Spread & Containment
Walking is a state of mind – it can teach you so much about where you are
Walking roots us in new places. It also unlocks memories of those we’ve moved away from.
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During lockdown in 2020, governments across the world encouraged people to take short walks in their neighbourhoods. Even before COVID hit though, amid the renewal of city centres and environmental and public health concerns, walking was promoted in many places as a form of active travel, to replace car journeys.
This resurgence in urban walking has been a long time coming. Our first baby steps might still be celebrated. But since the explosion of car use in the 1950s, people in Europe and North America have walked less and less.
UK transport statistics show an annual increase of about 4.8 billion passenger motor vehicle miles (from car and taxi use) in the four decades to 1990. The last decade of the 20th century saw that growth slow. But until recently, our collective motor use just kept climbing.
The pandemic changed that. Passenger motor vehicle miles decreased by over 68 billion. And surveys suggest that 38% of the people who took up walking as a new pursuit aim to stick with it. My research shows walking is more than an activity: it both ties you to where you are and unlocks your memories.
How walking connects you to your city
In the 2000s, as part of their Rescue Geography project, geographers Paul Evans and Phil Jones facilitated group walks in the Eastside district of Birmingham, Britain’s third largest city. The idea was to “rescue” local people’s understandings of an area before it is redeveloped. They accompanied older former residents on foot through streets they’d known as children, before these inner-city neighbourhoods were demolished in the 1950s and 1960s and they had relocated to suburbia – a shift which saw the car become their only option for everyday transport.
Similarly, in my doctoral research I used walking to understand how a neighbourhood of Caerleon in south Wales had expanded in the 1960s and 1970s. I did many one-to-one interviews with people not sat down in a room, but strolling through streets they knew well. It became a way of exploring how spaces act as thresholds to memories and to levels of the unconscious, which may not otherwise reveal themselves.
People showed me the streets where they had lived at points through their lives. One person took me on the route he took to school during the 1970s, as a teenager. Passing certain shops prompted stories of how he’d walk to pick up a block of cheese or rashers of bacon for his mother. He told me how his family’s shopping habits had changed over time. After getting a freezer in the late 1970s, they started driving to the out-of-town supermarket.
I met another family who had lived on the same street for three generations. The grandfather was in his 70s, his daughter middle-aged, and his granddaughter 11. His daughter described how the streets she’d known as a child in the 1980s were now so much busier, and more dangerous, because of the cars. She described her daughter’s world as being “narrower”, as a result.
How walking unlocks our memories
Walking changes the way we tell our life stories. Taking a street we once took often unlocks things: we might not struggle as much to remember specific dates. We find a freedom of sorts to go deeper into our memories.
This chimes with the non-representational theories championed by geographer Nigel Thrift. Broadly this approach highlights how physically being in a specific place can help us retrieve feelings or knowledge that are deep within the subconsious.
In her research with migrant communities in the UK, sociologist Maggie O'Neill has used walking and participatory theatre as what she calls biographical methods for exploring ideas of borders, risk and belonging.
In a similar way, I collaborated on two public group walks with a dancer, Marega Palser. I planned lines on the ground which linked environments such as houses, shops, schools, busy roads, paths, and green spaces. And Palser turned material I’d gathered from my walking interviews into short pieces of street theatre that we would share, as a collective.
Palser’s interpretations were deliberately disarming and playful, and they triggered unexpected responses. In one case she used toy vehicles to recall a car crash from the late 1960s.
One person recalled how a relative in the 1960s had accidentally pierced the gas pipe (a very new technology at the time) in their council house kitchen. While the anecdote had initially seemed unimportant, we learned that the incident had happened on Christmas Eve and that the council had come straight away to sort out the problem.
Minds were cast back to a time when technologies now common were only just emerging. Many more attendees came forward and shared stories from their lives in the mid-1950s to mid-1970s. They relayed how central heating had arrived with new-build houses on suburban housing estates and how supermarkets had offered more choice.
As with Evans and Jones’ Rescue Geography project, I found that it was through touching and feeling these geographical spaces that people were able to connect with their memories. Walking, one person in middle-age told me, “takes you back yourself, on a journey, to the places you’ve lived”. They spoke about the “packed connections” these places hold, of being taken back to childhood and thinking about people who have spent their entire lives living in one place.
Walking is about slowing life down and thinking about the local. It enables conversations. It develops empathy.. More than a simple physical activity, it is a way of thinking and a state of mind. From online resources for composing walks and apps for tracking them to the online walking communities of people who cover each street in their city – the every-single-streeters – there are plenty of ideas for you to get walking too.
Dr Aled Mark Singleton receives funding from the Economic and Social Research Council, grant reference ES/W007568/1.
lockdown pandemic europe uk
International
Repeated COVID-19 Vaccination Weakens Immune System: Study
Repeated COVID-19 Vaccination Weakens Immune System: Study
Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
Repeated COVID-19…
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Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
Repeated COVID-19 vaccination weakens the immune system, potentially making people susceptible to life-threatening conditions such as cancer, according to a new study.
Multiple doses of the Pfizer or Moderna COVID-19 vaccines lead to higher levels of antibodies called IgG4, which can provide a protective effect. But a growing body of evidence indicates that the “abnormally high levels” of the immunoglobulin subclass actually make the immune system more susceptible to the COVID-19 spike protein in the vaccines, researchers said in the paper.
They pointed to experiments performed on mice that found multiple boosters on top of the initial COVID-19 vaccination “significantly decreased” protection against both the Delta and Omicron virus variants and testing that found a spike in IgG4 levels after repeat Pfizer vaccination, suggesting immune exhaustion.
Studies have detected higher levels of IgG4 in people who died with COVID-19 when compared to those who recovered and linked the levels with another known determinant of COVID-19-related mortality, the researchers also noted.
A review of the literature also showed that vaccines against HIV, malaria, and pertussis also induce the production of IgG4.
“In sum, COVID-19 epidemiological studies cited in our work plus the failure of HIV, Malaria, and Pertussis vaccines constitute irrefutable evidence demonstrating that an increase in IgG4 levels impairs immune responses,” Alberto Rubio Casillas, a researcher with the biology laboratory at the University of Guadalajara in Mexico and one of the authors of the new paper, told The Epoch Times via email.
The paper was published by the journal Vaccines in May.
Pfizer and Moderna officials didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Both companies utilize messenger RNA (mRNA) technology in their vaccines.
Dr. Robert Malone, who helped invent the technology, said the paper illustrates why he’s been warning about the negative effects of repeated vaccination.
“I warned that more jabs can result in what’s called high zone tolerance, of which the switch to IgG4 is one of the mechanisms. And now we have data that clearly demonstrate that’s occurring in the case of this as well as some other vaccines,” Malone, who wasn’t involved with the study, told The Epoch Times.
“So it’s basically validating that this rush to administer and re-administer without having solid data to back those decisions was highly counterproductive and appears to have resulted in a cohort of people that are actually more susceptible to the disease.”
Possible Problems
The weakened immune systems brought about by repeated vaccination could lead to serious problems, including cancer, the researchers said.
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Spread & Containment
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Banned By Major Social Media Site, Campaign Pages Blocked
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Banned By Major Social Media Site, Campaign Pages Blocked
Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
Twitter…
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Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
Twitter owner Elon Musk invited Democrat presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for a discussion on his Twitter Spaces after Kennedy said his campaign was suspended by Meta-owned Instagram.
“Interesting… when we use our TeamKennedy email address to set up @instagram accounts we get an automatic 180-day ban. Can anyone guess why that’s happening?” he wrote on Twitter.
An accompanying image shows that Instagram said it “suspended” his “Team Kennedy” account and that there “are 180 days remaining to disagree” with the company’s decision.
In response to his post, Musk wrote: “Would you like to do a Spaces discussion with me next week?” Kennedy agreed, saying he would do it Monday at 2 p.m. ET.
Hours later, Kennedy wrote that Instagram “still hasn’t reinstated my account, which was banned years ago with more than 900k followers.” He argued that “to silence a major political candidate is profoundly undemocratic.”
“Social media is the modern equivalent of the town square,” the candidate, who is the nephew of former President John F. Kennedy, wrote. “How can democracy function if only some candidates have access to it?”
The Epoch Times approached Instagram for comment.
Interesting… when we use our TeamKennedy email address to set up @instagram accounts we get an automatic 180-day ban. Can anyone guess why that’s happening? pic.twitter.com/0G8oRnoXTv
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) June 2, 2023
It’s not the first time that either Facebook or Instagram has taken action against Kennedy. In 2021, Instagram banned him from posting claims about vaccine safety and COVID-19.
After he was banned by the platform, Kennedy said that his Instagram posts raised legitimate concerns about vaccines and were backed by research. His account was banned just days after Facebook and Instagram announced they would block the spread of what they described as misinformation about vaccines, including research saying the shots cause autism, are dangerous, or are ineffective.
“This kind of censorship is counterproductive if our objective is a safe and effective vaccine supply,” he said at the time.
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International
Study Falsely Linking Hydroxychloroquine To Increased Deaths Frequently Cited Even After Retraction
Study Falsely Linking Hydroxychloroquine To Increased Deaths Frequently Cited Even After Retraction
Authored by Jessie Zhang via Thje Epoch…
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Authored by Jessie Zhang via Thje Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
An Australian and Swedish investigation has found that among the hundreds of COVID-19 research papers that have been withdrawn, a retracted study linking the drug hydroxychloroquine to increased mortality was the most cited paper.
With 1,360 citations at the time of data extraction, researchers in the field were still referring to the paper “Hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine with or without a macrolide for treatment of COVID-19: a multinational registry analysis” long after it was retracted.
Authors of the analysis involving the University of Wollongong, Linköping University, and Western Sydney Local Health District wrote (pdf) that “most researchers who cite retracted research do not identify that the paper is retracted, even when submitting long after the paper has been withdrawn.”
“This has serious implications for the reliability of published research and the academic literature, which need to be addressed,” they said.
“Retraction is the final safeguard against academic error and misconduct, and thus a cornerstone of the entire process of knowledge generation.”
Scientists Question Findings
Over 100 medical professionals wrote an open letter, raising ten major issues with the paper.
These included the fact that there was “no ethics review” and “unusually small reported variances in baseline variables, interventions and outcomes,” as well as “no mention of the countries or hospitals that contributed to the data source and no acknowledgments to their contributions.”
Other concerns were that the average daily doses of hydroxychloroquine were higher than the FDA-recommended amounts, which would present skewed results.
They also found that the data that was reportedly from Australian patients did not seem to match data from the Australian government.
Eventually, the study led the World Health Organization to temporarily suspend the trial of hydroxychloroquine on COVID-19 patients and to the UK regulatory body, MHRA, requesting the temporary pause of recruitment into all hydroxychloroquine trials in the UK.
France also changed its national recommendation of the drug in COVID-19 treatments and halted all trials.
Currently, a total of 337 research papers on COVID-19 have been retracted, according to Retraction Watch.
Further retractions are expected as the investigation of proceeds.
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