Paul Krugman and other mainstream trade experts are now admitting that they were wrong about globalization: It hurt American workers far more than they thought it would.

Foreign PolicyMichael Hirsh

Paul Krugman has never suffered fools gladly. The Nobel Prize-winning economist rose to international fame—and a coveted space on the New York Times op-ed page—by lacerating his intellectual opponents in the most withering way. In a series of books and articles beginning in the 1990s, Krugman branded just about everybody who questioned the rapid pace of globalization a fool who didn’t understand economics very well. “Silly” was a word Krugman used a lot to describe pundits who raised fears of economic competition from other nations, especially China. Don’t worry about it, he said: Free trade will have only minor impact on your prosperity.

Now Krugman has come out and admitted, offhandedly, that his own understanding of economics has been seriously deficient as well. In a recent essay titled “What Economists (Including Me) Got Wrong About Globalization,” adapted from a forthcoming book on inequality, Krugman writes that he and other mainstream economists “missed a crucial part of the story” in failing to realize that globalization would lead to “hyperglobalization” and huge economic and social upheaval, particularly of the industrial middle class in America. And many of these working-class communities have been hit hard by Chinese competition, which economists made a “major mistake” in underestimating, Krugman says.

It was quite a “whoops” moment, considering all the ruined American communities and displaced millions of workers we’ve seen in the interim. And a newly humbled Krugman must consider an even more disturbing idea: Did he and other mainstream economists help put a protectionist populist, Donald Trump, in the White House with a lot of bad advice about free markets?

To be fair, Krugman has been forthright in recent years in second-guessing his earlier assertions about the effects of open trade. He has also become a leading and sometimes harsh critic of his own profession, especially in the aftermath of the financial crisis and Great Recession, when he declared that much of the past 30 years of macroeconomics was “spectacularly useless at best, and positively harmful at worst.” He admirably held the Obama administration to account for its timid financial and economic reforms. He even had some kind things to say about proto-progressives such as Robert Reich, the former Clinton administration labor secretary who worried about global competition and sought better protections and retraining for American workers, and whom Krugman had once dismissed to me—back in his lacerating days in the ’90s—as an “offensive figure, a brilliant coiner of one-liners but not a serious thinker.”

“I’m glad he’s finally seen the light on trade,” Reich told me in an email. Krugman, in another email, wrote: “I regret having said that about Reich, but if he foresaw hyperglobalization or the localized effects of the China shock, that’s news to me.”

Yet it has taken an awful long time for economists to admit that their profession has been far too sure of itself—or, as a penitent Krugman put it himself in a 2009 article in the New York Times Magazine, that “economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth.” As the journalist Binyamin Appelbaum writes in his book, The Economists’ Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society, economists came to dominate policymaking in Washington in a way they never had before and, starting in the late 1960s, seriously misled the nation, helping to disrupt and divide it socially with a false sense of scientific certainty about the wonders of free markets. The economists pushed efficiency at all costs at the expense of social welfare and “subsumed the interests of Americans as producers to the interests of Americans as consumers, trading well-paid jobs for low-cost electronics.”

David Autor, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) whose documentation of the surprising effects of China’s rapid rise on the U.S. labor market is cited by Krugman in his essay, gives the Times columnist a lot of credit for admitting error. “How rare is that?!” Autor wrote via email. He said he doesn’t blame Krugman or other defenders of “the prior consensus” for making faulty predictions about trade. “I honestly think that getting this one right ex ante would have been akin to accurately forecasting the date, time and location of an earthquake.” The bigger problem was the pro-free trade zeitgeist, Autor said. “I think that the received wisdom inhibited economists from closely evaluating the evidence of what was underway. … One could say that there was something of a guild orthodoxy: The key dictum was that policymakers should be told that trade was good for everyone in all places and times.”

Dani Rodrik, a Harvard University economist who in 1997 published a then-heretical book called Has Globalization Gone Too Far?, said last week that he wrote it precisely because he believed that “the profession was so blasé about globalization.” Now his views are mainstream, and Rodrik is president-elect of the International Economic Association. But the economists have barely begun to clean up the mess they left behind, as a recent conference on inequality at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, organized by Rodrik and former International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief economist Olivier Blanchard, made clear. And now in some ways it’s too late because, as Rodrik says, it’s not even possible to have a reasonable discussion under Trump. The U.S. president has effectively discarded modern economics, reembraced crude protectionism, and, like the mercantilists of the pre-Adam Smith era, appears to see trade as a zero-sum game in which surpluses are in effect profits and deficits are losses. His ignorance of basic economics “is without parallel among modern American presidents,” Appelbaum writes in The Economists’ Hour.

Yet Trump has been able to launch an unprecedented trade war, exploiting the public’s mistrust and fear of China, thanks in part to the economists’ early misreadings—specifically of how swiftly China’s economic surge would displace so many U.S. industrial jobs. As Krugman now acknowledges, “manufacturing employment fell off a cliff after 2000, and this decline corresponded to a sharp increase” in the U.S. trade deficit, especially with China. Those numbers, in turn, have tended to lend credence to Trump’s mercantilist notions, no matter how spurious.

“One of the most perverse effects of Trump was that it completely erased any reasonable discussion” about how to address trade, inequality, and the right degree of protection for workers, Rodrik said. And this, too, is a downstream effect of the bad advice economists delivered about free trade going back to the ’90s.

Or as MIT’s Autor put it: “Ultimately this policy boosterism blinded policymakers to the potentially grave consequences of trade shocks and likely lulled us into underpreparing for these shocks (e.g., we had a paltry safety net and retraining policies on hand). It led us somewhat blithely into a non-negligible policy disaster (AKA the China Shock) and provoked a public backlash that has rendered free trade toxic in the U.S. policy debate. There’s an irony for you: trade boosterism has ultimately hurt the cause of free trade.”

Asked whether the mistakes made by him and other economists helped lead to the rise of Trump, Krugman responded: “We’re still debating this, but as far as I can tell Trump’s trade policy isn’t resonating with many people, even his blue-collar base. So it’s kind of hard to blame trade analysts for the phenomenon.”

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Others would disagree. Part of the problem is that, back in the ’90s, when the post-Cold War consensus was just emerging, economists tended to take a simplistic either-or view of trade—either you were a free trader or a protectionist—and forced people to choose sides. Krugman was one of them, adopting by and large the free trade position, which was ironic considering that his Nobel-winning work in economics was far more nuanced than his books and columns (and actually helped lay the intellectual foundations for smart strategic trade policy).

Yet there were others in the policy debates—such as Rodrik, Reich, and Laura D’Andrea Tyson, who led former President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers—who were far more worried about rapid globalization. They dared to question the pro-free trade consensus or at least, in Tyson’s case, to push for government-led industrial policy that would sharpen American competitiveness at a time when, after the Cold War, many newly liberalized nations were piling into the global economy at a great rate. This idea also was anathema to Krugman.

“Dani was way ahead of his time,” Autor said. “He was worried not about sudden shocks per se but about the way that globalization hemmed in the policy options of open economies (options for financing social insurance, taxing increasingly mobile capital, etc). That was and is a deep point. … Meanwhile, Laura Tyson was advocating forward-looking industrial policy at a time when industrial policy was the Voldemort of policy tools.” Those who have studied Krugman’s work closely, like Autor, say that of course he understood that just the right kind of industrial policy could help build competitive sectors. But Autor added: “I suspect that economists feared that stating these points aloud to policymakers would be like handing a loaded weapon to a impetuous child.”

Krugman maintains that his new mea culpa “was a fairly narrow one” about how trade would affect lower-wage workers and exacerbate inequality. That is true. But after the Cold War ended, the debate over trade (Krugman’s Nobel-winning specialty) became a proxy for a larger intellectual struggle over free markets versus government intervention. And Krugman played a major part in attacking what he saw as economic ignorance by “strategic traders” who argued that U.S. jobs and wages might be seriously affected by competition from cheap labor in the developing world. When William Greider, the former Washington Post journalist, warned in a deeply reported book called One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism that developing nations were gearing up for major industrial competition that would mean “[s]ome sectors of Americans are triumphant and other sectors are devastated,” Krugman called it a “thoroughly silly book.” When Michael Lind, another prominent public intellectual, suggested (accurately) that U.S. productivity growth might not be enough to offset “the global sweatshop economy,” Krugman declared Lind to be ignorant of economic “facts” and said that “one should not expect someone who does not work in the field to be able to get it right without some guidance.” Krugman was no less kind to fellow economists who dared to question the free trade consensus. When Tyson was chosen to head Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers in 1993, Krugman said she lacked the “necessary analytical skills.”

It was all just bad economics, Krugman said. Don’t worry so much about what all the other countries are up to; things will even out thanks to neoclassical concepts such as comparative advantage, which allows all nations to benefit from open trade. Indeed, those who advocated anything resembling government interference in markets and “fair trade” (more tariffs, unemployment insurance, and worker protections) over “free trade” were usually branded protectionists and excluded from the debate. Clinton, reveling in his reputation as the “globalization” president, barely held a meeting on the fate of the industrially displaced. When his old Rhodes Scholar pal from the University of Oxford, Labor Secretary Reich, openly advocated reinvestment in education, training, and infrastructure at a time when Clinton was keen on deficit-cutting, Reich was also edged out of the conversation and, eventually, the administration.

Some ex-Clintonites such as Gene Sperling, the former head of the National Economic Council, argue that the debate was never so stark. “Clinton cared about the middle class,” he told me. And had the Democrats continued in power, they would have worked much harder to bring China into compliance with trade norms, for example by enforcing “anti-surge” protections—required of China as part of its World Trade Organization membership negotiated by Clinton in 1999—against the dumping of huge amounts of cheap product that undercut U.S. jobs, Sperling said. “People think that the only difference with Al Gore [in the 2000 presidential election] was the Iraq War, but another huge difference would have been that Gore would have gone way beyond anything [George W.] Bush did to protect manufacturing,” Sperling said. (A new book by the former Washington Post economics reporter Paul Blustein, Schism: China, America, and the Fracturing of the Global Trading System, also concludes that the Bush administration let China get away with far too much, including artificially devaluing its currency to boost exports—which led ultimately to Trump’s claim that China had committed “rape” of the U.S. economy.)

Other former Krugman victims still blame him for his misjudgments and are not so assuaged by his penitence. “This is not bad as mea culpas go, but if you read through to the end, Krugman persists with the oversimplified dichotomy of free trade versus protectionism, ignoring such successful hybrids as East Asian neo-mercantilism,” said Robert Kuttner, the co-editor of the American Prospect and a much-cited progressive thinker. “This is all the more bizarre because the young Krugman came to prominence demonstrating that [national] competitive advantage could be created, something that any non-economist student of economic history could have told him.”

Krugman, in his defense, has always believed in protections for the middle class, including better health care and education (his old Times blog was titled “The Conscience of a Liberal”), and he says now that just because he has admitted errors on trade doesn’t mean he ever endorsed the so-called Washington Consensus—the neoliberal (that is, pro-free trade) view that regularly came down on the side of fiscal discipline, rapid privatization, and deregulation. “I guess the point is that conceding that we got some things wrong doesn’t mean that every critic was right; it depends on what they said, and as far as I know almost nobody foresaw the massive rise in trade or focused at all on localized regional impacts,” Krugman told me.

But there were deeper conceptual problems with the pro-globalization consensus as well. Another Nobel-winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz, who like Rodrik warned back in the ’90s of the disruptive effects of too rapid lowering of trade and capital barriers, told me that the problem with “standard neoclassical analysis” was that it “never paid any attention to adjustment. Labor market adjustment miraculously happened costlessly.” Like Tyson and Reich, Stiglitz, who served as a chair of Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers, was an outlier at the time, seeking (but failing) to slow the pace of international capital flows. He also argued that “typically jobs were destroyed far faster than new jobs were created.”

Krugman, in his essay, admits that the economists like him in favor of the ’90s consensus behind free trade—who thought that the effects on labor would be minimal—“didn’t turn much to analytic methods that focus on workers in particular industries and communities, which would have given a better picture of short-run trends. This was, I now believe, a major mistake—one in which I shared a hand.”

But there were plenty who did pay attention to how the old verities about open trade and comparative advantage were no longer as telling, displaced by new trends such as global supply chains, which shifted huge numbers of jobs overseas and took out whole communities. Krugman himself eventually concluded in a 2008 academic paper that because of these supercomplex supply chains, “the changing nature of world trade has outpaced economists’ ability to engage in secure quantitative analysis.”

As Stiglitz put it to Foreign Policy: “Obviously, the costs [of globalization] would be borne by particular communities, particular places—and manufacturing had located [to] places where wages were low, suggesting that these were places where adjustment costs were likely large.” And it’s increasingly clear the detrimental effects may not be merely short-term trends. The swift opening up of trade with developing countries, combined with investment agreements, has “dramatically changed workers’ bargaining power (an effect reinforced by weakening unions and other changes in labor legislation and regulation).”

That in turn has forced the rethinking of another major dimension of traditional economics. Economists once believed that low unemployment led to inflation, but today that relationship, called the standard Phillips curve, has broken down, the Economist wrote in a recent cover story. The main loser, again, is the American worker. Whereas economists used to believe that workers, during boom times, could drive up their compensation (thus leading to inflation), the emerging economic wisdom now suggests something different: After a quarter century in which multinationals have turned the whole globe into their economic turf (while workers usually have to stay in their home countries), globalized capital—manifesting itself as multinational supply chains—has the upper hand over domestic labor.

Hence, economists themselves are surprised at how quickly the mainstream of their profession has moved leftward—as many of them found at 2019’s conference on inequality. And when it comes to 2020 U.S. election politics, the profession is much more with progressives like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, some of the participants said, than the centrist Joe Biden—open to radical solutions that give back bargaining power to labor (for example, Warren’s proposal to give workers a large place on corporate boards). “I came here as a French socialist, and now I find I’m in the center,” joked former IMF chief economist Blanchard.

And this may be the ultimate downstream effect of all those misreadings dating back to the ’90s. “People,” Tyson remarked, “missed how fast things could change.”

Michael Hirsh is a senior correspondent and deputy news editor at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @michaelphirsh.

Source: Economists on the Run

Sorry, what?

A Black Lives Matter-supporting teacher took to Twitter to assert that 2+2 only = 4 because of “western imperialism.”

Yes, really.Brittany Marshall’s tweet went viral after she claimed during the course of a discussion about racism, “Nope the idea of 2 + 2 equaling 4 is cultural and because of western imperialism/colonization, we think of it as the only way of knowing.”

Marshall, who includes her pronouns in her bio, lists her occupation as “teacher, scholar, social justice change agent” and apparently is studying for a PhD at Rutgers.

Her bizarre statement is yet another example of Intersectionality, the pseudo-intellectual garbage feminist notion taught in all major universities that racism and sexism are prevalent throughout all areas of society and are intertwined.

In this case, Marshall appears to be arguing that maths itself is racist, an argument that has been made by numerous social justice warriors down the years, some of whom question why ‘Western Math’ is in common use and not other methods such as the way Aborigines count (maybe because we’re western and not Aborigine).

The notion that 2+2 might not = 4 is of course lifted from George Orwell’s 1984, when the one party state was able to torture dissidents into believing it could equal 5.

Respondents to the tweet expressed their varied opinions.

“Unfortunately it’s nothing new,” remarked one. “There are videos circulating showing black students promoting to stop science because it represents white supremacy. They would prefer magic and voodoo.”

“Scary thing is, this person is a teacher probably preaching the same nonsense to our children,” said another.

Source: BLM Teacher Says 2+2 Only = 4 Because of “Western Imperialism”

Michael F. Shaughnessy –

1) Otto Meyerhof—Nobel Prize winner—came to us from Germany—when was he born, and how did he spend his youth?

Dr. Otto Meyerhof is best known for elucidating the glycolytic pathway, also named the Embden-Meyerhof-Parnas pathway in honor of him and his co-discoverers, Gustav Embden and Jacob Parnas. Otto Fritz Meyerhof was born to Jewish parents Felix (an affluent merchant) and Bettina May Meyerhof on the 12^th of April in 1884 in Hannover, Germany.

Meyerhof suffered from kidney troubles in his mid-teen years and was unable to attend school. His mother was his constant companion during his recovery, and she provided him with various reading materials dealing with biology, chemistry, and medicine. He was known to write poetry and made strides with artistic endeavors as well. Thus, his mother had a significant influence on his forthcoming profession. In 1900, his physician recommended that he spend time in Egypt to build up his strength.

Meyerhof was enrolled at Wilhelms Gymnasium (classical secondary school). After high school graduation, Meyerhof attended the University of Freiburg at Breisgau, then at the University of Berlin. He also attended the University of Strasbourg. During Meyerhof’s time, it was a common practice to acquire medical training and experience at many different universities. In 1909 Meyerhof took his M.D. degree from the University of Heidelberg.

2) Early on, he seemed to show an interest in psychiatry, psychology, philosophy, and mental illness. I wonder what dissuaded him.

Before taking his medical doctorate in 1909, Meyerhof’s dissertation was focused on the psychological theory of mental disturbances and revealed his early interest in psychology and psychiatry. Meyerhof’s interests in these topics began in high school and extended into his university studies and medical school. One significant influence in these areas was imparted upon Meyerhof by Leonard Nelson. He had led a group devoted to the study of German philosophers Jacob Friedrich Fries and Immanuel Kant and their religious philosophy. The main emphasis of the Fries and Kant philosophy was that of rational thought as applied to a religious inquiry. Meyerhof’s early writings and lectures indicate these philosophical approaches in his scientific thinking.

Immediately after graduating from medical school, Dr. Meyerhof started work at Heidelberg in a medical clinic headed by Dr. Ludwig Krehl, whose expertise was in cell physiology. However, the main driving force for dissuading Meyerhof from psychiatry and psychology was Dr. Otto Warburg, whom Meyerhof had met for the first time in Krehl’s clinic in 1909. You will recall from our first book that Warburg would be famous for his discoveries about the mode and nature of respiration and who would garner a Nobel Prize in 1931 for his breakthroughs in this field. Warburg and Meyerhof worked at the prestigious Marine Zoological Laboratory at Naples, Italy, where they studied metabolism in the eggs of sea urchins.

Warburg is widely credited with converting Meyerhof’s interests in psychiatry, psychology, and philosophy into those of cellular biochemistry and physiology. Meyerhof’s new way of thinking was now centered on the problem of body heat and its liberation from the body by the consumption of food and its subsequent breakdown. Thus, with his new interests in physiology and biochemistry inspired by Warburg, Meyerhof approached the body heat problem by focusing his investigation on how exactly the energy stored food was transduced into useful energy when generating heat.

Meyerhof reasoned that the energy liberation from food involved a series of energy transformations, which in turn provided a basis for conferring life upon cells, tissues, organs, and organisms. Furthermore, Meyerhof viewed these energy transductions as a sort of dynamic process, continually in flux but somehow in an equilibrium. Thus, because Meyerhof’s thought processes now invoked new approaches inspired in 1909 by Warburg and involving biological- and chemical-based energy transformations, Meyerhof was to transform the entire fields of physiology and biochemistry fundamentally. Meyerhof would begin this new field transformation with a molecule called lactic acid, also known as lactate in modern times. For clarity, we will keep using the term lactic acid throughout.

Between 1909 and 1912, Meyerhof worked in a medical laboratory at the University of Heidelberg.

In 1914, Meyerhof married Hedwig Schallenberg, who was a mathematics student and painter. The couple had one daughter and two sons.

In 1912 Meyerhof became an assistant in the department of physiology at the University of Kiel. In 1913 he delivered a lecture on the energetics of living cells. It was one of the first adaptations of the physical laws of thermodynamics to physiological chemistry. From 1918 to 1924, Meyerhof was an Assistant Professor at the University of Kiel studying cellular respiration and later chemical events and heat fluctuations during muscle contraction. He worked with Archibald Vivian Hill on these experiments involving heat production in muscle tissue.

From 1924 to 1929, Meyerhof was appointed Director of the Institute of Physiology at the Keiser Wilhelm Institute of Cell Physiology. Then, he headed the department of physiology at the Max Planck, formerly Kaiser Wilhelm, Institute for Medical Research at Heidelberg, and was an Honorary Professor of the Faculty of Medicine until 1938. Due to relentless tension from the National Socialists, his teaching license was revoked in 1935, and Meyerhof eventually fled to Paris, France, in 1938, where he held the position of director of research at the Institute of Physico-Chemical Biology, until 1940. At the time of the Nazi invasion of France, Meyerhof evacuated to the United States. In 1940 Meyerhof was appointed a research professor of physiological chemistry at the School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania.

3) Lactic acid and muscles—where was he right, and where was he wrong?

By the time that Meyerhof had been converted by Warburg to the cellular physiological and biochemical approaches to the field of food degradation by living systems in 1909, it had already been established in 1906 that lactic acid played prominent roles in these metabolic systems. The importance of lactic acid had been demonstrated by Sir Walter Morley Fletcher and Sir Frederick Howland Hopkins (see the chapter in this book about Hopkins). They had observed that when muscles were stimulated to contract repeatedly without oxygen, lactic acid amounts increased. Still, when the muscle contraction experiments were repeated in the presence of oxygen, lactic acid concentrations dwindled. During the period when Meyerhof had become interested in the field, it had been poorly understood how, if any, biochemical reactions might be involved in food catabolism.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7a/Figure_07_05_02.png

Figure Lactic Acid Fermentation

Meyerhof entered the fledging field of cellular respiration with a new laboratory method in hand. He developed a method for measuring lactic acid. The technique was called the micro-method, and it was vastly improved in terms of its accuracy and speed, providing data almost immediately, compared with waiting an entire week for results using existing older methods.

Consistent with the findings of Fletcher, Hopkins, and Hill, when Meyerhof examined contracting muscles, he observed that lactic acid was produced in proportion to the tension created during contraction. Taking Hill’s lactic acid data into account, a cyclic nature was proposed for lactic acid metabolism.

The discovery of the so-called glycogen-lactic acid cycle and its connection to respiration during heat generation and muscle contraction was the first case in which experimental data was found to support a cyclic nature to energy transduction. That is, Meyerhof provided evidence that glycogen broke down into lactic acid during intense muscle contraction and that some of it went back to glycogen during recovery. Such was the work for which Meyerhof would share the 1922 Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology with A.V. Hill.

Unfortunately, Meyerhof incorrectly concluded that lactic acid itself played a direct role in the mechanism of muscle contraction. The idea had become popularly known as the “lactic acid theory” of muscle contraction, or the “lactic acid cycle.” Scientists all over the world were under the mistaken impression that muscle contraction and energy generation were coupled directly to lactic acid—until 1934, that is—but not until a battle was fought about it, first.

Einar Lundsgaard, who was a professor of physiology at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, had discovered that a compound called iodoacetate inhibited the production of lactic acid. Then, surprisingly, Lundsgaard went on to find that when the iodoacetate was added to muscles and prevented the manufacture of lactic acid, the muscles contracted anyway! The muscles should have been poisoned by the iodoacetate, if indeed lactic acid was necessary for muscle contraction, as hypothesized by Meyerhof. Instead, Lundsgaard observed no such muscular poisoning—he saw the muscles contracting without lactic acid—but he found that another compound, called creatine phosphate (also called phosphocreatine), must be degraded.

Creatine phosphate had been discovered independently by two laboratories, A.V. Hill’s laboratory at Manchester University, where Philip and Grace Palmer Eggleton worked, and the laboratory of Cyrus Fiske and Yellapragada Subbarow at Harvard Medical School. The creatine phosphate disappearance seemed to correspond to the muscle tension measured during contraction. Thus, Lundsgaard suggested that phosphocreatine (and not lactic acid) was necessary for the contractions of muscles.

Though Lundsgaard was correct in concluding that lactic acid was not needed for muscle contraction, he was not entirely correct with the postulate for phosphocreatine as the prime source of phosphate energy. Furthermore, Meyerhof was already having doubts about lactic acid and contracting muscle, especially when he read about the discovery in 1926 of creatine phosphate. Lundsgaard’s laboratory, and David Nachmansohn assisting in Meyerhof’s laboratory, studied the requirement for phosphate and soon focused on creatine phosphate.

Then, Lundsgaard had personally visited Meyerhof’s laboratory to demonstrate the results with iodoacetate, having Fritz Lipmann pick up Lundsgaard from the railway station and taking him directly to the lab to begin experiments! Meyerhof, Lipmann, and Nachmansohn focused on creatine phosphate metabolism during muscle action and measured energy release and lactic acid levels in muscle extracts and on whole muscles. The results showed that creatine phosphate was not the primary phosphate source for exercising muscles. In 1932, Meyerhof and assistant Karl Lohmann found that ATP breakdown, releasing two phosphates plus adenosine monophosphate (AMP), occurred with much heat energy.

In 1934, the importance of ATP in muscle contraction was becoming more clearly understood. Before this realization, in 1929, Lohmann observed that in muscle extracts, creatine phosphate released free phosphate if adenosine diphosphate (ADP) was present. The ADP molecules combine with creatine phosphate to form free creatine and a new ATP molecule. Next, the newly made ATP is broken down to regenerate the ADP and a compound called phosphoric acid. Lohmann had also discovered ATP hydrolysis took place before the creatine phosphate breakdown during muscle contraction. Incidentally, Lohmann is credited with having discovered ATP, in 1929, although it appears to be a matter of contention.

4) In a sense, Meyerhof’s work studying intermediate metabolism is a combination of physiology, pharmacology, physics, and pathology. Now how is it possible that one scientist could know how all these fields interact to produce muscles, and why is it important to understand the interaction of these four realms? 

You are entirely accurate about Meyerhof and his attempts to study intermediary metabolism. He needed to attain a deeper understanding of seemingly disparate fields of expertise. These vastly different fields provided a framework for his participation in one of biochemistry’s most significant discovery—glycolysis.

Before Meyerhof’s conversion to biochemistry and physiology, he was an avid fan of mental disorders as they pertained to psychiatry and psychology. Thus, Meyerhof’s earliest training dealt with pathology. Meyerhof’s lactic acid studies would be relevant to cancer biology. In healthy cells, glycolysis occurs under anaerobic conditions. Tumor cells must be continually fed to maintain their cell proliferative properties. Therefore, they rapidly acquire nutrients. Then they undergo an abnormally heightened rate of glycolysis in the presence of oxygen, i.e., under aerobic conditions, enhancing the production of lactic acid and thus of cellular division.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/LDH_activity-_normal_vs_canceous_cells.png

Figure Lactate dehydrogenase activities

To understand energy transformations during nutrient breakdown and work, Meyerhof needed to know muscle physiology. He had to know muscle contraction in greater depth than was available at the time. Meyerhof had to know how to measure muscle contraction in the lab. Thus, his contributions were such that lactic acid metabolism, as related to muscle physiology, informed biochemistry by discovering its role in its production during glycogen degradation.

To understand the precise role of energy transformation, Meyerhof needed to gain a deeper grasp of pharmacology. As alluded to above, he needed to evaluate the effects of muscle poisoning with iodoacetate and the function of lactic acid. To study biological energy transduction, Meyerhof needed to know physics. Much of the characterization of muscle physiology was often described in mechanical-physical terms, like work, power, tension, energy, etc. These characterizations about muscle metabolism can be viewed from the standpoint of their counterparts in physics.

Meyerhof’s expertise in disparate fields and his energetics studies of muscle physiology paved the way to his momentous discovery. Meyerhof made a meaningful contribution to biochemistry: the glycolytic pathway. It would later be called the Embden-Meyerhof-Parnas pathway.

In 1930, Meyerhof turned his attention to the study of glycogen conversion to lactic acid. The process involved the release of sugars from glycogen stores and their subsequent conversion to lactic acid. Today, we know that the conversion of glucose into pyruvate constitutes glycolysis. At the time of Meyerhof, this had yet to be discovered.

Only a few hints into the yet-to-be-discovered glycolytic process were available. Carl Neuberg had proposed that during yeast fermentation, particular waste intermediates were possibly phosphorylated twice over and consisted of hexoses with ester chemical groups attached. Today, we know this waste product to be fructose-1,6-diphosphate, a proper glycolytic intermediate.

Treating Neuberg’s waste product idea as a serious matter, the early biochemists’ investigations into intermediary metabolism led to the emergence of two prevailing themes.

The first theme was postulated by Gustav Embden, who had proposed that a molecule he called lactocidogen was somehow related to the fructose-1,6-diphosphate production. At the time, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Embden had, quite rightly, not held much confidence in Meyerhof’s lactic acid theory for muscle contraction. Instead, Embden had just as incorrectly believed that his lactocidogen molecule was the activation factor and thus the source of energy for muscle contraction. We know today that neither Embden (lactocidogen) nor Meyerhof (lactic acid) was correct with their choices for the energetic driving forces of muscle contraction.

The second theme was proposed by Meyerhof, who had hypothesized that glucose goes through an esterification process to produce phosphate-laden intermediates. If true, Meyerhof then elaborated that these phosphorylated intermediates must lead to pyruvate and later to lactic acid. He was correct.

During this productive era, it was still unknown what the sequence of events was for the breakdown of glucose to its putative endpoint, pyruvate. Meanwhile, in 1932, Embden had proposed a linear set of steps for glycolysis. His proposal was surprisingly closely accurate and almost complete. Meyerhof was reasonably impressed with Embden’s model for glycolysis. Unfortunately, however, before Gustav Georg Embden could commence the accumulation of the necessary evidence for his glycolytic model, he died in July of 1933.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Glycolysis.svg

Figure Embden-Meyerhof-Parnas pathway of glycolysis

Meyerhof devoted the next five years to testing Embden’s glycolysis hypothesis—the sequence of its biochemical events. He identified enzymes involved in phosphorylation during the degradative process. Using yeast, he had studied, in 1927, the enzyme hexokinase, the starting point for glycolysis. The hexokinase converts glucose into glucose-6-phosphate.

In 1934, Meyerhof studied candidate intermediate substrates thought to constitute glycolysis. These intermediates were dihydroxyacetone phosphate, glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate, 2-phosphoglycerate, and phosphoenolpyruvate. Then in 1935, Meyerhof had identified phosphoglycerate mutase and enolase enzymes involved in glycolysis. In 1936, Meyerhof identified fructose bis-phosphate aldolase and triosephosphate isomerase. It became apparent that aldolase would be the enzyme that split the sugar into two pieces. Lohmann had identified glucose-phosphate isomerase. Jacob Parnas, in 1934, identified pyruvate kinase, which converted phosphoenolpyruvate onto the last product of glycolysis, called pyruvate.

In 1936, Paul Ostern, J.A. Guthke, and Jurij Terszakoweć, working in Jacob Parnas’s laboratory, discovered a key regulatory enzyme, phosphofructokinase, which converts fructose-6-phosphate to fructose 1,6-bisphosphate. In 1941, Ostern would be murdered by the Nazis. In 1939, Warburg and his laboratory had identified glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase. The remaining enzyme, 3-phosphoglycerate kinase, was discovered in 1942 by Theodor Bücher. The entire pathway for the glycolytic pathway had been elucidated, and Meyerhof had a hand in identifying half of the ten enzymes involved in it—hence, the name Embden-Meyerhof-Parnas pathway.

5) We have all done some exercising—and used oxygen or breathed deeply while jogging or lifting weights—But Meyerhof looked at the interaction of our use of oxygen and, at the same time, the ongoing metabolism of lactic acid in the muscle. How exactly did he study this relationship?

As explained in our 2020 book about biomedical scientists, Professor Archibald Vivian (A.V.) Hill, in 1910, had demonstrated that the amount of heat formed was somehow linked to the amount of frog muscle contraction work that was performed. He had shown that the heat of muscle contraction occurred in two phases. First, Hill discovered a first heat, which occurred with or without oxygen during muscle contraction. Second, Hill demonstrated a delayed heat, which occurred with oxygen.

Hill also found that approximately half of the heat was generated during muscle contraction without oxygen, i.e., under anaerobic conditions. Hill then found that the other half of the heat appeared during a recovery phase with oxygen present, i.e., under aerobic circumstances. This knowledge was the state of the field regarding energetics and metabolism when Meyerhof started his investigations shortly after the end of the Great War in 1920.

Meyerhof had observed that during muscle recovery (after intense activity), under aerobic conditions, a small amount of the lactic acid produced was oxidized to form carbon dioxide and water. At the same time, however, the remaining majority of lactic acid went back to reform glycogen! Meyerhof had also established that glycogen was the precursor source for lactic acid production under anaerobic conditions.

The findings by Meyerhof also strongly supported a notion first propounded by Dr. Louis Pasteur. He noted that less glycogen is degraded by muscle glycolysis and fermentation aerobically than anaerobically. During anaerobic fermentation, more carbohydrate is degraded than if the carbohydrates are metabolized aerobically. The hypothesis had been known as the “Pasteur effect.”

Thus, in a sense, glycolysis seemed to be thwarted by aerobic respiration. Meyerhof found that, under aerobic conditions, little lactic acid is produced, but under anaerobic conditions, lactic acid is produced in significant quantities via glycolysis. This phenomenon later came to be known as the “Pasteur-Meyerhof Effect.”

6) Sadly, due to World War II, his life was disrupted. Tell us what happened.

Reluctantly, Meyerhof had to flee his beloved homeland of Germany. His family was Jewish, and they were living and working in Heidelberg, Germany, during the 1930s. Hitler and his Nazi Party were in firm control of the country, and they enjoyed the broad support of the German populace. Anti-Semitism was spreading in Germany throughout the decade. Signs of impending disruption emerged when Meyerhof watched his students, friends, and colleagues leave Germany. Among the refugees included a brain drain of talented scientists, such as Fritz Lipmann, who would share the Nobel with another refugee, Hans Krebs. Other notable investigators included the famous Carl Sandel Neuberg, who some consider a pioneering father of biochemistry for his work with ethanol and pyruvate fermentation. Nobel Laureate Severo Ochoa, who is highlighted in another chapter in this book for his discovery of RNA polymerase, fled Germany as soon as he could.

At first, Meyerhof and his family felt that they somewhat protected from the Nazi German authorities because of the 1922 Nobel Prize and their productive work at the Physiology Institute at Heidelberg. Meyerhof was gathering a tremendous amount of data making pioneering breakthroughs with glycolysis. He had amassed a great deal of data to support Embden’s model for the sequence of reactions of glycolysis.

But in 1937, the situation with Hitler’s Germany was untenable for Meyerhof. He had just completed the identification and characterization of half the enzymes in glycolysis! Then he had to cease the work abruptly and instead place his efforts towards making a secret plan to escape from Germany!

First, Meyerhof had previously planned for his two older children, a daughter, and son, to leave the country under the guise of attending boarding school. This phase of the secret plan worked, and it did not seem to catch the attention of the German Nazi authorities. However, Meyerhof had been denied permission to leave the country to attend a high-status scientific conference, the International Physiological Congress, to be held in Zurich in 1938. Then, Meyerhof’s former laboratory assistant, David Nachmansohn, now working in Paris, France, at the Sorbonne, made arrangements with the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation for Meyerhof to be offered a new post of director of research at the Institute of Physico-Chemical Biology, in Paris.

To keep the escape plan a secret, Nachmansohn and Meyerhof corresponded with each other in code! Furthermore, Meyerhof told none of his colleagues in Heidelberg of the secret getaway plan. To keep his colleagues and any spying German Nazis ignorant of the secret plot, Meyerhof made the painful decision to abandon all of his scientifically collected data and leave them behind in his office and the lab. He also decided to leave behind all the family’s possessions at home, lest anyone get suspicious of their flight from Nazi Germany. Then, in 1938, securing permission papers for Meyerhof, Hedwig and their youngest son to travel to Switzerland for the child to acquire medical treatment, the remaining members of the Meyerhof family made good their escape across the border, after which they journeyed safely to Paris!

Unfortunately, when the Germans invaded France, the Meyerhof family had to flee the Nazis again. In June of 1940, the Meyerhof family took a taxi from Paris to Toulouse, where he was befriended by welcoming sympathizers there at the Medical Faculty. The brief escape from Paris, however, was tenuous as many other refugees were in the same precarious situation. With help from the Unitarian Service Committee, the Meyerhofs secured passage into Spain but had to plead and argue with the authorities there to not be sent back to France. The story is told that Hedwig Meyerhof tactfully undertook the delicate negotiations and prevented their deportation!

Fortunately, Meyerhof was offered a position at the University of Pennsylvania, and in 1940 the Meyerhofs moved to the U.S. Professor David Wright Wilson was the chair of the physiological chemistry department during these years. He introduced the Meyerhofs to Woods Hole, MA, where Meyerhof would research during the summer months at the famed Marine Biological Laboratory. In 1944, he suffered his first of two heart attacks. Meyerhof spent the rest of his life in the U.S. until his death at 67 on the 6th of October, in 1951.

7) He was fairly ahead of his time in that he also studied the effects of narcotics on oxidation processes. What specific narcotics, and what did he find?

By “narcotics,” Meyerhof, in 1911, was referring to substances meant to influence oxidation of cysteine and not necessarily what the term means for us today in modern times. Working well into the year 1919, Meyerhof studied oxidation in sea urchin eggs, bacteria, and yeast. Meyerhof used “narcotics,” such as phenyl-, dimethyl- and diethyl-urea derivatives, acetamide, valeramide, acetone, methyl-phenyl ketone, ethanol, amyl alcohol, acetonitrile, and valeronitrile in his investigations on oxidation.

With these substances, he measured the inhibition of invertase activity, which breaks down table sugar. Thus, he used these “narcotic” substances to inhibit fermentation and respiration in microbes. Meyerhof employed these agents to make connections between oxygen respiration in frog muscle and ethanol fermentation in live and dead yeast. He collected a variety of data on the energetics of live yeast cells, making comparisons with extracts composed of dead yeast cells. The substances inhibited biochemical reactions of enzymes in living and dead yeast cells. He made the astute observation that enzymes must participate in both processes. He had referred to the respiratory enzymes as “respiration bodies.”

In one experiment, Meyerhof grew yeast cells and prepared versions of living versus dead cells. Then he added “narcotics” to inhibit respiration and fermentation. He used the method of washing acetone-incubated yeast with water to attain respiration inhibition. Next, measured respiration and observed its depletion by both methods. Then, he added back yeast extract containing his Atmungskörper “respiration bodies” (enzymes) and observed a restoration of respiration. He found that the yeast extract was susceptible to heat, whereas the enzymes were thermostable, i.e., impervious to heat treatment, and able to undergo the respiration restoration.

In a follow-up experiment, he added a hexose phosphate, probably glucose-6-phosphate, and, again, it restored the respiratory activity.

These findings led to his subsequent focus on lactic acid as a central participant in muscle physiology and microbial-based alcohol fermentation. These experimental studies represented some of his first forays into biochemistry research and helped to launch his scientific career.

8) Further, he looked at the impact of methylene blue on oxidation processes—and the impact of this on killed cells. (As an aside, is methyl blue the same as methylene blue?)

When Meyerhof had tested the effects of the “narcotic” agents mentioned above in 1918, he used methylene blue to detect the degree of the microbial respiration activity that was affected by these “narcotics.” Before, methylene blue had been observed by the great Dr. Paul Ehrlich in 1885 to be reduced in tissues, presumably because it served as a good acceptor of hydrogens harboring electrons. In 1912, Dr. Heinrich Wieland had hypothesized that cellular respiration involved hydrogen. In contrast, Meyerhof hypothesized that such respiration was attributable to oxygen.

We know today that when methylene blue is oxidized, it appears as a blue color, but when it is reduced, it becomes colorless. We also know in modern times that aerobic respiration involves electron transfer along the respiratory chain to oxygen, with a concomitant hydrogen ion (proton) transport across the membrane. Thus, it seems that both Wieland and Meyerhof had been correct all along.

Although it might make sense that they are identical if not similar, we know that methylene blue and methyl blue are entirely different chemicals. While both substances are indeed blue, they are otherwise structurally and functionally dissimilar compounds. They each have their distinctive uses.

Methylene blue is also known as basic blue 9, Swiss blue, urolene blue, and methylthioninium chloride, with a molecular formula of C₁₆H₁₈ClN₃S and molecular weight of 319.9 Daltons. In addition to its use as an oxidation-reduction reagent, it is an antioxidant, an old anti-malarial drug, and an anti-depressant agent. Other properties of methylene blue include its inhibition of monoamine oxidase, as a pH indicator, a cardioprotective activity, and neuroprotection.

Methyl blue is also known as Helvetia blue, cotton blue, and acid blue 93, with a proper chemical name called disodium ((4-(bis(4-((sulphonatophenyl) amino) phenyl) methylene) cyclohexa-2,5-dien-1-ylidene) amino) benzenesulphonate. The molecular weight of methyl blue is 799.8 Daltons, with a chemical formula C₃₇H₂₇N₃Na₂O₉S₃. Along with other chemicals, methyl blue is used to prepare histological stains, such as aniline blue, for the staining collagen fibers and connective tissue.

9) What have I neglected to ask about this Nobel Prize winner?

When one of us (M.F.V.) was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School in the mid-1990s, he was told by his lab mentor Professor Thomas Hastings Wilson that his father Professor David Wright Wilson had hired Meyerhof. Indeed, the story is supported by documentation in a biographical memoir written by Eric G. Ball and John M. Buchanan and published in 1973 by the National Academy of Sciences. Drs. D. Wright Wilson and A.N. Richards at the University of Pennsylvania had worked with the Rockefeller Foundation to arrange for funding of a new position to offer Meyerhof. In 1940, Nobel Laureate Otto Meyerhof accepted the offer as a research professor in the Department of Physiological Chemistry, where he worked for the remainder of his life. Meyerhof published 50 papers during his ten years in the United States. Overall, he published 400 papers in scientific journals.

For further information on this extraordinary scientist, go to the following links:

• Book: https://www.amazon.com/Metabolism-Function-Collection-Dedicated-Meyerhof/dp/B001BWUT0C
• Chemistry tree: https://academictree.org/chemistry/tree.php?pid=4339

Michael F. Shaughnessy –

1. Curt, these are difficult times for teachers- and many millions of teachers need training- some need a refresher- and some need to adjust to new methods.

You are correct in your assertion; these times are complex, unusual, and highly difficult for anyone in the field of education. K-12 teachers, higher education instructors, corporate and military trainers, and all others involved in education woke up a few months ago to a new normal. Perhaps, when this occurred, some of them decided to get a job in other fields or take an early retirement. However, the vast majority of educators in North America and Europe were forced to switch gears in mid-March and to begin developing online curricula and pedagogical activities for courses that they were in the midst of teaching. Alternatively, for those in China, Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan, where the virus first broke out, it was courses that they were about to teach that were delayed. Wherever one was in the world, it was a full stop moment rarely, if ever, experienced in education.

Almost immediately, administrators, who have no real sense of the field of online and distance teaching and learning, referred to it as “emergency remote teaching.” Implicitly they were telling the world that online teaching was second rate instruction and only useful when things are quite dire. In a well-timed response a couple weeks into the crisis, Charles Hodges, Stephanie Moore, Barb Lockee, Torrey Trust and Aaron Bond published an insightful piece in EDUCUASE Review, “The Difference Between Emergency Remote Teaching and Online Learning.” In their thoughtful March 27, 2020 piece, they cautioned against equating well planned online and blended learning courses and experiences with those hastily designed to deal with a crisis or disaster like H1N1, Hurricane Katrina, Harvey, or Maria, or COVID-19.

Think of the psychological trauma that unfolded in the spring of 2020. Imagine having spent years, or, in some cases, decades, avoiding, ignoring, downplaying, or shortchanging online instruction. More plausibly, countless millions have been experimenting with online supplements to their courses or have taught one or more courses that were truly blended. In fact, blended learning was already becoming widely accepted during the past decade. And many instructors had already bit the bullet and taught a fully online course and lived to tell about it. Whatever they had experienced with Web-based forms of teaching and learning in the past, however, it was not as abrupt and extensive a shift to online instruction as what was now required during COVID-19.

Tens of millions of teachers around the world might have experienced a wide spectrum of emotions all at once; ranging from sadness that they will not see some of their students again to rage at those who ordered the new online-only policies to panic regarding the date by which they must prepare new lessons. They might also have experienced much nervousness regarding the types of assessments that they had to adopt, significant confusion as to the feedback mechanisms to employ and the course management requirements, and extreme bouts of jealousy of others who have fewer courses to teach or less students to grade.

At the same time, of course, many may have felt some surprise and happiness when delivering their first online class and bringing in their initial synchronous guest and finding that the technology works. Perhaps in such times they even felt a sense of thrill with these new forms of instruction. Along the way, disgust, joy, embarrassment, frustration, regret, curiosity, kindness, relief, amazement, love, hope, wonder, guilt, and many other emotions were likely on full display too. Suffice to say, early COVID-19 era teachers were riding a perpetual emotional roller coaster and still are.

Eventually in such situations, most teachers, being human, will implicitly or explicitly acknowledge that they need some training in a host of areas—online pedagogy, technology tools, and assessment practices, among them. Recent research published by one of my teams indicates that many online instructors learn by browsing other online courses, watching tutorials, reading articles, taking advantage of technology training, and talking to colleagues. So, to answer your question, it is more than a refresher or an adjustment that is now required; online instruction, while extensive, was perhaps just 15-20 percent of all instruction before COVID-19 (Note: the exact percentage of online and blended courses will depend on where you are in the world and the level and type of the courses taught, among other factors). However, as we all just witnessed, literally overnight, online education or “emergency remote teaching” was the majority of instruction and, for many, it was the only viable method or approach.

Of course, given the quick pace of change and limited time available, many educators could only take part in small bursts of training when ramping up to teach online this spring. When this happened, the genie came out of the bottle after being pinned inside for decades with excuses and idea squelching statements like “It won’t work for my subject area or discipline,” “Face-to-face teaching is the best form of instruction, period!,” and “We don’t know enough about online teaching and learning yet.” Masses of online course trials this spring have altered many such “we’ve never done that before” views forever.

To be clear, tough odds were faced by online educators as many students lacked Internet access or sufficient technology in the home, whereas others lacked basic digital learning competencies. Still others lacked confidence and appropriate levels of self-efficacy to succeed. Nevertheless, with the genie out, there will be consequences. Among them will be a renewed call for extensive and effective training programs for online instruction. That leads me to your second question.

2. What are you doing this summer to help?

Not answering the phone. Not opening email. At this time, I am on sabbatical. Well as much as I wish I could avoid all such connections to the outside world, I am enjoying the fact that my three decades of work in online and distance learning may be having a bit of an impact in these times. Since my sabbatical started a few weeks ago, I am continuously getting phone calls or emails with questions about online teaching and learning or requests to provide online training. Is there a stop button on life?

This past week, I have committed to a virtual training event for teachers in the New York City area in partnership with my former student Dr. Roberto Joseph at Hofstra University.

Also this week, I agreed to provide teacher training on online motivational strategies for teachers and counselors in the state of Indiana via the Indiana Youth Institute. In the higher education space, I will be involved in an event for instructors at California State University at Long Beach run by Dr. Sheryl Narahara. Sheryl is another Indiana University (IU) alum of my program in Instructional Systems Technology (IST).

But first on the radar is a session for Contact North, a distance learning organization in Ontario, Canada. “As a community-based organization, Contact North | Contact Nord helps underserved Ontarians in 600 small, rural, remote, Indigenous and Francophone communities get jobs by making it possible for them to access education and training without leaving their communities.”

My old friend Maxim Jean-Louis is the President of Contact North representing Ontario’s Distance Education and Training Network with employees located in Thunder Bay and Sudbury, Ontario but with activities and initiatives stretching across the province. Maxim has asked me to do a free one-hour Webinar Monday June 29 at 10:15-11:15 am EST on online motivation and retention (this event is open to anyone).

The session will be based on my free book, “Adding Some TEC-VARIETY: 100+ Activities for Motivating and Retaining Learners Online” (http://tec-variety.com/). The TEC-VARIETY book can be downloaded by chapter or the entire book. It is available as a free download in both Chinese and English. To date, that book has been downloaded more than 250,000 times. As I note in the next answer, Contact North has many other free Webinars lined up this summer. See Contact North | Contact Nord Webinars: Registration link. Hit that link and explore.

I should also note that in March, a team of five professors and I started a Webcast show in response to COVID-19 called “Silver Lining for Learning” (SLL). The group includes Chris Dede at Harvard, Yong Zhao at the University of Kansas, Punya Mishra at Arizona State University, Scott McLeod at the University of Colorado at Denver, Shuangye Chen at East China Normal University in Shanghai, and myself. As we note on the SLL website, the COVID-19 disruption offers “an opportunity to reimagine teaching and learning so as to create an equitable and humanistic learning ecosystem for all. Barriers and structures that have resisted much needed change are now in disarray, offering the chance for transformative improvements.”

We air at 5:30 pm EST each Saturday. We have already had a dozen SLL episodes. We also have a blog for SLL. In fact, I recently blog posted information on the training event for Contact North. The show is streamed live to our YouTube channel at this link.

Clearly, I have committed to do too much already during my sabbatical. But it will be fun to be working with so many people in need.

3. When and where will this presentation take place and how much will it cost?

Due to the pandemic, the presentation for Contact North is virtual this time and will take place in Zoom. If you register, the system will send you the appropriate links to obtain access to the live event or the archive of the session. It is possible that Contact North event will be run again. Explore their list of pending Webinar topics and if you have particular needs or suggestions for topics not listed, let me know. Their line-up of event hosts and speakers is impressive including Ron Owston at York University who is repeating his very popular session on “How to Teach Effectively Online with Zoom” as well as his session on “How to Keep Zoom Classes Private and Secure.” Other presenters include such notables as Tony Bates, George Veletsianos, Diane Conrad, Phil Hill, and Stephen Murgatroyd. Again check out their Webinars.

4. Do you know of any other trainings going on that would be helpful for teachers?

It seems like this summer everyone is asking that question.

First, check the websites of your favorite professional organizations as they may offer relevant and timely online learning leadership and training opportunities.

Second, instead of hitting the delete button, read or skim their weekly or monthly digital newsletters when they arrive in your inbox.

Third, explore the websites of other organizations and conferences in the online, flexible, and distance learning space. For K-12 teacher training, browse conference websites and homepages for SITE and ISTE. For higher education, the Online Learning Consortium (OLC) offers online teaching certificates.

In addition, the OLC Innovate Conference will virtually take place this summer from June 15 to June 26. Another favorite of mine, the Wisconsin Distance Teaching and Learning Conference (DT&L), which is normally in lovely Madison, Wisconsin each summer, but is online this year, will offer several certificates related to online learning August 3-7. Also well known is the PennState World Campus which offers an array of online teaching certificates, including one for K-12 educators and one for graduate students. There are likely dozens more online events, summits, podcasts, webcasts, and institutes that are being designed specifically for this coming summer and fall. I recommend people spend a few minutes searching for them and then take advantage of them.

5. Now, what are you currently writing or researching?

I am fortunate to have a couple of very productive and committed research teams. They are working me hard. In the past year or two, we have published many articles on such topics as flipped classrooms in Korea, scaffolded instruction in online learning, the educational technology competencies embedded in social media job postings like Twitter and LinkedIn, and an assortment of studies related to open education and massive open online courses (MOOCs). All my publications that are open access can be found at PublicationShare.com which can also be accessed in the “Articles” link on my homepage.

My MOOC research projects are extensive due to the fact that my team and I have a database of over 3,000 MOOC instructors.

To date, we have explored MOOC instructor motivation and innovation, professional development, gamification strategies (just published today, see https://rdcu.be/b4G6r), instructional design challenges and practices, work engagement, techniques for cultural sensitivity, and MOOC related personalization practices. My brilliant former advisee, Dr. Meina Zhu at Wayne State University, and I have recently conducted a couple of studies (Study #1; Study #2) on student and instructor perceptions of self-directed learning techniques in MOOCs. In an attempt to apply this SDL research to practice, we participated in an international webinar series on the development of e-learning courses and MOOCs coordinated by Dr. Sanjaya Mishra at the Commonwealth of Learning in Vancouver two weeks ago. In it, we summarized our key MOOC research findings and offered advice in designing MOOCs to foster learner SDL and overall engagement. Now, Meina and I are investigating MOOC learners’ career adaptability and career change; we are joined in this effort by another highly productive former student of mine, Dr. Min Young Doo from Sejong University who is leading that particular project. Together, the three of us have published many MOOC-related research articles in the past year.

In addition, recently, my colleagues, Ke Zhang also at Wayne State, Tom Reeves at The University of Georgia, Tom Reynolds at National University, and I edited a book with 28 chapters on “MOOCs and Open Education in the Global South” that was published by Routledge in 2020. We have chapters from such places as Nepal, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Egypt, Brazil, Chile, India, Fiji, Kenya, and Thailand. The frontmatter for that book (which includes the foreword written by Dr. Mimi Lee from the University of Houston as well as the Preface and Chapter 1) is freely available and can be found online at MOOCsbook.com.

That particular book is a follow-up to a previously edited volume by Mimi, Tom, Tom, and I in 2015, “MOOCs and Open Education Around the World.” That award-winning book with 29 chapters was also published by Routledge. Both books have over 65 contributors. While I’m glad to be done with the second volume, it is always a wonderful experience meeting dozens of prominent people around the world and having them become your friends.

At present, I am also knee-deep in editing a special issue of Educational Technology Research and Development (ETR&D) with Florence Martin of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and Vanessa Dennen of Florida State University. This particular journal issue theme is “Systematic Reviews of Research on Emerging Learning Environments and Technologies.” It will have topics such as social media, wearable technology, mobile devices for language learning, adaptive learning, digital game-based learning, massive open online courses (MOOCs), and more. We are about done. Relief!

Once the special issue is off to press, I have at least two books to write. First, I plan to pen a follow up to my 2009 book, “The World is Open: How Web Technology is Revolutionizing Education.” The new book, “The World is Wide Open,” will contain stories of people whose lives have been transformed from open and online educational opportunities in this open age. In effect, the book will explore how technology has enabled people to accomplish something through various online, blended, and open forms of education that a decade or two ago was next to impossible. In a nutshell, it will entail stories of life change.

I had also earmarked part of my sabbatical toward writing the book “Education 20/20” which is intended to detail my vision of powerful learning environments for the 21^st century which some are calling Education 3.0. In terms of Education 20/20, I will describe 20 new roles of instructors (i.e., curator, counselor, concierge, consultant, etc. (all 20 starting with “C”)) and 20 LAST Principles of Instruction (e.g., the principle of spontaneity, the principle of meaningfulness, the principle of support and feedback, the principle choice and options, the principle of flexibility, the principle of convenience, etc.).

These 20 principles coalesce to form my Learning Activation System Template or “LAST” Principles of Instruction; I should point out that the highly esteemed instructional technologist Dr. David Merrill famously crafted the First Principles of Instruction with five key principles a couple of decades ago. I should also note that I started writing the Education 20/20 book two or three years ago, but now that project is on hold as it is 2020 already and I have not come close to completion.

Additionally, in the coming months, I will edit a book tentatively called “Making Impact.” It will be a book of short stories of 30-40 award winning Fulbright teachers who came to IU during the fall semester for the past five or six years. These teachers were from Finland, Israel, Palestine, Singapore, India, Morocco, Mexico, Botswana, New Zealand, and Taiwan. They all audited my instructional strategies class for critical and creative thinking, collaboration, motivation, and technology integration and became fantastic friends of mine. They will write how they utilized one or more of the ideas or strategies learned in that class to make an impact in their local community or country since returning home.

Finally, on my personal reading list to complete this summer are the following books from three fabulous friends of mine, Bryan Alexander, Joshua Kim, and Sugata Mitra; actually, these books are all on my kitchen table right now waiting for me to finish. Each is insightfully written, well organized, highly current, and packed with thought provoking information. All three successfully take us on a pleasant, albeit a tad bumpy, ride into the exciting future of education.

1. Alexander, B. (2020). Academic next: The futures of higher education. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

2. Kim, J. & Maloney, E. (2020). Learning innovation and the future of higher education. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

3. Mitra, S. (2020). The school in the cloud: The emerging future of learning. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

6. What have I neglected to ask?

Well, you did not ask my predictions for the coming fall of 2020 and spring of 2021 semesters. I am not Nostradamus, but there are signs all around us that schools, colleges, and universities are opening up to some degree because online learning is now an agreed upon safety net.

This safety net will come into action for older or at-risk instructors who will teach online as well as for students who do not trust health and safety measures on college campuses and will opt to learn online. Online learning options will exist for the winter months when COVID-19 outbreaks may reappear. Without a doubt, online and blended learning options will continue for some time to come.

Suffice to say, post-COVID-19, there will always be blended and fully online learning options. As such, there will be a resurgence in online teaching certificate programs, online learning books, videos on best online teaching practices, e-learning summits and conferences, and additional funding for training as well as research into virtual learning environments. Personally, I produced a series of 27 short online learning training videos for Indiana University and the world community a decade ago that have been downloaded more than 160,000 times. This project was called Video Primers in an Online Repository of eTeaching and Learning (i.e., the V-PORTAL). These video primers are likely too old now to be of much use. However, I predict a plethora of such resources will be created in the coming years by a host of online learning support organizations.

There will be increasing understanding of and respect for online education. As part of this reaction, job descriptions will change to emphasize experience teaching in fully online and blended environments. Along these same lines, there will be greater recognition and incentives for online teaching. As this occurs, mentoring and coaching programs will also come into prominence. Suffice to say, in addition to the challenges, problems, and barriers, many refreshingly innovative and exciting things will emerge in this new normal.

The men whom the people ought to choose to represent them are too busy to take the jobs. But the politician is waiting for it. He’s the pestilence of modern times. What we should try to do is make politics as local as possible. Keep the politicians near enough to kick them. The villagers who met under the village tree could also hang their politicians to the tree. It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged. —G. K. Chesterton

We have a corrupt judiciary, a corrupt Justice Department and a corrupt FBI, and as Trump said when he was campaigning for the office of President in 2016, “The system is crooked.”  We have an AG whose inaction is the definitive action regarding the outcome of the election this November.  He has not stood up for truth, for justice, for accountability and for doing his job as AG while sitting there saying he doesn’t want to influence the upcoming election.  His job is to bring justice and prosecute evil doers, many of whom surround him, not to worry about his influence or the election.

Where are the indictments of the Deep State Criminals?  How long must we wait?

Action speaks louder than words and we’ve waited way too long for justice.

Barr’s Father

William Barr’s father is Donald Barr, who was the headmaster at Dalton School in Manhattan which was founded by progressive educator, Helen Parkhurst who took her cues from developmental psychologist Jean Piaget and education reformers such as John Dewey and Horace Mann.  Jeffrey Epstein became a professor at the Dalton School.  Yes, really!

In 1983 President Reagan nominated Donald Barr to be a member of the National Council on Educational Research.

Donald Barr also had a stint in the precursor to the CIA, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during WWII.  Prior to that, he described himself as having a Marxist upbringing in terms of his own memoirs and ruminations on education.  He had a footnote on the dialectic and stated that as a child he enjoyed being a Marxist and reading Marx and Engels.

Barr wrote a book entitled, Who Pushed Humpty Dumpty? wherein he claimed to have three very strange radical leftist mentors in his life who migrated toward establishment mainstream status basically infiltrating old right conservatism just as did William F. Buckley and Irving Kristol.  Gordon Myrick, Ralph Lynton and Carlton Hayes were the mentors and Diana West is researching all three.

Establishment Ties

Back in 1992, the first time Bill Barr was U.S. attorney general, New York Times writer William Safire referred to him as “Coverup-General Barr” because of his role in burying evidence of then-President George H. W. Bush’s involvement in “Iraq-gate” and “Iran-Contra.”

Barr expressed his support for gun control measures as well as confiscation during the hearings in 1991 for his first time as Attorney General for President George H.W. Bush.  He is widely considered to be the author of  PL 101-647, The Crime Control Act of 1990.

As President Bush’s most notorious CIA insider from 1973 to 1977, and as the AG from 1991 to 1993, Barr wreaked havoc, flaunted the rule of law, and proved himself to be one of the CIA/Deep State’s greatest and most ruthless champions and protectors.

AG Barr owes virtually his entire career to the Bushes, so where does his allegiance truly lie? Conservapedia gives us some important facts.

Barr donated $55,000 to establishment candidate Jeb Bush in the 2016 presidential election, but after Trump became the nominee, Barr donated only $2,700. He was on the board of Time Warner, the parent company of CNN, between 2009 and 2018, and he thus supported its merger with AT&T when conservatives and the Trump Administration opposed it.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, who was forced to resign from the Senate Intelligence Committee for leaking information related to the Menna/Contra operation in 1987, was an enthusiastic Barr supporter. Bush DOJ official Stuart Gerson called Barr and Bob Mueller “folks of the establishment.”

Prior to his appointment as Attorney General, Barr served as Chief Counsel for the CIA airline Southern Air Transport during Iran Contra. Robert Mueller served as Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division during Barr’s tenure.

Barr and Robert Mueller are personal friends and actually worked together during Barr’s first stint under George H.W. Bush from 1991-1993. Mueller headed the FBI Criminal Division at the time of the Ruby Ridge killings and was infuriated that members of Congress and public officials dared complain about the FBI sniper shooting Vicki Weaver in the head while she held her 10-month-old baby.

In August of 1992 when the Ruby Ridge siege occurred, AG Barr was in charge. After he left office, he spearheaded legal efforts to assure total immunity for Lon Horiuchi, the sniper who killed Vicki Weaver, and any federal sniper who behaved similarly.

In late March of this year, Bill Barr asked Congress to expand legal authorities to circumvent civil liberties because of Covid-19, which easily happened and gave governors dictatorial totalitarian powers over their citizens.

The CIA

Barr was a full-time CIA operative, recruited by Langley out of high school, starting in 1971. Barr’s youth career goal was to head the CIA. See my previous article, AG William Barr, CIA Asset and Deep State Impresario.

In the final pages of Compromised, Terry Reed writes that in 1992, several years after working with CIA-connected Robert Johnson, he made the “miraculous find” that “Robert Johnson” was also William P. Barr. Reed’s CIA contact, William Barr, known at that time by his alias Robert Johnson, told Reed that Attorney General Edwin Meese had appointed Michael Fitzhugh to be US Attorney in Western Arkansas, and that he would stonewall any investigation into the Mena, Arkansas drug-related activities. This obstruction of justice by Justice Department officials did occur.

Don’t forget Edwin Meese’s involvement in the Inslaw/Promis software theft by the federal government.

When George H.W. Bush became CIA Director in 1976, Barr joined the CIA’s “legal office” and Bush’s inner circle, and worked alongside Bush’s longtime CIA enforcers Theodore “Ted” Shackley, Felix Rodriguez, Thomas Clines, and others, several of whom were likely involved with the Bay of Pigs/John F. Kennedy assassination, and numerous southeast Asian operations, from the Phoenix Program to Golden Triangle narco-trafficking.

The Church Committee was a U.S. Senate select committee in 1975 that investigated abuses by the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Internal Revenue Service.Barr stonewalled and destroyed the Committee investigations into CIA abuses.

A memo uncovered in the Central Intelligence Agency’s declassified archives shows that during his time at the CIA’s Office of Legislative Council, current AG Barr drafted letters calling for the end of the moratorium on destroying records imposed on the Agency ahead of the Church Committee hearings.  We need to keep the docs showing the evil of the CIA, but Barr wants them destroyed.

And President George H. W. Bush was all for the destruction since he had headed the CIA and was likely culpable for many of the CIAs actions.

Obama/Biden Culpability

There is strong evidence that President Barack Hussein Obama and Vice-President Joe Biden were involved in a conspiracy to obstruct justice and a conspiracy to criminality that shows the Justice Department wasn’t interested in following the corrupt trails to begin with.

Attorney General Bill Barr has actually given a pass to former President Obama and VP Joe Biden saying there is nothing he has seen in John Durham’s investigation to suggest any wrongdoing by either Obama or Biden.  Barr told reporters he has a general idea how Durham’s investigation into Obama gate and the conduct of the Obama era intelligence community is going, and he confirmed, “Some aspects are being investigated as potential crimes.”  He did all of this standing next to Deep State FBI Director Wray on May 18^th, 2020.

Barr made this statement, “What happened to the President throughout his 2016 campaign and election was abhorrent.  It was a grave injustice and it was unprecedented in American history.  As to President Obama and Vice President Biden, whatever their level of involvement, based on the information I have today, I don’t expect Mr. Durham’s work will lead to a criminal investigation of either man.  Our concern over potential criminality is focused on others.” Coverup…no justice!

Slow or No Justice

Barr said that while potential crimes by the Deep State are under investigation, it seems to be happening at an extraordinarily slow pace.  It is even slow by DOJ standards established by the Obama presidency.  Former CIA Director John Brennan (who voted for communist Gus Hall in the 1976 presidential election) says he has yet to even be interviewed by John Durham.

Why so long?  His DOJ seems to be playing cover for the Deep State.  Why did his investigation of the Clintons end with a whimper? Why did he refuse to prosecute former FBI Director James Comey for leaking memos with classified information? Why did he refuse to charge former FBI Deputy Director and then Acting Director Andrew McCabe for lying to investigators? It was Bill Barr who praised former Acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein despite Rosenstein helping to launch the Mueller witch-hunt which was fraudulent from the very beginning.

AG Barr also played a role in the sweetheart deal for former senate aid, James Wolfe who served only two months in prison for leaking the Carter Page FISA warrants to four leftwing media, one with whom he was having an affair.  Wolfe was never charged with leaking classified information. Politico reports that during the lame duck session after the 2018 midterms, Senators Warner, Richard Burr and Diane Feinstein asked for leniency in his case and received it. And Barr wants FISA reauthorized without any reforms.

Barr Appointments

John Durham has interviewed several of the FBI investigators who worked on Robert Mueller’s witch hunt.  It remains unknown which ones are being investigated and it is also unknown whether any prosecutors are being investigated as well.  If Durham follows the same model used by the Justice Department of late, justice will likely not be served.

Is AG Barr waiting to see if Trump is reelected?  If Trump loses, Barr can bury it, but if he wins, then Barr has to have a scapegoat.  Will the people stand for criminals going free and the innocents being destroyed?

Barr said it was just fine that the House went through with impeachment! But the impeachment was to cover Biden’s son Hunter and his Ukrainian Burisma dealings.  Is Barr ruling that out of his investigation? And what about Pelosi’s son, Kerry’s step-son, Chris Heinz, and Mitt Romney’s top advisor, Cofer Black?

If the president wants justice himself, he cannot rely on these Deep State agencies that should have been cleaned out three years ago.  He can and should appoint his own special council outside of the FBI and their investigators to do this.  How about Sidney Powell?!

Barr’s appointment of U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Jensen actually succeeded in getting exculpatory evidence to Sidney Powell and forced the DOJ to dismiss the case against General Flynn.  This evidence should have been given to his attorneys prior to his plea of guilty which he did to save his son from Mueller’s attack dogs.

The AG has now assigned Trump appointee U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Texas, John Bash, to examine “criminal unmasking” by the Obama administration.

Sounds good, except for the fact that the DOJ is defending the president’s Deep State persecutors and they are suggesting they won’t do anything serious regarding criminal prosecution.

Richard Grenell

Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell did more in three months to declassify information about Obama administration  officials who were behind the “unmasking” of Michael Flynn. Grenell declassified the transcripts of Flynn’s phone calls with Russian Ambassador Kislyak, which proves the General did nothing wrong.

There is wide spread domestic political spying, far greater than AG Barr will admit. Brennan and Clapper had their own secret surveillance system. Barr also has a long history of supporting expansive government surveillance programs and related legislation, including the Patriot Act.

As head of Trump’s transition team, Mike Pence chose his neo-con Deep State Republican establishment mainstay friend, Dan Coates as Director of National Intelligence.  In two and a half years, Coates did nothing to release these materials.  AG Barr and FBI Director Wray were mum.

Sidney Powell went to the mat for her client and clamored for the Justice Department to release the exculpatory evidence.  They are still sitting on their hands regarding the original 302s (reports of Flynn interview by Strzok and Pientka), which I believe were destroyed once Strzok and Page rewrote them.  Neither Barr nor Wray acted to release the documents. Only last January, federal prosecutors wanted General Flynn to spend six months in prison.

Dobbs on Barr

It’s obvious Fox News’ host Lou Dobbs is not at all pleased with Bill Barr.  “Where the hell are the indictments, where the hell are the charges against the corrupt, the politically corrupt deep state within the Justice Department, the FBI?” Dobbs asked. “Why in the hell are we hearing apologies from someone in that rancid, corrupt department?”

Dobbs has stated more than once that Barr should be more loyal to Trump and shot down the longstanding practice of impartiality for DOJ officials.  Think of Bobbie Kennedy and his brother, President John Kennedy.  As Dobbs says, “The Justice Department works for the president.  It’s part of the executive branch.”

Since AG Barr has taken over for the impotent AG Jeff Sessions, he has dropped the Clinton Foundation investigation, punted on charging Comey for leaking classified memos, and punted on charging McCabe despite a slam-dunk 18 USC 1001 false statements case.

Conclusion

Diana West, author of American Betrayal and The Red Thread stated that when President Trump chose William Barr for his AG, her heart sank, and for good reason. Barr was a double agent during the Iran contra affair and a fixer for Poppy Bush.  Barr wanted the Church Commission to remove the moratorium on the destruction of CIA documents…covering for his bosses.  While at the CIA Barr drafted letters asking if the agency could again “start” destroying Church Committee records.

It’s been 15 months since Bill Barr became the U.S. Attorney General.  While skilled at coverups, he has been derelict regarding indictments of his Deep State comrades. Will we ever see justice?

© 2020 Kelleigh Nelson – All Rights Reserved

E-Mail Kelleigh Nelson: proverbs133@bellsouth.net

Source: Attorney General Bill Barr’s Criminal Coverup Background – News With Views

“Contact Tracing – Total Loss of Our Rights As Americans”

By Donna Garner

5.30.20

This video has just been released on 5.25.20; therefore, it is very recent. The woman who has put this video together has gone through nine hours of contact tracing preparation with two certificates to prove it.  She did her preparation in California; however, she presents documents (very disturbing documents and video clips) taken from a number of other states that have already launched into contact tracing.

I started out thinking, “There is no way that contact tracing is ever going to impact me. I am going to refuse to download the 13.5 IOS update on my iPhone. Nobody is going to tell me that I have to be vaccinated for COVID-19.  I am an American with privacy rights guaranteed in our Constitution. This lady must simply be a conspiracy theorist.”   

I guarantee you that my eyes have now been opened thoroughly.  Unfortunately, my own state of Texas has already launched into contact tracing as so many other states have done.  The Texas Department of Health Services has just awarded a $259 Million, 27-month state contract.  However, if our state leaders as well as our national leaders understood fully the ramifications of the grand plan behind contact tracing and the possible passage in the U. S. House of HR 666 (costing $100 Billion), they would nix the entire idea IMMEDIATELY.

This engrossing and very disturbing video has laid out the entire plan. If states have already begun to launch into contact tracing, they must immediately cut any ties to it because if allowed to go forward, nobody in this country could avoid what is sold as being “for the common good” but which in reality is a total takeover of our rights to live as free Americans under the protection of our Constitution. Under contact tracing, our Constitutional rights would be shredded.  

You cannot afford NOT to watch this video; your lives and rights literally depend upon it:

VIDEO:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlDyh1dtsjc&feature=share&fbclid=IwAR3bHpV0NMbY1O00xmazQxXtRbsL6vFaWFNzc8oXP8OzViwaMZlROAwznI0

4.25.20

“Two Experienced ER Doctors: Lockdowns Weaken Our Immune Systems”

By Donna Garner

Dr. Dan Erickson and Dr. Artin Massihi are Emergency Room doctors with each having had more than 20 years of medical and emergency care experience. They are the co-owners of Accelerated Urgent Care with offices in Bakersfield, Fresno, and Temecula, California. 

They see patients every day in their clinics and have spent late-night hours gathering, studying, and assimilating their own data on COVID-19. They have been in contact with ER doctors from across the country in an effort to share common experiences so as to gain a better understanding of COVID-19 over time.  More and more is being learned about this virus each day.  

Dr. Erickson and Dr. Massihi were interviewed by 23ABC News on 4.22.20, and the information these doctors shared with the press needs to be shared with America and the world.

Please take the time to watch their two-part video (links posted below).

As these doctors explained it, COVID-19 is a new mutation of a coronavirus; and they said they would have done what the leaders of our country did early-on to protect our nation.  However, they said as the months have gone on, many new things have been learned. It is time to cease the lockdowns and get our country back to work.

Based upon their data (which has been carefully verified with personal follow-ups) and national/international data gathered from public sources, a person living in California has a 0.03% chance of dying from COVID-19.  In New York State, it is a 0.1% chance of dying from COVID-19.

Spain’s chance of dying from COVID-19 is 0.05% with a 90% recovery rate.

Each year the number of flu deaths in the United States runs between 24,000 to 62,000.  The chance of dying from the flu is 0.13%.   

Dr. Erickson did a comparison between Sweden (which did not implement a complete lockdown) and Norway (which implemented a complete lockdown).  By comparing the data from the two countries, there is not statistically different data to prove that a lockdown is medically superior.

Across the United States, there is a 19.6% chance of testing positive for COVID-19.  In just a couple of months, the United States has tested over 4 million people which is double that of any other country.

Dr. Erickson said that the reason more have not been tested is that people are afraid to come to the hospitals/clinics to get the tests, and many of the healthcare facilities are themselves shut down with doctors/nurses/staffers being laid off or sent home!

One of the important points that Dr. Massihi made was to explain how our bodies develop a strong immune system by being faced with different viruses that are around us (i. e., herd immunity).  By being exposed to the bacteria and flora that surround us, our bodies build antibodies; but by being locked down and inside our houses, we are weakening our own immune systems. 

The two doctors expressed their deep concerns that when the country emerges from lockdown, sick patients (whose weakened bodies will more easily pick up various viruses) will flood the healthcare systems at a time when those clinics/hospitals have laid off vast numbers of workers because of empty beds.  This will be a dual crisis.

Both men said that they are seeing in their “lockdown” patients an increase in child molestation, spousal abuse, suicides, depression, alcohol, drug abuse, and other negative behaviors.  These have lifetime consequences while COVID-19 is only for a season.

When these co-owners were challenged by a reporter in the room who suggested they were only concerned about their financial interests, Dr. Erickson said that he had talked to countless other medical providers who do not own clinics but who share the very same concerns that he and Dr. Massihi have.  

Dr. Erickson and Dr. Massihi believe that shelter-in-place orders need to be lifted; all businesses should be opened in a deliberate and safe way; and more testing needs to be made available.  

However, they stated that a large percentage of people have already had COVID-19; those people have built up immunities; and it is not statistically possible to test everyone in America before allowing them to go back to work.  

These two ER experts said it would defy all biological and scientific logic to think that the public would be “safe” milling around at a large retail store while at the same time forbidding them from going to an outdoor venue.  

Speaking offhandedly, they said to leaders who are making such lockdown declarations, “Good luck with the litigation that comes from that decision.”

YOU TUBE LINKS: 

Part 1:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfLVxx_lBLU&feature=youtu.be

Part 2:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb6j7o1pLBw&t=627s

by Bianca Lopez –

Source: Religious Resistance to Quarantine Has a Long History – InsideSources

“Expert Lupus Doctor Says No COVID-19 in His Patients”

By Donna Garner

4.8.20

Daniel J. Wallace, MD, FACP, MACR is a board-certified internist and rheumatologist.  He is one of the most respected rheumatologists and lupus experts in the entire United States.  Dr. Wallace is a Clinical Professor of Medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and is the Associate Director of the Rheumatology Fellowship Program at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center where he also serves on the Board of Governors.

Dr. Wallace has authored nearly 450 peer reviewed manuscripts, 30 book chapters, eight textbooks (on lupus, osteoarthritis, Sjogren’s syndrome and fibromyalgia); and his practice includes caring for 2,000 lupus patients, the largest lupus cohort in the United States

On 4.7.20, Dr. Daniel J. Wallace was asked about the possible preventive (prophylactic) use of hydroxychloroquine (i.e., Plaquenil) in his Lupus patients.

Dr. Wallace said that he has had 800 Lupus patients (unique visits) since Sept. 1, 2019 who are taking hydroxychloroquine (a.k.a., HQ).  He has not had a single one of these patients who has been diagnosed with COVID-19. 

In the Cedars Sinai Hospital where he also works, there has only been one person with Lupus who has been hospitalized; but that patient was taking HQ only intermittently — https://detroit.cbslocal.com/2020/04/07/dr-oz-asks-rheumatologist-dr-daniel-wallace-if-any-of-his-patients-with-lupus-have-contracted-covid-19/

Dr. Mehmet Cengiz Oz (born in Cleveland, Ohio from Turkish immigrant parents – his father also a doctor) is a board certified cardiothoracic surgeon and has served as the vice chair of Columbia’s Department of Surgery. He has his own syndicated TV show on which he discusses breakthroughs in the field of medicine and answers people’s questions about their health.

In a recent conversation that Dr. Oz had with Dr. Daniel Wallace, the lupus specialist mentioned that in his 46 years of treating thousands of lupus patients with HQ, he has never seen any serious side effects.   

This set Dr. Oz’s mind in motion.  He decided to try to find out if any lupus patients around the country have contracted COVID-19. He is now working with major health insurance companies to encourage them to do a deep dive into their data to see if lupus patients may perhaps be gaining preventive results against COVID-19 by taking HQ.  This could be vital information for the general public to know if it indicates that there is something in HQ that prevents people from contracting COVID-19.   

Dr. Oz has also set up a site on his webpage to encourage any lupus patients in the United States who have contracted COVID-19 to submit their information to him:  https://www.doctoroz.com/

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Dr. Daniel Wallace’s Curriculum Vitae and Cedars Sinai bio:

https://attunehealth.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/DR-Wallace-CV-July-2018-PDF.pdf

https://bio.cedars-sinai.org/wallaced/index.html

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4.8.10 – “Dr. Marc Siegel opens up about his father, 96, and his successful use of hydroxychloroquine” — By Edmund DeMarche – Fox News – /dr-marc-siegel-opens-up-about-his-father-96-and-his-use-of-hydroxychloroquine/

4.5.20 — “Doctors in the Trenches Bring Hope Against COVID-19”– By Donna Garner – EdViews.org — /doctors-in-the-trenches-bring-hope-against-covid-19/