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Category: Academic Analysis

  • MIL-OSI Global: Workplace wellbeing programmes often don’t work – but here’s how to make them better

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jolanta Burke, Senior Lecturer, Centre for Positive Health Sciences, RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences

    Research shows wellbeing programmes often have little impact. Lucky Business/ Shutterstock

    The World Health Organization (WHO) has just published alarming statistics showing that employee mental health issues result in a US$1 trillion (£747 billion) loss in productivity each year. The WHO has called on employers to take urgent action by introducing comprehensive wellbeing programmes to tackle the escalating mental health crisis in the workplace.

    But the problem is that many workplace wellbeing programmes don’t work. A UK study which looked at 46,336 employees from 233 organisations found there was no evidence that a range of common workplace wellbeing initiatives – including mindfulness and stress management classes, one-to-one mental health coaching, wellbeing apps or volunteering work – improved employee wellbeing.

    So despite companies investing over US$60 billion annually worldwide in wellbeing programmes, they appear to make little impact.

    There are a number of reasons why these programmes don’t work – and understanding them is the only way companies will be able to make these programmes effective.

    Motivation

    Organisations often opt for easy-to-implement initiatives, such as hosting wellbeing talks or offering mindfulness or yoga classes. They then complain that employees don’t attend or don’t appreciate them.

    Many employees say they don’t attend these activities because they find them irrelevant, unhelpful or they don’t value them enough to attend – meaning their workplace has failed in identifying their needs.

    Understanding what motivates people to participate in wellbeing programmes is crucial in improving its effectiveness. For example, one survey found employees were more interested in learning about healthy lifestyles than having a discussion about stress management. Although not directly related to mental wellbeing, prioritising these kinds of talks would have a greater effect on improving wellbeing in the end.

    Content matters

    Wellbeing programmes tend to be more effective for people whose wellbeing is average or below average. So when people with high levels of wellbeing participate in such programmes, they often see little benefit. This can make it appear the programme isn’t effective – when in reality, it still is for those who need it most.

    This is why it’s so important to determine what type of help employees need most when designing wellbeing programmes.

    For employees who aren’t experiencing poor mental health, a programme that primarily addresses depression or anxiety may be less effective as they’re probably already practising many of the strategies such programmes would discuss. But if the wellbeing programme goes beyond reducing symptoms and focuses on promoting flourishing, meaning and purpose in life, it could provide value to a broader audience.

    This is where a programme designed by an expert in positive psychology would be beneficial in workplaces. Positive psychology is the science of wellbeing. It focuses on building on the positive aspects of life that make life worth living – rather than solely addressing symptoms of mental ill health which only affect 10-20% of the population.But positive psychology measures still have a positive impact on those who experience mental health issues at the same time. They include such activities as identifying and using your character strengths at work, re-thinking your past events positively, learning optimism or practising gratitude.

    The content of workplace wellbeing programmes is crucial. Avoiding generic self-help approaches will enhance their overall impact.

    Everyone is different

    Factors such as whether or not an employee enjoys a specific wellbeing activity or programme, whether they believe that wellbeing can be changed or their level of distress when starting a programme can all affect whether or not workplace wellbeing initiatives work.

    Even a person’s genetics can significantly affect whether such programmes have any impact. Research shows that people who have a higher genetic predisposition towards change are more likely to benefit disproportionately from these programmes – and their positive effect tends to last longer.

    All of these factors should be carefully considered when designing a workplace wellbeing programme. And given how difficult this will make it to design one that’s effective, it’s important employee wellbeing programmes are actually developed by experts in the field – not consultants who lack in-depth knowledge of psychology.

    Implementation

    The way a wellbeing programme is implemented is just as important as its content – though this aspect is often overlooked by wellbeing consultants.

    For instance, overusing gratitude exercises can lead to disengagement from a programme. Similarly, offering too many wellbeing activity options can overwhelm participants and result in them discontinuing the programme.

    To maximise the impact a wellbeing programme has in the workplace requires careful attention not only to the content but also how it’s implemented.

    There are many nuances involved in designing a workplace wellbeing programme. Employers must ensure the programmes they offer not only promote wellbeing but also avoid causing unintended harm to others in the process. Consulting experts who know the nuances of psychology and of wellbeing programmes is key, as they will ensure programmes will be effective and helpful. Programmes that combine positive psychology and lifestyle medicine (which focus on helping people improve their health and fitness) may be particularly beneficial in workplaces.

    Jolanta Burke does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. Workplace wellbeing programmes often don’t work – but here’s how to make them better – https://theconversation.com/workplace-wellbeing-programmes-often-dont-work-but-heres-how-to-make-them-better-239040

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Ethiopia’s grand plans for Addis Ababa: 4 essential reads on the social cost of transforming an African city

    Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Kagure Gacheche, Commissioning Editor, East Africa

    Ethiopia’s capital city is undergoing a transformation. Addis Ababa is being redeveloped as part of Ethiopia’s broader economic ambitions. Mega road projects, ambitious housing developments and infrastructural changes, all aimed at modernising one of Africa’s fastest-growing cities, are shaping its facade.

    Over the past three decades, Addis Ababa has expanded in area and population. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s rise to power in 2018 accelerated the city’s transformation.

    But the promise of a shiny, new Addis Ababa comes with social costs. Many of the city’s residents, including marginalised communities and those living in informal settlements, have lost homes and social bonds. So, will Addis Ababa’s evolution serve its estimated 4 million inhabitants?

    At The Conversation Africa, we have worked with academics whose research seeks to answer this question. Here we share some essential reads on Abiy’s gentrification plans.

    The challenges

    Demolitions have become a common sight in Addis Ababa as the government pushes forward with plans to modernise the city. These plans are aimed at bringing foreign private capital into the country. However, to make this a reality, whole neighbourhoods have been levelled to make way for roads, high-rise buildings and modern housing complexes. Homes and livelihoods are being destroyed. Fikir Getaneh Haile has studied the impact of Addis Ababa’s urban renewal on residents. She suggests that policymakers should make sure the voices of affected communities are heard.



    Read more:
    Demolitions in Ethiopia are giving rise to a new Addis Ababa – it comes at the expense of the city’s residents

    As it is, when bulldozers arrive in neighbourhoods, residents are left with little recourse and forced to rebuild their lives elsewhere. The destruction of these communities is not only material. There is a deep social cost. Neighbours who relied on each other are separated. The government is making efforts to relocate people to new housing projects, but houses are allocated by lottery. This is dismantling social networks. Further, with state housing developments located away from the city centre where jobs are concentrated, people are spending more time travelling to and from work, and less on building relationships with neighbours. Hone Mandefro’s research explains what happens when urbanisation plans disrupt the community ties that residents rely on for support and stability.



    Read more:
    Ethiopia has one of Africa’s most ambitious housing policies – but the lottery-based system is pulling communities apart

    Political elites are driving Addis Ababa’s physical transformation. This has led to top-down planning that excludes the voices of the majority. Ezana Weldeghebrael explains that the state’s focus on aesthetics, with features like skyscrapers, shopping malls and luxury housing complexes, fails to address the needs of the 80% of the city’s residents who live in dilapidated housing. This is widening the gap between the wealthier parts of the city and the poorer neighbourhoods. For the most vulnerable residents, the megaprojects represent yet another layer of exclusion. The city’s gentrification is creating pockets of prosperity surrounded by areas of deep poverty.



    Read more:
    Addis Ababa yet to meet the needs of residents: what has to change

    What needs to change

    Addis Ababa’s redevelopment must create a more inclusive and equitable city. Biruk Terrefe explains that this requires a shift in focus from large-scale megaprojects to more localised, community-centred development that takes into account the social and economic realities of the city’s population. Resources and investments should be distributed more equitably across the city so that all residents, regardless of their income level, have access to basic services and infrastructure.



    Read more:
    Megaprojects in Addis Ababa raise questions about spatial justice

    Ultimately, Addis Ababa’s transformation presents an opportunity to build a city that works for everyone. This requires a more inclusive approach that centres the needs and voices of its residents.

    – ref. Ethiopia’s grand plans for Addis Ababa: 4 essential reads on the social cost of transforming an African city – https://theconversation.com/ethiopias-grand-plans-for-addis-ababa-4-essential-reads-on-the-social-cost-of-transforming-an-african-city-239703

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: The boomer generation hit the economic jackpot. Young people will inherit their massive debts

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Renaud Foucart, Senior Lecturer in Economics, Lancaster University Management School, Lancaster University

    GoodIdeas/Shutterstock

    Young people in Britain could be forgiven for despairing at the financial pressures they face – and feeling that previous generations enjoyed a much fairer economic environment. Then just to add to their worries about home ownership and a precarious jobs market, along comes the gloomy announcement that the UK’s public debt is now 100% of GDP.

    That debt burden will have to be carried by tax-payers for decades to come. Paying the interest – just the interest – of the country’s debt currently accounts for around 7.3% of public spending. That’s more than what is spent on defence (4.8%) or transport (3.8%).

    And while some of what’s left will go to towards essential future public services, it will also go towards fixing problems caused by a historic lack of public investment (less money being spent by previous generations) in water, railways and other crucial infrastructure.

    In fact, in the 1980s much of that infrastructure was used by the UK government to help finance itself, with assets including British Gas sold off at a bargain price. Those baby boomers and older generations who could afford to buy shares often made a decent profit.

    There are other kinds of costs that today’s younger generations have had to bear too. During COVID lockdowns, universities and schools were closed as the young were forced to stay at home, predominantly to protect the elderly. They have lost the freedom to live and work in the EU after 60% of retired people voted for Brexit, while most young people voted against. Leaving Europe has also made the UK less well-off.

    But not everyone is poorer. In the last 20 years, the average income of pensioners has increased on average by more than 50%, while that of working-age adults has risen by less than 10%. The median income of pensioner households is now higher after housing costs than that of households with children.

    Most of the country’s wealth is now in the hands of older people. In 2018, one in four people aged over 65 was living in a household with a total wealth of over a £1 million pounds. Poverty rates of pensioners are now lower than for the rest of the population.

    Yet pensioners receive all sorts of unconditional discounts and benefits, such as free or discounted public transport. Their income is exempt from national insurance contributions, and there is a triple-lock on state pensions, which is guaranteed to grow faster than work income.

    Until recently, the winter fuel allowance meant that anyone born in 1944 or before received £300 (reduced to £200 for younger pensioners).

    Boomer and bust?

    While there is mild popular support for limiting the fuel allowance to poorer pensioners, the question of recouping money from older people remains highly sensitive. (Back in 2017, the then prime minister Theresa May had to quickly U-turn when she suggested using pensioners’ wealth to finance the rising cost of care.)

    One reason for this reluctance to prise money from older people may be that while most pensioners are doing better (compared to the working population) this is not true of the poorest ones. Also, some pensioners do not claim the benefits they are entitled to, and the last thing a civilised society wants is to let its older people freeze.

    ‘Loser has to pay off the national debt.’
    fizkes/Shutterstock

    But the apparent economic divide raises a broader question about inter-generational justice. What does one generation owe the generations that follow?

    And it’s not just about money. Global warming is another thing older people have not spent most of their lives having to pay for, with the burden for repairing environmental damage again falling mostly on the young.

    Perhaps a fair philosophical approach would be that it’s OK to leave certain costs to be paid in the future if the next generation can generally expect to live longer and in better health, with more consumer choice and comfort, and an improved quality of life.

    But this does not seem to be the expectation right now. Incomes have stalled, and so has life expectancy, while housing prices have not been so expensive relative to earnings since the 19th century.

    In that sense, many people, however old they are, would probably sympathise with young people today. And they may even argue that it’s time for the government to focus on policies that explicitly benefit the young – like house building, different forms of taxation or subjecting pension income to national insurance.

    There could also be a change in fiscal rules to allow for more investment in national infrastructure, higher taxes on fossil fuels to pay for the energy transition, or sharing the cost of funding higher education more evenly among all graduates, regardless of when they got their degree.

    Such changes would provide a dramatic shift towards an economic system which seeks to redistribute wealth not just among citizens – but between the generations.

    Renaud Foucart does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. The boomer generation hit the economic jackpot. Young people will inherit their massive debts – https://theconversation.com/the-boomer-generation-hit-the-economic-jackpot-young-people-will-inherit-their-massive-debts-238908

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: South Africa has a good childhood vaccination system – what’s stopping it from being great

    Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Susan Goldstein, Associate Professor in the SAMRC Centre for Health Economics and Decision Science – PRICELESS SA (Priority Cost Effective Lessons in Systems Strengthening South Africa), University of the Witwatersrand

    The two public health interventions that have had the greatest impact on the world’s health are clean water and vaccines. Professors Susan Goldstein and Haroon Saloojee assess South Africa’s child vaccination programme.

    Why are childhood vaccinations so important? What are some essential ones?

    A recent study published in The Lancet estimated that since 1974, 154 million lives have been saved by immunisation, most of them children.

    A 2016 study of low- and middle-income countries found that for every dollar invested in vaccines, the return on investment was estimated to be US$44, considering broader social and economic benefits.

    Childhood vaccines are most effective when they are administered to children at the right age, and with the recommended dosage, as children are susceptible to certain diseases at certain ages.

    As an example, polio occurs most frequently in children below the age of five. Five doses of polio vaccinations are recommended, starting at birth.

    As the most contagious and fast-moving of the vaccine-preventable diseases, measles is often described as the “canary in the coalmine”: a warning of other disease outbreaks that might spring up where there are gaps in vaccination coverage.

    How does South Africa fare?

    A case study done in 2011/2012 found South Africa spent US$131 million on basic child vaccine procurement, less than 1%-1.5% of public health expenditure and comparable to Latin American countries known for early vaccine adoption. In 2023 new vaccines were included in the routine Expanded Programme on Immunisation to the value of US$194 million.

    We do spend appropriately on vaccines.

    South Africa has an excellent immunisation schedule with protection offered against 11 diseases.

    According to the District Health Barometer, national coverage for children under one year was 82.2% in 2022/3.

    In 2019, a national household immunisation survey, the first such survey done in two decades, provided the most detailed picture of South Africa’s vaccination programme that we have. The survey screened almost 2 million households and found 84% of babies had received all their shots by the time they turned one.

    Although these rates may seem good, they fall short of the 90% target set by the United Nations. They are also lower than in several other sub-Saharan countries, as this graph shows.

    A greater concern, however, is the disparity at the district level. For instance, Sekhukhune in Limpopo province had a coverage rate of just 53%, meaning almost one in two children were not fully immunised. Ten other districts had coverage rates below 75%, meaning that at least a quarter of the children were not fully protected.

    What is preventing the country from achieving the 90% target?

    In the national survey the main reasons for children not being fully immunised were related to the health service:

    • the vaccine was out of stock (29%)

    • the child was ill and not offered a vaccine (12%)

    • caregivers did not know that the child was due for immunisation (19%)

    • the caregiver forgot that the child had a scheduled immunisation visit (6%)

    • there was no-one to take the child to the clinic (9%).

    Other factors include:

    • negative interactions with healthcare workers – these can deter caregivers from taking children for their vaccines

    • waiting times

    • the dynamics within families – for example, adolescent mothers and elderly caregivers might have difficulty getting children to clinics.

    Vaccine refusal by parents for religious or other reasons existed, but this was infrequent (3%).

    What needs to be done?

    To protect children better, Unicef’s Immunization Agenda 2030 recommends a “people-centred” approach:

    • ensuring all healthcare workers are skilled at administering inoculations, and not missing opportunities to vaccinate a child whenever they visit a health service

    • avoiding vaccine shortages by electronically linking central pharmacies to facilities

    • listening to communities to understand their attitudes towards vaccines and their experiences with health workers at clinics, both good and bad.

    In South Africa districts with low coverage warrant special attention, such as increasing access to immunisation services. This could mean opening clinics on weekends or evenings so that working parents could bring their children to be vaccinated.

    Vaccinations are the safest method to protect children from life-threatening diseases. We need to ensure that every child gets them.

    The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. South Africa has a good childhood vaccination system – what’s stopping it from being great – https://theconversation.com/south-africa-has-a-good-childhood-vaccination-system-whats-stopping-it-from-being-great-237336

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Are you a Destiel stan? There’s so much more to ‘shipping’ than wanting characters to kiss

    Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Effie Sapuridis, PhD Candidate in Media Studies, Western University

    Castiel, played by Misha Collins, and Dean Winchester, played by Jensen Ackles, in an episode of ‘Supernatural.’ Destiel is the slash ship between the two characters. (Apple TV)

    In 1993, X-Files fans began using the term “relationshippers” to describe fans who were invested in a romantic relationship between the two leads, Fox Mulder and Dana Scully.

    Although the practice of pairing two characters together had existed in fandom for a while, this is recognized as the first use of the term. By the late 1990s, “relationshipper” had been shortened to “shipper” and was being used in other major media fandoms as well.

    A ship refers to a romantic pairing between two or more characters, and is often a pairing that doesn’t actively exist in the original story. To “ship” a pairing is to support and enjoy the idea of that specific relationship.

    Top 11 Smulder moments from the X-Files YouTube channel.

    In the early 2000s, ships were often assigned nautical names, but now they are commonly portmanteaus of the two characters being paired — like Drarry, for Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy, or Spuffy for Buffy Summers and Spike.

    Many people can relate to seeing two characters interact and thinking, “they’d make a great couple!” But why do we become so invested in these relationships? And what makes some characters more shippable than others?

    No one’s 20s and 30s look the same. You might be saving for a mortgage or just struggling to pay rent. You could be swiping dating apps, or trying to understand childcare. No matter your current challenges, our Quarter Life series has articles to share in the group chat, or just to remind you that you’re not alone.

    Read more from Quarter Life:

    Why we become invested

    Shipping has become a massive part of fan culture. Even when writers and media producers don’t explicitly pair up characters, fans will fill the gaps, creating their own versions and interpretations.

    Fans often become deeply invested in fictional couples because they empathize with and feel connected to the characters.

    Well-developed characters evoke emotional responses in audiences, similar to the connections we forge with others in real life, especially when we’ve spent a lot of time engaging with the media. The characters become like friends on the screen or page — we become invested in their relationships and growth.

    This connection grows even more when characters are placed in relatable situations, such as navigating a breakup or unrequited love. When we can put ourselves in the shoes of the character, we become more invested in their story. Fans connect with characters, and then yearn for their happiness because it feels connected to their own happiness.

    It becomes more than just a story; instead, shipping the characters becomes a way for fans to explore their own emotions.

    The slow burn effect

    In recent decades, media producers and writers have leaned heavily into “will they or won’t they” relationships. These situations, much like a cliffhanger, keep audiences emotionally invested and engaged with the relationship.

    The anticipation keeps viewers coming back for more, waiting for the romantic payoff, even in cases when they know it will never happen. The tension built between characters and the feeling of an unresolved romantic narrative — whether intentional or not — heightens fan interest and engagement in shipping.

    Shipping also allows fans to project their own desires and fantasies onto a character. We all have our ideal meet-cutes and daydreams about meeting “our person” and what that connection would be like.

    Aziraphale, played by Michael Sheen, and Crowley, played by David Tennant, in an episode of ‘Good Omens.’ Ineffable Husbands is the ship name of these two characters.
    (Amazon Prime)

    So, when we encounter a character who feels relatable, or who feels like “our person,” shipping allows us to explore those daydreams without any of the actual risks of complications involved in real life relationships. In many ways, the act of shipping is an exercise in emotional fulfillment for the fan.

    In 2019, the podcast Fansplaining found that fans had strong feelings about the emotional intensity they felt when shipping. Fan studies scholars have also turned to this question often; Brit Kelley’s recent monograph Loving Fanfiction comes to mind as a prime example of a deep dive into affect and emotion in fanfiction and, of course, shipping.

    What makes characters shippable?

    Some characters naturally have a spark that draw fans to them — whether it’s through witty banter, emotional vulnerability, opposites-attract tension or the fact that there’s only one bed. When characters have great chemistry, fans can’t help but see the potential for something deeper.

    This is especially true when a character’s arc involves personal or emotional growth, as we are eager to imagine a happy ending for characters who are evolving. Combine this growth with the tension of a “will they or won’t they” relationship — a classic of the 90s and 2000s sitcom, think Rachel and Ross from Friends, or Ted and Robin from How I Met Your Mother — and you’ve got the perfect recipe for a beloved ship.

    In fact, a common shipping trope is the slow burn where the romance builds excruciatingly slowly. These types of relationships keep fans hooked because the development is gradual, and subtle. On-screen couples like Jess and Nick from New Girl and Jake Peralta and Amy Santiago from Brooklyn Nine-Nine are prime examples of this.

    Jake Proposes to Amy on Brooklyn Nine-Nine.

    Fans experience the full gamut of the emotional journey with these characters and, should then tension break and romance bloom, the pay-off is incredibly satisfying.

    If the relationships don’t come to pass, fans often turn to fanfiction — stories written by and for fans — to explore the potential of that ship more fully, with platforms like Archive of Our Own providing a space for these creative explorations.

    Pushing for diversity in media

    Fans are often drawn to relationships and characters that challenge the dominant ideologies and norms seen in media. Some of the most popular ships involve queer pairings — a trend that dates back, at least, to early days of media fandom with Spirk (Spock/Kirk) fanfiction.

    Some of today’s most popular queer ships include Aziraphale/Crowley from Good Omens, Dean Winchester/Castiel from Supernatural, Villanelle/Eve from Killing Eve and Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham from Hannibal.

    Such relationships can provide a sense of representation that’s often lacking in mainstream media, allowing fans to see themselves in the stories they love. In this way, shipping can serve as a form of advocacy, pushing for greater diversity and inclusivity in media.

    Shipping is about more than wanting characters to kiss — it’s an emotionally charged experience that culminates from empathy, narrative tension, personal fantasies and desires. For fans, these fictional relationships can feel as real as any in our own lives, and that’s why we keep coming back for more.

    Effie Sapuridis does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. Are you a Destiel stan? There’s so much more to ‘shipping’ than wanting characters to kiss – https://theconversation.com/are-you-a-destiel-stan-theres-so-much-more-to-shipping-than-wanting-characters-to-kiss-238394

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: How the ‘New Right’ in Latin America differs from other emerging far-right movements

    Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Juan Manuel Morales, PhD Candidate, Political Science, Université de Montréal

    Following the end of the progressive wave of the 2000s and 2010s in Latin America, the right has reinvented itself and regained political space.

    There is the self-styled libertarianism of Javier Milei in Argentina, the protests against leftist president Gustavo Petro in Colombia and the increasingly authoritarian government of Nayib Bukele in El Salvador.

    There’s also a plethora of influencers and media personalities that vociferously defend conservative positions in the region.

    “New Right” candidates are running in municipal elections in Chile and general elections in Uruguay in October.

    What is the New Right?

    Research defines the New Right as “a diverse set of individuals and organizations aiming to maintain societal hierarchies that are perceived as traditional or natural.”

    Whereas the traditional right often showed no interest in democracy and was more concerned with economic issues and fighting communism, the new right uses the tools of democracy to obtain power and govern, and focuses more on cultural issues.

    Chief among these issues is the control of sexuality and gender, which differentiates the new Latin American right from its western counterparts, which are prioritizing the issue of migration.



    Read more:
    Why the ideology of the ‘New Right’ is so dangerous

    The issues

    Researchers have observed the focus on sexuality in the new Latin American right. While conducting field work last year in Colombia with right-wing activists, it became clear to me that groups as diverse as economic libertarians, evangelical anti-abortionists and security hardliners with military backgrounds shared a desire to control the sexuality of others.

    Earlier this year, El Salvador’s Bukele ordered gender-related content removed from the public education system. Argentina’s Milei routinely attacks women’s reproductive rights, and the Peruvian government defined transgender identities as a “mental health problem.”

    These varied efforts seek to maintain heterosexual and binary gender models at the top of the social hierarchy, while people with diverse identities are marginalized. These authoritarian tendencies are aligned with another of the new right’s favourite issues: a tough-on-crime approach to security.

    Bukele has become an inspiration on this matter.



    Read more:
    ‘Bukelism,’ El Salvador’s flawed approach to gang violence, is no silver bullet for Ecuador

    The Argentine and Ecuadorian governments have expressed an interest in building Bukele-style mega-prisons to curb crime.

    Likewise, politicians in different countries market themselves as the local Bukele to win votes.

    Sexuality, crime

    Except for a few countries, migration is not a particularly relevant issue for adherents of the New Right in Latin America.

    This is not due to a lack of migration. More than six million Venezuelans have migrated to other countries in the region as of 2023; several Latin American countries are transit points for migrants trying to reach the United States; internal migration and forced displacement are an ongoing issue for some countries.

    Nevertheless, anti-migrant and nativist views are not commonplace. There is, however, an effort by the New Right to preserve white and white/mixed-race populations as well as western Christian values at the top of the social hierarchy — to the detriment of Latin America’s Indigenous and Black communities.

    The strategies

    The traditional right in Latin America resorted to coups d’état and military dictatorships as part of its repertoire of action. This happened in particular before the 1990s, but it’s also occurred in the last three decades.

    Conversely, the New Right prefers to leverage the tools of democracy to erode the democratic system from within and prolong its grip on power.

    New Right figures now become leaders by winning elections. But once in office, they often try to concentrate power in the executive branch by undermining the separation of powers.

    Bukele, for example, controls the legislative and judicial branches in El Salvador. Jair Bolsonaro took a similar path in Brazil but was ultimately thwarted by the victory of leftist Lula da Silva in 2022.

    The New Right has also become adept at using judicial activism to advance its agenda and curtail the rights of marginalized citizens.

    Grassroots organizing and social activism — tactics traditionally associated with the left — are now part of the New Right’s playbook in Latin America. Social movements were instrumental in the fall of Brazil’s Dilma Roussef and the subsequent 2018 victory of Bolsonaro.

    Right-wing social movement entities have systematically taken to the streets in Colombia to protest the leftist government.

    Evangelical churches have also taken on a more visible role within the New Right, disputing the traditional leadership of the Catholic Church among conservatives. While evangelicals have long been an important electoral force in places like Brazil, they have had more mixed results in other countries.

    Future implications

    The New Right continues to influence the public debate and society at large in Latin America through street and social media activism, as well as institutional politics.

    In 2025, the New Right could make further electoral gains in countries like Chile and Ecuador.

    Because many existing New Right governments regularly undermine democracy and the rights of marginalized communities, it’s important to better understand their strategies and priorities — particularly in a region marred by exclusion and inequality.

    Juan Manuel Morales does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. How the ‘New Right’ in Latin America differs from other emerging far-right movements – https://theconversation.com/how-the-new-right-in-latin-america-differs-from-other-emerging-far-right-movements-239267

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Why do we yawn when we see someone else yawn?

    Source: The Conversation – France – By Astrid Thébault Guiochon, Ingénieure et Enseignante, Université Lumière Lyon 2

    After a hearty lunch at work, you and your co-workers go into a meeting. First one colleague starts to yawn, then a second and finally it’s your turn. Many biological explanations have been put forward for this, but what is the scientific consensus?

    Yawning is a universal phenomenon, observed in many vertebrate species, from wolves to parrots, and, of course, humans, from a very early age. But why do we tend to yawn when we see someone else doing it?

    The reason why yawning has been present in so many species for so long is that it seems to be a necessary survival mechanism. But what is its real purpose? Whether it’s to oxygenate the brain, regulate body temperature or provide a social signal, there is no shortage of hypotheses, both among the general public and in the scientific community.

    The widespread idea that yawning increases oxygenation of the brain has not been confirmed. Another explanation suggests that yawning helps maintain attention. Again, there is no consensus on this either.

    What seems more certain is the link between yawning and circadian rhythm, our biological clock. The majority of yawns occur at rest, generally concentrated around the phases of waking and falling asleep. More precisely, they occur when the body is less alert, as when it’s working to digest a meal.

    A means of communication?

    Although the reasons behind yawning have yet to be confirmed, it’s “contagious” nature is generating significant discoveries in various disciplines, both in biology and social psychology.

    Yawning could play an important role in social interactions, as observed in ostriches, which use it to synchronise group behaviour. As in humans, they often yawn when they shift from waking to resting, or vice versa. Yawning can then serve as a signal indicating a change in activity or alertness, ensuring that all members of the group are alert or at rest at the same time, increasing collective safety and maintaining the group’s rhythm.

    However, the contagion of the yawn seems to be a predominantly human characteristic, with a few exceptions, such as chimpanzees or the lion monkey. This specificity reinforces the idea that human yawning, over and above its purely physiological functions, is a means of non-verbal communication. The main hypothesis is that yawning helps to synchronise group behaviour, a function similar to that observed in ostriches.

    Indeed, seeing or hearing someone yawn stimulates brain regions involved in imitation and empathy, thanks in particular to mirror neurons. These neurons are activated by observing actions – for example when a child follows his parent’s movements to tie her or his shoes. However, certain areas of the brain specifically involved in contagious yawning are part of neural networks linked to empathy and social interaction.

    A predisposition to contagious yawning?

    Empathy appears to play a key role in susceptibility to contagious yawning. Individuals with social disorders, such as autism or schizophrenia, seem less receptive to picking up yawning from others. Research even shows that external factors such as breathing and body temperature could respectively reduce and increase contagious yawning.

    This observation reinforces the idea that the perception of contagion may be exaggerated, partly because studies often involve observing individuals in groups. This dynamic could influence the observed frequency of yawning, suggesting that it is not necessarily seeing someone yawn that triggers the reaction, but rather the presence and interactions within the group.

    So if you find yourself yawning when your colleague yawns after lunch, it may well be that it’s not his or her yawning that’s influencing you. Instead, it could simply be the shared context – in this case, having eaten well together – that provokes this synchronised reaction.

    Astrid Thébault Guiochon ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d’une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n’a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.

    – ref. Why do we yawn when we see someone else yawn? – https://theconversation.com/why-do-we-yawn-when-we-see-someone-else-yawn-239762

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Ukraine war: Vladimir Putin ups the ante on his nuclear blackmail – the big question is how the west will respond

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Christoph Bluth, Professor of International Relations and Security, University of Bradford

    Vladimir Putin has announced what appears to be a dramatic strengthening of Russia’s nuclear doctrine. The Russian president was responding to speculation that the west may relax its restrictions on Ukraine’s use of its weapons to attack targets inside Russia.

    He told his security council that Russia would consider using nuclear weapons if it was attacked by any state with conventional weapons. The trigger for the launch of nuclear missiles against Ukraine or any of its allies, he said, would be “reliable information about a massive launch of aerospace attack means and their crossing of our state border”.

    Whether this will affect the thinking of Ukraine’s western allies about the use of its long-range missiles has yet to be seen. But one of the major features of the public discourse about the Ukraine war has been the risk of the use of nuclear weapons.

    Nuclear threats have been a standard tactic for the Russian leadership. Whenever Ukraine receives new weapons from the west or is allowed to use western arms to target Russian territory Moscow has responded by either referring to the devastation it could wreak with its nuclear arsenal or by holding a drill to remind the west of its existence.

    But there have recently been reports of a growing realisation among Putin’s close advisers that these threats are beginning to wear thin, as one after another of Moscow’s “red lines” are ignored.

    Nevertheless, despite providing Ukraine with the most advanced air defence systems and offensive missiles that could strike targets deep within Russia – and perhaps even influence the course of the war – Nato countries are maintaining a strict limit on their use. It’s an indication that despite scepticism about Putin’s willingness to use nuclear weapons, deterrence remains robust – in western minds anyway.

    Nuclear deterrence is based on the threat to inflict “unacceptable damage” on an enemy. It is credible only if the adversary believes that the threat is accompanied by the capability and will to follow through.

    Nuclear powers have generally conducted nuclear messaging by publicising guidelines for the use of their arsenals. Nato’s current strategic concept was adopted by heads of state and government at the alliance’s summit in Madrid in June 2022. It states: “The circumstances in which Nato might have to use nuclear weapons are extremely remote.”

    But the document stresses that if nuclear weapons were used against any Nato member state it would “fundamentally alter” any conflict in which Nato was engaged. It goes on to warn that: “The Alliance has the capabilities and resolve to impose costs on an adversary that would be unacceptable and far outweigh the benefits that any adversary could hope to achieve.”

    Russia, meanwhile, is reportedly updating its nuclear doctrine in response to what it says is “western escalation” in the war in Ukraine. The current doctrine, established by a decree in 2020, says Russia can use nuclear weapons to respond to a nuclear attack by an enemy, or to a conventional attack that “threatens the existence of the state”.

    The latest statement by Putin is apparently the “draft” of a reworked nuclear doctrine. It certainly appears to lower the bar on resorting to the use of nuclear weapons.

    Sabre rattling

    The Russian leader made his first overt threat to use nuclear weapons in the conflict in Ukraine in September 2022. He was overseeing the annexation of four occupied Ukrainian provinces after hastily arranged plebiscites, which were generally regarded in the west as being rigged.

    He stated that “the US is the only country in the world that twice used nuclear weapons, destroying the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Incidentally, they created a precedent.”

    He went on to assert that during the second world war the US and Britain had deliberately bombed several German cities to rubble. This, he insisted, had the “sole goal, just like in the case of nuclear bombardments in Japan, to scare our country and the entire world”.

    But CIA director William Burns recently said the west should not take Putin’s threats seriously: “Putin’s a bully. He’s going to continue to sabre rattle from time to time.”

    CIA director Wiliam Burns and MI6 chief Richatrd Moore in conversation at an FT conference, September 2024.

    Burns told a festival organised by the Financial Times on September 7 that: “There was a moment in the fall of 2022 when I think there was a genuine risk of potential use of tactical nuclear weapons … I never thought … we should be unnecessarily intimidated by that.”

    He said he had subsequently passed on a message from US president Joe Biden to Sergey Naryshkin, the head of the Russian foreign intelligence service at a meeting in Turkey in November 2022 “to make very clear what the consequences of that kind of escalation would be”.

    US satellite networks and other intelligence sources have shown no evidence of any preparations for the employment of nuclear weapons. This is despite Russian claims that the alert status of Russian forces has been raised.

    But Putin’s proxies have been busily putting out propaganda messages to reinforce their leader’s threats. According to the Washington Post, Alexander Mikhailov, the director of the Bureau of Military Political Analysis, recently called for Russia to bomb plywood mock-ups of London and Washington to simulate a nuclear attack, so that that would “burn so beautifully that it will horrify the world”.

    The speaker of the lower house, Vyacheslav Volodin, warned that strikes on Russia would lead to war with nuclear weapons and warned that the European parliament in Strasbourg was only a three-minute flight for a Russian nuclear missile.

    So far Putin’s threats have been sufficient to limit the scope of western involvement. Whether the Russian president’s latest threat will be effective is now the question.

    Christoph Bluth received funding from the Volkswagen Stiftung and the AHRC

    – ref. Ukraine war: Vladimir Putin ups the ante on his nuclear blackmail – the big question is how the west will respond – https://theconversation.com/ukraine-war-vladimir-putin-ups-the-ante-on-his-nuclear-blackmail-the-big-question-is-how-the-west-will-respond-239660

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Ukraine war: Zelensky’s pleas for help are getting drowned out in the clamour from the Middle East

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Stefan Wolff, Professor of International Security, University of Birmingham

    While Russia continues its nuclear sabre rattling, with renewed threats to use its arsenal if attacked, fighting on the frontlines in Ukraine and in Russia’s Kursk region remains intense. But the diplomatic centre of gravity of the war recently shifted to New York and Washington.

    Discussions at the UN and meetings scheduled between the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, the US president Joe Biden and vice-president Kamala Harris are by no means unimportant for the outcomes of the conflict. But it is unlikely that they will constitute the pivotal moment in accelerating the pace towards a Ukrainian victory that Zelensky might envisage.

    At meetings at the UN general assembly and security council, Zelensky appealed to world leaders to support his country and force Russia to make peace with Ukraine. His vision to achieve this is via a second global peace summit. This time he wants Russia to participate after the first effort in Switzerland in June achieved very little.



    Read more:
    Ukraine summit fails to provide a path to peace for Kyiv and its allies

    But with Zelensky continuing to push his ten-point peace plan and Putin insisting on Ukraine recognising Russia’s annexation of Crimea and four regions on the mainland, the two sides are as far apart as ever. So prospects of any meaningful negotiations virtually non-existent.

    This has not deterred Zelensky from promoting to Ukraine’s allies what he is calling his “victory plan”.

    The plan “envisages quick and concrete steps by our strategic partners … from now until the end of December”. These concrete steps are likely to include more western military support and the permission to use longer-range western weapons against targets deeper inside Russia.

    This latter point is something on which the western alliance is divided – and the US sceptical on its strategic value. Putin’s insistence that Russia will respond by using its nuclear arsenal if it detects any western missiles crossing its border will have added to this uncertainty.

    Even if more decisive western support were suddenly forthcoming, it is unlikely that it would offset other disadvantages that Ukraine and its allies are facing on the battlefield and beyond. Russia has consolidated its alliances with Iran, North Korea and China. All of these countries have supplied mission-critical ammunition and equipment that has enabled the Kremlin to sustain its war effort in Ukraine.

    Russia, so far, has also maintained its advantage in numbers. It appears to be determined to push this even harder following Putin’s order to increase the number of combat troops of the Russian army by another 180,000 soldiers.

    Meanwhile, a relentless Russian air campaign against Ukrainian infrastructure has also caused lasting damage, especially to the country’s energy supply network. This is likely to have a particularly adverse effect on Ukraine’s civilian population. It is likely to seriously dent morale during the coming winter.

    Other plans (and priorities)

    As discussions at the UN this week have underlined, there is also some diplomatic momentum building up behind a joint proposal by Brazil and China that was initially launched in May. Brazil’s president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, pushed the plan during his speech at the UN general assembly on September 24, as did China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi.

    Like previous proposals from China and Brazil individually, as well as from Indonesia, a group of African states and Saudi Arabia, the joint Brazilian-Chinese plan calls for a ceasefire along the current frontlines. Negotiations would then follow.

    Ukraine fears, rightly, that this would entrench the status quo and effectively amount to Kyiv giving up territory illegally annexed by Russia. It would not guarantee any fruitful negotiations but give Russia time and space to regroup and rebuild its armed forces for a likely future escalation. None of this is acceptable to Ukraine and its allies as Zelensky made clear in his speech at the UN.

    Volodymr Zelensky criticises the Brazil-China plan at the UN general assembly.

    China’s previous effort to promote this joint initiative with Brazil just before the peace summit in Switzerland last June, did not go very far. It may not go much further this time either.

    But attention and resources are now much more focused on the Middle East and – to a lesser extent – the civil war in Sudan. So the very fact of this plan’s resurrection may be enough for Russia and its allies to prevent the rest of the world from uniting behind the western-backed Ukrainian proposal for a second global peace summit.

    This is clearly a concern for Ukraine. Zelensky, with a clear eye on countries in the global south, not only rejected the proposal but also argued that forcing Ukraine to make territorial concessions to Russia would be akin to reimposing a version of the brutal colonial past of the Soviet era on his country.

    Will Zelensky be Trumped in November?

    While the stars are thus hardly aligning in Ukraine’s favour at the UN in New York, things did not go much better as far as US domestic politics is concerned ahead of presidential elections in November. Questioning whether Donald Trump really has a credible plan to end the war, Zelensky triggered the notoriously short-fused Republican contender into lashing out at him at campaign rallies.

    Donald Trump takes aim at Volodymr Zelensky.

    Trump is both accusing Zelensky of refusing to make a deal and expressing doubts about Ukraine’s ability to win the war. Meanwhile, a recent opinion piece penned by Robert F. Kennedy Jnr and Donald Trump Jnr for The Hill, an influential political newspaper, urges that Ukraine be pushed to make a deal with Russia to prevent nuclear escalation.

    And Trump’s running-mate J.D. Vance has made clear his opposition to the US continuing to supply aid to Ukraine if elected in November. So it’s pretty clear that there is a very real prospect that Washington may soon cease to be Kyiv’s most important global ally.

    All of this explains the urgency behind Zelensky’s push for more and more decisive western support in the coming months, and his pleas to the wider international community to back efforts for a just peace for Ukraine. But it also indicates that Russia and its allies have, for now, done enough to further frustrate any progress towards a Ukrainian victory both on the battlefield and at the negotiation table.

    Stefan Wolff is a past recipient of grant funding from the Natural Environment Research Council of the UK, the United States Institute of Peace, the Economic and Social Research Council of the UK, the British Academy, the NATO Science for Peace Programme, the EU Framework Programmes 6 and 7 and Horizon 2020, as well as the EU’s Jean Monnet Programme. He is a Trustee and Honorary Treasurer of the Political Studies Association of the UK and a Senior Research Fellow at the Foreign Policy Centre in London.

    – ref. Ukraine war: Zelensky’s pleas for help are getting drowned out in the clamour from the Middle East – https://theconversation.com/ukraine-war-zelenskys-pleas-for-help-are-getting-drowned-out-in-the-clamour-from-the-middle-east-239752

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: How history can teach us to prevent deaths at sea

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Guy Collender, Post Doctoral Senior Research Associate, Centre for Port Cities and Maritime Cultures, University of Portsmouth

    AndriiKoval/Shutterstock

    The rapid sinking of the Bayesian superyacht and the loss of seven lives, including tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch, in August 2024 cruelly emphasised the potentially lethal perils of the sea. This tragedy, although much publicised, is far from unusual. Globally, accidents at sea lead to thousands of deaths every year – but the true scale of the problem is unknown.

    Undoubtedly, life at sea remains hard and dangerous in the 21st century, but this is difficult to quantify. There were 215 shipping industry related deaths at sea recorded in 2022. However, due to a lack of standardised data and under-reporting this figure is likely to be an underestimate.

    Efforts to raise awareness and improve safety at sea today have much to learn from historic and successful safety initiatives in the UK’s docks. My research on early 20th century docks shows that proper data is a prerequisite to understanding a problem and identifying trends. Such an assessment can then lead to the allocation of resources, targeted safety measures – and life-saving change.

    These steps all apply to improving safety at sea, but the lack of accurate data is a real stumbling block.

    Life and death at sea

    Fishing is widely recognised as the “most dangerous occupation globally”, but estimates of deaths among the fishing community vary enormously from 32,000 to more than 100,000 deaths per year. Of course, such deaths also occur inland in lakes and rivers, as well as at sea.

    Twenty-six vessels of over 100 gross tonnes were recorded lost in 2023, with 13 sinking beneath the waves. This is low when compared with the loss of more than 200 vessels a year in the 1990s, but there have also been recent worrying trends such as attacks on shipping in the Red Sea. So far in 2024, four Red Sea seafarers have been killed by Houthi rebels from Yemem, with others injured and held hostage.

    Desperation and war are also leading to deaths and risks elsewhere. A total of 3,155 migrants crossing the Mediterranean were recorded as missing or dead in 2023.

    Nevertheless, such challenges and risks to life are increasingly being recognised and efforts are underway to address them. Importantly, better data collection and monitoring is in the pipeline.

    An amendment to the 2006 international maritime labour convention is expected to come into force in December 2024. It will require countries that have agreed to the convention to report deaths of seafarers on an annual basis to the UN’s International Labour Office.

    These will be published in a global register, and they will be investigated. It remains to be seen how such reporting will operate in practice and how deaths will be categorised – but it will be a good start.

    History lessons

    This is where it is helpful to learn from the past. I have researched the historic reduction of the dangers of dock work in the UK for Hindsight Perspectives for a Safer World – a collaboration between History and Policy and Lloyd’s Register Foundation.

    My study shows how progress was linked to gathering better data, and recognising the risks of loading and unloading cargo. The counting and scrupulous categorisation of accidents helped identify the problems and appropriate safety measures.

    In 1900, factory inspectors identified five causes of dock accidents, including falls (into the ship’s hold, or into the water), and shunting accidents involving trains. The docks were classified as one of the “dangerous trades” in the Factory and Workshop Act, 1901.

    Under the dock regulations of 1904, “life-saving appliances” – chains or floats – were introduced to prevent drownings. Lifting machinery was also subject to stringent checks to prevent deaths from falling loads.

    And more and more proactive inspections took place as the number of inspectors rose from 137 in 1900 to 320 by 1939. All these safety measures and others contributed to dock deaths falling from 115 a year in 1899 to 69 a year in 1939.

    Today’s safety initiatives at sea often echo the work of those safety pioneers in the early 20th century. Together in Safety, a consortium of companies dedicated to improving safety in the maritime sector, suggests a three-step safety process – assess the situation, act to improve, appraise the progress – which replicates the work of those early legislators and inspectors.

    Together in Safety’s clear and succinct golden safety rules show how to mitigate the risks of maritime work, including working over water and entering enclosed spaces.

    What’s more, Lloyd’s Register Foundation – a charity that helps to protect life and property at sea, on land, and in the air – is undertaking work to “assure the safety of people as the ocean economy grows” as part of its Global Maritime Trends 2050 Research Programme.

    Two million seafarers face daily dangers to keep the global supply chain operating smoothly. Doing more to highlight their safety will hopefully lead to a better understanding of the challenges they face. This, in turn, should lead to better safety procedures and practices to save lives at sea.

    Guy Collender was commissioned and paid to research the history of dock safety in the UK for Hindsight Perspectives for a Safer World – a collaboration between History and Policy and Lloyd’s Register Foundation. He is currently employed by the University of Portsmouth on the ‘Sail to Steam, Carbon to Green’ research project, which is funded by Lloyd’s Register Foundation.

    – ref. How history can teach us to prevent deaths at sea – https://theconversation.com/how-history-can-teach-us-to-prevent-deaths-at-sea-237432

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: The world isn’t taking Putin’s nuclear threats seriously – the history of propaganda suggests it should

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Colin Alexander, Senior Lecturer in Political Communications, Nottingham Trent University

    Vladimir Putin has spoken several times about using nuclear weapons since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. However, the initial attention and concern that global news media gave to Putin when he first spoke on the issue in September 2022 seemed to have largely dissipated over the past two years of conflict, perhaps because of the frequency with which he has threatened to resort to use of Russia’s nuclear arsenal.

    Now Putin has issued his strongest threat yet, saying that Russia would use nuclear weapons against any country attacking it, even with conventional weapons. This statement appears to be intended to influence the debate happening at the United Nations, where Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky is trying to persuade his country’s western allies to allow Ukraine to use the weapons they have provided against targets deep within Russia itself.

    This has been a “red line” hitherto that Ukraine’s allies have been unwilling to cross. That may be about to change though and Russia’s reaction has been to reiterate a nuclear response.

    For those interested in the study of propaganda, Putin’s threats appear to have moved from what American media scholar Dan Hallin called the “sphere of legitimate controversy”, where the validity of an utterance is urgently debated by journalists, politicians and academics, into the “sphere of consensus”, where there is broad agreement about the meaning of the message. This generally results in it receiving less attention.

    To believe that Putin is not serious about using nuclear weapons is a dangerous assumption to make. But it provides a good opportunity to examine the political and public relationship with nuclear weapons in more detail.

    The psychology of nuclear threat

    Most adults know of the existence of nuclear weapons and understand the consequences of their use. Very few are simply ignorant of them or their immense power. But global annihilation is too overwhelming to think about other than fleetingly. As a result we tend to focus on less drastic futures.

    These regular denials and self-deceptions affect political outlooks though. Every so often the leader of a nuclear-armed country is asked by a journalist or another politician about their readiness to press the nuclear button. They always say “yes”. When this question is asked in front of an audience there is usually enthusiastic applause.

    This response – applauding an individual politician’s willingness to bring about the end of the world – is perhaps the most compelling evidence of the duality that the threat of nuclear war exists within. Rather than perceiving such a response as the worrying sign that a maniac has somehow manoeuvred their way into high office and should be immediately removed, the voter perceives the utterance as a signifier of leadership strength.

    Psychologically, it can be argued that the applause actually represents an outpouring of relief that this mass self-deception can continue.

    ‘Fear propaganda’ and confirmation bias

    During the cold war, official propaganda placed great emphasis upon threat and preparedness for nuclear attack. The BBC film Threads first aired 40 years ago in September 1984 and depicted the aftermath of a nuclear strike. It was responsible for great alarm among the British public at a time when news media, movies and even official literature were also focused upon the threat of nuclear war.

    Between 1974 and 1980, the UK government issued a booklet entitled Protect and Survive, accompanied by short films. The BBC, in its public service role, also ran documentary programming including a 1980 edition of Panorama called If The Bomb Drops. While US secretary of state Henry Kissinger’s 1957 study Nuclear War and Foreign Policy caused alarm for arguing that small-scale nuclear war using “battlefield” weapons might be possible.

    Cold war communications like these served to focus the public mind towards the threat of nuclear attack above all other fears. And perhaps, at that time, they were right to do so. But more than 30 years have now passed since the end of the cold war and the emphasis within what is known as “fear propaganda” now focuses on other threats, such as extremism, pandemics and migration.

    As such, Putin’s nuclear threats provide propaganda analysts like myself with a case study about the important role played by fear propaganda in determining what people are scared of. If taken within the wider history of the fear of nuclear holocaust, it is clear that political leaders cannot rely on their words alone to be taken seriously. They require a wider supportive propaganda environment – like the atmosphere created at the height of the cold war.

    Putin the ‘madman’

    Questions around how to understand Putin’s nuclear attack threats ought to be positioned as the latest in a long(ish) line of world leaders who have tried to convince global publics of their readiness to commit nuclear genocide.

    Richard Nixon, for example, used what was referred to as “madman” tactics when trying to convince people of his readiness to push the button. Interestingly, the more recent depictions of Putin, Kim Jong-un and other authoritarian leaders as madmen by western tabloids can actually helps them by playing down the fact of their inferior military capabilities when compared to those of the Nato allies.

    Don’t think for a moment though that any of this discussion of propaganda increases or decreases the actual threat posed by nuclear weapons. Indeed, there exists a degree of confirmation bias among politicians, journalists and other public commentators that because nuclear war did not happen during the cold war, it is unlikely to happen now. But this can’t be guaranteed. It may be that these conclusions are mistakenly based upon the intensity of the propaganda environment – not the actuality of the threat posed.

    To this end, it ought to be remembered that the ability to press the button sits well within the capacity of the sane human mind. US president Harry S. Truman pushed the button in 1945. He was then given detailed reports of the death and destruction that his decision caused to Hiroshima. Then he pushed the button again to annihilate Nagasaki.

    Colin Alexander does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. The world isn’t taking Putin’s nuclear threats seriously – the history of propaganda suggests it should – https://theconversation.com/the-world-isnt-taking-putins-nuclear-threats-seriously-the-history-of-propaganda-suggests-it-should-239942

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-Evening Report: Australia may be facing another La Niña summer. We’ve found a way to predict them earlier, to help us prepare

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mandy Freund, Lecturer, Climate Science Geography, The University of Melbourne

    Meteorologists are again predicting a possible La Niña this summer, which means Australia may face wetter and cooler conditions than normal.

    It would be the fourth La Niña in Australia in five years, and highlights the need for Australians to prepare for what may be an extreme weather season.

    Typically, a La Niña or its counterpart, El Niño, signals its arrival earlier in the year. Signs of this potential La Niña are emerging fairly late. That’s where new research by my colleagues and I may help in future.

    La Niña and El Niño explained

    La Niña and its opposite phase, El Niño, are created by changes in ocean temperatures in the Pacific Ocean’s equatorial region. Together, the two phenomena are known as the El Niño Southern Oscillation.

    The oscillation is said to be in the positive phase during an El Niño and the negative phase during a La Niña. When sitting between the two, the cycle is in neutral phase.

    Earlier this month, the World Meteorological Organization said there was a 60% chance of La Niña conditions emerging by year’s end.

    In the United States, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration put the likelihood at 71%. Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology is in “watch” mode, predicting a 50% chance of a La Niña weather pattern forming later this year.

    La Niña occurs when strengthening winds change currents on the ocean surface, pulling cool water up from the deep.

    The winds also cause warm surface waters in the western Pacific and north of Australia, bringing increased rainfall and clouds. This usually means above-average rainfall and cooler temperatures for Australia, particularly in the east and north.

    Conversely, an El Niño weather pattern generally brings hotter temperatures across Australia, and less rainfall in the east and north.

    The Bureau of Meteorology is in La Niña ‘watch mode’.
    Bureau of Meteorology

    Paths of destruction

    La Niña or El Niño events can cause devastation around the world.

    The El Niño in 2015–16, for example, caused crops to fail and affected the food security and nutrition of almost 60 million people globally.

    In Australia, El Niño events can bring increased risk of drought, bushfires and heatwaves, and water shortages.

    Meanwhile, rainfall associated with La Niña conditions can lead to greater crop yield. But particularly heavy rainfall can wash crops away. It also heightens flood risks for some communities.

    These far-reaching impacts mean it’s essential to plan ahead when a La Niña or El Niño is on the cards. But predicting these events has always been tricky.

    Both types of events usually develop in the Southern Hemisphere autumn, peak in late spring or summer, and weaken by the next autumn. But it’s now late spring without a clear La Niña declaration. Why the delay?

    Climate change is one factor. The Bureau of Meteorology says as oceans absorb heat from global warming, it’s harder to spot the specific warming patterns linked to La Niña.

    The sheer complexity of the ocean-atmosphere system adds to the difficulty. The computer models used to predict El Niño and La Niña are improving all the time.
    But scientists still need more information on deep ocean processes, and how winds affect the oscillation.

    Predictions are hardest during the Southern Hemisphere’s autumn. That’s because the cycle then is very susceptible to change – teetering at a point where either a La Niña or El Niño could develop.

    That’s why the earliest an El Niño or La Niña can be predicted is usually around May or June.

    But new research offers a way to predict the events much earlier – and start preparing if necessary.

    Better, earlier forecasts

    The study, which I led, assessed the likelihood of La Niña or El Niño events occurring in succession – either in the eastern or central region of the Pacific Ocean.

    This distinction is important. For Australia, El Niño and La Niña events peaking in the Central Pacific, close to our continent, have greater impacts here compared to those peaking in the east, closer to South America.

    We analysed weather observations, and the sequence of past El Niño and La Niña events, over the past 150 years. We also examined climate models for future changes in transitions between El Niño and La Niña events.

    From this, we determined the likelihood of an El Niño or La Niña occurring in two consecutive years.

    We found most El Niño events are followed by neutral conditions the next year (with a likelihood of 37–56%).

    But La Niña behaves differently. In 40% of cases, a Central Pacific El Niño could follow an Eastern Pacific La Niña. And there is a 28% chance of two consecutive La Niña events in the Central Pacific.

    These results allow for more advanced predictions. By identifying patterns in this way, the odds of an El Niño or La Niña can be predicted up to a year in advance.

    El Niño or La Niña are the result of complex interactions between winds and sea in the Pacific Ocean.
    Shutterstock

    Looking ahead

    So, what does our research suggest for Australia? Will a La Niña develop here this year?

    From September last year, Australia experienced a strong Eastern Pacific El Niño. So our findings suggest there is only a 17% chance of La Niña this year.

    If the La Niña arrives, it will likely peak in the Central Pacific, potentially affecting Australia rainfall. But overall, any La Niña that develops this late is likely to be weak and relatively short-lived.

    Our research also found that as climate change accelerates, the El Niño Southern Oscillation is likely to shift. For example, the odds of two consecutive El Niños peaking in the central Pacific region will likely increase. And we can expect fewer calm, neutral years between events.

    We hope our research enables more accurate, long-range forecasts, giving communities additional time to plan and prepare.

    Mandy Freund receives funding from the ARC Centre of Excellence for 21st Century Weather

    – ref. Australia may be facing another La Niña summer. We’ve found a way to predict them earlier, to help us prepare – https://theconversation.com/australia-may-be-facing-another-la-nina-summer-weve-found-a-way-to-predict-them-earlier-to-help-us-prepare-239826

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: Australia’s air and tourism industries need government-backed insolvency insurance. Here’s why

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Beirman, Adjunct Fellow Management & Tourism, University of Technology Sydney

    Australia has a long history of domestic airlines collapsing, often affecting thousands of travellers, yet the industry provides little or no recompense.

    Even the federal government’s recently released aviation discussion paper recognised the need for change by recommending important protections for passengers. These included making airlines honour refunds if flights were cancelled or significantly delayed.

    The 2024 Aviation White Paper included the most consumer friendly proposals in 30 years. However, there was one significant omission in the 156-page report.

    There was no mention of insolvency protection for airline passengers. To put it simply, if a domestic or international airline collapses there is little likelihood passengers who paid airfares will receive a refund.

    In most cases, passengers affected by airline collapses receive little or no compensation. Fewer than 20% of Australian domestic passengers pay for domestic travel insurance compared to the 90% of Australians who buy insurance when they fly internationally.

    A history of failed airlines

    Since 1990 we have seen the rise and fall of multiple Australian airlines. This includes Compass Mark 1, Compass Mark 2, Ansett Airlines, Impulse Air and Aussie Air.

    In May, Bonza collapsed after less than a year of operation. And more recently, services operated by REX (Regional Air Express) between capital cities stopped and its regional services are under pressure.

    Virgin and Qantas immediately volunteered to honour the inter-city bookings of some REX ticket holders. However, nearly all affected Bonza passengers lost their money because no other airlines flew the same routes.

    The risk of both domestic and international airline collapses affecting Australian travellers is real. Consumers are as entitled to be protected from that risk as they are from many other travel related risks.

    The UK and European approach

    The UK approach to insolvency insurance has worked well since 1973. The UK scheme is known as “ATOL” or Air Travel Operators Licence. It applies to package tour companies who sell air travel combined with land tours or accommodation

    This user-pays, government-guaranteed insurance cover is compulsory for all British travellers who book a package tour. It costs only A$5 per person. It guarantees a full refund and return flights to the passenger’s point of origin if the tour operator goes out of business.

    A similar scheme has operated in the European Union since 1990, its known as the European Package Travel Directive.

    As part of a 2024 book I co-edited with Bruce Prideaux, I focused on the collapse of the famous British tour operator, Thomas Cook in 2019.

    I also compared insolvency consumer protection in the UK with that of Australia and New Zealand.

    The Thomas Cook experience

    When Thomas Cook collapsed in the United Kingdom and Europe, 600,000 British and European Union passengers were fully refunded the cost of their tours and flown to their port of departure under their regions’ respective schemes. And the cost of their disrupted tours was refunded.

    Funding built into the UK scheme covered full refunds to affected passengers at negligible cost to government which guaranteed the scheme.

    By contrast, a far smaller collapse of two Australian based tour operators, Tempo Holidays and Bentours in September 2019 affected fewer than 1,000 passengers.

    However not all the affected travellers were refunded due to the limitations of the insolvency scheme run by what was then the Australian Federation of Travel Agents.

    Under this scheme travellers only receive insolvency protection if they pay by credit or debit card. There is a reliance on banks to refund if a tour operator becomes insolvent. If the passenger paid for their tour by cheque or cash, no refund applied.

    What Australia needs

    There are three key categories of business insolvency which affect travellers. The collapse of an airline, the collapse of a tour operator and the collapse of a travel agent.

    If the Australian government is genuinely interested in protecting travel consumers at minimal cost to the taxpayer we should be using the UK and European schemes as a model.

    A compulsory user-pays, government guaranteed insolvency protection scheme would cost the consumer very little and would be an ideal safety net for consumers in the event that their travel company goes bust.

    David Beirman is affiliated in an honorary basis with DFAT’s Consular Consulting Group, a stakeholder group which advises DFAT on government travel advisories and broader issues of tourism safety and security.

    – ref. Australia’s air and tourism industries need government-backed insolvency insurance. Here’s why – https://theconversation.com/australias-air-and-tourism-industries-need-government-backed-insolvency-insurance-heres-why-239060

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Greener nanomaterials could transform how our everyday stuff is made

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Amber Keegan, PhD Candidate, Green Chemistry, University of Sheffield

    Silica nanomaterial could help advance medicines and improve controlled drug release. Love Employee/Shutterstock

    Tiny nanoparticles are at the forefront of materials science – with special properties that make them great at absorbing light in solar panels, cleaning wastewater, and delivering drugs precisely.

    Some nanoparticles take the form of sheets or fibres. But nanomaterials all have one thing in common – their structure contains components with dimensions in the nanometre scale – that’s more than 10,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair. Research shows that nanomaterials often perform better than the same materials made at a larger scale. They have huge potential, but currently their manufacture can result in harmful environmental effects due to the use or production of hazardous chemicals.

    I’m one of many researchers studying how to create, manipulate and apply these materials sustainably to develop new technologies and improve existing ones. This offers advantages across many applications, including aerospace, solar panels and electronics.

    Silica nanomaterial is already all around you, but you probably don’t even realise it. Silica (SiO₂), a compound that contains both silicon and oxygen, is commonly found in rocks. It is one of the most mass produced nanomaterials worldwide, with an expected market of US$5 trillion (£3.8 trillion) by 2025.

    It’s used to make things you encounter every day, from improving the strength of concrete or the durability of rubber tyres, plus it enhances the cleaning properties and consistency of toothpaste. Silica nanomaterial could have exciting high-value applications, like medicines and wastewater treatment.

    While silica products might be great, the way they are made is often not great for the environment, or even economically feasible. Manufacture is key to overall product sustainability, but it’s often invisible to consumers. As such, it’s an aspect that most people consider far less than, for example, whether something will be recycled.

    Making silica often requires energy-intensive processes, or makes nasty waste products that are difficult to safely dispose of. Trying to reduce the environmental footprint for existing processes is not enough. Developing new production methods is paramount to ensuring that new technologies, such as more advanced solar panels, can both help society and have less impact on the environment than traditional manufacture.

    I am part of the Green Nanomaterials Research Group at the University of Sheffield, where my colleagues and I are working hard to develop sustainable, scalable and economical routes to functional nanostructured materials. We address aspects from discovery to manufacturing, applications and commercialisation, considering the performance, scalability, environment and cost.

    A greener approach to chemistry

    We aim to make better nanomaterials for important applications, while considering the environmental impact at every stage of a nanomaterial’s life, from raw materials through to the use and disposal of product and any by-products. This approach is known as “green chemistry”, a concept developed in 1998 that has been used to develop strategies for greener routes to nanomaterials.

    Some algae, including these diatoms, make silica naturally to build cell walls and are studied in the development of bio-inspired silica.
    Diana Will/Shutterstock

    Silica nanomaterial suits this green chemistry approach because it is already made in nature by plants and sponges as structural support. What better teacher for green chemistry than to learn from nature itself? My research group created bio-inspired silica, a product that can be made at room temperature, and in the mild conditions under which silica is made in biology naturally.

    Now, colleagues in my research group are scaling up bio-inspired silica production, exploring its use in different applications and making different nanomaterials. Meanwhile, I’m exploring how changing the conditions under which we make silica can improve the properties, like surface area, that make it function better.

    There’s huge scope for green nanomaterials to advance essential technologies, and if green silica could be scaled up, the potential for substantial change drug delivery and renewables is vast.


    Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?

    Get a weekly roundup in your inbox instead. Every Wednesday, The Conversation’s environment editor writes Imagine, a short email that goes a little deeper into just one climate issue. Join the 35,000+ readers who’ve subscribed so far.

    Amber Keegan receives PhD funding from The University of Sheffield.

    – ref. Greener nanomaterials could transform how our everyday stuff is made – https://theconversation.com/greener-nanomaterials-could-transform-how-our-everyday-stuff-is-made-237791

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: David Olusoga’s new book joins the struggle to make Black history mainstream

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jenny Woodley, Senior Lecturer in Modern American History, Nottingham Trent University

    For decades, Black history in the UK has been siloed from the mainstream, as if incidental to the nation’s history. Black History Month in October is dedicated to celebrating Black heritage, but the rest of the year, it feels largely neglected and ignored. Public historian and broadcaster David Olusoga, is at the forefront of efforts to integrate Black history into our national story.

    His latest book, Black History for Every Day of the Year, co-created with two of his siblings, Yinka and Kemi, is another contribution to that work. This attractive and substantial book has an entry for each calendar day detailing an event, person, place, or theme associated with black history.

    There are biographies of artists, musicians, activists, politicians, filmmakers, writers, and scientists. We learn about legal cases, such as Brown v Board of Education, when racial segregation in US schools was ruled unconstitutional, and the Mansfield Judgment, a 1772 British ruling which decided the fate of enslaved African James Somerset, and was used by abolitionists in their campaign to end slavery.

    We get to see important objects, like the Benin Bronzes, a collection of sculptures created by skilled artisans in the Kingdom of Benin – now part of Nigeria – which were looted by British forces in 1897. They were then given to institutions like the British Museum, where some are still on display.

    The book narrates histories of violence and injustice, from centuries of enslavement and brutal colonial rule, to South Africa’s Sharpeville massacre when, in March 1960, 69 people protesting apartheid laws were killed by the police.

    The tragedy of the 1981 New Cross fire in south London, where 14 young Black people were killed in a suspected arson attack on a house party, is recounted as is the racist murder of teenager Stephen Lawrence, also in south London in 1993.

    It tells stories of resistance and resilience, such as the uprising of enslaved people in Jamaica in 1760, known as Tacky’s revolt, and the 1961 Freedom Rides, when Black and white students challenged racial segregation on American buses and were met with violence.

    In Britain it examines the Bristol bus boycott of 1963, a four-month-long protest against the bus company’s refusal to hire Black or Asian drivers. Many of the events and names will be familiar to some readers but there is likely to be plenty that is new and novel.

    It is not a book which invites intensive reading, but rather the joy is to dip in and out, finding connections between entries, dates and themes. The popularity of social media “On This Day” posts suggests many readers will enjoy connecting past with present.

    At the end of the volume, as well as a glossary of terms, are 12 timelines which place some of the entries into a more cohesive – though potentially more limiting – narrative.

    For example, they outline Black resistance to slavery, abolitionist movements, and histories of imperialism and colonialism. Both here and throughout the book readers are pointed to connections between the entries. The text is enhanced by beautiful illustrations at the beginning of each month, which explore objects, places and themes associated with the entries, and the timelines are likewise creatively illustrated.

    Black History for Every Day is educational and informative, but it is written with a deft touch and its format, along with the illustrations and inclusion of photographs, mean it is also engaging and accessible.

    The scope of the histories included is global and many are transnational, showing the connections between the struggles and stories of people of African descent across the world. However, the majority of entries are associated with British and US history. This is not surprising given the authors’ research interests and the likely market for the book.

    While it is apparent that an attempt has been made to be geographically and chronologically diverse, around a third of the 366 entries deal with US history, suggesting that our understanding of Black history is still often dominated by its American iterations.

    The book is not attempting to break new ground. The timeline of the US civil rights movement, for example, begins with the Supreme Court ruling to desegregate education in 1954 and includes the acts of nonviolent direct action which have dominated the widely accepted “master narrative” of the era.

    However, the book does at least go slightly beyond the usual cut-off point to include the Black Panther Party’s breakfast program, which addressed poverty and hunger in the Black community between 1969 and 1980, and the murder of Black Panther deputy chairman Fred Hampton, who was killed in 1969 at the age of 21.

    The entry for Martin Luther King Jr. claims he organised the Montgomery bus boycott, ignoring the contributions of black women who were the driving force behind the movement. This is somewhat modified by the entry for activist Rosa Parks, which acknowledges the work of the Women’s Political Council in Montgomery.

    The book’s purpose is not to be comprehensive; it cannot be, given its breadth. Rather, each entry is intended to serve as an introduction. The authors explain they hope people will be inspired to find out more after reading it.

    Taken together, the daily entries narrate centuries of discrimination, violence and injustice against people of African descent. But they also tell stories of Black resilience, innovation, talent and achievement. The Olusogas’ book is published in time for Black History month in the UK, but it makes the case for engaging with black history beyond a single month every year.


    Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here.

    Jenny Woodley has received funding from the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust.

    – ref. David Olusoga’s new book joins the struggle to make Black history mainstream – https://theconversation.com/david-olusogas-new-book-joins-the-struggle-to-make-black-history-mainstream-238825

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Starmer promises ‘homes for heroes’ – here’s what we know about veteran homelessness in England

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Lisa O’Malley, Senior lecturer, social policy, University of York

    Clare Louise Jackson/Shutterstock

    In a surprise announcement, Keir Starmer told Labour party conference that his government would end homelessness for veterans. “Homes will be there for heroes,” the prime minister said.

    Labour has promised to build 1.5 million new homes as part of its manifesto. In his speech, Starmer also said that care leavers and victims of domestic abuse will have a “guaranteed roof over their head”.

    I’ve been involved in research about veteran homelessness for ten years. While Starmer’s promise is welcome, it will be hard to achieve. Government data reported that there were 2,110 homeless families with an armed forces veteran in England in 2022-23, a 14% increase from the previous year.

    But that figure is likely to underestimate overall levels of housing insecurity among veterans. Many people who leave military service could be considered “hidden homeless”, particularly female veterans who are unlikely to engage with formal services and young service leavers who easily slip through the cracks of existing provision.

    Those who have been lucky enough to find the right service at the right time may live in veteran-specific housing, including supported accommodation. Others may have found help through Operation Fortitude. This government-run referral scheme for veterans at risk of homelessness has housed over 400 people since it began in September 2023. But these services aren’t enough to ensure stable and secure housing for all veterans.

    The scale of the housing crisis has widened the gap between military and civilian life. Service leavers now need to save more and for longer than they did in the past to have any hope of closing the gap between their entitlements in military accommodation and the cost and availability of civilian housing.

    While in the military, service members’ accommodation is deeply subsidised. Today, a service family with two children could be entitled to a three-bedroom house, paying around £320 a month. For single personnel, it could be as little as £106 per month. In 2013 (the most recent available data), most personnel paid less than 12% of their salary for accommodation charges. The civilian population at the time paid between 20% and 40% for housing.

    However, many service members do not consider what they might do once that support ends. The people most vulnerable to homelessness after military service are those who are discharged quickly, for example for medical or disciplinary reasons. They might be required to leave military accommodation within weeks (or sometimes hours), and haven’t had chance to plan for life after the military.

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    Many of the veterans and service members my colleagues and I interviewed for our research spoke of the lack of planning and ability to save. One told us: “When you join at 18 and get a salary at the same time as all my mates’ student loans, you think you’re a multi-millionaire.”

    Our research suggests that home ownership at the point of discharge is out of reach for many. Social housing is not an option for many veterans, who do not qualify if they are single or have available savings.

    Social housing allocation rules require applicants to have a local connection to qualify. The government said it will bring in changes to fully exempt veterans, care leavers and domestic abuse survivors. Veterans are currently exempt from this for five years. But the exemption is irrelevant if there are no suitable properties available, and veterans are consequently likely to be in temporary accommodation.

    Housing in the private rented sector is expensive to secure and costly to maintain. Many service leavers find themselves returning to the parental home, sometimes after many years of successful service.

    Transitioning to civilian life

    The move from military to civilian life is hard to navigate. While it is certainly true that many service leavers thrive in civilian life, others struggle to find the right support and resources. They may not have the financial literacy and planning to know how to navigate the housing system. One veteran described feelings of “abandonment” after leaving service:

    I joined at 16. I did 15 years. I left at 31. The Royal Navy were my parents. … I didn’t know where to go or what to do.

    Many service leavers are affected by trauma and PTSD, as well as other mental health or substance abuse problems. Like civilians suffering from these conditions, these interconnected issues can exacerbate housing insecurity. And long wait times for mental health services can reduce the chances of finding long-term housing as they struggle to maintain tenancies, pay bills on time and keep stable employment.

    How then, can the government and military best help veterans at risk?

    The first 12 months after leaving service are critical to help the transition to civilian life and ensure service leavers have accommodation. In that time, service leavers should be given an automatic referral to a time-limited housing support scheme if they have nowhere to go.

    They could also be given the option to remain in military accommodation with support to give them time to transition. Another direct solution would be to give service leavers money for private rented sector or mortgage deposits.

    These solutions can’t just start when people leave service. Better mental health support and improving financial literacy while still in service is critical.

    And any solutions can’t be short-term. The homeless veterans I have met over the years were often discharged many years before they experienced homelessness. Evidence suggests that within five years post-discharge is a critical time for rough sleeping to be established. Support for those who left service some years ago also needs to be part of the offer.

    Lisa O’Malley receives funding from Forces in Mind Trust.

    – ref. Starmer promises ‘homes for heroes’ – here’s what we know about veteran homelessness in England – https://theconversation.com/starmer-promises-homes-for-heroes-heres-what-we-know-about-veteran-homelessness-in-england-239782

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: The universe is smoother than the standard model of cosmology suggests – so is the theory broken?

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Ian G. McCarthy, Reader of Astrophysics, Liverpool John Moores University

    Cosmic microwave background shows fluctuations in temperature. ESA/Planck Collaboration

    Given how unfathomably large the universe is, it is perhaps understandable that we haven’t yet cracked all its secrets. But there are actually some pretty basic features, ones we used to think we could explain, that cosmologists are increasingly struggling to make sense of.

    Recent measurements of the distribution of matter in the universe (so-called large-scale structure) appear to be in conflict with the predictions of the standard model of cosmology, our best understanding of how the universe works.

    The standard model originated some 25 years ago and has successfully reproduced a whole plethora of observations. But some of the latest measurements of large-scale structure, a topic which I work on, indicate that the matter is less clustered (smoother) than it ought to be according to the standard model.

    This result has cosmologists scratching their heads looking for explanations. Some solutions are relatively mundane, such as unknown systematic errors in the measurements. But there are more radical solutions. These include rethinking the nature of dark energy (the force causing the universe’s expansion to accelerate), invoking a new force of nature or even tweaking Einstein’s theory of gravity on the largest of scales.

    At present, the data cannot easily distinguish between different competing ideas. But the measurements from forthcoming surveys are poised to take a giant leap forward in precision. We may be on the cusp of finally breaking the standard model of cosmology.

    This is article is part of our series Cosmology in crisis? which uncovers the greatest problems facing cosmologists today – and discusses the implications of solving them.

    The early universe

    To understand the nature of the current tension and its possible solutions, it is important to understand how structure in the universe formed and subsequently evolved. Much of our understanding comes from measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The CMB is radiation that fills the universe and is a leftover relic from the first few hundred thousand years of cosmic evolution after the Big Bang (for comparison, the universe is estimated to be 13.7 billion years old).

    Scientists discovered the CMB by accident in 1964 (garnering them a Nobel prize), but its existence and properties had been predicted years earlier.

    In excellent agreement with some of the earliest theoretical work, the observed temperature of the CMB today is an incredibly chilly 3 Kelvin (-270°C). However, at very early times, it was sufficiently hot (millions of degrees) to enable the fusion of all of the light elements in the universe, including helium and lithium, into heavier ones.

    The CMB’s spectrum (light broken down by wavelength) suggests it must have been in thermal equilibrium with matter in the past – meaning they had the same distribution of energies. Matter and radiation can only reach thermal equilibrium in very dense environments. So measurements of the CMB convincingly demonstrate that the universe was once an extremely hot and dense place, with all the matter and radiation packed into a very small space.

    As the universe expanded, it quickly cooled. And as it did so, some of the free electrons that existed at the time were captured by protons, forming atoms of hydrogen. This “era of recombination” happened around 300,000 years after the Big Bang. After this point, the universe was suddenly less dense so the CMB radiation was “released” to travel without impediment, and it has not significantly interacted with matter since.

    The universe’s timeline.
    Nasa/wikipedia, CC BY-SA

    As the radiation is very old, when we make measurements of the CMB today, we are learning about the conditions of the early universe. But detailed mapping of the CMB tells us a great deal more than this.

    A key insight from CMB maps obtained with the Planck telescope is that the universe was also exceptionally smooth at early times. There was only a 0.001% variation from place to place in the density and temperature of the matter and radiation in the universe. If there had been more extreme variation, that matter and radiation would have been much more clustered.

    These variations, or “fluctuations”, are of fundamental importance to how structure subsequently evolved in the universe. Without these fluctuations, there would be no galaxies, no stars or planets – and no life. A very interesting question is, where did these fluctuations come from?

    Our current understanding is that they are a result of quantum mechanics, the theory of the microcosmos of atoms and particles. Quantum mechanics shows that empty space has some background energy which allows sudden, local changes, such as particles popping in and out of existence. The quantum nature of matter and energy has been verified to remarkable accuracy in the laboratory.

    These fluctuations are thought to have been blown up to large scales in a very rapid period of expansion in the early universe called “inflation”, although the detailed mechanism behind inflation is still not fully understood.

    Over time, these fluctuations grew and the arrangement of matter and radiation in the universe became more clustered. Regions that were slightly denser had a stronger gravitational pull and so attracted even more matter, which increased the density, which strengthened the gravitational pull, and so on. Regions of slightly lower density lost out, becoming emptier with time – a cosmic case of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.

    The fluctuations grew to such an extent over time that galaxies and stars started to form, with galaxies being distributed in and along the familiar filaments and nodes that make up a “cosmic web”.

    The standard explanation

    The rate at which fluctuations grow over time, and how they are clustered in space depends on several factors: the nature of gravity, the constituent components of matter and energy in the universe, and how these components interact (both with themselves and with each other).

    These factors are encapsulated in the standard model of cosmology. The model is based on a solution to Einstein’s general theory of relativity (our best understanding of gravity) that assumes the universe is homogeneous and isotropic on large scales – meaning it looks the same in every direction to every observer.

    It also assumes that the matter and energy in the universe is composed of normal matter (“baryons”), dark matter consisting of relatively heavy and slow-moving particles (“cold” dark matter) and a constant amount of dark energy (Einstein’s cosmological constant, denoted Lambda).

    Since its origin approximately 25 years ago, the model has successfully explained a great many observations of the universe on large scales, including the [detailed properties of the CMB].

    And until very recently, it also provided excellent fits to a variety of measurements of the clustering of large-scale structure at late times. In fact, some measurements of large-scale structure are still very well described by the standard model and this may be providing an important clue as to the origin of the current tension.

    Remember that the CMB shows us the clustering of matter (the fluctuations) at early times. So we can use the standard model to evolve that forward in time and predict what it should, theoretically, look like today. If there is a fit between this prediction and observations, that is a very strong indication that the ingredients of the standard model are correct.

    The ‘S8’ tension

    What has changed recently is that our measurements of large-scale structure, particularly at very late times, have significantly improved in their precision. Various surveys such as the Dark Energy Survey and the Kilo Degree Survey have found evidence for inconsistencies between observations and the standard model.

    In other words, there is a mismatch between the early time and late time fluctuations: the late-time fluctuations are not as large as expected. Cosmologists refer to this clash as the “S8 tension”, as S8 is a parameter that we use to characterise the clustering of matter in the late-time universe.

    Depending on the particular data set, the chance of the tension being a statistical fluke may be as low as 0.3%. But from a statistical point of view, that is not enough to firmly rule out the standard model.

    However, there are strong hints of the tension in a variety of independent observations. And attempts to explain it away due to systematic uncertainties in the measurements or modelling have simply not been successful to date.

    For example, it had previously been suggested that perhaps energetic non-gravitational processes, such as winds and jets from supermassive black holes, could inject enough energy to alter the clustering of matter on large scales.
    However, we have shown using state-of-the-art cosmological hydrodynamical simulations (called Flamingo) that such effects appear to be too small to explain the tension with the standard model of cosmology.

    If the tension is indeed pointing us to a flaw in the standard model, this would imply that something in the basic ingredients of the model is not correct.

    This would have huge consequences for fundamental physics. For example, the tension may be indicating that something is wrong about our understanding of gravity, or the nature of the unknown substance called dark matter or dark energy. In the case of dark matter, one possibility is that it interacts with itself via an unknown force (something beyond just gravity).

    Alternatively, perhaps dark energy is not constant but evolves with time, as early results from the Dark Energy Survey Instrument (Desi) may indicate. Some scientists are even considering the possibility of a new (fifth) force of nature. This would be a force of similar strength to gravity that operates over very large scales and would act to slow the growth of structure.

    But note that any modifications of the standard model would also need to account for the many observations of the universe that the model successfully explains. This is no simple task. And before we jump to grand conclusions, we must be sure that the tension is real and not simply a statistical fluctuation.

    The good news is that forthcoming measurements of large-scale structure with Desi, the Rubin Observatory, Euclid, the Simons Observatory and other experiments will be able to confirm if the tension is real with much more precise measurements.

    They will also be able to thoroughly test many of the alternatives to the standard model that have been proposed. It may be that within the next couple of years we will have ruled out the standard model of cosmology and profoundly changed our understanding of how the universe works. Or the model may be vindicated and more reliable than ever. It’s an exciting time to be a cosmologist.

    Ian G. McCarthy receives funding from UKRI’s Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). He works for Liverpool John Moores University.

    – ref. The universe is smoother than the standard model of cosmology suggests – so is the theory broken? – https://theconversation.com/the-universe-is-smoother-than-the-standard-model-of-cosmology-suggests-so-is-the-theory-broken-238098

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Himpathy: the psychology of why some people side with perpetrators of sexual misconduct – podcast

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Gemma Ware, Host, The Conversation Weekly Podcast, The Conversation

    In 2018, the Australian philosopher Kate Manne coined the word “himpathy” to describe what she called “the inappropriate and disproportionate sympathy powerful men often enjoy in cases of sexual assault, intimate partner violence, homicide and other misogynistic behavior”.

    This happened to former US President Donald Trump who was found liable for sexually abusing the writer E. Jean Carroll in 2023. Carroll faced abuse from online trolls, she received death threats and was driven from her home.

    What makes somebody more likely to feel himpathetic, either to somebody facing accusations in the public eye, or in their own workplace?

    In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we speak to a human behaviour expert whose research seeks to understand what makes some people more inclined to support perpetrators of sexual misconduct than the victims.

    Samantha Dodson is an assistant professor of organisational behaviour and human resources at the University of Calgary in Canada. She first started researching the ways people react to accusations of sexual misconduct around the time of the #MeToo movement, as women came forward with accusations of sexual harassment in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein case.

    Dodson and her colleagues wanted to understand why some people are predisposed to express sympathy towards male perpetrators of sexual misconduct, or himpathy. Over a series of five studies, both analysing public comments on X related to the #MeToo movement and through lab-based psychology experiments. Her team used moral foundations theory to build a profile of the kinds of people more likely to be himpathetic.

    Moral foundations theory argues that there are innate moral concerns that everybody holds to different levels. These concerns include respect for authority, loyalty, staying pure, being fair and being caring toward other people.

    Don’t rock the boat

    What we found is that when people strongly value things like loyalty, respect for authority and purity, they’re more likely to feel sympathy toward the man accused of sexual misconduct and feel anger toward the women who made that allegation.

    Dodson says people who hold these moral values very strongly are more likely to see allegations as a threat to the stability of a company, or institution. And, as a result, they’re also less likely to believe a victim.

    It also leads to people being more likely to seek punishment for the women who made the accusations and less likely to seek punishment for the men who have been accused.

    Overall, Dodson found the vast majority of people in their studies were “not himpathetic” and it’s just a small subset of people who react this way.

    The challenge is if those people are in positions of authority, or … if you have one person that you work with who’s himpathetic and you’re a victim you might experience some iciness from them or ostracism.

    Their work also looks at how managers can better deal with accusations of sexual harassment in the workplace as a result of their findings.

    Listen to Samantha Dodson talk about her research and the recommendations from it on The Conversation Weekly podcast, which also features an introduction from Eleni Vlahiotis, business and economy editor at The Conversation in Canada.

    A transcript of this episode is available on Apple Podcasts.

    This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Katie Flood with assistance from Mend Mariwany. Sound design was by Michelle Macklem, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Gemma Ware is the executive producer.

    Newsclips in this episode from ABC News,
    PBS News Hour and NBC News.

    You can find us on Instagram at theconversationdotcom or via email. You can also subscribe to The Conversation’s free daily email here.

    Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here.

    Samantha Dodson receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

    – ref. Himpathy: the psychology of why some people side with perpetrators of sexual misconduct – podcast – https://theconversation.com/himpathy-the-psychology-of-why-some-people-side-with-perpetrators-of-sexual-misconduct-podcast-239860

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-Evening Report: Grattan on Friday: Experts want Albanese to lead on indoor air quality as part of pandemic planning

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

    FOTOGRIN/Shutterstock

    Last month, a delegation led by Brendan Crabb, head of the Burnet Institute, a prestigious medical research body, met Anthony Albanese in the prime minister’s parliament house office.

    Its members, who included Lidia Morawska from Queensland University of Technology, a world-leading expert on air quality and health, also blitzed ministers and staffers. They were pitching for the federal government to spearhead a comprehensive policy on clean indoor air and for the issue to be put on the national cabinet’s agenda.

    They pointed out to Albanese that indoor air is an outlier in our otherwise comprehensive public health framework. Despite people spending the majority of their time inside, indoor air quality is mostly unregulated, in contrast to the standards that apply to, for example, food and water.

    There are multiple health and economic reasons to be concerned about this air quality but a major one is to limit the transmission of airborne diseases, such as COVID.

    For many of us, COVID has become just a bad memory, despite its lasting and mixed legacies. For instance, without the pandemic, fewer people would now be working from home. More small businesses would be flourishing in our CBDs. Arguably, fewer children would be trying to catch up from inadequate schooling.

    While the media have largely lost interest in COVID, and people are now rather blase about it, the disease is still taking a toll.

    In 2023 there were about 4,600 deaths attributed to COVID, and almost certainly more in reality, given Australia that year had 8,400 “excess deaths” (defined as actual deaths above expected deaths).

    Up to July this year there were 2,503 COVID deaths.

    In nursing homes, whilst survival rates from COVID are much improved with vaccination and antivirals, as of September 19, there were 117 active outbreaks with 59 new outbreaks in that past week. There had been 900 deaths for the year so far.

    Long COVID has become a serious issue, with varying respiratory, cardiac, cognitive and immunological symptoms. It is estimated between 200,000 and 900,000 people in Australia currently have long COVID.

    The Albanese government is presently awaiting the report it commissioned into how the COVID pandemic was handled.

    The inquiry has looked at the performance of the Morrison government, but its terms of reference didn’t include the states. That limits its usefulness, but there were politics involved, given high profile state Labor governments.

    Not that the state and territory leaders of that time are around anymore (apart from the ACT’s Andrew Barr). Those faces that became so familiar from their daily news conference have disappeared into the never-never: Victoria’s Dan Andrews, Western Australia’s Mark McGowan, New South Wales’ Gladys Berejiklian, Queensland’s Annastacia Palaszczuk.

    COVID variously made or tarnished leaders’ reputations. McGowan, in particular, reached stratospheric heights of popularity. Andrews deeply divided people.

    In general, however, COVID boosted support for leaders and increased public trust in them and in government. In times of uncertainty, the public looked to known institutions and to authority figures. Since then, trust has eroded again.

    Experts came into their own during the pandemic but then found themselves in the middle of the political bickering. In retrospect, some of them were wrong.

    In the broad, especially in terms of the death rate and the economy, Australia navigated the crisis well. But drill down, and the story is more complex, as documented by two leading economists, Steven Hamilton (based in Washington and connected to the Australian National University) and Richard Holden (from UNSW).

    In their just-published book, Australia’s Pandemic Exceptionalism, their bottom-line conclusion is that Australia was very impressive in its (vastly expensive) economic response but it was a mixed picture on the health side.

    While Australia was quick out of the blocks in closing the national border and bringing in other measures, it fell down dramatically on two fronts. The Morrison government failed to order a wide variety of vaccines and it failed to buy enough Rapid Antigen Tests (RATs).

    The “vaccine procurement strategy was an unmitigated disaster,” Hamilton and Holden write. This was not just “the greatest failure of the pandemic – it was arguably the greatest single public policy failure in Australian history”.

    “We put all our vaccine eggs in just two baskets”, both of which failed to differing degrees. This was “a terrible risk to take. Pandemics are times for insurance, not gambling,” they write.

    “And while our tax and statistical authorities marshalled their forces to operate much faster and more nimbly to serve the desperate needs of a government facing a once-in-a-century crisis, our medical regulatory complex repeatedly ignored international evidence and experience, and our political leaders capitulated to their advice. And then the prime minister told us that when it came to getting Australians vaccinated:‘it’s not a race’”.

    The failure to order every vaccine on the horizon meant when production or supply problems arose for those that were hoped for or on order, the rollout was delayed.

    After this bungle, “stunningly, we turned around and repeated these same mistakes all over again” by not obtaining and distributing freely massive numbers of RATs. In this failure, “our federal government showed the same lack of foresight, the same penny-wise but pound-foolish mindset that it had displayed in the vaccine rollout”.

    The authors blame Scott Morrison, then-health minister Greg Hunt, then-chief medical officer Brendan Murphy, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), and the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI) for the health failures, which prolonged the lockdowns, cost lives and delayed reopening.

    Urging better preparation for the next pandemic, Hamilton and Holden have a list of suggestions. They stress we need to ensure we have mRNA vaccine manufacturing capability (on which there is fairly good progress). We must get vaccine procurement “right from the start” regardless of cost. Huge quantities of RATs should be procured as soon as they become available, ready to be used immediately.

    A complete overhaul of the medical-regulatory complex should be undertaken. As well, Australia should continue to invest in “economic infrastructure”. In the pandemic, the economic effort was facilitated by having a single touch payroll system. “The first obvious candidate for improvement is a real-time GST turnover reporting capability.”

    Perhaps a comprehensive indoor clean air policy could be added to the infrastructure list.

    The government’s review will have its own recommendations. Crabb and his colleagues hope they include attention to indoor air quality, following advice from the Chief Scientist and the National Science and Technology Council.

    Members of the delegation say they received an attentive hearing from the PM.

    Anna-Maria Arabia, chief executive of the Australian Academy of Science, and a member of the delegation, says Albanese “understood that improving indoor air quality is a cornerstone requirement to preparing for future pandemics and [he] was attuned to the practical implications of having good indoor air quality systems, including schools and workplaces being able to stay open and functional, reduce absenteeism and boost productivity”.

    What’s needed beyond awareness, however, is timely policy action. Pandemics don’t give much notice of their arrival.

    Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. Grattan on Friday: Experts want Albanese to lead on indoor air quality as part of pandemic planning – https://theconversation.com/grattan-on-friday-experts-want-albanese-to-lead-on-indoor-air-quality-as-part-of-pandemic-planning-239829

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Eco-anxiety Q&A: how the IPCC’s vice-chair keeps her head cool on a warming planet

    Source: The Conversation – France – By Diána Ürge-Vorsatz, Professor of Environmental Sciences, Central European University

    In the past months, the planet has experienced the hottest months of June and August, boreal summer and day on record, with a global average temperature of 17.16°C on 22 July. While many have been getting on with their lives as best as they can, there are many more who are feeling the heat, as levels of climate anxiety continue to rise. At risk are people experiencing climate impacts in the Global South, but also professionals in the Earth sciences documenting and modelling them.

    So, how can we channel our alarm in a way that doesn’t paralyse us, but propel us into action? To answer this question, The Conversation Europe spoke to one of the world’s most public-facing climate scientists, the Vice-Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Diána Ürge-Vorsatz.

    Could you start off by describing your work? According to you, what have been the highlights of your career as a climate scientist?

    So I mostly work in the area of energy efficiency. I have done a lot of modelling, including to demonstrate how higher efficiency buildings could reduce carbon emissions. Among others, I have alerted the world of what we call the carbon lock-in risks of inefficient building retrofits — when fossil fuel-intensive systems perpetuate, delay, or prevent the transition to low-carbon alternatives.

    I’ve always tried to concentrate on solutions which not only allow us to solve environmental issues, but also to increase human well-being and meet other societal goals. That’s because I come from a country [Hungary] where I see that while the environment and climate change are important, they typically play second fiddle to other priorities. Hence, I believe we have to solve these things in a way that makes it worthwhile.

    Diána Ürge-Vorsatz, 2024.
    Fourni par l’auteur

    My work therefore prompted lawmakers to revise the EU’s legislation to boost building energy efficiency – the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive – in 2010. On the first day the Fidesz government was reelected that year, I showed them how many jobs could be created through high efficiency building retrofits. Based on our research, they committed that the entire building stock would be refurbished to slash energy consumption by 60 %, which would have been really very ambitious, the first such commitment in the world. Unfortunately, a few months later, they changed their direction and they rather went into other energy policy priorities.

    Do you also research alarming climate scenarios? You told me the other day that you were particularly concerned with the potential collapse of Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) at the moment

    That’s one of my concerns, yes, because it’s amongst the tipping points that would exert its impact the earliest.

    If we look at other Earth system tipping points, most of them require a century, several centuries, if not several millennia until they exert a full impact. If AMOC collapses, it would exert its full impact within two to three decades, potentially. These are very strong impacts predicted clearly, on Europe as well as other regions. More and more papers have shown evidence that its collapse could already be underway. That’s definitely been alarming.

    When you started on this career path, would you describe yourself as prey to eco-anxiety? And if not, was there a turning point when it appeared?

    No, when I started I don’t think we had any knowledge that would have amounted to any existential threat, and it was still not so tangible that so many things could go wrong.

    I was studying for my PhD at UCLA, at UC Berkeley from 1992-96. In the LA Times, there was a two page advertisement calling for artists to design artwork that would scare anyone away, which they could put above the Yucca Mountain deep high-level based nuclear repository so that even if people didn’t speak English or they didn’t understand our script anymore, they could still understand that there was something really dangerous under that.

    At that point, I remember thinking: “Oh my God, if you just can’t dig or walk wherever you want anymore, that’s just wrong. We cannot do that to future generations.”

    Then there’s the never-ending news cycle, making it hard to pinpoint specific moments that alarm you. One that comes to mind has been the discovery over time that forever chemicals – Per and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) – are everywhere, even in the most remote parts of the earth and rain is no longer of drinking water quality even in Antarctica. This isn’t going to go away — precisely because PFAS are what we call forever chemicals. We will never be able to vacuum clean the planet from PFAS. Likewise with microplastics. When you start looking ahead with your eyes open, it can be really scary.

    And how do you experience the intimate knowledge of that alarming data on the one hand, and the public’s, and above all the elites’, climate inaction on the other?

    Well, I wouldn’t quite call it “climate inaction”. It’s easy to dwell on the idea that the glass is half empty. But in fact, the glass is half full. Lots has been done since the 2015 Paris Agreement, which was itself a miracle.

    You were there when the deal was struck, weren’t you? Could you tell us what it was like?

    Well, it was truly euphoric, because before that, if a scientist dared mentioning [the threshold of] 1.5°C [of warming above pre-industrial levels], you were a tree-hugger and an advocate, not a scientist. You did not get funding.

    And suddenly that became a political reality, or at least a political goal. I think that was really amazing for me because that time we didn’t have science clearly backing that you actually could achieve 1.5°C. So in the run-up to the Paris Agreement, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) asked the IPCC to produce a report on 1.5°C. I remember talking about it with colleagues at the time, who told me: “That’s crazy, this train is gone, let’s not do it”.

    Then the months went by and and those voices faded. By the time we got to the plenary meeting in January there was not a single voice saying “We shouldn’t do this report”. Scientists changed course and put so much effort in on trying to say “Okay can this be done well? Let’s actually see”. Then they ran their models to figure out that actually not only can it be done — but there are so many ways we can get there. Yes, I know that it’s now increasingly unlikely that we still will meet it, but it still created a lot of momentum.

    One fact that we don’t emphasize enough: we have prevented the world from warming by five to six degrees by the end of the century, and we are now at worst saying perhaps four degrees, but more likely 2.5°C to 3.5°C.

    How do you communicate with your children about the climate crisis? For example, are there things that you choose not to tell them in order to protect them?

    I don’t hide anything from them. We quite frequently talk about the gravity of the situation because I cannot help bearing on them in the evening all the negative experiences and facts I learned during the day and I just have to unload these for them at dinners and so on.

    One of my daughters did experience quite severe environmental anxiety for almost two years when she was about nine years old. She had come with me to a TV shooting and they allowed her into the studio. And before my interview, they just played this intense clip about storms and fires – typical climate impacts. But after that, she was really very afraid for a long time.

    How did that fear translate itself?

    She couldn’t sleep very well. She was constantly afraid physically. She would tell me: “My god, is this going to burn around us? Are we going to have floods?”

    And it’s that a nine year old cannot, of course, fully comprehend yet how these risks will unfold in the future. I think she was put in this state of fear and anxiety. So that’s why it was also hard to manage because it wasn’t anything concrete or anything that she could verbally express or phrase nicely.

    And I couldn’t say, “Look darling, it’s not going to happen.”

    And how did she manage to surface from that state of paralysis?

    After a while, I think she understood that it wasn’t yet threatening her life. But all of my children are still concerned and many of them want to contribute to fighting climate change in some way.

    For example, my eldest daughter was studying medicine, but after her second year, she spent the entire summer in tears. She was deeply passionate about climate action and believed there were only two paths forward. Either she could still save the planet by becoming an architect to design zero-energy buildings, or, if it was too late, she should focus on mitigating the damage by remaining in medicine. After two months of struggling with this dilemma, she abandoned her dream of architecture and decided to continue with medical school. It was heartbreaking for me to see how little hope they had of solving the climate crisis.

    What would your advice be for parents whose children are suffering from eco-anxiety?

    I think the best way is to turn anxiety into action — to explain to them that they have and we still have agency. Even though we are small, we have a very important impact. We can vote. We can choose a profession where we can change the world. We can be role models and we can influence our peers through social media and many other ways.

    So if we tell them the five scenarios that the IPCC presents (investor, consumer, citizen, role model, professional) in the 6th Assessment Report as individual roles we can play to curb climate change, it’s not only through whether we choose to take a plastic bag or not. The future isn’t something that happens to us, but in our hands. We are all part of systems where each of us can influence more than we think.

    If your children were to start striking for the climate, would you support them?

    Yes, I think protests are one of the very important ways how we can have an impact. Besides, children often don’t have any other tools. And that’s why they also feel anxiety because they don’t yet have influence. They don’t have any money to spend, or any voting rights yet. They don’t yet have a profession through which they can influence the world. They feel powerless.

    And often children’s only power is to protest. If we give them other means to where they can influence the processes, that’d be even better.

    Diána Ürge-Vorsatz ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d’une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n’a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.

    – ref. Eco-anxiety Q&A: how the IPCC’s vice-chair keeps her head cool on a warming planet – https://theconversation.com/eco-anxiety-qanda-how-the-ipccs-vice-chair-keeps-her-head-cool-on-a-warming-planet-231226

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Eco-anxiety Q&A: how the IPCC’s vice-chair keeps her head cool on a warming planet

    Source: The Conversation – France – By Diána Ürge-Vorsatz, Professor of Environmental Sciences, Central European University

    In the past months, the planet has experienced the hottest months of June and August, boreal summer and day on record, with a global average temperature of 17.16°C on 22 July. While many have been getting on with their lives as best as they can, there are many more who are feeling the heat, as levels of climate anxiety continue to rise. At risk are people experiencing climate impacts in the Global South, but also professionals in the Earth sciences documenting and modelling them.

    So, how can we channel our alarm in a way that doesn’t paralyse us, but propel us into action? To answer this question, The Conversation Europe spoke to one of the world’s most public-facing climate scientists, the Vice-Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Diána Ürge-Vorsatz.

    Could you start off by describing your work? According to you, what have been the highlights of your career as a climate scientist?

    So I mostly work in the area of energy efficiency. I have done a lot of modelling, including to demonstrate how higher efficiency buildings could reduce carbon emissions. Among others, I have alerted the world of what we call the carbon lock-in risks of inefficient building retrofits — when fossil fuel-intensive systems perpetuate, delay, or prevent the transition to low-carbon alternatives.

    I’ve always tried to concentrate on solutions which not only allow us to solve environmental issues, but also to increase human well-being and meet other societal goals. That’s because I come from a country [Hungary] where I see that while the environment and climate change are important, they typically play second fiddle to other priorities. Hence, I believe we have to solve these things in a way that makes it worthwhile.

    Diána Ürge-Vorsatz, 2024.
    Fourni par l’auteur

    My work therefore prompted lawmakers to revise the EU’s legislation to boost building energy efficiency – the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive – in 2010. On the first day the Fidesz government was reelected that year, I showed them how many jobs could be created through high efficiency building retrofits. Based on our research, they committed that the entire building stock would be refurbished to slash energy consumption by 60 %, which would have been really very ambitious, the first such commitment in the world. Unfortunately, a few months later, they changed their direction and they rather went into other energy policy priorities.

    Do you also research alarming climate scenarios? You told me the other day that you were particularly concerned with the potential collapse of Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) at the moment

    That’s one of my concerns, yes, because it’s amongst the tipping points that would exert its impact the earliest.

    If we look at other Earth system tipping points, most of them require a century, several centuries, if not several millennia until they exert a full impact. If AMOC collapses, it would exert its full impact within two to three decades, potentially. These are very strong impacts predicted clearly, on Europe as well as other regions. More and more papers have shown evidence that its collapse could already be underway. That’s definitely been alarming.

    When you started on this career path, would you describe yourself as prey to eco-anxiety? And if not, was there a turning point when it appeared?

    No, when I started I don’t think we had any knowledge that would have amounted to any existential threat, and it was still not so tangible that so many things could go wrong.

    I was studying for my PhD at UCLA, at UC Berkeley from 1992-96. In the LA Times, there was a two page advertisement calling for artists to design artwork that would scare anyone away, which they could put above the Yucca Mountain deep high-level based nuclear repository so that even if people didn’t speak English or they didn’t understand our script anymore, they could still understand that there was something really dangerous under that.

    At that point, I remember thinking: “Oh my God, if you just can’t dig or walk wherever you want anymore, that’s just wrong. We cannot do that to future generations.”

    Then there’s the never-ending news cycle, making it hard to pinpoint specific moments that alarm you. One that comes to mind has been the discovery over time that forever chemicals – Per and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) – are everywhere, even in the most remote parts of the earth and rain is no longer of drinking water quality even in Antarctica. This isn’t going to go away — precisely because PFAS are what we call forever chemicals. We will never be able to vacuum clean the planet from PFAS. Likewise with microplastics. When you start looking ahead with your eyes open, it can be really scary.

    And how do you experience the intimate knowledge of that alarming data on the one hand, and the public’s, and above all the elites’, climate inaction on the other?

    Well, I wouldn’t quite call it “climate inaction”. It’s easy to dwell on the idea that the glass is half empty. But in fact, the glass is half full. Lots has been done since the 2015 Paris Agreement, which was itself a miracle.

    You were there when the deal was struck, weren’t you? Could you tell us what it was like?

    Well, it was truly euphoric, because before that, if a scientist dared mentioning [the threshold of] 1.5°C [of warming above pre-industrial levels], you were a tree-hugger and an advocate, not a scientist. You did not get funding.

    And suddenly that became a political reality, or at least a political goal. I think that was really amazing for me because that time we didn’t have science clearly backing that you actually could achieve 1.5°C. So in the run-up to the Paris Agreement, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) asked the IPCC to produce a report on 1.5°C. I remember talking about it with colleagues at the time, who told me: “That’s crazy, this train is gone, let’s not do it”.

    Then the months went by and and those voices faded. By the time we got to the plenary meeting in January there was not a single voice saying “We shouldn’t do this report”. Scientists changed course and put so much effort in on trying to say “Okay can this be done well? Let’s actually see”. Then they ran their models to figure out that actually not only can it be done — but there are so many ways we can get there. Yes, I know that it’s now increasingly unlikely that we still will meet it, but it still created a lot of momentum.

    One fact that we don’t emphasize enough: we have prevented the world from warming by five to six degrees by the end of the century, and we are now at worst saying perhaps four degrees, but more likely 2.5°C to 3.5°C.

    How do you communicate with your children about the climate crisis? For example, are there things that you choose not to tell them in order to protect them?

    I don’t hide anything from them. We quite frequently talk about the gravity of the situation because I cannot help bearing on them in the evening all the negative experiences and facts I learned during the day and I just have to unload these for them at dinners and so on.

    One of my daughters did experience quite severe environmental anxiety for almost two years when she was about nine years old. She had come with me to a TV shooting and they allowed her into the studio. And before my interview, they just played this intense clip about storms and fires – typical climate impacts. But after that, she was really very afraid for a long time.

    How did that fear translate itself?

    She couldn’t sleep very well. She was constantly afraid physically. She would tell me: “My god, is this going to burn around us? Are we going to have floods?”

    And it’s that a nine year old cannot, of course, fully comprehend yet how these risks will unfold in the future. I think she was put in this state of fear and anxiety. So that’s why it was also hard to manage because it wasn’t anything concrete or anything that she could verbally express or phrase nicely.

    And I couldn’t say, “Look darling, it’s not going to happen.”

    And how did she manage to surface from that state of paralysis?

    After a while, I think she understood that it wasn’t yet threatening her life. But all of my children are still concerned and many of them want to contribute to fighting climate change in some way.

    For example, my eldest daughter was studying medicine, but after her second year, she spent the entire summer in tears. She was deeply passionate about climate action and believed there were only two paths forward. Either she could still save the planet by becoming an architect to design zero-energy buildings, or, if it was too late, she should focus on mitigating the damage by remaining in medicine. After two months of struggling with this dilemma, she abandoned her dream of architecture and decided to continue with medical school. It was heartbreaking for me to see how little hope they had of solving the climate crisis.

    What would your advice be for parents whose children are suffering from eco-anxiety?

    I think the best way is to turn anxiety into action — to explain to them that they have and we still have agency. Even though we are small, we have a very important impact. We can vote. We can choose a profession where we can change the world. We can be role models and we can influence our peers through social media and many other ways.

    So if we tell them the five scenarios that the IPCC presents (investor, consumer, citizen, role model, professional) in the 6th Assessment Report as individual roles we can play to curb climate change, it’s not only through whether we choose to take a plastic bag or not. The future isn’t something that happens to us, but in our hands. We are all part of systems where each of us can influence more than we think.

    If your children were to start striking for the climate, would you support them?

    Yes, I think protests are one of the very important ways how we can have an impact. Besides, children often don’t have any other tools. And that’s why they also feel anxiety because they don’t yet have influence. They don’t have any money to spend, or any voting rights yet. They don’t yet have a profession through which they can influence the world. They feel powerless.

    And often children’s only power is to protest. If we give them other means to where they can influence the processes, that’d be even better.

    Diána Ürge-Vorsatz ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d’une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n’a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.

    – ref. Eco-anxiety Q&A: how the IPCC’s vice-chair keeps her head cool on a warming planet – https://theconversation.com/eco-anxiety-qanda-how-the-ipccs-vice-chair-keeps-her-head-cool-on-a-warming-planet-231226

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Easing Africa’s debt burdens: a fresh approach, based on an old idea

    Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Danny Bradlow, Professor/Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Advancement of Scholarship, University of Pretoria

    The statistics are stark: 54 governments, of which 25 are African, are spending at least 10% of their revenues on servicing their debts; 48 countries, home to 3.3 billion people, are spending more on debt service than on health or education.

    Among them, 23 African countries are spending more on debt service than on health or education.

    While the international community stands by, these countries are servicing their debts and defaulting on their development goals.

    The Group of 20’s current approach for dealing with the debts of low income countries is the Common Framework.

    It requires the debtor to first discuss its problems with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and obtain its assessment of how much debt relief it needs. Then it must negotiate with its official creditors – international organisations, governments and government agencies – over how much debt relief they will provide. Only then can the debtor reach an agreement – on comparable terms to the official creditors – with its commercial creditors.

    Unfortunately, this process has been sub-optimal.

    One reason is that it works too slowly to meet the urgent needs of distressed borrowers. As a result, it condemns debtor countries to financial limbo. The resulting uncertainty is not in anyone’s interest. For example, Zambia has been working through the G20’s cumbersome process for more than three and a half years and has not yet finalised agreements with all its creditors.

    The need for a new approach is overwhelmingly evident. Although the current crisis has not yet become the “systemic” threat it was in the 1980s when multiple countries defaulted on their debt, it is a “silent” sovereign debt crisis.

    We propose a two-part approach that would improve the situation of sovereign debtors and their creditors. This proposal is based on the lessons we have learned from our work on the legal and economic aspects of developing country debt, particularly African debt.

    First, we suggest that official creditors and the IMF create a strategic buyer of “last resort” that can purchase the bonds of debt distressed countries and refinance them on better terms.

    Second, we recommend that all parties involved in sovereign debt restructurings adopt a set of principles that they can use to guide the debtor and its creditors in reaching an optimal agreement and monitoring its implementation.

    The current approach fails to deal effectively and fairly with both the concerns of the creditors and all the debtor’s legal obligations and responsibilities. Our proposed solution would offer debtors debt relief that does not undermine their ability to meet their other legal obligations and responsibilities, while also accommodating private creditors’ preference for cash payments.

    Our proposal is not risk-free. And buybacks are not appropriate for all debtors. Nevertheless it offers a principled and feasible approach to dealing with a silent debt crisis that threatens to undermine international efforts to address global challenges such as climate, poverty and inequality.

    It uses the IMF’s existing resources to meet both the bondholders’ preferences for immediate cash and the developing countries’ need to reduce their debt burdens in a transparent and principled way.

    It also helps the international community avoid a widespread default on debt and development.

    Bondholders are a major problem

    Foreign bondholders, who are the major creditors of many developing countries, have proven to be particularly challenging in providing substantive debt relief in a timely manner. In theory, they should be more flexible than official creditors.

    Developing countries have been paying bondholders a premium to compensate them for providing financing to borrowers that are perceived to be risky. As a result, bondholders have already received larger payouts than official creditors. Therefore, they should be better placed than official creditors to assist the debtor in the restructuring processes.

    However, despite having received large returns from defaulted bonds, bondholders have remained obstinate in debt restructurings.

    Our proposal seeks to overcome this hurdle in a way that is fair to debtors, creditors and their respective stakeholders.

    How it would work

    First, the official creditors and the IMF should create and fund a strategic buyer “of last resort” who can purchase distressed (and expensive) debt at a discount from bondholders. The buyer, now the creditor of the country in distress, can repackage the debt and sell it to the debtor country on more manageable terms. The net result is that the bondholders receive cash for their bonds, while the debtor country benefits from substantial debt relief. In addition, the debtor and its remaining official creditors benefit from a simplified debt restructuring process.

    This concept has precedent. In 1989, as part of the Highly Indebted Poor Countries Initiative, the international community’s effort to deal with the then existing debt burdens of poor countries, the World Bank Group established the Debt Reduction Facility, which helped eligible governments repurchase their external commercial debts at deep discounts. It completed 25 transactions which helped erase approximately US$10.3 billion in debt principal and over US$3.5 billion in interest arrears.

    Some individual countries have also bought back their own debt. In 2009, Ecuador repurchased 93% of its defaulted debt at a deep discount. This enabled the government to reduce its debt stock by 27% and promote economic growth in subsequent years.

    Unfortunately, the countries currently in debt distress lack sufficient foreign reserves to pursue such a strategy. Hence, they need to find a “friendly” buyer of last resort.

    The IMF is well positioned to play this role. It has the mandate to support countries during financial crises. It also has the resources to fund such a facility. It can use a mix of its own resources, including its gold reserves, and donor funding, such as a portion of the US$100 billion in Special Drawing Rights (SDR), the IMF’s own reserve currency, which rich economies committed to reallocate for development purposes.

    Such a facility, for example, would have enabled Kenya to refinance its debts at the SDR interest rate, currently at 3.75% per year, rather than at the 10.375% rate it paid in the financial markets.

    It is noteworthy that the 47 low-income countries identified as in need of debt relief have just US$60 billion in outstanding debts owed to bondholders. Our proposed buyer of last resort would help reduce the burden of these countries to manageable levels.

    Second, we propose that both debtors and creditors should commit to the following set of shared principles, based on internationally accepted norms and standards for debt restructurings.

    Guiding principles

    1. Guiding norms: Sovereign debt restructurings should be guided by six norms: credibility, responsibility, good faith, optimality, inclusiveness and effectiveness.

    Optimality means that the negotiating parties should aim to achieve an outcome that, considering the circumstances in which the parties are negotiating and their respective rights, obligations and responsibilities, offers each of them the best possible mix of economic, financial, environmental, social, human rights and governance benefits.

    2. Transparency: All parties should have access to the information that they need to make informed decisions.

    3. Due diligence: The sovereign debtor and its creditors should each undertake appropriate due diligence before concluding a sovereign debt restructuring process.

    4. Optimal outcome assessment: The parties should publicly disclose why they expect their restructuring agreement to result in an optimal outcome.

    5. Monitoring: There should be credible mechanisms for monitoring the implementation of the restructuring agreement.

    6. Inter-creditor comparability: All creditors should make a comparable contribution to the restructuring of debt.

    7. Fair burden sharing: The burden of the restructuring should be fairly allocated between the negotiating parties.

    8. Maintaining market access: The process should be designed to facilitate future market access for the borrower at affordable rates.

    The G20’s current efforts to address the silent debt crisis are failing. They are contributing to the likely failure of low income countries in Africa and the rest of the global south to offer all their residents the possibility of leading lives of dignity and opportunity.

    Danny Bradlow, in addition to his university position, is Co-Chair of the T20 task force on sovereign debt, and Co-Chair of the Academic Circle on the Right to Development.

    Marina Zucker-Marques is a co-chair for the Brazil T20 Task Force 3 on reforming the International Financial Architecture

    Kevin P. Gallagher does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. Easing Africa’s debt burdens: a fresh approach, based on an old idea – https://theconversation.com/easing-africas-debt-burdens-a-fresh-approach-based-on-an-old-idea-239427

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-Evening Report: In a new manifesto, OpenAI’s Sam Altman envisions an AI utopia – and reveals glaring blind spots

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hallam Stevens, Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, James Cook University

    Ryan Carter Images / Shutterstock

    By now, many of us are probably familiar with artificial intelligence hype. AI will make artists redundant! AI can do lab experiments! AI will end grief!

    Even by these standards, the latest proclamation from OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, published on his personal website this week, seems remarkably hyperbolic. We are on the verge of “The Intelligence Age”, he declares, powered by a “superintelligence” that may just be a “few thousand days” away. The new era will bring “astounding triumphs”, including “fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics”.

    Altman and his company – which is trying to raise billions from investors and pitching unprecedently huge datacentres to the US government, while shedding key staff and ditching its nonprofit roots to give Altman a share of ownership – have much to gain from hype.

    However, even setting aside these motivations, it’s worth taking a look at some of the assumptions behind Altman’s predictions. On closer inspection, they reveal a lot about the worldview of AI’s biggest cheerleaders – and the blind spots in their thinking.

    Steam engines for thought?

    Altman grounds his marvellous predictions in a two-paragraph history of humanity:

    People have become dramatically more capable over time; we can already accomplish things now that our predecessors would have believed impossible.

    This is a story of unmitigated progress heading in a single direction, driven by human intelligence. The cumulative discoveries and inventions of science and technology – Altman reveals – have led us to the computer chip and, inexorably, to artificial intelligence which will take us the rest of the way to the future. This view owes much to the futuristic visions of the singularitarian movement.

    Such a story is seductively simple. If human intelligence has driven us to ever-greater heights, it is hard not to conclude that better, faster, artificial intelligence will drive progress even farther and higher.

    This is an old dream. In the 1820s, when Charles Babbage saw steam engines revolutionising human physical labour in England’s industrial revolution, he began to imagine constructing similar machines for automating mental labour. Babbage’s “analytical engine” was never built, but the notion that humanity’s ultimate achievement would entail mechanising thought itself has persisted.

    According to Altman, we’re now (almost) at that mountaintop.

    Deep learning worked – but for what?

    The reason we are so close to the glorious future is simple, Altman says: “deep learning worked”.

    Deep learning is a particular kind of machine learning that involves artificial neural networks, loosely inspired by biological nervous systems. It has certainly been surprisingly successful in a few domains: deep learning is behind models that have proven adept at stringing words together in more or less coherent ways, at generating pretty pictures and videos, and even contributing to the solutions of some scientific problems.

    So the contributions of deep learning are not trivial. They are likely to have significant social and economic impacts (both positive and negative).

    But deep learning “works” only for a limited set of problems. Altman knows this:

    humanity discovered an algorithm that could really, truly learn any distribution of data (or really the underlying “rules” that produce any distribution of data).

    That’s what deep learning does – that’s how it “works”. That’s important, and it’s a technique that can be applied to various domains, but it’s far from the only problem that exists.

    Not every problem is reducible to pattern matching. Nor do all problems provide the massive amounts of data that deep learning requires to do its work. Nor is this how human intelligence works.

    A big hammer looking for nails

    What is interesting here is the fact that Altman thinks “rules from data” will go so far towards solving all humanity’s problems.

    There is an adage that a person holding a hammer is likely to see everything as a nail. Altman is now holding a big and very expensive hammer.

    Deep learning may be “working” but only because Altman and others are starting to reimagine (and build) a world composed of distributions of data. There’s a danger here that AI is starting to limit, rather than expand, the kinds of problem-solving we are doing.

    What is barely visible in Altman’s celebration of AI are the expanding resources needed also for deep learning to “work”. We can acknowledge the great gains and remarkable achievements of modern medicine, transportation and communication (to name a few) without pretending these have not come at a significant cost.

    They have come at a cost both to some humans – for whom the gains of global north have meant diminishing returns – and to animals, plants and ecosystems, ruthlessly exploited and destroyed by the extractive might of capitalism plus technology.

    Although Altman and his booster friends might dismiss such views as nitpicking, the question of costs goes right to the heart of predictions and concerns about the future of AI.

    Altman is certainly aware that AI is facing limits, noting “there are still a lot of details we have to figure out”. One of these is the rapidly expanding energy costs of training AI models.

    Microsoft recently announced a US$30 billion fund to build AI data centres and generators to power them. The veteran tech giant, which has invested more than US$10 billion in OpenAI, has also signed a deal with owners of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant (infamous for its 1979 meltdown) to supply power for AI. The frantic spending suggests there may be a hint of desperation in the air.

    Magic or just magical thinking?

    Given the magnitude of such challenges, even if we accept Altman’s rosy view of human progress up to now, we might have to acknowledge that the past may not be a reliable guide to the future. Resources are finite. Limits are reached. Exponential growth can end.

    What’s most revealing about Altman’s post is not his rash predictions. Rather, what emerges is his sense of untrammelled optimism in science and progress.

    This makes it hard to imagine that Altman or OpenAI takes seriously the “downsides” of technology. With so much to gain, why worry about a few niggling problems? When AI seems so close to triumph, why pause to think?

    What is emerging around AI is less an “age of intelligence” and more an “age of inflation” – inflating resource consumption, inflating company valuations and, most of all, inflating the promises of AI.

    It’s certainly true that some of us do things now that would have seemed magic a century and a half ago. That doesn’t mean all the changes between then and now have been for the better.

    AI has remarkable potential in many domains, but imagining it holds the key to solving all of humanity’s problems – that’s magical thinking too.

    Hallam Stevens has previously received funding from the Ministry of Education (Singapore), the National Heritage Board (Singapore), the National Science Foundation (USA) and the Wenner-Gren Foundation.

    – ref. In a new manifesto, OpenAI’s Sam Altman envisions an AI utopia – and reveals glaring blind spots – https://theconversation.com/in-a-new-manifesto-openais-sam-altman-envisions-an-ai-utopia-and-reveals-glaring-blind-spots-239841

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: Are private hospitals really in trouble? And is more public funding the answer?

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anthony Scott, Professor of Health Economics and Director, Centre for Health Economics, Monash Business School, Monash University

    Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock

    A battle between private hospitals and private health insurers is playing out in public.

    At its heart is how much health insurers pay hospitals for their services, and whether that’s enough for private hospitals to remain viable.

    Concerns over the viability of the private health system have caught the attention of the federal government, which has launched a review into private hospitals that has yet to be made public.

    But are private hospitals really in trouble? And if so, is more public funding the answer?

    Private hospitals vs private health insurers

    Many private hospital operators have reported significant pressures since the start of the COVID pandemic, including staff shortages.

    Inflationary pressures have increased the costs of supplies and equipment, pushing up the costs of providing hospital care.

    Now, private hospitals have publicised their difficult contract negotiations with private health insurers in an attempt to gain support and help their case.

    Healthscope, which runs 38 for-profit private hospitals in Australia, has been threatening to end agreements with private health insurers.

    St Vincent’s, which operates ten not-for-profit private hospitals, announced it would end its contract with nib (one of Australia’s largest for-profit health insurers) but then reached an agreement.

    UnitingCare Queensland, which operates four private hospitals, announced it would end its contract with the Australian Health Service Alliance, which represents more than 20 small and medium non-profit private health insurers. Since then, the two parties have also kissed and made up.

    Why should we care?

    There are three reasons why viability of the private health sector affects us all, regardless of whether we have private health insurance or use private hospitals.

    1. Taxpayers subsidise the private health system

    Australian taxpayers subsidised private health insurance premiums by A$6.3 billion
    (in premium rebates) in 2021–22. Much of this makes its way to private hospitals. Medicare also subsidised fees for medical services delivered for private patients in private and public hospitals to the tune of $3.81 billion in 2023–24.

    But when the going gets tough, the private health sector (both hospitals and health insurers) turns to the government for more handouts.

    So we should be concerned about the value we currently get from our public investment into the private health system, and if more public investment is warranted.

    2. Public hospitals may be affected if private hospitals close

    Calls for greater government support for private health have long argued that a larger private hospital sector would help reduce pressures on the public system.

    Indeed, this was the justification for a series of incentives introduced from the late 1990s to support private health insurance in Australia.

    However, the extent of this is hotly debated. Recent evidence shows higher private health insurance coverage leads to only very small falls in waiting times in public hospitals.

    While it is possible the closure of a few private hospitals might lead some patients to seek care in public hospitals, this shift might not be that large and will not increase waiting times too much.

    3. Fewer private beds, but is that a bad thing?

    If unviable private hospitals close or merge, we’d expect to see fewer
    private hospital beds overall.

    Fewer private hospital beds is not necessarily bad news. Mergers of small private day hospitals, in particular, might make them more efficient and lead to lower costs, which in turn lowers health insurance premiums.

    We might also need fewer private beds. This is due to policies that try to shift health care out of hospitals into the community or the use of
    hospital-in-the-home schemes (where patients receive hospital-type care at home with the support of visiting health staff and/or telehealth). The private health insurers are supporting both.

    If a few small private hospitals close, this reflects the market adjusting to less demand for hospital care. Some of the closures have been for maternity wards but with falling birth rates, this also seems like an appropriate market adjustment.

    Falling birth rates mean less demand for maternity wards.
    christinarosepix/Shutterstock

    What do we know?

    Any objective data about what is happening in the private hospital sector is scarce. This is mainly because the Australian Bureau of Statistics has stopped a compulsory survey of all private hospitals. The latest data we have is from 2016–17.

    Health insurers are the largest payer of private hospitals and hence wield a considerable amount of negotiating power. In 2016–17, almost 80% of private hospitals’ income came from private health insurers. Health insurers have also increasingly become “active” purchasers of health care – not just passively paying insurance claims, but wanting to strike a good deal with private hospitals for their members to keep premiums (and costs) down, and profits high.

    Reports of hospitals closing ignore hospitals that are opening at the same time. But since 2016–17 there are no publicly reported data on the total number of private hospitals in Australia or changes over time.

    The latest figures we have show about half of all hospitals in Australia are private, and of these 62% are for-profit with the rest run by not-for-profit organisations (such as St Vincent’s).

    The main for-profit providers are Ramsay Health Care and Healthscope. Both have operations overseas and were in trouble before the COVID pandemic.

    Fast-forward to 2024 and the recent issues with contract negotiations suggests the financial situation of for-profit private hospitals might not have improved. So this could reflect a long-term issue with the sustainability of the private hospital sector.

    What are the options?

    The private health system already receives large public subsidies. So the crux of the current debate is whether the government should intervene again to prop up the private sector. Here are some options:

    • do nothing and let this stoush play out Closure and mergers of private hospitals might be good if smaller hospitals and wards are no longer needed and patients have other alternatives

    • introduce more regulation Negotiations between small groups of private hospitals and very large dominant private health insurers may not be efficient. If the insurers have significant market power they can force small groups of private hospitals into submission. Some private hospital groups may be negotiating with many different health insurers at the same time, which can be costly. Regulation of exactly how these negotiations happen could make the process more efficient and create a more level playing field

    • change how private hospitals are paid Public hospitals are essentially paid the same national price for each procedure they provide. This provides incentives for efficiency as the price is fixed and so if their costs are below the price, they can make a surplus. Private hospitals could also be funded this way, which could remove much of the costs of contract negotiations with private hospitals. Instead, private hospitals would be free to focus on other issues such as the number and quality of procedures, and providing high-value health care.

    How do we help private hospitals become more efficient? Regulating prices and contract negotiations are a start.
    Kitreel/Shutterstock

    What next?

    Revisiting the regulation of prices and contract negotiations between private hospitals and private health insurers could potentially help the private hospital sector to be more efficient.

    Private health insurers are rightly trying to encourage such efficiencies but the tools they have to do this through contract negotiations are quite blunt.

    As we wait for the results of the review into the private hospital sector, value for money for taxpayers is paramount. We are all subsidising the private hospital sector.

    Anthony Scott has previously received funding from the Medibank Better Health Foundation.

    Terence C. Cheng does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment

    – ref. Are private hospitals really in trouble? And is more public funding the answer? – https://theconversation.com/are-private-hospitals-really-in-trouble-and-is-more-public-funding-the-answer-238891

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: Access to a GP can make all the difference in surviving lung cancer – and that is a problem for Māori

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ross Lawrenson, Professor of Population Health, University of Waikato

    Surviving lung cancer in Aotearoa New Zealand could depend on whether you can access a GP – raising questions about equity in the country’s health system.

    Our new research examines the outcomes for patients who are diagnosed with lung cancer through their GP versus those who are diagnosed at the emergency department (ED).

    Examining 2,400 lung cancer diagnoses in Waikato between 2011 and 2021, we found those who are diagnosed with lung cancer after ED visits tended to have later-stage disease and poorer outcomes compared to those diagnosed after a GP referral.

    We also found diagnosis after ED attendance was 27% higher for Māori than non-Māori and 22% higher for men than women.

    These results raise important questions about health inequity in New Zealand and highlight the need to ensure everyone is able to access an early cancer diagnosis.

    Limited access to everyday health care

    Currently half of all general practices have closed their books to new patients, leaving 290,000 patients unenrolled and reliant on emergency departments for their health care.

    Some 80% of practices have closed their books to new patients at some point since 2019.

    For those who are enrolled in a practice, the wait times for appointments are often such that the only option is to go to the ED for help.

    This is especially true in rural areas where the hospital can become the default route to diagnosis.

    Lung cancer is New Zealand’s single biggest cause of cancer deaths, with over 1,800 per year. Some 80% of those who are diagnosed with lung cancer present with advanced disease and very poor prospects of survival.

    It’s also the cancer with the largest equity gap. The mortality rate for Māori with lung cancer is three to four times that of people of European descent.

    While much of this disparity is due to differences in the rates of smoking among ethnic groups, there is also evidence delays in diagnosis and poorer access to surgery are also major influences on survival rates.

    Identifying lung cancer

    Lung cancer usually starts in the tissue lining the airways and symptoms can initially be relatively minor – some shortness of breath during exercise, a niggly cough or sharp pains while breathing.

    Patients with these sorts of symptoms usually go to a GP to check whether this is something that needs further investigation.

    But if someone cannot get an appointment, or does not recognise the symptoms as serious, then they are likely to delay taking action.

    Advanced symptoms of lung cancer include coughing up blood or having lumps in the neck due to lymphatic spread of the cancer. People with these alarming symptoms tend to go to the hospital for treatment.

    Our study confirms earlier findings that those diagnosed through the emergency department are:

    • more likely to have advanced disease
    • more likely to have a more aggressive type of cancer (called small cell cancer), and
    • have substantially poorer likelihoods of survival.

    The median survival for those who never went to the ED was 13.6 months, while the median survival for those with one ED visit was just three months.

    That said, attending an emergency department has some advantages. These include being seen by a doctor within a few hours, immediate access to x-rays and, in our major hospitals, access to the definitive diagnostic tool for a lung cancer – a computed tomography (CT) machine.

    Our study found 25% of cases went to the ED two or more times in the two weeks before their diagnosis. This was especially true for those going to one of the Waikato rural hospitals, where a second or third visit was more likely before being diagnosed.

    Barriers to care

    It is clear New Zealand still has several barriers to primary care. This has lead to an over-reliance on emergency departments for diagnosing cancer, despite the long-running faster cancer treatment targets.

    The situation is unlikely to improve. Access to GPs is getting worse, in part due to increasing fees.

    Māori and Pacific patients with lung cancer were less likely than other ethnic groups to have been enrolled with a primary health organisation when they were diagnosed. They were also less likely to have visited a GP in the three months prior to diagnosis.

    Making it easier to see a GP

    Making general practice care more accessible is the most effective way of addressing the inequities in our lung cancer statistics.

    Currently, New Zealand has only 74 GPs per 100,000 people, compared to 110 in Australia.

    It is clear we need to substantially increase the number of GPs. This is a long-term project but needs to be a strategic goal for the health sector.

    In the meantime, we need to make primary care more accessible by increasing patient subsidies and reducing the direct patient costs to see a doctor. At the same time, we need to better equip GPs with access to diagnostic facilities, including in our rural hospitals.

    Ross Lawrenson receives funding from NZ Health Research Council. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners.

    Chunhuan Lao receives funding from NZ Health Research Council.

    – ref. Access to a GP can make all the difference in surviving lung cancer – and that is a problem for Māori – https://theconversation.com/access-to-a-gp-can-make-all-the-difference-in-surviving-lung-cancer-and-that-is-a-problem-for-maori-239808

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: Is an ankle sprain also a brain injury? How neuroscience is helping athletes, astronauts and ‘average Joes’

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gordon Waddington, AIS Professor of Sports Medicine Research, University of Canberra

    Have you ever thought of an ankle sprain as a brain injury? Most people probably wouldn’t.

    However, we are starting to understand how the brain is constantly adapting, known as plasticity.

    Even though the damage of an ankle sprain happens at the ankle, there may also be some changes going on in the brain to how it well it senses pain or movement.

    One of our doctoral students, Ashley Marchant, has shown something similar happens when we change how much weight (or load) we put on the muscles of the lower limb. The closer the load is to normal earth gravity, the more accurate our movement sense is; the lower the muscle load, the less accurate we get.

    This work means we need to rethink how the brain controls and responds to movement.

    Solving an important puzzle

    Historically, movement science has attempted to improve muscle function through resistance training, cardiovascular exercise and flexibility.

    One of the big issues in the treatment and prevention of sport injuries is that even when the sports medicine team feels an athlete is ready to return, the risk of a future injury remains twice to eight times higher than if they’d never had an injury.

    This means sports medicos have been missing something.

    Our work at the University of Canberra and the Australian Institute of Sport has targeted sensory input in an attempt to solve this puzzle. The goal has been to assess the ability of the sensory reception, or perception, aspect of movement control.

    Input (sensory) nerves outnumber output (motor) nerves by roughly ten to one.

    Over 20 years, scientists have developed tools to allow us to determine the quality of the sensory input to the brain, which forms the basis of how well we can perceive movement. Gauging this input could be useful for everyone from astronauts to athletes and older people at risk of falls.

    We can now measure how well a person gets information from three critical input systems:

    • the vestibular system (inner ear balance organs)
    • the visual system (pupil responses to changes in light intensity)
    • the position sense system in the lower limbs (predominantly from sensors in the muscles and skin of the ankle and foot).

    This information allows us to build a picture of how well a person’s brain is gathering movement information. It also indicates which of the three systems might benefit from additional rehabilitation or training.

    Lessons from space

    You may have seen videos of astronauts, such as on the International Space Station, moving around using only their arms, with their legs hanging behind them.

    The crew of the International Space Station have some fun with ‘synchronised space swimming’ in 2021.

    This shows how when people leave earth’s gravity, they get minimal information to the sensory system from the skin and muscles of their legs.

    The brain rapidly deactivates the connections it normally uses for controlling movement. This is OK while the astronaut is in space but as soon as they need to stand or walk on the earth or moon surface, they are at greater risk of falls and injury.

    Similar brain changes might be occurring for athletes due to changes in movement patterns after injury.

    For example, developing a limp after a leg injury means the brain is receiving very different movement information from that leg’s movement patterns. With plasticity, this may mean the movement control pattern doesn’t return to an optimum pre-injury status.

    As mentioned previously, a history of injury is the best predictor of future injury.

    This suggests something changes in the athlete’s movement control processes after injury – most likely in the brain – which extends beyond the time when the injured tissue has healed.

    Measures of how well an athlete perceives movement are associated with how well they go on to perform in a range of sports. So sensory awareness could also be a way to identify athletic talent early.

    In older people and in the context of preventing falls, poor scores on the same sensory input perception measures can predict later falls.

    This might be due to reduced physical activity in some older people. This “use it or lose it” idea might show how brain connections for movement perception and control can degrade over time.

    Precise health care

    New technologies to track sensory ability are part of a new direction in health care described as precision health.

    Precision health uses technologies and artificial intelligence to consider the range of factors (such as their genetic make-up) that affect a person’s health and provide treatments designed specifically for them.

    Applying a precision health approach in the area of movement control could allow much more targeted rehabilitation for athletes, training for astronauts and earlier falls prevention for older people.

    Gordon Waddington owns shares in Prism Neuro Pty Ltd a perceptual neuroscience ability measurement company. He receives funding from the Medical Research Futures Fund, Australian Research Council, NSW Institute of Sport, Queensland Academy of Sport and the Australian Institute of Sport.

    Jeremy Witchalls receives funding from the NSW Institute of Sport and the Australian Institute of Sport.

    – ref. Is an ankle sprain also a brain injury? How neuroscience is helping athletes, astronauts and ‘average Joes’ – https://theconversation.com/is-an-ankle-sprain-also-a-brain-injury-how-neuroscience-is-helping-athletes-astronauts-and-average-joes-230416

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: The common raupō once kept NZ’s wetlands and lakes thriving – now it could help restore them

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rewi Newnham, Professor in Physical Geography, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

    Shutterstock/Sketchart

    With about 90% of New Zealand’s natural wetlands drained or severely damaged during the past decades, we need to understand the role of native plants in the restoration of these important habitats.

    Raupō is a resilient plant and acts as an ecological buffer.
    Wikimedia Commons/Grapeman4, CC BY-SA

    Our new research details the history of raupō (bulrush) from the time before people arrived in Aotearoa. It shows this resilient, opportunistic plant – and taonga species – can play an important role restoring wetlands and freshwater quality.

    An unexpected finding was that the decline of freshwater quality in many lakes did not really kick in until the mid-20th century with intensification of agriculture. Until then, lake water quality indicators generally showed these ecosystems remained healthy. The prolific expansion of raupō after Aotearoa was first settled may have helped.

    Thriving on material washed from disturbed catchments, raupō acted as an ecological buffer, intercepting nutrients and sediments, and reducing potentially harmful effects on freshwater ecosystems.

    From the mid-20th century, as water quality began to deteriorate, raupō populations – and any buffering effects – were generally in decline as wetlands and lake shallows were drained for grazing land and better access to water supply.

    Lessons from this plant’s past can be put to good use today as we strive to bring back the mauri (life force) of our freshwater systems.

    Survival strategies for hard times

    Before settlement, when dense forest covered most of the country, raupō was surviving on the fringes. As a wetland plant, it likes its roots submerged, but needs light to grow.

    Its preferred niche is the shallow margins of lakes, ponds and streams or nutrient-rich swamps. Before people, these places were much less common. Forests typically grew right up to the water’s edge and extended across some swamps.

    Under these conditions, raupō evolved strategies for survival: aerated roots to cope with water logging; tiny, abundant seeds that spread far and wide on the wind; rhizomes (underground stems) that extend from the mother plant and store carbohydrates to keep the plant alive in lean times.

    Raupō has several attributes that allow it to grow on disturbed land. 1. large, resilient structures; 2. small, wind-dispersed seeds; 3. long-lived seed bank; 4. flowers produce abundant pollen; 5. aerated roots; 6. rhizomes store energy over winter; 7. rhizomes anchor in substrate, trapping sediment; 8. aggressive clonal propagation; 9. floating rhizome mats.
    Author provided, CC BY-SA

    Raupō can even build floating root mats, from sediment trapped by its rhizomes, that extend out across open water and even detach from the shoreline to become mobile raupō islands.

    With these survival strategies, raupō could wait for better times which, in Aotearoa’s dynamic environment, duly arrived.

    Episodic agents of disruption – storms, floods, earthquakes, landslides, volcanic ashfall – created opportunities. Local forest damage allowed light to penetrate to ground level, and slips and floods brought nutrient-rich sediment from soils.

    Raupō would seize these opportunities to expand. But they were typically short-lived as the inevitable process of forest succession returned the environment to stability – and raupō back to a state of patient hibernation.

    Hitting the jackpot

    Then people arrived, with fire and hungry mouths to feed. This time, the disturbances persisted. Forest clearances endured, sediments rich in nutrients flooded wetlands and lakes, and raupō, supremely equipped for just this scenario, spread across swamps and lake shores as wildfires spread on land.

    Our tūpuna (ancestors) observed this behaviour, as well as what was happening around raupō. Insects and birds were feeding and nesting. Freshwater fish, crays, shellfish and eel spawned among its fertile beds.

    This new-found abundance also offered a range of resource opportunities. Raupō’s flax-like leaves were woven into mats, rope and string. Leaves and stems were used like thatch to cloak the roofs and walls of whare.

    This graphic shows how raupō responded to environmental changes during the past millennium (upper panels), informed by pollen analysis of lake sediments (lower panels).
    Author provided, CC BY-SA

    Traditional poi were often made from raupō leaves. Some iwi, particularly in the south, used the stems to build lightweight boats for navigating rivers and lakes. Flower stalks, shoots and young leaves were eaten, and the rhizomes and roots, when cooked, provided edible carbohydrates. The most cherished raupō kai, however, were cakes baked using the copious raupō pollen.

    Unsurprisingly, for many iwi raupō remains a taonga species today, treasured for this array of resources and for its ecological and even spiritual roles in maintaining the mauri of freshwater habitats, upon which so much depends.

    For some iwi, raupō are seen as kaitiaki (guardians) watching over a lake or wetland, and signalling its health. In these ways, raupō also connects us with other Indigenous communities. Although raupō is native to this country, the same species is found in Australia and parts of East Asia, while relatives in the genus Typha (Greek for marsh) occur naturally on all continents, except Antarctica.

    Similar practices occurred wherever raupō and its relatives are found.
    This connection between cultural and ecological roles is one of the fascinating findings from our research. We describe raupō as a “human-associated species”, not just because of its taonga status, but because its fate seems so closely linked to people.

    More work needs to be done, but history tells us raupō has an important role in restoring the health of our freshwater ecosystems. Not only can it soak up nutrients and contaminants, but as both a native and taonga species it can assist remediation solutions that are ecologically and culturally supportive and sustainable.

    This research was funded by the New Zealand Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment research programmes – Our lakes’ health; past, present, future (C05X1707) and Our lakes, Our future (CAWX2305).

    – ref. The common raupō once kept NZ’s wetlands and lakes thriving – now it could help restore them – https://theconversation.com/the-common-raupo-once-kept-nzs-wetlands-and-lakes-thriving-now-it-could-help-restore-them-238887

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: Before Trump, there was a long history of race-baiting, fear-mongering and building walls on the US-Mexico border

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Marie-Eve Loiselle, Lecturer in Law, Macquarie University

    Last month, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump delivered a one-hour address on the danger of illegal immigration to the United States. His stage was the US-Mexico border in Arizona and the set piece of his performance was the border wall.

    The message was simple: with their border policy, Democrats have “unleashed a deadly plague of migrant crime”. Trump has ratcheted up the tensions on immigration further since then, repeating wild conspiracy theories about Haitian immigrants eating pets and, more recently, claiming migrants are “attacking villages and cities all throughout the Midwest”.

    What the US needs, Trump has repeatedly stressed, is a closed border, a walled border.

    A long history of wall-building advocacy

    The US-Mexico border wall, which is currently around 700 miles in length in various stretches, has loomed large in American politics in recent decades, especially since the 2016 US presidential campaign. Yet, current stories about the wall mostly overlook its history.

    Most importantly, the media ignore the long-standing appeal of the wall as a tool of spatial and cultural division in the making of the US-Mexico border.

    In my forthcoming book, I trace the origin of the border wall to the early 1900s, when the US Immigration Service and other federal agencies called for the construction of barriers at the border.

    Congress answered their appeal by adopting an act in 1935 that authorised the secretary of state to construct and maintain fences between the US and Mexico. For decades following its adoption, US officials stood before Congress almost yearly, asking for funding for the construction of border fences.

    This trend culminated in the 1940s with two parallel projects: the Western Land Boundary Fence Project (576 miles or 926 kilometres of fencing from El Paso, Texas, to the west) and the Rio Grande Border Fence Project (415 miles or 668 kilometres of fencing along the Mexico-Texas border).

    Neither one of these projects was ever fully realised. But if they had been built, they would have surpassed the length of the current border wall.

    Immigration, disease and crime

    What is telling when looking at the history is how similar the arguments supporting such fences in the early 1900s were to those deployed today. Immigration, disease and crime have been recurring justifications for the wall, both then and now.

    Indeed, there is an uncanny likeness to Trump’s rhetoric surrounding the US-Mexico border — including during his August speech in Arizona — and the narratives justifying a border wall in the mid-20th century.

    High on the list of justifications was the need to deter “juvenile delinquents”, “thieves”, “beggars”, undocumented workers, narcotic smugglers, “wetbacks” (a derogatory term for Mexicans), and Mexican nationals seeking medical care in the US at public expense.

    These arguments appeared regularly in government reports and during congressional hearings from the 1930s to the late 1950s.

    A 1934 report by the Immigration Services on the feasibility of a short border fence between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, for example, said it would stifle illegal immigration that took employment opportunities from American workers, while lowering wages in the borderland area.

    Reminiscent of recent analogies between the borderland and a “war zone”, the report noted that sending agents to patrol the border without proper equipment was pointless. It was akin to:

    put[ting] a body of troops in the field in an enemy’s theatre of operation without artillery, observation planes, trucks, ammunition and other weapons.

    The fence was “the correct solution to the problem.”

    At times, the fear of the undocumented merged with the fear of contagion. A foot and mouth disease outbreak in Mexico in 1946, for example, provided additional rhetorical support for the wall. As Texas Senator Tom Connally said when the Committee on Foreign Relations considered the issue:

    It has been a dream of the Department of State for many years to have this fence, not because of the hoof and mouth disease, but for immigration and customs and smuggling and all of that sort of thing.

    Senator Tom Connally in 1938.
    Harris & Ewing photographs, via Wikimedia Commons

    Persistent racial faultlines

    The 1935 act has long been forgotten. In fact, by the end of the 1950s, only a few hundred miles of fencing had actually been built.

    These earlier walling plans failed for a range of reasons, including opposition by Texan landowners and industries relying on illegal Mexican labour. Perhaps most importantly, there were serious reservations back then about the efficiency of fences in curbing immigration.

    Yet, these doubts have not weighed in to the same extent in contemporary debates about the border wall. This underscores the performative role of the wall in today’s politics.

    In fact, close to 700 hundred miles (1,126 kilometres) of fencing has been built under the Secure Fence Act of 2006. This includes large portions of the wall built under the presidency of Barack Obama and, to a lesser extent, Trump’s.

    What has filtered through, however, is the racialised narrative that paints Mexicans nationals in a disparaging way.

    This rhetoric relied on generalisations and stereotypes on themes such as criminality, licentiousness and disease. It transformed Mexico into a threat to be curtailed and became a frame of reference that has permeated politics for decades – and is now a defining issue in the upcoming presidential election.

    Marie-Eve Loiselle does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. Before Trump, there was a long history of race-baiting, fear-mongering and building walls on the US-Mexico border – https://theconversation.com/before-trump-there-was-a-long-history-of-race-baiting-fear-mongering-and-building-walls-on-the-us-mexico-border-238425

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: In a US presidential election with razor-thin margins, will ‘couch-sitters’ decide who wins?

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jeff Bleich, Professorial fellow, Jeff Bleich Centre for Democracy and Disruptive Technologies, Flinders University

    In countries with compulsory voting, such as Australia and many in Latin America, the system usually ensures an overwhelming majority of voters cast their ballots election after election.

    In the United States, it’s a very different story. Two-thirds of eligible voters turned out to vote in the 2020 presidential election – the highest rate since 1900. Turnout in presidential elections before 2020 tended to hover between 50% and 65%.

    Often, it’s the voters choosing to stay home on the couch who effectively decide an election’s outcome.

    Under the United States’ unusual Electoral College presidential voting system, the candidate who wins the most votes nationally does not necessarily win the election. Twice in the past 25 years, Democrats have won the popular vote in the presidential race and still lost the election. That includes Donald Trump’s win over Hillary Clinton in 2016.

    As such, victory depends on getting more voters “off the couch” in key battleground states where the decisive Electoral College votes are up for grabs. In those states, it doesn’t matter what percentage of people show up to vote, or how much a candidate wins by, it is winner take all.

    A voter who doesn’t vote, therefore, actually makes an active choice — they remove a vote from the candidate they would have likely chosen, and so give an important advantage to the person they would not have voted for.

    The “couch” is effectively where Americans go to vote against their self-interest.

    Who is more incentivised to vote?

    As this year’s presidential election between Trump and Kamala Harris approaches, we ask a simple question: whose “couch” will decide one of the most consequential elections in living memory?

    Recent research demonstrates that partisanship is an important driver of voter choice in presidential elections.

    The fact that the US is deeply divided is not news to most, but current survey data show how evenly split along partisan lines it actually is. With about 30% of Americans identifying as a Republican and 30% identifying as a Democrat, there is virtually no difference in the total number of voters who support each major party.

    The remaining 40% of Americans identify as “independent” – that is, not loyal to either major political party. Almost seven decades of research on the American voter shows, however, that independents heavily “lean” towards one party or the other, with about half leaning Republican and the other half leaning Democrat.

    One possible insight into which group has greater incentive to vote is polling on people’s dissatisfaction with their party’s candidate.

    According to the most recent Gallup Poll data, 9% of Republicans currently have an unfavourable opinion of Trump. In contrast, only 5% of Democrats have an unfavourable opinion of Harris.

    Partisan voters who are dissatisfied with their party candidate have a massive incentive to “stay on the couch” and refrain from voting. They don’t really want to vote for “the other team”, but they can’t stand their own team anymore either.

    For example, Republican women in the suburbs, veterans and traditional Republicans have started to abandon Trump over his stances on reproductive rights and national security, and his temperament. The Trump campaign clearly knows this. At a rally in New York a few days ago, he told attendees to “get your fat ass out of the couch” to go vote for him.

    Should these disaffected Republican and Republican-leaning voters stay home on November 5, Harris may well have a decisive edge over Trump.

    When the couch wins, America loses

    In 2016, Trump defied the polls and traditional voter turn-out trends by convincing some disaffected, working-class Democrats to stay on the couch, vote for an unelectable third party candidate or, in some cases, vote for him.

    Could this happen again? Or will Democrats be able to reverse this phenomenon by getting exhausted Republicans suffering Trump fatigue to stay home, while motivating everyone from Taylor Swift fans to “never Trumpers” to veterans of foreign wars to get out to vote.

    Recent trends suggest overall turnout will be comparatively high, in line with the past three federal US elections.

    Democrats have traditionally benefited from higher voter turn-out, but it is not as clear this is still the case in 2024. Recent research shows higher turnout rates seem to have favoured the Republican Party since 2016.

    Yet both parties still have significant numbers of people who don’t vote. According to the Pew Research Center, 46% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents didn’t vote in the past three elections (2018, 2020 and 2022), compared to the 41% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents.

    So again, who sits on the couch matters. Inevitably, many of those who stay home will get precisely what they don’t want. When the couch wins, America loses.

    Jeff Bleich is a former US ambassador to Australia and a member of the National Security Leaders for America, a group of 700 former generals, admirals, service secretaries, ambassadors, and other national security professionals, that has endorsed Kamala Harris in the presidential election. He was also special counsel to President Barack Obama and served as chair of the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board under President Donald Trump and as a member of President Joe Biden’s (non-partisan) National Security Education Board.

    Rodrigo Praino receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the Australian Government Department of Defence, and SmartSat CRC.

    – ref. In a US presidential election with razor-thin margins, will ‘couch-sitters’ decide who wins? – https://theconversation.com/in-a-us-presidential-election-with-razor-thin-margins-will-couch-sitters-decide-who-wins-239394

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Why US home insurance rates are rising so fast – hurricanes and wildfires play a big role, but there’s more to it

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Andrew J. Hoffman, Professor of Management & Organizations, Environment & Sustainability, and Sustainable Enterprise, University of Michigan

    The U.S. has seen a large number of billion-dollar disasters in recent years. AP Photo/Mark Zaleski

    Millions of Americans have been watching with growing alarm as their homeowners insurance premiums rise and their coverage shrinks. Nationwide, premiums rose 34% between 2017 and 2023, and they continued to rise in 2024 across much of the country.

    To add insult to injury, those rates go even higher if you make a claim – as much as 25% if you claim a total loss of your home.

    Why is this happening?

    There are a few reasons, but a common thread: Climate change is fueling more severe weather, and insurers are responding to rising damage claims. The losses are exacerbated by more frequent extreme weather disasters striking densely populated areas, rising construction costs and homeowners experiencing damage that was once more rare.

    Hurricane Ian, supercharged by warm water in the Gulf of Mexico, hit Florida as a Category 4 hurricane in October 2022 and caused an estimated $112.9 billion in damage.
    Ricardo Arduengo/AFP via Getty Images

    Parts of the U.S. have been seeing larger and more damaging hail, higher storm surges, massive and widespread wildfires, and heat waves that kink metal and buckle asphalt. In Houston, what used to be a 100-year disaster, such as Hurricane Harvey in 2017, is now a 1-in-23-years event, estimates by risk assessors at First Street Foundation suggest. In addition, more people are moving into coastal and wildland areas at risk from storms and wildfires.

    Just a decade ago, few insurance companies had a comprehensive strategy for addressing climate risk as a core business issue. Today, insurance companies have no choice but to factor climate change into their policy models.

    Rising damage costs, higher premiums

    There’s a saying that to get someone to pay attention to climate change, put a price on it. Rising insurance costs are doing just that.

    Increasing global temperatures lead to more extreme weather, and that means insurance companies have had to make higher payouts. In turn, they have been raising their prices and changing their coverage in order to remain solvent. That raises the costs for homeowners and for everyone else.

    The importance of insurance to the economy cannot be understated. You generally cannot get a mortgage or even drive a car, build an office building or enter into contracts without insurance to protect against the inherent risks. Because insurance is so tightly woven into economies, state agencies review insurance companies’ proposals to increase premiums or reduce coverage.

    The insurance companies are not making political statements with the increases. They are looking at the numbers, calculating risk and pricing it accordingly. And the numbers are concerning.

    The arithmetic of climate risk

    Insurance companies use data from past disasters and complex models to calculate expected future payouts. Then they price their policies to cover those expected costs. In doing so, they have to balance three concerns: keeping rates low enough to remain competitive, setting rates high enough to cover payouts and not running afoul of insurance regulators.

    But climate change is disrupting those risk models. As global temperatures rise, driven by greenhouse gases from fossil fuel use and other human activities, past is no longer prologue: What happened over the past 10 to 20 years is less predictive of what will happen in the next 10 to 20 years.

    The number of billion-dollar disasters in the U.S. each year offers a clear example. The average rose from 3.3 per year in the 1980s to 18.3 per year in the 10-year period ending in 2024, with all years adjusted for inflation.

    With that more than fivefold increase in billion-dollar disasters came rising insurance costs in the Southeast because of hurricanes and extreme rainfall, in the West because of wildfires, and in the Midwest because of wind, hail and flood damage.

    Hurricanes tend to be the most damaging single events. They caused more than US$692 billion in property damage in the U.S. between 2014 and 2023. But severe hail and windstorms, including tornadoes, are also costly; together, those on the billion-dollar disaster list did more than $246 billion in property damage over the same period.

    As insurance companies adjust to the uncertainty, they may run a loss in one segment, such as homeowners insurance, but recoup their losses in other segments, such as auto or commercial insurance. But that cannot be sustained over the long term, and companies can be caught by unexpected events. California’s unprecedented wildfires in 2017 and 2018 wiped out nearly 25 years’ worth of profits for insurance companies in that state.

    To balance their risk, insurance companies often turn to reinsurance companies; in effect, insurance companies that insure insurance companies. But reinsurers have also been raising their prices to cover their costs. Property reinsurance alone increased by 35% in 2023. Insurers are passing those costs to their policyholders.

    What this means for your homeowners policy

    Not only are homeowners insurance premiums going up, coverage is shrinking. In some cases, insurers are reducing or dropping coverage for items such as metal trim, doors and roof repair, increasing deductibles for risks such as hail and fire damage, or refusing to pay full replacement costs for things such as older roofs.

    Some insurances companies are simply withdrawing from markets altogether, canceling existing policies or refusing to write new ones when risks become too uncertain or regulators do not approve their rate increases to cover costs. In recent years, State Farm and Allstate pulled back from California’s homeowner market, and Farmers, Progressive and AAA pulled back from the Florida market, which is seeing some of the highest insurance rates in the country.

    In some cases, insurers are restricting coverage. Roof repairs, like these in Fort Myers Beach, Fla., after Hurricane Ian, can be expensive and widespread after windstorms.
    Joe Raedle/Getty Images

    State-run “insurers of last resort,” which can provide coverage for people who can’t get coverage from private companies, are struggling too. Taxpayers in states such as California and Florida have been forced to bail out their state insurers. And the National Flood Insurance Program has raised its premiums, leading 10 states to sue to stop them.

    About 7.4% of U.S. homeowners have given up on insurance altogether, leaving an estimated $1.6 trillion in property value at risk, including in high-risk states such as Florida.

    No, insurance costs aren’t done rising

    According to NOAA data, 2023 was the hottest year on record “by far.” And 2024 could be even hotter. This general warming trend and the rise in extreme weather is expected to continue until greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere are abated.

    In the face of such worrying analyses, U.S. homeowners insurance will continue to get more expensive and cover less. And yet, Jacques de Vaucleroy, chairman of the board of reinsurance giant Swiss Re, believes U.S. insurance is still priced too low to fully cover the risk from climate change.

    Climate change is a major factor in the rising cost of insurance. Join us for a special free webinar with experts Andrew Hoffman of the University of Michigan and Melanie Gall of Arizona State University to discuss the arithmetic behind these rising rates, what climate change has to do with it, and what may be coming in your future insurance bills.

    Wednesday, October 9, 2024, 11:30 a.m. PT/2:30 p.m. ET.
    Register for the webinar here.

    Andrew J. Hoffman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. Why US home insurance rates are rising so fast – hurricanes and wildfires play a big role, but there’s more to it – https://theconversation.com/why-us-home-insurance-rates-are-rising-so-fast-hurricanes-and-wildfires-play-a-big-role-but-theres-more-to-it-238939

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –