in the Philippines! They’re still fighting. And from the way things look, they will be fighting forever, just like American drug warriors!

If the killing spree in the Philippines hasn’t worked to win the war on drugs, isn’t that a good sign that no crackdown, no matter how vicious, can ever succeed in winning the war on drugs? 

I suppose a drug-war proponent could say, “Jacob, bring in the military and have them fight the drug war as viciously as they fought the Taliban.” But at the risk of belaboring the obvious, the military lost its war against the Taliban. Moreover, when Mexico used its military to fight to the drug war, the results was tens of thousands of innocent people killed, with no end in sight to the drug war.

I’ve got a better idea, a libertarian idea: Let’s just end the drug war by legalizing all drugs. No more drug-war searches, arrests, harassment, incarceration, or killings. Just leave people free to ingest whatever they want. Leave drug rehabilitation to private groups, like Alcoholics Anonymous. 

Legalizing drugs would immediately put all drug lords out of business because they couldn’t compete against legitimate pharmacies and other businesses. It would enable drug addicts to secure sound drugs rather than the polluted drugs that they are forced to buy on the black market and that often lead to their deaths. It would encourage people with drug problems to openly seek treatment. And it would put the entire drug-war enforcement bureaucracy out of business, which would save taxpayers a ton of money.

No crackdown, no matter how vicious, will ever end up winning the war on drugs. The drug war will continue to destroy our civil liberties and bring ever-increasing violence to our land.

More important though is a fundamental principle of liberty: People have the fundamental right to ingest whatever they want, no matter how harmful. 

For those two reasons — the futility of winning the war on drugs and the freedom of the individual — there is no reason for Congress or the states to continue the drug war one day longer. To move toward a free, peaceful, prosperous, healthy, and harmonious society, they need to legalize drugs — all drugs — now.

No Militarization of Space Act

Karl Grossman

Finally, there’s some good news about the U.S. push to turn space into a war zone. The “No Militarization of Space Act” has been introduced in the U.S. Congress. It would abolish the new U.S. Space Force.

It is being sponsored by five members of the House of Representatives led by Representative Jared Huffman. In a statement announcing the September 22nd introduction of the measure, Huffman called the U.S. Space Force “costly and unnecessary.”

The arms and aerospace industries, which have a central role in U.S. space military activities, will no doubt be super-active in coming weeks working to stop movement of the legislation.

Representative Huffman, with a background as a consumer attorney specializing in public interest cases, was elected in 2012 to represent the 2^nd Congressional District in California which covers the state’s North Coast up to the Oregon border. He resides in San Rafael.

In his statement announcing the introduction of the bill, Huffman said the “long-standing neutrality of space has fostered a competitive, non-militarized age of exploration every nation and generation has valued since the first days of space travel. But since its creation under the former Trump administration, the Space Force has threatened longstanding peace and flagrantly wasted billions of taxpayer dollars.” And, he continued: “It’s time we turn our attention back to where it belongs: addressing urgent domestic and international priorities like battling COVID-19, climate change, and growing economic inequality. Our mission must be to support the American people, not spend billions on the militarization of space.”

Co-sponsors of the “No Militarization of Space Act” are Representatives Mark Pocan of Wisconsin, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus; Maxine Waters of California; Rashida Tlaib of Michigan; and Jesus Garcia of Illinois. All are Democrats.

Alice Slater, a board member of the organization World BEYOND War, commented that Trump, “in his besotted hunkering for hegemonic glory,” established the Space Force as “a brand new branch of the already gargantuan military juggernaut….Sadly, the new U.S. President Biden has done nothing to ratchet down the warmongering. Fortunately, help is on the way with a group of five sane members of Congress.”

But not only has Joe Biden stuck with the U.S. Space Force, but most Democrats in both the House of Representatives and Senate voted for its creation as championed by Trump. All Republicans in Congress voted for it.

“With Biden’s ‘full support,’ the Space Force is officially here to stay,” Defense News headlined this year: Its article opened: “U.S. President Joe Biden will not seek to eliminate the Space Force and roll military space functions back into the Air Force, the White House confirmed.” It quoted White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki telling reporters at a February press conference: “We’re not revisiting the decision.”

The Space Force was established in 2019 as the sixth branch of U.S. armed forces after President Donald Trump asserted that “it is not enough to merely have an American presence in space. We must have American dominance in space.”

Slater in discussing the Huffman legislation pointed to “repeated calls from Russia and China on the United States to negotiate a treaty to ban weapons in space” and how the U.S. “has blocked all discussion”

“Only last week,” said Slater, “in a speech to a United Nations conference in Geneva, Li Song, China’s ambassador for disarmament affairs, urged the U.S. to stop being a ‘stumbling block’ to preventing an arms race in outer space noting its disrespect for treaties, starting with the end of the Cold War, and its repeated intentions to dominate and control space.”

The major international treaty on space is the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 which sets aside space for peaceful purposes and prohibits the deployment of weapons of mass destruction. It was put together by the United States, the former Soviet Union and Great Britain. Craig Eisendrath, who as a young U.S. State Department office was involved in the Outer Space Treaty’s creation, has said “we sought to de-weaponize space before it got weaponized…to keep war out of space.”

For decades, China, Russia and U.S. neighbor Canada have sought to broaden that treaty with a Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space (PAROS) treaty. It would ban the placement of all weapons in space. However, it must be approved by the UN’s Conference on Disarmament before being enacted—and for that a there must be unanimous vote by nations in the conference. The U.S. has refused to support the PAROS treaty, blocking its passage.

The speech last week that Slater was referring to at the UN in Geneva was reported on by the South China Morning Post. It quoted Li Song as saying the U.S. should “stop being a ‘stumbling block’” on the PAROS treaty and going on: “After the end of the Cold War, and especially in the past two decades, the U.S. has tried its best to get rid of its international obligations, refused to be bound by new treaties and long resisted multilateral negotiations on PAROS. To put it bluntly, the U.S. wants to dominate outer space.”

Li said: “If space is not effectively prevented from becoming a battlefield, then the ‘rules of space traffic’ will be no more than a ‘code of space warfare.’”

Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of The Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space, said: “The Global Network congratulates Representatives Huffman and his co-sponsors for their truthful and valiant introduction of a bill to abolish the wasteful and provocative Space Force. There can be no question that we do not need a new arms race in space at the very time climate crisis is raging, our medical care system is collapsing, and the wealth divide is growing beyond imagination. How dare we even consider spending trillions of dollars so the U.S. can become the ‘Master of Space’!” said Gagnon referring to the “Master of Space” motto of a component of the Space Force.

“War in space signifies a deep spiritual disconnection from all that matters most on our Mother Earth,” he said. “We encourage every living, breathing American citizen to contact their congressional representatives and demand they support this bill to get rid of Space Force.”

The Huffman legislation, if approved, would be part of the National Defense Authorization Act for 2022, the annual bill that authorizes military spending. The U.S. Space Force has a budget this year of $15.5 billion and has requested a budget of $17.4 billion for 2022 to “grow the service,” reports Air Force Magazine. “Space Force 2022 Budget Adds Satellites, Warfighting Center, More Guardians,” was the headline of its article.

The U.S. Space Force “received its first offensive weapon… satellite jammers,” reported American Military News in 2020. “The weapon does not destroy enemy satellites, but can be used to interrupt enemy satellite communications and hinder enemy early warning systems meant to detect a U.S. attack,” it stated. Soon afterwards, the Financial Times’ headline: “U.S military officials eye new generation of space weapons.” In 2001, the headline on the c4isrnet.com website, which describes itself as “Media for the Intelligence Age Military,” declared: “The Space Force wants to use directed-energy systems for space superiority.”