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CNN Reporter Ridiculed After Saying Taliban Militants Chanting “Death to America” Seemed “Friendly”

A professor with close ties to the Communist Chinese Government has declared that his country ‘defeated’ the U.S. in 2020, winning a biological war, and putting America ‘back in it’s place’.
The comments were made by <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ping-Chen" target="_blank">Chen Ping</a>, a Senior Researcher at The China Institute of Fudan University, a CCP affiliated think tank, and a professor at Peking University.
The video, which appeared online recently, was translated by New York-based Chinese blogger Jennifer Zeng:
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<a href="https://www.jenniferzengblog.com/home/ccp-researcher-china-won-unprecedented-biological-warfare-in-2020">Zeng writes</a> that the researcher claims “the Western model has failed, the 500-year maritime civilization is doomed, the CCP has won and ‘will lead the way of the modernization in the new era after the biology revolution’ after the 2020 CCPVirus (COVID19) pandemic.”
Ping states in the video that “In 2020, China won the trade war, science and technology war, and especially the biological war.”
“The achievement is unprecedented. This is an epoch-making historical record,” he continues, adding “So for the liberal, America-worshiping cult within China, their worship of the U.S. is actually unfounded.”
“After this trade war and biological warfare, the U.S. was beaten back to its original shape,” Ping emphasised.
Ping also commented on the 2020 U.S. election, noting “I think Trump’s attempt to restore the declining international status of the U.S. during his 4 years has failed. This failure is not only the failure of Trump’s personal campaign for re-election as president, but also the failure of the neo-liberalism-led globalization of the past four decades led by the U.S. and the UK.”
“Therefore, the development and modernization model of the U.S. and Europe is not worthy of China’s imitation and repetition,” Ping added.
China’s <a href="https://www.infowars.com/posts/chinas-economy-grows-at-record-pace-in-covid-rebound/">economy has expanded by 18.3%</a> in the first quarter of 2021 compared to the same period last year, marking the biggest increase since China started keeping quarterly records in 1992.
The country has undoubtedly been able to rebound quickly by getting ahead of the pandemic in late 2019, stalling and obscuring the facts of what was unfolding while a criminally compliant World Health Organisation <a href="https://www.infowars.com/sources-tell-fox-news-who-was-complicit-in-helping-china-cover-up-coronavirus-leak-from-wuhan-lab/">parroted CCP talking points</a> to the rest of the world.
With Trump out of office, America is now at the mercy of the Communist state, with Joe Biden having a <a href="https://www.infowars.com/posts/biden-in-michigan-ignores-record-allowing-china-to-buy-up-american-electric-vehicle-industry/">long track record</a> of selling out American industry to Chinese investors.
As we recently reported, a group of the world’s leading scientists <a href="https://summit.news/2021/05/14/worlds-leading-scientists-who-has-failed-to-make-balanced-consideration-on-possibility-covid-leaked-from-chinese-lab/">have urged</a> more investigation into the possibility that the coronavirus pandemic was caused by a leak from Wuhan’s Institute of Virology, saying that the World Health Organisation has dismissed the notion without proper consideration.
Meanwhile, GOP representatives on the House Intelligence Committee have <a href="https://summit.news/2021/05/17/gop-reps-demand-intel-update-from-biden-on-wuhan-lab-leak-possibility/">demanded an update</a> from the White House and the Director of National Intelligence on the possibility that the coronavirus leaked from the lab.
The Republicans, led by Ranking Member Devin Nunes also want access to any intelligence on the <a href="https://archives.infowars.com/global-bombshell-china-admits-to-developing-testing-covid-19-in-wuhan-level-4-lab/">“gain of function” research</a> that was undertaken at the Wuhan lab in conjunction with US agencies.
As we <a href="https://summit.news/2021/01/04/us-national-security-still-believes-coronavirus-leaked-from-chinese-lab/">reported earlier in the year</a>, top US National Security officials have indicated that they believe the most credible theory on the origin of COVID-19 is that it escaped from the Chinese laboratory.
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revolution summit CNN Reporter Ridiculed After Saying Taliban Militants Chanting “Death to America” Seemed “Friendly”

A professor with close ties to the Communist Chinese Government has declared that his country ‘defeated’ the U.S. in 2020, winning a biologi...

Videos: Complete Chaos At Kabul Airport After Fall Of Afghanistan To Taliban

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki finally admitted Thursday, at the third or fourth time of asking, that the people of Cuba are rising up against a failed communist system of government, rather than a rise in COVID cases.
Fox News reporter Peter Doocy asked Psaki, “Now that you’ve had a few days to think about it, does this White House still think that the protests in Cuba are happening because people are upset about a rise in COVID cases there, or is there some thought maybe given to the possibility that they’re protesting because they’re sick of communism?”
Psaki responded “Well, Peter, first I would say communism is a failed ideology, and we certainly believe that.”
She continued, “It has failed the people of Cuba. They deserve freedom; they deserve a government that supports them, whether that is making sure they have health and medical supplies, access to vaccines, or whether they have economic opportunity and prosperity.”
Psaki added, “And, instead, this has been a government, an authoritarian communist regime that has repressed its people, and has failed the people of Cuba, and hence, we’re seeing them in the streets.” 
Watch:
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After spending all week refusing to condemn communism and the fact that the Cuban people have had enough of this far-left regime, Jen Psaki FINALLY admits to Fox's Peter Doocy that "communism is a failed ideology" and the Cuban people "deserve freedom." <a href="https://t.co/6nQlocBEbX">pic.twitter.com/6nQlocBEbX</a>
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) <a href="https://twitter.com/CurtisHouck/status/1415729364826742795?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 15, 2021</a></blockquote>
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Psaki spent the entire week avoiding criticising the communist Cuban tyranny, instead claiming that <a href="https://summit.news/2021/07/15/video-white-house-refuses-to-condemn-communist-cuban-tyranny-instead-says-its-mismanagement/">“government mismanagement”</a> was to blame for the people rising up.
Many in the streets have been witnessed waving the American flag and asking for U.S. support to help them be free of the Marxist oppression.
As we <a href="https://summit.news/2021/07/14/video-rubio-demands-u-s-government-call-it-for-what-it-is-in-cuba-a-communist-marxist-socialist-tyranny/">noted</a>, Senator Marco Rubio, among others, called for a clear denunciation of “this communist, this Marxist, this socialist tyranny” in Cuba, saying that America must make “clear about whose side we’re on.” 
The Biden administration and the media, however, continued to blame Donald Trump for the collapse of Cuba’s economy, in lockstep with the communist Cuban oppressors, and even groups such as <a href="https://summit.news/2021/07/15/horrible-blm-issues-statement-supporting-marxist-cuban-tyranny/">Black Lives Matter, which issued a statement</a> blaming the U.S. for the crimes of the Marxist regime in Cuba.
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source <a href="https://summit.news/2021/08/16/videos-complete-chaos-at-kabul-airport-after-fall-of-afghanistan-to-taliban/">https://summit.news/2021/08/16/videos-complete-chaos-at-kabul-airport-after-fall-of-afghanistan-to-taliban/</a>

revolution summit Videos: Complete Chaos At Kabul Airport After Fall Of Afghanistan To Taliban

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki finally admitted Thursday, at the third or fourth time of asking, that the people of Cuba are rising u...

Why no one really knows how bad Facebook’s vaccine misinformation problem is

<div><img class="ff-og-image-inserted" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/KJNXrTeNG2YtZmXAIh2jYS5UwCE=/0x215:3000x1786/fit-in/1200x630/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22780866/GettyImages_1287191706_copy.jpg" /></div>
Is Facebook “killing people” by enabling the spread of Covid-19 misinformation, as President Joe Biden <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/16/white-house-says-facebook-needs-to-do-more-to-fight-vaccine-misinformation.html">said a few weeks ago</a>? Or is the social media company efficiently purging Covid-19 misinformation from its platform and showing millions of people information about where to get vaccinated, as the company <a href="https://about.fb.com/news/2021/07/support-for-covid-19-vaccines-is-high-on-facebook-and-growing/">argued a day later</a> in its response to the president?
Biden partially walked back his comments, but the reality is we simply don’t know the true size or effect of Covid-19 misinformation on Facebook and Facebook-owned Instagram. That’s in large part because Facebook isn’t giving researchers enough of the real-time data they need to figure out exactly how much Covid-19 misinformation is on the platform, who’s seeing it, and how it’s impacting their willingness to get vaccinated. Researchers say they need this kind of data to understand the scope of the misinformation problem, which misleading messages are resonating with people, and how public health officials can counter them.
“Right now, we’re guessing [on] a lot of stuff,” said Katherine Ognyanova, an associate professor of communications at Rutgers University who participates in the <a href="https://covidstates.org/">Covid States project</a>, a research group that surveys people about their social media use and Covid-19 behaviors. “We can ask people questions. But Facebook truly has the data about what people have seen and how their attention is being devoted on the platform.”
Over a dozen independent researchers who regularly study Facebook, including six who are specifically researching the spread of information about Covid-19, told Recode that the company makes it difficult for people studying the platform to access vital information, including how many times people viewed Covid-related articles, what health misinformation Facebook takes down, and what’s being shared on private pages and groups.
Facebook does have some programs, like the Social Science One data-sharing initiative, to give researchers more detailed information than is publicly available. But some say that the process for receiving that data takes too long to keep up with the ever-changing Covid-19 situation. This has led researchers to use alternative methods to log posts manually, run opt-in user studies, or design independent surveys, and Facebook has sometimes disputed the results of those who do these workarounds.
Researchers aren’t just clamoring for more information about Facebook, either. YouTube, Twitter, and other social media networks also have troves of data about Covid-19 misinformation that could help researchers. But because Facebook is the largest social media platform for sharing news — one where many posts are private — the company is central to the debate about transparency in Big Tech and the societal impacts of its products.
Facebook VP of global affairs Nick Clegg <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZ9p03GHcJk">said that the company</a> is “already committed to providing unprecedented data sets to independent researchers” and that “everyone always wants more, and we will always seek to do more,” when asked about the issue of researcher data access at a recent event hosted by the nonprofit Freedom House.
Meanwhile, several academics Recode spoke with say that a lack of access to Facebook data is limiting their ability to understand how many people are seeing Covid-19 misinformation that could be causing vaccine hesitancy in the US. It’s an increasingly urgent issue as the delta variant of the virus spreads across the country, infecting tens of thousands of new people daily. Only about half the population is fully vaccinated, and an estimated <a href="https://news.gallup.com/opinion/polling-matters/352976/vaccine-hesitancy-public-opinion.aspx">20 percent of Americans remain unwilling to get the shot</a>.
Researcher access to how social media spreads online is “profoundly important” to overcoming vaccine hesitancy in the US, according to Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, whose office recently <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/2021/7/15/22578924/surgeon-general-vivek-murthy-misinformation-covid-vaccine-social-media-public-health-threat">put out a report</a> calling misinformation a threat to public health.
“The data gap means we are flying blind. We don’t know the extent of the problem. We don’t know what’s working to solve the problem. We don’t know who’s most impacted by the problem,” Murthy told Recode.
More accurate research data is “absolutely essential for us to be able to take targeted effective action to address misinformation,” he added. “The fact that you don’t have it is hampering us at a time when misinformation is actively harming people’s health.”
Facebook’s contentious relationship with researchers recently <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/22612151/laura-edelson-facebook-nyu-ad-observatory-social-media-researcher">attracted headlines, after the company cut off access</a> to the accounts of a group of outside researchers at NYU’s Ad Observatory, which was monitoring political ads on the platform. Facebook said it revoked the group’s access because of privacy concerns, but the Ad Observatory argued that the study’s participants were all opt-in volunteers, who willingly shared information about what ads they were seeing on Facebook for research purposes. The group’s leader said Facebook is “silencing” research that “calls attention to problems” with how the company handles political ads. The Ad Observatory was also helping with some Covid-19 misinformation research.
There are, however, legitimate privacy reasons for Facebook to be hesitant about giving researchers carte blanche to study user data. Since <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/23/17151916/facebook-cambridge-analytica-trump-diagram">the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2016</a>, when a psychology researcher exploited the private information of up to 87 million Facebook users for political purposes, Facebook has been more guarded about how it shares information with academics. But researchers say there are still ways for Facebook to share anonymized data, such as a list of the most viewed articles in real time or aggregated information about which Covid-19 topics are popular with certain demographics of people.
“It’s defensible on the part of Facebook that they want to protect the data of an everyday person,” Rachel Moran, a researcher studying Covid-19 misinformation on social media at the University of Washington’s Information School, told Recode. “But in trying to understand actually how much misinformation is on Facebook, and how it’s being interacted with on a daily basis, we need to know more.”
While preserving user privacy is a laudable goal, the concern among the academic community is that Facebook is effectively using this rationale as a shield against critics who want more open access to the platform. And now more than ever, this access could be critical in helping researchers and public health experts understand what kinds of false narratives about Covid-19 are affecting vulnerable communities and how to allocate resources to help them.
Facebook offers a few tools to people studying the platform, like the real-time analytics platform Crowdtangle and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/20/how-data-can-aid-fight-against-covid-19/">regular survey results about Facebook users’ Covid-19 symptoms</a> and <a href="https://covidsurvey.mit.edu/">attitudes about Covid-19, including vaccines</a>. The company also supplies a special data set to the <a href="https://socialscience.one/">Social Science One consortium of academics</a>.
But these resources — while helpful — aren’t enough to keep up with the constantly evolving barrage of Covid-19 misinformation, and to truly understand how it impacts their behavior, according to several leading social media researchers.
So academics have devised their own manual methods to gather data, including independent surveys and opt-in user experiments.
“We often try and take an embedded approach where we’re like, ‘Okay, so if I was an average Facebook user, how would I encounter this information?’” said Moran. “I have a poor research assistant who literally is charged with manually capturing each story, each video that comes up, because there’s no way of accessing that information otherwise.”
Moran and her staff can spend “hours and hours” poring over Instagram stories of popular misinformation influencers, where users are slipping in bogus claims about Covid-19. While useful in understanding the tactics that influencers use to deceive their audiences, that kind of time-consuming research is ultimately just a small snapshot of the larger Facebook ecosystem.
To get a grasp on what Covid-19 misinformation may be going viral, many researchers use Crowdtangle as a starting point. This Facebook-owned tool lets researchers look up how many times a specific URL has been shared or reacted to on Facebook. Crowdtangle does not give researchers certain key metrics, though, like how many people view a post and what’s circulating on people’s private Facebook profiles as opposed to public pages. These details can be more important than how many people share or react to it.
Facebook itself acknowledges the limitations of Crowdtangle data but still declines to share more accurate data about what the most popular content is on its platform. It would be “extremely easy,” for example, for Facebook to release an up-to-date list of the most viewed websites that people link to on its platform, without raising any concerns over user privacy, according to David Rothschild, an economist at Microsoft Research. But Facebook has historically refused to release even high-level, aggregate data like this.
“It’s baffling,” Rothschild said. “Just baffling.”
Without more data access from Facebook about what people are seeing and what’s being taken down, researchers say they’re trying to crack open a black box. Making matters more difficult, Facebook and other social media companies are constantly changing their features and tweaking their algorithms, which can render researchers’ homegrown methods for studying the social network useless.
“Just when you think that you have a set of tools and scripts and codes coming from these platforms, they make some changes and you have to start over,” said Rutgers’s Ognyanova. “So that’s kind of the plight of social media researchers.”
David Lazer leads the <a href="https://covidstates.org/">Covid States Project</a>, one of the top research groups trying to understand, in part, why so many Americans don’t want to get vaccinated. The well-respected team’s survey findings are regularly used by politicians, health experts, and other researchers to better inform public policy.
The Covid States Project <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/07/27/people-are-more-anti-vaccine-if-they-get-their-covid-19-news-facebook-rather-than-fox-news-new-data-shows/">put out a report in late July</a> showing that Facebook news consumers were less likely to get vaccinated than Fox News viewers. Facebook promptly attacked the study’s methodology. A company <a href="https://gizmodo.com/facebook-news-consumers-are-more-anti-vaccine-than-fox-1847378398">spokesperson told Gizmodo</a> that the results were “sensationalized” and “overstated,” in part because they relied on self-reported survey data over a short time window. Instead, Facebook argued, researchers should have used better data, like people’s actual reliance on the social network for news over self-reported survey data — data that only Facebook can access.
Lazer says he could have asked Facebook directly to collaborate to design an experiment together to get better data about how people used the platform, but that would take time. Last year, Lazer was one of several academics selected to work with Facebook on a <a href="https://about.fb.com/news/2020/08/research-impact-of-facebook-and-instagram-on-us-election/">separate elections-related ongoing research project</a>, for which he’s receiving special access to user behavior data. But that model wouldn’t work for the Covid States Project, since his team needed real-time data to study quickly shifting messaging on Covid-19 vaccines.
“[Facebook] is saying: ‘You can’t answer this question unless you have data like that. Oh, and by the way, we have a monopoly on data like that,’” said Lazer. “That’s a problem.”
The back-and-forth represents a longstanding issue between Facebook and outside researchers who study social media. For years, researchers have requested more detailed information about how people use the site, including links they’ve clicked on and <a href="https://www.wired.com/2016/02/facebook-reactions-totally-redesigned-like-button/">emotion-based reactions to posts</a>. They want this data so they can better understand how content in people’s Facebook and Instagram feeds informs their opinions. More granular data could help them answer, for example, whether people who view one piece of misinformation are more likely to click on another, or whether a certain demographic is more susceptible to sharing Covid-19 hoaxes than others.
“Facebook can say, ‘Oh, you saw this story? Oh, you lingered on it,’” Lazer suggested. “So Facebook has the dream machine for understanding human behavior.”
Facebook has also disputed the findings of an influential report cited by Biden and <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/2021/7/22/22588829/amy-klobuchar-health-misinformation-act-section-230-covid-19-facebook-twitter-youtube-social-media">Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) that claimed only 12 users</a> — a so-called “Disinformation Dozen” — were responsible for 65 percent of vaccine misinformation on Facebook and Twitter. Facebook told Recode that it left out key facts about how the company had disabled many popular accounts responsible for spreading misinformation. But rather than critiquing outside studies, Facebook should be opening its books to researchers about how it prioritizes content people see in their News Feed, says Imran Ahmed, the CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which authored the report.
“It is extraordinary that companies whose core defense is that they need to provide open spaces are actually some of the most controlling and opaque organizations on the planet,” Ahmed told Recode. “They control the communications and knowledge architecture of the world and will not provide insight into their algorithms and what they want to amplify.”
Facebook even questioned the credibility of data coming from its own tool, Crowdtangle, after New York Times journalist Kevin Roose used the analytics platform to compile daily lists of the 10 most shared Facebook links, which were often dominated by right-wing pages. Facebook disputed these findings, arguing that the Crowdtangle data shows <a href="https://about.fb.com/news/2020/11/what-do-people-actually-see-on-facebook-in-the-us/">a distorted view of what’s really popular</a> on Facebook. Last month, Roose <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/14/technology/facebook-data.html">reported that some executives within the company were considering limiting Crowdtangle</a> data access to journalists altogether because of the negative PR repercussions, although Facebook has said it has no plans to shut down Crowdtangle.
Nevertheless, the incident has left some researchers worried that Facebook may be limiting one of the few direct data sources they have to work with. And it’s problematic that one of the most useful tools that journalists and researchers currently have to understand misinformation on the platform can be disabled whenever Facebook wants.
When Facebook effectively shut down the NYU Ad Observatory in early August, similar concerns spread not only in the academic community but also with lawmakers and the Federal Trade Commission. To critics, Facebook’s handling of the Ad Observatory incident was just another example of the company trying to silence those attempting to hold it accountable.
“For several years now, I have called on social media platforms like Facebook to work with, and better empower, independent researchers, whose efforts consistently improve the integrity and safety of social media platforms by exposing harmful and exploitative activity,” Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) said in a statement the day after Facebook took action against the Ad Observatory. “Instead, Facebook has seemingly done the opposite.”
To its credit, Facebook grants some researchers permission to access more detailed data sets about user behavior through the Facebook Open Research and Transparency (FORT) program. The problem is, researchers say, those data sets largely haven’t been useful so far in studying posts about Covid-19.
Social Science One is one of the most ambitious academic partnership projects Facebook has participated in through FORT to date. Started by Stanford law professor Nate Persily and Harvard political science professor Gary King in 2018, the group intended to set up a system for <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-gives-researchers-full-access-for-election-studies-1531348942?mod=article_inline">outside academics to study internal data generated by Facebook’s 2.2 billion users</a>, like how many times a URL has been viewed across the platform and which demographics viewed it. Establishing such a workflow was initially expected to take two months but ended up taking two years, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-delivers-long-awaited-trove-of-data-to-outside-researchers-11581602403">after Facebook raised legal concerns over sharing too much user data</a> and potentially violating people’s privacy. (Facebook ultimately applied a “differential privacy” technique to anonymize the data, which some researchers say makes it less accurate and more difficult to parse.)
Since the original data set was released in February 2020, researchers have published eight academic papers using Social Science One data, according to Facebook. They range in topics from the influence of political campaigns on Facebook in Chile to the prevalence of fake news on the platform. There are currently 22 draft academic papers using Social Science One data. Only one involves research about Covid-19 misinformation.
Although the mission of Social Science One is laudable, several researchers say it offers only a static snapshot of Facebook’s data universe, one that isn’t particularly useful for understanding the constantly evolving world of Covid-19 misinformation. And until earlier this summer, the data set only included data until July 2019, though it has since been updated to include data up to March 2020. Something as simple as “speeding up” the process by which researchers apply for and get access to updated data via Social Science One, Lazer says, would be a big improvement.
Despite Facebook’s massive computing power, running data sets like the ones used in Social Science One can take significant time: up to a month and a half of work for data covering a three-month time period, the company said. According to researchers, that lag can render Covid-19 information outdated, so Facebook needs to find a way to get this information to them more quickly.
Some academics believe that government intervention is the only way to get Facebook and other social media companies to share more data with researchers.
Persily, the Stanford law professor who co-founded Social Science One, resigned from the organization ahead of the 2020 elections and is now advocating for new laws to address issues between social media companies and researchers. Such legislation would force companies like Facebook to share more data with researchers and loosen the privacy laws around them doing so. This could resolve the longstanding debate between researchers and social media companies about whether companies can legally share user data without violating privacy laws.
“Unless you create some kind of legal immunity for companies sharing data, and a legal compulsion for them to share that data, you can’t win the argument, because all it looks like is risk,” Persily said. “I think that sharing data is legal, but I’m not the one paying $5 billion if I’m fined.”
Persily added that Social Science One was a substantial step forward in getting Facebook to give researchers more freedom to study its platform. He commended Facebook for taking part in it.
But ultimately, Persily said, companies like Facebook need more incentive to participate in such projects without fear of getting in trouble with regulators, who also don’t want to see Facebook repeat the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Some lawmakers, like Klobuchar and Warner, have criticized Facebook for not sharing enough data with researchers. At the same time, they have also called for these companies to do a better job protecting user privacy.
“The spread of misinformation about the coronavirus vaccine has had dire consequences,” Klobuchar said in a statement to Recode. “These are some of the biggest, richest companies in the world and it is vital that they are transparent about the misinformation on their platforms so researchers and policymakers can better assess and tackle this problem.”
For Persily and many others in the academic community, getting researchers access to better data is a key step before regulators can solve other questions.
“Whether we can answer the question about whether Facebook is killing people with Covid misinformation depends on if outsiders are able to assess how much misinformation actually exists on Facebook,” said Persily. “Data access is the linchpin for all other social media issues.”
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/22622070/facebook-data-covid-19-vaccine-misinformation-researchers-access-nyu-academics">https://www.vox.com/22622070/facebook-data-covid-19-vaccine-misinformation-researchers-access-nyu-academics</a>

vox Why no one really knows how bad Facebook’s vaccine misinformation problem is

Is Facebook “killing people” by enabling the spread of Covid-19 misinformation, as President Joe Biden said a few weeks ago ? Or is the soc...

Why it’s so hard to be a nurse in America, according to two nurses

Last month, at the start of a fourth Covid-19 wave in the US, a nurse in a Seattle-area intensive-care unit announced her resignation on Twitter. “No amount of money could convince me to stay on as a bedside ICU nurse right now,” she wrote. “I can’t continue to live with the toll on my body and mind. Even weekly therapy has not been enough to dilute the horrors I carry with me from this past year and a half.”
The nurse, Sara, who asked to be identified by her first name so she could speak freely about her experiences at work, told Vox that she’s been offered incredible bonuses in exchange for extra hours. She said she could make an entire month’s mortgage payment just by working one extra shift, but has declined. “We’re not soldiers,” Sara said. “We’re not the saviors of humanity. We’re humans who have families and the need to take care of ourselves.”
In June, Julia Belluz wrote for Vox about the many <a href="https://www.vox.com/22439911/doctors-mental-health-suicide-coronavirus-pandemic">structural barriers that prevent physicians from getting mental health treatment</a>. It led to an outpouring of support, and a question: What about the nurses?
The roughly <a href="https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes291141.htm">3 million</a> registered nurses (RNs) currently employed in the United States are, in Sara’s words, “the eyes and the ears and hands and feet of providing health care.” But nurses are leaving the profession at a staggering rate. According to a 2021 report from Nursing Solutions, the turnover rate for registered nurses last year was <a href="https://www.nsinursingsolutions.com/Documents/Library/NSI_National_Health_Care_Retention_Report.pdf">close to 20 percent</a>. This leaves hospitals understaffed: About 10 percent of hospital RN positions were vacant last year, the same report found, perpetuating a cycle of burnout and likely <a href="https://www.aacnnursing.org/News-Information/Nursing-Shortage-Resources/Impact">worsening the quality of care</a> for patients.
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-conversation="none">
I’ve been an ICU nurse for 3 years — the role came to define me in a way no other job has. Critical care nursing through this pandemic has wrung every last bit of emotional, psychological, and physical strength from me. I can’t face another <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/COVID19?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#COVID19</a> surge as a bedside ICU nurse.
— Sara, BSN RN CCRN (she/her) (@queenofironyRN) <a href="https://twitter.com/queenofironyRN/status/1418067339417948163?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 22, 2021</a></blockquote>
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As an ICU nurse, Sara said the pressure and strain have felt unbearable. When Covid-19 arrived, she was often the only health care provider in the room with a critically ill patient, “feeling like this person’s life was completely in my hands, and it was up to me,” she told Vox. She said her own symptoms now mirror some of those of post-traumatic stress disorder: traumatic flashbacks, nightmares, uncontrolled moods, and crying.
Sara was able to carve out time to find a therapist and join a virtual support group, but she worries that many nurses don’t have the capacity to seek support on their own. “It feels like everybody’s running on fumes,” she said. “We need to make the barriers to accessing [mental health support] quite a bit lower because people are just so exhausted.”
The mental health of nurses was taxed even before the Covid-19 pandemic. Female nurses in particular were at <a href="https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/article-abstract/2778209?guestAccessKey=b027c29e-f11c-415a-92d6-766fdb5a083b&utm_source=For_The_Media&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=ftm_links&utm_content=tfl&utm_term=041421">twice the risk of dying by suicide</a> as women in the general population, according to research published earlier this year. And that’s only “the tip of the iceberg,” said <a href="https://ihpi.umich.edu/our-experts/cfriese">Christopher Friese</a>, a professor of nursing at the University of Michigan and a co-author of the study. “What I worry about is the large number of nurses that we can’t even quantify, that are suffering in silence.”
Friese, who has practiced as a registered nurse for 27 years, spoke with Vox about the toll nursing can take on mental health, and what has to change for nurses to get the support they need. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What have been some of the biggest strains on nurses, before the pandemic, that might put them at these greater risks for mental health challenges?
I think there are a couple of buckets to think about. The first bucket is their personal experience. Nurses are not only delivering care to the patients and their communities, but they’re also caring for their children, their family members, and loved ones. They take on an added caregiving role beyond their job. So I think we need to understand that better.
The second bucket is the workplace. The health care workplace has not been healthy for nurses for some time. We’ve known for over a decade that nurses have been concerned about their workloads. They’ve been concerned about the resources that they have to take care of patients or communities. And they are often the group that we add new tasks on to. So adding the electronic health record has placed that very heavy burden on nurses because nurses are sort of a catchall for all of that work. And we haven’t taken anything away from nurses. The only thing we’ve done is continued to pile on to their work.
And I think the final point that we need to be aware of, and I’ve certainly seen, is increased hostility in the workplace. Nurses more frequently are bearing the brunt of verbal and physical abuse from patients, patients’ family members, and some staff. And we have not created a safe environment to work.
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<figcaption>Registered nurses from Keck Hospital of USC in Los Angeles strike due to “unsafe staffing conditions” on July 13, 2021.</figcaption>
<cite>Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images</cite></figure>
Have you experienced some of these strains firsthand in your time as a clinical nurse?
Nursing is a very rewarding profession, but there are times when it can be very draining. I’m deeply worried by what I’m seeing. Despite all my experience, it is definitely harder work than it was when I started. It was getting harder before the pandemic, and the pandemic only exposed those fault lines where the system has not served nurses well.
Could you talk more about how Covid-19 might have impacted nurses’ mental health?
In our data, we had over 700 nurses die from suicide in the 2017-2018 period. That was an all-time high. So we were trending up, and then Covid-19 hits. They were dealing with these really risky clinical scenarios where we don’t have good information, early on in the pandemic. How do we protect people? Do people have the right protective gear?
There is also a unique combination of their personal health at risk, their loved ones’ safety, and then the societal split in our approach to this public health crisis, which you’re seeing right now. We have really good tools to protect our population — we have really effective and very safe vaccines. We’ve learned in this pandemic that masking and staying out of crowds is effective. And yet we have a swath of the population who is not doing that. And they’re in our ICU and they’re in our hospital beds, and nurses have to live with that duality.
The other thing we’re observing is staff shortage — either people have left the workforce, or they’re ill themselves, or their loved ones are ill and they’re caring for family members. Everybody’s picking up more work. That just perpetuates the cycle. We’re on a hamster wheel here, where nurses just can’t get off.
Are you worried about attrition from the nursing profession, especially from the added strain of the pandemic?
I’m deeply worried. I’m already aware of particularly experienced nurses who have left their clinical position, and you can’t really replace them, their decades of experience. Those are the folks who train our next generation and help support physicians and others. So it’s a real brain drain.
Then it creates this cyclical problem where you’re always running short. We have very clear evidence: when you don’t have enough nurses, patients have more complications, they’re more at risk of dying, etc. So there’s a direct connection to a healthy, fully staffed nursing workforce and public health. There’s real consequences for our nation’s health if we do not curb this crisis.
Do you find nurses tend to have good access to mental health care?
Most employed nurses have relatively good health insurance, so they probably have access on paper. But it’s very difficult for health care professionals — and especially nurses — to seek out mental health services because of the stigma we have in place. Nurses might be concerned that if they seek out mental health services and undergo treatment, that might jeopardize their employment.
There are numerous examples. As nurses are applying for positions and interviewing and going under intake questioning, they might disclose that they have a mental health condition or they’re taking medication. And leadership is questioning whether they’re suitable for those positions: Can they handle the pressure of that work? So that only makes it more likely that you’re not going to disclose and you’re not going to access services.
We need a really different kind of model for nurses. We all need mental health services that are safe, accessible, and confidential.
The final piece of that is the disciplinary process for nurses. Right now, if a nurse makes what is assessed to be a clinical error, we quickly go down the disciplinary route, and we don’t realize that there might be someone in trouble, a human being in front of us who needs care. Is this person well? Do they need help? And what kind of help? These should be the first questions we ask, and then we can get to the other things.
As my colleague Julia Belluz <a href="https://www.vox.com/22439911/doctors-mental-health-suicide-coronavirus-pandemic">reported earlier this year</a>, physicians often seem reluctant to get mental health treatment because in some states, and in some cases, they are worried it could jeopardize their medical license. Do nurses have similar disclosure requirements or licensing concerns?
I don’t know of boards of nursing that formally ask if you have a mental health diagnosis or you’re taking medication. But in a lot of the boards, you have these statements about “moral character.” Assessing one’s character can get wrapped into mental health very quickly in our country. So I think we really want to separate that out. We want people to feel comfortable knowing you can be an excellent nurse and also have a mental health condition. And we want to make sure that you’re getting the recommended treatment you need. It’s just like having diabetes or some other condition. We need to get that stigma out of mental health.
I appreciate there are many nurses who are very public about their struggles, but they’re the exception. And there’s nothing magical that would exempt nurses from having the same underlying health conditions — mental or otherwise — [as] the rest of the population.
Are you comfortable disclosing whether you’ve ever struggled with mental health issues as a registered nurse?
I wouldn’t say that I’ve had a crisis situation. I’ve certainly had stressful moments. I can vividly remember days on the unit even decades later. The work nurses do is physically demanding, and it can be emotionally taxing. It can also be very rewarding. But the kind of work we’re doing, with people’s lives in our hands in very fragile emotional states, you can’t just walk away from that. It sticks with you. I’m thankful that I’ve been able to navigate that, but there are certain events in my career that I will never forget and come back to haunt me.
Do you see your findings about suicide as a potential indicator for the risk of mental health challenges overall?
Below the surface of this is a much larger group of nurses who are, day-to-day, struggling with these issues. We may not even know they are in trouble or they are struggling, and we have no way to know whether they’re getting the help they need. The challenge is to make sure that we can keep them safe before they’re even contemplating suicide.
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<figcaption>A nurse writes information on the window of a patient’s room at the Covid-19 ICU in Salinas, California, in January 2021.</figcaption>
<cite>Nic Coury/Bloomberg/Getty Images</cite></figure>
It seems like physicians and their struggles may get more attention than nurses, even though there are so many more nurses in the country. Why do you think that is?
First, we have better data collected on physicians, so it’s a bit easier to track them over time. Their professional organizations have a fairly robust data set. It’s been a little harder to track nurses over time. We only do surveys of nurses. I think, too, the medical profession has done a better job of understanding this risk and developing unique programs for physicians.
One of the areas to think about is the power differential. Physicians tend to enjoy a relatively privileged place, particularly in the US, relative to other health care workers. So their concerns and issues more often reach prominence. We don’t have a lot of information about other demographic factors, such as gender or sexual identity, etc., but you could imagine that groups that are historically disadvantaged are going to be less likely to be heard on this issue.
There’s a ton of other health care professionals — respiratory therapists, pharmacists — who have been strained, too. And the challenge is to get good data on them. This is only the surface of what the problem may be. We don’t have the fundamental research to help us understand why these things are occurring.
Are there other barriers you see standing in the way of nurses getting mental health care?
We need a different model that is specific to nurses. I think that’s the missing piece. We have specific programs for veterans. We have specific programs for rural residents and adolescents. We don’t really have that for nurses, despite the really alarming data we presented.
We also don’t know the sequence of events. Is it the workplace that’s triggering this? The family environment? Unless we do some really basic registry work, we’ll never know the answer to that. So it limits our ability to help, without research, and that adds to the stigma. If we don’t know what we’re dealing with, then we can’t even let nurses know that there are greater risks and maybe they need to reach out.
<figure class="e-image"><picture class="c-picture" data-cid="site/picture_element-1629130115_3308_1341122" data-cdata='{"asset_id":22779082,"ratio":"*"}'><source srcset="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/jPvV1B_pQ3OXrgGbqLUHwb4_aF0=/0x0:3000x2000/320x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x2000):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22779082/GettyImages_1230332055_copy.jpg 320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/ou3Vbk8CbsvGO21KCwxfj9HQ73k=/0x0:3000x2000/520x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x2000):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22779082/GettyImages_1230332055_copy.jpg 520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/hTEorwl0Q683UrX0hT7qwgbn0x0=/0x0:3000x2000/720x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x2000):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22779082/GettyImages_1230332055_copy.jpg 720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/shXnIyEGDtOekIJzX5ZS8bcX4lY=/0x0:3000x2000/920x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x2000):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22779082/GettyImages_1230332055_copy.jpg 920w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/QPsmPLvIeCHbUrCxe1N9dQZvITs=/0x0:3000x2000/1120x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x2000):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22779082/GettyImages_1230332055_copy.jpg 1120w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/bIOkJaDsgv0j1q2__XaC3uGE10I=/0x0:3000x2000/1320x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x2000):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22779082/GettyImages_1230332055_copy.jpg 1320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/thEbMMpagzVyPQiWOYc1z2CqinM=/0x0:3000x2000/1520x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x2000):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22779082/GettyImages_1230332055_copy.jpg 1520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/spA8whBHGghczPo2QhIN2gDy9ZY=/0x0:3000x2000/1720x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x2000):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22779082/GettyImages_1230332055_copy.jpg 1720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/gMjlEIYQQxOcU9M3Ytx_5dc_c0I=/0x0:3000x2000/1920x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x2000):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22779082/GettyImages_1230332055_copy.jpg 1920w" sizes="(min-width: 1221px) 846px, (min-width: 880px) calc(100vw - 334px), 100vw" type="image/webp" /> <img alt="" data-upload-width="3000" sizes="(min-width: 1221px) 846px, (min-width: 880px) calc(100vw - 334px), 100vw" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/WCYdqdIBhCp_TUaoKlAUAPZh3JA=/0x0:3000x2000/1200x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x2000):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22779082/GettyImages_1230332055_copy.jpg" srcset="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/oTd8RFsd8-OEAu1SeDO1-M7DYaA=/0x0:3000x2000/320x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x2000):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22779082/GettyImages_1230332055_copy.jpg 320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/fwE4VdU9W8CtdP3O3waUtDCg80s=/0x0:3000x2000/520x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x2000):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22779082/GettyImages_1230332055_copy.jpg 520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/xs8C8OhMHwhUF-_0WnMwOo_S6_E=/0x0:3000x2000/720x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x2000):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22779082/GettyImages_1230332055_copy.jpg 720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Txb82KLh2Fw59ThBxFFx0pqlHdM=/0x0:3000x2000/920x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x2000):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22779082/GettyImages_1230332055_copy.jpg 920w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/-YZXIALUQIBuA9iypo1EcHzoh3U=/0x0:3000x2000/1120x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x2000):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22779082/GettyImages_1230332055_copy.jpg 1120w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/pa0XAEw8a3lt-eonEciLy_p17hU=/0x0:3000x2000/1320x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x2000):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22779082/GettyImages_1230332055_copy.jpg 1320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/SV1pAbI_N40iAV-mpZFBNd3RsbA=/0x0:3000x2000/1520x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x2000):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22779082/GettyImages_1230332055_copy.jpg 1520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/hlyU0uhWIuMuj8w8Zax6xysyD6w=/0x0:3000x2000/1720x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x2000):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22779082/GettyImages_1230332055_copy.jpg 1720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/U4xetAtYWfo2iCVs0GlGrTdoyh8=/0x0:3000x2000/1920x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x2000):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22779082/GettyImages_1230332055_copy.jpg 1920w" /></picture>
<figcaption>Nurse Ana Ramos holds the hand of Margaret Gallegos, 91, inside the Providence St. Jude ICU in Fullerton, California, on Christmas Day in 2020.</figcaption>
<cite>Francine Orr/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images</cite></figure>
How can we take better care of nurses?
We all have a family member or a loved one who’s a nurse. And I think oftentimes we don’t necessarily check in with them and ask them how they’re doing, how their day was. We know their work is difficult. Sometimes they’re not able to tell us a lot for privacy reasons. But checking in with loved ones who are nurses, making sure they know they’re valued. If a family member is struggling, making sure they know that is a normal thing and that seeking help is perfectly okay.
I think we also need to have a conversation as a nation about how we value nurses — and how we structure health care so that they can actually be the best nurse they can be for our patients and for our loved ones. Right now, it’s very transactional. We really need to think carefully, particularly after this pandemic: Can we redesign their work so that we take full advantage of their clinical skill? I think right now we’re not doing that.
The last thing would be to advocate for research on nurses. That has not been valued. Just like we want better understanding of diabetes and cancer, we want to have a better understanding of: Are nurses at risk, and what can we do to help them? We have the tools to do this.
Do we as a society want to put value on this? Do we want to try to better understand how we can have a healthy, safe nursing workforce? I think, for our loved ones, that’s the question. Because if we don’t, we’re going to be in big trouble.
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/22600439/nurse-america-mental-health-suicide">https://www.vox.com/22600439/nurse-america-mental-health-suicide</a>

vox Why it’s so hard to be a nurse in America, according to two nurses

Last month, at the start of a fourth Covid-19 wave in the US, a nurse in a Seattle-area intensive-care unit announced her resignation on Twi...

Nothing changes on The White Lotus. That’s the point.

Nothing changes on <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/22608476/old-shyamalan-white-lotus-hbo-mike-white-beach-hawaii-covid-climate">The White Lotus</a>.
The HBO limited series vividly dissects the entrenched systems of power that rule the planet with an iron fist. Yet on some level, it does not believe those systems can be changed — only observed.
You can try to escape the ultrawealthy white people who comprise most of the show’s cast of characters, it suggests, but you’ll almost always end up subsumed by them. Only two characters materially change their circumstances, and one of those two characters ends up dead. It’s not a particularly hopeful vision.
I won’t be surprised by viewers who find the finale utterly depressing. (The White Lotus has been renewed for a second installment, but it will feature new characters in a new location, so this is the last we’ll see of the current cast.) The show comes so very close to making at least one or two of the rich characters at its center face the fact that their way of life — and the comfort to which they’re accustomed — must change if the world is to become a better place. Then the finale comes so very close to shaking up several characters’ status quo, only to bring them right back to where they started.
The show’s affluent vacationers are impervious to anything but their own whims, and they never stop making the same mistakes. Nothing can disrupt the cycle.
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<figcaption>Olivia (Sydney Sweeney, left) and Paula are college friends who ill-advisedly go on a vacation with Olivia’s family.</figcaption>
<cite>HBO</cite></figure>
The White Lotus, broadly speaking, is a class satire about social climbing. The point of the class satire is that it’s built around the rotten core of class in America, and stories of social climbers have a rich history in American pop culture. You can obscure the rottenness in the happy ending of a rags-to-riches story, or you can play it up with a lot of screwball comedy, but it’s always there. The genre is often built around social climbers, who aim to navigate the class ladder without losing the qualities that make them protagonists worth rooting for. But the ladder itself is rotting from within.
The White Lotus is unique for how incessantly it spotlights its rottenness. The show takes a while to reveal which of its characters are our social climbers, thanks to its expansive, tremendous ensemble cast. By the season’s midpoint, it is zeroing in on two characters in particular as our windows into this world: newlywed Rachel (Alexandra Daddario) and best friend along for a family’s ride Paula (Brittany O’Grady). They aren’t the main characters, per se, but they are the characters who have the most to lose and whose ascent of the class ladder puts them in a perilous position.
As the finale begins, both women are on the precipice of major change. Rachel has decided to leave her boorish husband, Shane (Jake Lacy), on their honeymoon. Paula is hoping that her hotel staff lover, Kai (Kekoa Scott Kekumano), has gotten away with robbing the family Paula has joined on vacation.
The White Lotus is rife with instances of characters intermingling, then accidentally making the lives of people beneath them on the social ladder just a little bit worse. Ultimately, those with a higher position on the social ladder rewrite the story to wash away the pain and horror of anyone who isn’t them.
The story of Kai offers a window into what series creator, writer, and director Mike White is up to. Paula gives Kai the code to the safe in the suite where she is vacationing with the Mossbacher family, while everyone is supposedly out for the day. She thinks he should steal the family’s jewelry, to sell it and win back a tiny drop in the bucket of the ill-gotten gains of white America.
But Nicole (Connie Britton) and Mark Mossbacher (Steve Zahn) return to the room unexpectedly, resulting in an encounter where Mark tackles Kai. Kai escapes but barely. Should anyone pin the crime on Kai, Paula will surely fall under suspicion, if only from her friend Olivia Mossbacher (Sydney Sweeney).
Indeed, the only person who figures out Paula was involved is Olivia, and the scene where she coaxes that information out of Paula is maybe the most pointed of all. When Olivia objects to the notion that Kai stealing the jewelry might be a tiny little bit of payback for what Olivia and her family have taken from the planet, Paula says, “I guess it’s not stealing when you think that everything’s already yours.” Something awful might have happened, Olivia says, implying her mother might have died or been hurt badly. But something awful did happen, Paula says. Kai’s life is ruined now, and it’s become a Mossbacher anecdote about that time Mark rescued his wife from a masked intruder.
Throughout the finale, White tends to isolate Paula in the frame, cutting her off from all of the other characters. He stops doing this near the end of the episode, when Olivia rolls over and holds Paula tightly in the bed they’ve been sharing. It’s simultaneously a tender moment and a supremely cynical one. Olivia knows too much. Paula won’t be able to escape her anytime soon.
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<figcaption>Rachel almost escapes her marriage to Shane (Jake Lacy). Almost.</figcaption>
<cite>HBO</cite></figure>
For as gutting as Paula’s resolution is, it has nothing on Rachel’s. She spends most of the series figuring out that the man she’s married and the rich family she’s married into are toxic, poisonous creatures. Shane only values her for her hotness, and he encourages her to stop pursuing a journalism career that she worries has gone stagnant. The second half of the season and especially the finale are concerned with whether Rachel can extricate herself from her brand new marriage.
She does extricate herself — very briefly. Early in the finale, Rachel tells Shane she thinks the marriage was a mistake; he initially refuses to believe her, then just tries to ignore it. She eventually gets him to take her seriously and even checks into her own room. It doesn’t take. For whatever reason — fear, a need for money, a violent altercation Shane is involved in the night after the two “break up” — Rachel caves. The next morning, she shows up at the airport and tells Shane that she’ll be fine. They embrace and board the plane home together.
The penultimate episode of The White Lotus prominently quotes Tennyson’s “<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45364/the-lotos-eaters">The Lotos-Eaters</a>,” a poem based on the lotus-eaters, apathetic creatures from Greek mythology who lost all care for anything except pleasure once they’re drunk on the power of the lotus. The obvious connection the series draws between this myth and its characters is one of money. Rachel, having had just a taste of wealth, doesn’t want to go back to her old life. The series’ conclusion is depressing — but it also might be realistic.
Only one character openly rejects the lotus’s influence, though it’s arguable that his rejection is just the opposite. Quinn, the youngest of the Mossbachers, sneaks away from his family at the airport, because he’s decided he wants to stay in Hawaii, so inspired he feels by the state’s natural wonder and by the locals with whom he goes boating in the morning. He’s only able to stay in Hawaii because he’s got the privilege of his race and class. Still, he is trying to do something new.
Or is he? A character attaining a spiritual awakening from a tropical paradise has come up in White’s work before. The first episode of his masterpiece <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2020/2/11/21131796/enlightened-laura-dern-hbo-watch">Enlightened</a> involves a woman who has an epiphany after seeing a sea turtle, a sequence that White repeats almost beat for beat with Quinn in The White Lotus. But the show also sets up the Hawaiian resort where the characters stay as a kind of escape from reality and into pure pleasure. Quinn might think he’s chasing something authentic and real, and he’s certainly getting away from his family, but he’s still protected from consequence.
As The White Lotus ends, there’s only one character left who is trapped in the land of the lotus-eaters but not a lotus-eater herself. Belinda (Natasha Rothwell) is the manager of the resort’s spa, and across the span of the series, she becomes a sounding board and advice dispenser for many of the show’s rich, white people.
As a Black woman, Belinda is filling a particular character archetype within the class satire: a member of the support staff, usually a person of color, who is of a lower class but wise in a way the richer folks just can’t manage. The longer The White Lotus goes on, the less patience Belinda has for any of her well-heeled clientele. When Rachel asks Belinda what she should do about her marriage, Belinda can no longer bring herself to care. She exits, leaving Rachel to figure it out for herself. That’s when Rachel chooses comfort and luxury over the difficult work of self-realization.
Belinda doesn’t have that luxury. The second-to-last shot of the series zooms in on her face, unsmiling, as she waits for a new boat full of resort guests to arrive at the dock. As the vessel gets close enough for the passengers to see her, she plasters on a smile and begins to wave. In the eyes of the resort guests, Belinda exists not for herself but for the people who pay her to pamper them. Then, when they go elsewhere, she’s stuck, forced to endure another round of people who assume her to be a supporting character.
The final shot of The White Lotus tracks Quinn and his rowing crew as they paddle away from the island. The shot of Belinda’s faked expression and the shot of Quinn’s boat are in a kind of dialogue, each of them both a question posed and an answer resolving it. Is escape possible? Maybe, but you always have to come back. Can you actually change your life? Not if you get stuck in routine, but maybe if you break out of it.
The meaning changes depending on whose perspective you take. Quinn, young and white and rich, sees the possibility of escape; Belinda, jaded and Black and working in the hospitality industry, cannot allow herself to indulge in that kind of optimism. We take our pleasures where we find them, and sometimes, the greatest pleasure is believing you have done something deeply meaningful and that everybody around you exists to guide you along that journey, no matter how myopic that belief might be.
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/22622686/white-lotus-finale-departures-recap-review-hbo">https://www.vox.com/culture/22622686/white-lotus-finale-departures-recap-review-hbo</a>

vox Nothing changes on The White Lotus. That’s the point.

Nothing changes on The White Lotus . The HBO limited series vividly dissects the entrenched systems of power that rule the planet with an i...

70 Dead, Dozens Still Missing After Turkey Floods; Rescue Ops Continue

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<div class="ins_instory_dv_cont"><img alt="70 Dead, Dozens Still Missing After Turkey Floods; Rescue Ops Continue" src="https://c.ndtvimg.com/2021-08/c0ti72fs_turkey-floods_625x300_16_August_21.jpg" title="70 Dead, Dozens Still Missing After Turkey Floods; Rescue Ops Continue" /></div>
More than 40 villages still have no electricity after flash floods last week.
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Bozkurt:
Seventy people died and 47 are still missing in Turkey after flash floods hit Black Sea regions last week, officials said on Monday.
The death count has been climbing all weekend as rescue and recovery workers pick through debris left behind by the subsiding waters in the hardest-hit areas.
More than 40 villages still have no electricity and some areas have no running water, according to the disaster and emergencies service.
Emergency teams set up temporary cell phone receivers and transmitters to help with communications, it said.
The devastation across Turkey's northern regions came just as the country was gaining control over hundreds of wildfires that killed eight people and destroyed swathes of forest along its scenic southern coast.
On Saturday, five Russian servicemen and three Turkish citizens died when their Russian Be-200 firefighting plane crashed in a remote mountainous zone in the south.
Scientists say natural disasters such as wildfires and floods are becoming more intense and frequent because of global warming caused by polluting emissions.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
 
 
source <a href="https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/70-dead-dozens-still-missing-after-turkey-floods-rescue-ops-continue-2511808">https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/70-dead-dozens-still-missing-after-turkey-floods-rescue-ops-continue-2511808</a>

news world 70 Dead, Dozens Still Missing After Turkey Floods; Rescue Ops Continue

More than 40 villages still have no electricity after flash floods last week. Bozkurt: Seventy people died and 47 are still missing in ...