Google To Enable the Chrome Anti-Notification Spam System in July 2020 Google announced this week plans to enable its new anti-notification spam system in Chrome over the summer, with the release of Chrome 84, on July 12, 2020. From a report: Known internally as the "quieter notification permission UI," this Chrome component works by blocking sites from showing notification requests, which are hidden under an icon in the Chrome URL bar (on desktop) or under a toolbar (on mobile). Google first announced the "quieter notification permission UI" in January, and shipped it in February, in Chrome 80, in a limited, user opt-in fashion. But in a blog post, Google said the new UI and its ability to detect spammy notification popups has been improved and will roll out enabled by default for all users in July, with the release of Chrome 84.
SpaceXs Starship SN4 Launch Vehicle Prototype Explodes After Static Engine Fire Test SpaceX had just conducted yet another static fire test of the Raptor engine in its Starship SN4 prototype launch vehicle on Friday when the test vehicle exploded on the test stand in Boca Chica, Texas. TechCrunch reports: This was the fourth static fire test of this engine on this prototype, so its unclear what went wrong vs. other static fire attempts. This was a test in the development of Starship, a new spacecraft that SpaceX has been developing in Boca Chica. Eventually, the company hopes to use it to replace its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rocket, but Starship is still very early in its development phase, whereas those vehicles are flight-proven, multiple times over. SpaceX had just secured FAA approval to fly its Starship prototype for short, suborbital test flights earlier this week. The goal was to fly this SN4 prototype for short distances following static fire testing, but that clearly wont be possible now, as the vehicle appears to have been completely destroyed in the explosion following Fridays test, as you can see in the stream from NASASpaceflight.com. The explosion occurred around 1:49 PM local time in Texas, roughly two minutes after it had completed its engine test fire.
Twitter, Reddit Challenge US Rules Forcing Visa Applicants To Disclose Their Social Media Handles Twitter and Reddit have filed an amicus brief in support of a lawsuit challenging a U.S. government rule change compelling visa applicants to disclose their social media handles. From a report: The lawsuit, brought by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, the Brennan Center for Justice, and law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, seeks to undo both the State Departments requirement that visa applicants must disclose their social media handles prior to obtaining a U.S. visa, as well as related rules over the retention and dissemination of those records. Last year, the State Department began asking visa applicants for their current and former social media usernames, a move that affects millions non-citizens applying to travel to the United States each year. The rule change was part of the Trump administrations effort to expand its "enhanced" screening protocols. At the time, it was reported that the information would be used if the State Department determines that "such information is required to confirm identity or conduct more rigorous national security vetting."
Google Rescinds Offers To Thousands of Contract Workers Google, facing an advertising slump caused by the pandemic, has rescinded offers to several thousand people who had agreed to work at the company as temporary and contract workers. From a report: "Were slowing our pace of hiring and investment, and are not bringing on as many new starters as we had planned at the beginning of the year," Google said in an email to contracting agencies last week that was seen by The New York Times. The company told the firms that it "will not be moving forward to onboard" the people that the agencies had recruited to work at Google. The move affected more than 2,000 people globally who had signed offers with the agencies to be a contract or temp worker, according to three people familiar with the decision, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not allowed to speak publicly on the matter. Google employs more than 130,000 contractors and temp workers, a shadow work force that outnumbers its 123,000 full-time employees. Googles full-time staff are rewarded with high salaries and generous perks, but temps and contractors often receive less pay, fewer benefits and do not have the same protections, even though they work alongside full timers.
Why Remote Work Is So Hard -- and How It Can Be Fixed Cal Newport, writing at the New Yorker: Technological transitions often stumble when we expect them to sprint. In 1989, the Stanford economist Paul David wanted to understand why so many companies were so slow to adopt computer technology; for historical perspective, he turned to the history of the electric dynamo, which had been invented around a hundred years before, and which, before it transformed industrial production, had also been adopted slowly. In his paper "The Dynamo and the Computer: An Historical Perspective on the Modern Productivity Paradox," published in the American Economic Review, David explained that, at the turn of the century, most factories were powered by massive central steam engines. The engines turned overhead shafts, which were connected by an intricate array of belts and pulleys to close-packed machinery. When electric motors were first introduced, factory owners tried to integrate them into their existing setups; often, theyd simply replace the hulking steam engine with a giant electric dynamo. This introduced some conveniences -- no one had to shovel coal -- but also created complexities. It was hard to keep all the electrical components working; many factory owners opted to stay with steam. It took decades for factory owners to figure out how to make the most of electric power. Eventually, they discovered that the best approach was to put a small motor on each individual piece of machinery. Since a factory no longer needed to draw power from a central engine, its equipment could be spread out. This, in turn, changed the nature of industrial architecture. Buildings that no longer required reinforced ceilings to house shafts, belts, and pulleys could incorporate windows and skylights, of the sort we know today from urban loft buildings. Inertia, David found, had been part of the problem. Factory owners who had spent a lot of money and time building physical plants organized around central-drive trains were reluctant to commit to complex, expensive overhauls. There were imaginative obstacles: powering each machine with its own individual motor may seem like an obvious idea now, but in fact it represented a sharp break from the centralized-power model that had dominated for the previous hundred and fifty years. Finally, technological barriers stood in the way -- small issues, compared to the invention of electricity, but persistent and important ones nonetheless. Someone, for instance, had to figure out how to construct a building-wide power grid capable of handling the massively variable load created by many voltage-hungry mini-motors being turned off and on unpredictably. Until that happened, it was central power or bust. In some respects, we may be in an electric-dynamo moment for remote work. In theory, we have the technology we need to make remote work workable. And yet most companies that have tried to graft it onto their existing setups have found only mixed success. In response, many have stuck with what they know. Now the coronavirus pandemic has changed the equation. Whole workplaces have gone remote; steam engines have been outlawed. The question is whether, having been forced to embrace this new technology, we can solve the long-standing problems that have thwarted its adoption in the past. Some useful innovation is possible on an individual level. As a newly minted remote worker, you may find that demands on your attention are actually more incessant and intrusive than they used to be -- a natural consequence when a workplace depends more than ever on phone calls, e-mails, and video conferences. You might respond by consolidating all of your appointments into a given half of the day -- say, between 1 p.m. and 5 p.m. -- preserving the other hours, by default, for actually working on the items discussed.
NSA Warns of New Sandworm Attacks on Email Servers The US National Security Agency (NSA) has published a security alert warning of a new wave of cyberattacks against email servers, attacks conducted by one of Russias most advanced cyber-espionage units. From a report: The NSA says that members of Unit 74455 of the GRU Main Center for Special Technologies (GTsST), a division of the Russian military intelligence service, have been attacking email servers running the Exim mail transfer agent (MTA). Also known as "Sandworm," this group has been hacking Exim servers since August 2019 by exploiting a critical vulnerability tracked as CVE-2019-10149, the NSA said in a security alert shared today with ZDNet. "When Sandworm exploited CVE-2019-10149, the victim machine would subsequently download and execute a shell script from a Sandworm-controlled domain," the NSA says.
Google Makes Sharing Plus Codes Easier in a Push To Simplify Addressing System Globally Two years ago, Google open-sourced Plus Codes, a digital addressing system to help billions of people navigate to places that dont have clear addresses. The company said this week it is making it easier for anyone with an Android device to share its rendition of an address -- a six-digit alphanumeric code. From a report: Google Maps users on Android can now tap the blue dot that represents their current location to view and share their unique six-digit coordinate with friends. Anyone with the code can look it up on Google Maps or Google Search to get the precise location of the destination. The codes look like this: G6G4+CJ Delhi, India. Google says it divides the geographical surface of the world into tiled areas and attributes a unique six-letter code and the name of the city and country to each of them. More than 2 billion people on the planet either dont have an address or have an address that isnt easy to locate. This challenge is more prevalent in developed markets such as India where a street address could often be as long as a paragraph, and where people often rely on nearby landmarks to navigate their way.
Translation From VC-Backed PR Jargon To English of Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitzs Statement That Hes Stepping Down From a company-wide memo sent by Rony Abovitz, the founder of Magic Leap, which has raised nearly $3 billion from high-profile investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Google, AT&T, NTT DoCoMo, Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, JP Morgan, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers: As weve shared over the last several weeks, in order to set Magic Leap on a course for success, we have pivoted to focus on delivering a spatial computing platform for enterprise. Technology columnist John Gruber, translates: As nearly everyone has finally realized, our actual technology is nothing at all like what we promised, lied about for years, and sold gullible deep-pocketed investors on. Our con is falling apart at the seams, so well milk the last few dollars out of the only investors dumb enough to give us even more money, by repeating the word "enterprise" and doing that thing with our fingers like Obi-Wan Kenobi. Magic Leaps memo adds: We have closed significant new funding and have very positive momentum towards closing key strategic enterprise partnerships. Gruber, continues translation: Youre not going to believe this but we somehow raised another $350 million. I know, right? Magic Leap: As the board and I planned the changes we made and what Magic Leap needs for this next focused phase, it became clear to us that a change in my role was a natural next step. Gruber: Everyone agrees the jig is up. Magic Leap: I discussed this with the board and we have agreed that now is the time to bring in a new CEO who can help us to commercialize our focused plan for spatial computing in enterprise. We have been actively recruiting candidates for this role and I look forward to sharing more soon. Gruber: Our Craigslist ad: "Florida company seeks Bernie Madoff type." Magic Leap: I have been leading Magic Leap since 2011 (starting in my garage). We have created a new field. A new medium. And together we have defined the future of computing. Gruber: No one will remember us or anything weve donea--aunless Netflix makes one of those documentaries like the Fyre Festival one. I love that movie. Which makes me think maybe we should change our Craigslist ad to "Billy McFarland type." Actually, when does he get out of prison?
Twitter Flags Trump and White House Tweets About Minneapolis Protests for Glorifying Violence Twitter placed a notice on a tweet from President Trump, shielding it from view for breaking what the company said are its rules about glorifying violence [Editors note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. From a report: Mr. Trumps tweet was a comment on the violent protests in Minnesota. The post can now only be seen after users click a box with a notice saying it violated Twitters rules against encouraging violence, but it otherwise remains visible. "Weve taken action in the interest of preventing others from being inspired to commit violent acts, but have kept the Tweet on Twitter because it is important that the public still be able to see the Tweet given its relevance to ongoing matters of public importance," Twitter said on its official communications account. This is the first time such a step has been taken against a head of state for breaking Twitters rules about glorifying violence, a company spokesman said. The company said users ability to interact with the tweet will be limited, and that users can retweet it with comment, but not like, reply to, or otherwise retweet it. "...These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I wont let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!," Mr. Trumps tweet said. The official account of the White House, which tweeted Trumps message, has been flagged as well.
Miss Your Office? Some Companies Are Building Virtual Replicas An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Stay-home orders and the shuttering of workplaces have given corporate employees some respite from getting dragged into time-wasting water-cooler conversations. But some companies and their employees dont want to leave everything about the office behind, it turns out, and are replicating their offices in "SimCity"-like simulations online. File-transfer service WeTransfer BV opened its virtual space on May 1, almost seven weeks after closing its physical offices in New York, Los Angeles and Amsterdam as part of the global effort to slow the spread of the new coronavirus. Graphics reminiscent of early "Tomb Raider" videogames depict a version of the companys Dutch headquarters, adapted to include pool tables, techno music and in-jokes such as a "memorial" library named for the very- much-alive chief creative officer. Staff roam around in the form of avatars such as robots and panda bears. Gordon Willoughby, the chief executive of WeTransfer, said the platform helps provide the social experience of office life in the way that Zoom calls and Slack have replaced business meetings and desk-side chats. That is particularly valuable for recent hires, he said. [...] Although clients can use Breakroom to create their office utopia, the platform also enables real-world elements such additional privileges for senior staff. In Sine Waves own virtual world, senior members can lock the boardroom, which is located on top of a hill overlooking the rest of the office.
Artificial Immortality Seneca, the ancient philosopher, posited that the day of our death heralds the birth of eternity. The tantalizing prospect of evading death propels our exploration of immortality, now intertwined with the evolution of technology. This juncture marks a critical phase, where failure to adapt may lead... Sat, 07 Oct 2023 16:41:03 +0000
The World's Most Dangerous Arms Dealer Karl Lee, also known as Li Fangwei, emerges as a shadowy figure in the world of arms dealing and the proliferation of missile-related technologies, with multiple international intelligence agencies relentlessly pursuing him. His origins in a remote region of China during the tumultuous era of Mao... Sun, 10 Sep 2023 14:00:39 +0000
Driven by the expansion of new technologies such as artificial intelligence and the need for economic growth in developing countries, there is zero chance that Net Zero will be achieved by 2050
Pennsylvania legislators have introduced a good bill to ban gene therapy products such as mRNA technology from being injected into the food supply. Senate Bill 883 would also mandate […]
Ohio Legislative Bill SB 144 would trivialize very real vaccine risks and serious reactions by allowing pharmacy technicians and interns to administer vaccines. The bill would also lower the […]
The authors of the papers are being attacked and say that “activist scientists” threatened by the new findings are “aggressively conducting an orchestrated disinformation campaign to discredit the papers and the scientific reputation of the authors.”
Indeed, from insults on social media and furious blog posts to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests demanding emails from a journal editor and federal scientist, the controversy is getting heated.
Several scientists who spoke with The Epoch Times expressed shock at the tactics used against those whose latest research is casting renewed doubts on the official climate narrative.
William Happer, Princeton professor emeritus of physics and former climate adviser to President Donald Trump, wasn't surprised by the response to the new findings.
“Of course the climate cult will be dismissive of any information no matter how scientifically correct that is politically incorrect," he told The Epoch Times, noting that the new findings made important and valid points.
The reason that climate activists are so upset is that the findings of the new papers a trio of peer-reviewed studies by astrophysicist Willie Soon and dozens of other scientists from around the world are casting further doubt on the narrative of man-made global warming.
The papers are also fueling even more public skepticism about the U.N Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which the authors say ignores the facts as well as climate science more generally.
The rhetoric employed by taxpayer-funded scientists with a vested interest in the climate change narrative to attack the new research was profoundly unscientific, multiple scientists told The Epoch Times.
Atmospheric science professor Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University, for instance, denounced the authors of one of the new papers as “a group of climate denier [clown emoji]” on X.
Mr. Mann, famous for the now-widely ridiculed “hockey stick” graph purporting to show massive man-made warming, also described the editor of the journal Climate as a “denier clown.”
Gareth S. Jones with the UK Met Office ridiculed the new studies as "nonsense," while smearing the journal publisher for supposedly being "popular with the science denial community."
Mr. Jones also denounced the guest editor of Climate’s special issue, Ned Nikolov, for having a "bit of a reputation, so much so that other climate contrarians distance themselves from him."
Mr. Nikolov authored an earlier paper arguing that atmospheric pressure, not greenhouse gases, plays a primary role in temperatures on Earth and on other celestial bodies.
Also chiming in to attack the new papers and the scientists behind them was Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who's using a FOIA request to demand all of Mr. Nikolov’s emails with relevant scientists.
Mr. Schmidt mocked Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore, one of the authors, saying on X that there was “mo[o]re [expletive] going around” before posting a highly edited version of Mr. Moore’s post on social media.
“The only point of this paper (which every climate denier and their dog has jumped onto), is to launder dirty ‘science’ into a clean made-for-Fox meme,” Mr. Schmidt wrote on X before publishing a more detailed rebuttal on his blog Real Climate.
“The latest contrarian crowd pleaser from Soon et al (2023) is just the latest repetition of the old ‘it was the sun wot done it’ trope[1] that Willie Soon and his colleagues have been pushing for decades,” argued Mr. Schmidt, whose federal salary is almost $200,000 per year. “There is literally nothing new under the sun.”
Scientists Respond
The blog post by Mr. Schmidt “is dismissive in an insubstantive way,” said climatologist Judith Curry, who wasn't involved in the new papers but previously served as chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
“The response by Schmidt, Mann, and others, particularly with regard to the FOIA request regarding editorial discussions on this paper, reflects their ongoing attempts to control the scientific as well as public dialogue on climate change,” she told The Epoch Times. “In my opinion, their behavior not only reflects poorly on them but is damaging to climate science.”
Ms. Curry, author of "Climate Uncertainty and Risk," who has a post by the lead authors on her blog Climate Etc. to provide a forum for discussion, said the new paper raises “an important issue that is swept under the rug by the IPCC and many climate scientists.”
In particular, it has major implications for how 20th-century climate records are interpreted, she said.
“Further, the issue of the urban heat island effect on global land temperatures remains unresolved, which is also highlighted in the Soon et al. paper,” she said, calling it “a useful contribution to the climate science literature.”
Mr. Soon, the main author of the paper and a principal with the Center for Environmental Research and Earth Sciences (CERES), explained that the three new papers by CERES scientists are a major threat to powerful vested interests.
“For over three decades, the claims and conclusions by U.N. IPCC reports reigned supreme, unquestioned and unchallenged,” Mr. Soon, who was previously with the solar and stellar physics division of the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told The Epoch Times. “Our latest series of three published papers show that those claims are scientifically empty.
“Our results appear to rock the weak foundation of IPCC, and this must be the reason why you are seeing such instantaneous rejection and outright complaining by activists like Schmidt and Mann.”
Mr. Soon and some of the other scientists involved in the new papers published another groundbreaking study in 2021 showing that solar activity could explain all observed warming.
In a highly unusual development for complex scientific studies, that paper has been downloaded more than 55,000 times since it was published.
“The high level of attention to this paper by people hungry for truth might be the real threats that Schmidt and Mann are worrying about,” Mr. Soon said, pointing to a detailed response to the attacks from critics published on CERES-Science.com, titled "The orchestrated disinformation campaign by RealClimate.org to falsely discredit and censor our work."
Mr. Happer noted that the new paper by Mr. Soon and the other authors, headlined “The Detection and Attribution of Northern Hemisphere Land Surface Warming,” is indeed significant.
The two important and valid points are that there are “huge uncertainties” surrounding how much warming there has been since 1850 and how much of that might be due to human activities, he said.
“The paper presents very strong evidence that a warming bias is built into the records from urban areas,” Mr. Happer told The Epoch Times after reviewing the paper, which he wasn't involved with.
“This extra warming of urban versus rural areas is not caused by increasing concentrations of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. It is caused by humans, but it cannot be reversed by ruinous net-zero policies.”
Mr. Happer, who believes that human CO2 emissions are responsible for “a relatively small contribution” to the “modest warming” that has been observed, agreed with the paper’s conclusion that available data isn't good enough to determine how significant the various factors, such as volcanoes, solar irradiance, and greenhouse gas emissions, are to the warming.
Marc Morano, editor of the popular website Climate Depot, told The Epoch Times that the aggressive reaction to the new papers was an effort to silence dissent from the U.N.-backed narrative.
“The climate establishment is mimicking the same coercive tactics that we saw in COVID,” he said. “If you present any scientific challenge to the official narrative, you are the deplatformed, canceled, censored, and silenced.”
Indeed, the United Nations and other powerful groups are actively working to silence other views on the issue. U.N. Undersecretary-General for Global Communications Melissa Fleming is waging war on what she calls climate “disinformation.”
While insurgents were flying across the Israeli border on paragliders, a series of coordinated attacks left more than 1200 Israelis dead, many at a music festival on the Gaza border.
A day later, in response to the tragedy, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir announced that the country would be taking a series of actions to loosen its strict gun control laws.
Of course, with videos of Hamas gunmen kicking in doors in an Israeli village near the border, it's not hard to understand why the government of Israel is starting to second-guess its strict gun control laws.
The truth is the individual right of the people to keep and bear arms is "necessary to the security of a free state."
That's something that Americans understand. There's no need to fear an invading force of paragliders, (or any force at all, really) coming over the US border. Even if the military didn't immediately take care of the threat, American citizens would convert their F-150s into makeshift technicals and squash the invaders with overwhelming firepower.
Israel is currently passing out thousands of "weapons of war" to civilian security teams.
This is a complete 180 from when the Israeli Defense Forces were DISARMING people & leaving them with only a pistol and 50 rounds of ammunition.
Israel's gun culture is fraught with civilian firearm restrictions. And to make matters worse, the Israel Defense Forces have spent the last few years confiscating guns from local civilian security forces.
This confiscation has led to Israeli civilians being outgunned as they defend their homes. While Hamas terrorists invaded with machine guns, grenades, and missiles, these Israeli gun owners were forced to fight back with only a single handgun and 50 rounds of ammunition each, the maximum allowed by law.
But while the changes in Israel's Firearms Licensing Division will no doubt benefit self-defenders held up by bureaucracy and paperwork, those who are eligible to carry firearms under the new rules will still have "to undergo a telephone interview" and may have to wait up to "a week" for approval.
Even then, Israeli gun owners can only purchase a meager 100 rounds of ammunition. That's not even enough ammo for a good range day.
As of the writing of this article, the license application portal is down, likely due to overwhelming demand.
That means even citizens who qualify under this may-issue permitting system can't apply for that "speedy" telephone interview.
Instead of ammunition restrictions, waiting periods, and bureaucratic firearm licensing, Israel needs a Second Amendment protecting individuals' right to keep and bear arms for self-defense.
🚨BREAKING: Residents of a small settlement of roughly 30,000 are now eligible for their may-issue firearms license in Israel. This is a good but very small step. How were these people ineligible before?
American politicians who sit horrified by the scenes unfolding in Israel should stop attempting to strip law-abiding citizens of their Second Amendment rights and consider the unknown number of terrorists who may have crossed the southern US border undetected.
Our 2nd amendment is the BEST protection from every threat.
If you are armed, you can protect yourself from criminals or terrorists who want to hurt you and your family.
And the 2A gives us all the right to protect ourselves from a tyrannical government.
Over the past decades, progress towards gender parity in varying societal and economic contexts has advanced, albeit slowly in some places.
While, for example, literacy in females has caught up to that of their male counterparts since the 1970s, Statista's Florian Zandt notes that many scientific fields are still heavily male-dominated. This is especially true for STEM jobs.
Statista's chart, based on data from the National Center for Education Statistics, shows that progress towards a more equal distribution of conferred degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics was barely achieved over the past ten years.
In the academic year ending in 2021, more than 60 percent of all bachelor's, master's and doctorate degrees in United States postsecondary education institutions were awarded to men. The share distribution is even more tilted towards males for tertiary education below or at associate's degrees. The former are comprised of certificates not necessarily leading to an undergraduate degree, while the latter are typically awarded after completing community college or similar institutions. Here, 71 percent of degree holders in the academic year of 2020-21 were male. Still, associate degrees saw the most substantial shift towards a more equitable distribution over the past ten years, while the share of doctorate degrees awarded to females in STEM studies remained virtually the same.
Overall, around 800,000 STEM degrees were conferred in the academic year of 2020-21, an increase of 42 percent compared to ten years prior.
In terms of total associate's, bachelor's, master's and doctorate degrees awarded in the United States in 2021, STEM degrees account for around 20 percent.
For the past century, it’s been a mainstay of the science-fiction genre: the medicated society a society in which the majority of the population is given some form of drug to alter their behaviour, ostensibly for the better.
The most famous example of the genre is, of course, Aldous Huxley’s novel "Brave New World," published in 1932. In Huxley’s vision of the 26th century, the drug Soma is used to ensure the obedience of the lower classes of a “perfect” eugenic world where people are bred specifically for the social function they perform.
More recently, in the Christian Bale film "Equilibrium" (2002), the citizens of a totalitarian city-state must take an emotion-killing drug as a means to prevent war. Those who refuse to take the drug, called Prozium, are labeled “sense offenders” and are violently hunted down and sentenced to death by a special caste of “clerics.” Art, literature, and any expression of human emotion and creativity are prohibited.
Science-fiction writers return again and again to these scenarios because they raise fundamental questions about the nature of authority and social control. In doing so, they also ask us to question what it is that makes us truly human.
Would it be desirable to eliminate human imperfection with something as simple as a pill? Would the loss of certain “negative” or “destructive” aspects of our humanity be justified by the net gain to social order and the reduction in suffering? And would it be better to try to persuade ordinary people to surrender these aspects of themselves voluntarily for the greater good, or would an “enlightened” class of rulers have every reason to force people to do so, perhaps even without their knowledge?
The dramatization and the fictional settings shouldn't blind us to the fact that such possibilities are very real. Very real and very close. Just how close has been revealed by new figures from Public Health Scotland, which show that more than a million men and women, close to a quarter of Scotland’s adult population, are now being prescribed anti-depressants, powerful drugs with wide-ranging effects on mood and physical health. This probably makes Scotland the nation with the highest rate of anti-depressant use in the world. In the United States, by contrast, around 15 percent of adults are on anti-depressants, which is still, by any metric, a lot.
It’s not just anti-depressants that Scots are swallowing in record numbers. According to figures published by the Mail on Sunday, more than a third of Scottish adults are now being prescribed drugs from one of five broad classes associated with mental health issues. This includes a further 200,000 adults taking benzodiazepines, which are prescribed for anxiety and insomnia, and 190,000 who take gabapentinoids. Another 130,000 adults are given so-called z-drugs (such as zopiclone and zolpidem), and more than 800,000 are on opioid-based pain medication.
A situation like this doesn’t emerge overnight. It’s taken decades for Scotland to reach this point. The problem was already bad enough in 2007, when the ruling Scottish National Party (SNP) first came to power, that the government made a pledge to reduce the country’s dependency on anti-depressants. Instead, the figures have risen every year since. By 2010, 630,000 adults were taking anti-depressants, and an extra 390,000 were added over the next 12 years. There’s no reason to believe the trend won’t continue.
Politicians are now asking serious questions. Conservative Member of the Scottish Parliament Maurice Golden told the Mail on Sunday: “The sheer number of prescriptions being issued for depression and anxiety in Scotland is astonishing. The fact it has risen so considerably requires urgent and serious attention from the Scottish Government.
“There was a time when the SNP pledged to reduce the rise in these prescriptions, but it has only ever gone in this direction since.”
So why is this happening? A representative from Scotland’s Royal College of Psychiatrists, Dr. Jane Morris, suggested it may simply be due to increased public knowledge of mental health issues and the treatments on offer.
“We’d like to think public education and awareness of the treatability of mental illness means that more people are coming forward,” she told the Mail on Sunday.
On this view, the number of people suffering from depression would be fixed, more or less: All that actually changes is how many people decide to seek treatment. We’re supposed to conclude, then, that at least a quarter of the adult population of Scotland has always been depressed. You don’t need to be an expert to have serious doubts that this could ever actually be the case. Dr. Morris did at least acknowledge that “increased prescribing may now reflect a rise in Scotland’s need for mental health treatment.”
Getting to the bottom of the problem is likely to prove difficult. And the difficulties are only made more acute by the fact that anti-depressants don’t really work.
The state of depression research is shockingly limited. Even after decades of scientific study, there’s still no evidence that the dominant chemical explanation for depression serotonin deficiency is true. And yet the doctors of Scotland, and doctors throughout the Western world, continue prescribing selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (“SSRIs”) on the assumption that serotonin levels are the issue.
Many studies have shown that anti-depressants are barely more effective at improving mood than placebo. The improvement is so small that some scientists argue it’s really non-existent. Access to these minimal benefits is also unevenly distributed among users. A large-scale meta-analysis in the British Medical Journal, considering data from 232 studies of anti-depressant use dating back to 1979, showed that just 15 percent of users experienced an improvement they would not have derived from the placebo, with the remaining 85 percent gaining no benefit from their use.
Those who should supposedly benefit the most from anti-depressants sufferers of severe depression, comorbid anxiety, and suicidal thoughts may actually benefit the least from their use. Most clinical trials of anti-depressants deliberately exclude these people, resulting in misleading claims being directed at the drugs’ main target consumers.
If Scotland is facing an enormous mental health crisis, and there’s no reason to believe it isn’t, anti-depressants are unlikely to be the answer. Their blanket use is just complicating matters further. Not least of all because they introduce a range of unpleasant side-effects, ranging from widely publicized loss of libido and sexual function, to gastrointestinal problems, dizziness, insomnia, headaches, loss of or increase in appetite, and even suicidal ideation and self-harm, especially in the early stages of use.
But, more fundamentally, our reliance on drugs that don’t really even work is preventing us from understanding the root causes of depression and devising new ways real ways that work to address them.
This is a textbook case of what the philosopher Ivan Illich called “iatrogenesis,” or “medically caused harm.” In his famous book "Medical Nemesis" (1975), Illich argued that the growing medicalization of society is having the paradoxical effect of making us less and less well. In particular, what medicalization does, according to Illich, is reduce our capacity to respond to our problems of health and well-being in suitable ways.
When we see illness simply as an issue to be solved by technical interventions with pills, injections, and surgery administered to us by an anointed class of experts, we lose the ability to see illness on any other terms, as anything else. Like, for example, the product of a mismatch between our nature as human beings, stretching back 200,000+ years, and the very different social world we now inhabit. There’s no pill or surgery that can cure that.
I make the case repeatedly in my work that the modern industrial diet, consisting of more and more processed food, and our unprecedented exposure to harmful industrial chemicals are making us deeply unwell, including causing a precipitous decline in markers of reproductive health such as sperm counts and testosterone levels. I think depression is part and parcel of this too. In the last few weeks, new research has shown, for instance, that consumption of processed food, especially products containing artificial sweeteners, can increase depression risk by up to 50 percent, and that elevated exposure to phthalates, a class of ubiquitous chemicals found in everything from personal-care products to plastic bottles, can significantly increase the risk of post-partum depression in new mothers.
There's still much investigation to be done of what's clearly a very complex issue. But we would be fools not to heed the warnings of the thinkers who have shown us, on the page and on the screen, the dangers of a world of total medication. If we really want to do something about the massive rise in depression, in Scotland or anywhere else, we must face the possibility of a new Brave New World: one in which pills are not the answer to all our problems.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.
A new study, based on the analysis of growth rings in ancient trees, suggests that the most powerful solar storm on record slammed into Earth approximately 14,300 years ago. Should a storm of that intensity strike today, modern society would instantly collapse.
Researchers from the Collège de France, CEREGE, IMBE, Aix-Marseille University, and the University of Leeds published the new study in the Royal Society A journal. They measured radiocarbon levels in ancient trees preserved within the eroded banks of the Drouzet River near Gap, in the Southern French Alps, and found "tree trunks, which are subfossils – remains whose fossilization process is not complete – were sliced into tiny single tree-rings. Analysis of these individual rings identified an unprecedented spike in radiocarbon levels occurring precisely 14,300 years ago."
They said, "By comparing this radiocarbon spike with measurements of beryllium, a chemical element found in Greenland ice cores, the team proposes that the spike was caused by a massive solar storm that would have ejected huge volumes of energetic particles into Earth's atmosphere."
"Radiocarbon is constantly being produced in the upper atmosphere through a chain of reactions initiated by cosmic rays." Edouard Bard, lead author of the study, said in a statement.
Bard said, "Recently, scientists have found that extreme solar events including solar flares and coronal mass ejections can also create short-term bursts of energetic particles which are preserved as huge spikes in radiocarbon production occurring over the course of just a single year."
The researchers warned if "similar massive solar storms" slammed into Earth today, it would be "catastrophic for modern technological society, potentially wiping out telecommunications, satellite systems and electricity grids."
The study's co-author, Tim Heaton, a radiocarbon expert at the University of Leeds in England, explained, "Extreme solar storms could have huge impacts on Earth. Such super storms could permanently damage the transformers in our electricity grids, resulting in huge and widespread blackouts lasting months. They could also result in permanent damage to the satellites that we all rely on for navigation and telecommunication, leaving them unusable. They would also create severe radiation risks to astronauts."
Researchers said nine extreme solar storms - known as Miyake Events - have been identified over the last 15,000 years. The last known major solar storm fried telegraph machines in 1859 - has been called the "Carrington Event."
Solar Cycle 25 has been underway since April 2019 and might peak sometime in 2025. In December 2022, the total number of sunspots was at its highest in eight years, indicating solar activity has ramped up. Earlier this year, scientists observed twice as many sunspots -- red flags that solar maximum could be nearing.
Readers have been well-informed about what an 'X-class' flare could do to modern society:
Forget the climate change narrative pushed by corporate media. Focus on how to protect the grid from major solar storms...
The world needs to prepare for the next big solar storm. Remember, in 2016, former President Obama signed an executive order titled "Coordinating Efforts to Prepare the Nation for Space Weather Events."
