Mediaboss Marketing

Indias experimentations with fertility control programs go all the way back to the period preceding its Independence. In fact, it was one of the first countries to introduce an official programme of birth control intended to reduce the rate of population growth, but to this day the relative population size and fertility rates remain a contentious issue in electoral politics.

In July 2019, a Population Regulation Bill, proposing to introduce a two-child policy per couple, was introduced in the Rajya Sabha by BJP MP Rakesh Sinha. However, the Bill was withdrawn earlier this year following intervention by the Union health minister Mansukh Mandaviya who argued that NHFS and census data to show the positive impact of government-led awareness campaigns rather than force on indicators such as the Total Fertility Rate (TFR).

Experts too agree that at this juncture there is no requirement of a population control bill or any policy that enforces a fixed number of children a couple can have. Whatever goals that the latest population policy, NPP 2000, had set have been achieved and the fertility level everywhere is going down, reasons K Srinivasan, Emeritus Professor of International Institute of Population Sciences. If we take the case of Tamil Nadu, the fertility levels there are well below replacement levels for the last 10-12 years. Its population is going to decline from 2031. Keralas population will also decline soon after, he explains.

The idea that the population of the Indian subcontinent was a problem emerged only from the third decade of the 20th century. Much of the time that the British were in control, right up till the 1860s and 70s, they often took the view that there were not enough people, says Tim Dyson, Professor Emeritus of Population Studies at the London School of Economics.

Srinivasan in his book, Population concerns in India: Shifting trends, policies, and programs (2017)notes that the population of India within its present geographical boundaries in fact declined between 1911 and 1921 from 252.1 to 251.3 million on account of the global influenza pandemic of 1918-19. It is only from 1921 that the population rose due to measures undertaken by provincial governments. Concerns over this rapid rise in population arose from four quarters: intellectuals, social reformers (especially those interested in improving the status of women), the Congress party (the leading political party that spearheaded the movement for political independence) and the government, he writes.

The role of the Indian intellectual elite was particularly strong in this regard during the first two decades of the century. A large majority among them visited England for higher education and for training in posts for the Indian Civil Service. There they were introduced to Malthusian theories of population and Neo-Malthusian Leagues across Europe.

Historian Matthew Connelly in his article, Population control in India: Prologue to the Emergency period (2006) notes that the Indian elites, and particularly the Hindu upper caste elites, were active participants in international conferences on population, and were the most vocal proponents for population control as they remained concerned that differential fertility would increase the relative size and power of the lower-caste and Muslim communities.

The Western gaze towards India, citing it as a case where overpopulation led to checks like famines, war and epidemics went a long way in shaping the Indian elites response to the countrys population. Westerners preferred to make an example of India when developing their own theories and deriving lessons for policy, writes Connelly in his article. In the 1920s, when American and British authors began to warn of a Rising tide of colour, India was once again the most oft-cited example- even though there was not yet any evidence that its population was growing rapidly. American birth control activist Margaret Higgins Sanger and her Birth Control Information Centre in the 1930s focused on opening clinics in India.

There were Western economists who came up with economic arguments about why India needed to control its population, says Leela Visaria, Honorary Professor at the Gujarat Institute of Development Research. The burden that a country like India would be for the world got articulated in many ways such as advocating methods of family planning to women mostly, and carrying out studies.

The first public expression of the need for family planning in the country was carried out by Pyare Kishen Wattal with the publication of a book, The Population Problem in India in 1916 in which he advocated family limitation. A pioneering effort was led by Professor Raghunath Dhondo Karve when he opened the countrys first birth control clinic in Bombay in 1925. Karve was a professor of Mathematics and an activist on womens rights. He advocated widow remarriage and the practice of artificial methods of family planning. However, his writings and speeches on the subject were met with severe opposition and he was asked to resign by the authorities of the Christian Missionary College where he worked. The next attempt in this direction was the forming of the Madras Neo-Malthusian League in July 1929, which published a propaganda journal called Madras Birth Control Bulletin.

The humble beginnings of population control that started in Bombay and Madras, however, did not spread rapidly because of Mahatma Gandhis strong opposition to artificial methods of birth control. For Gandhi, sexual abstinence was the only ethical means of birth control. In his magazine Young India he wrote in 1936: Sex urge is a fine and noble thing. There is nothing to be ashamed of in it, but it is meant only for the act of creation. Any other use of it is a sin against God and humanity. Contraceptives of a kind there were before and there will be hereafter, but the use of them was formerly regarded as sinful. It was reserved for our generation to glorify vice by calling it virtue. (As cited in Srinivasans book).

Gandhis views on birth control were strongly challenged by western activists, particularly Edith How-Martyn and Sanger, who advocated family planning as a means of liberating women from child bearing and improving their status as individuals in society.

The womens movement in India and voluntary organisations continued to advocate for artificial methods of birth control despite Gandhis opposition. The annual meeting of the All India Womens Conference in 1935 focused on birth control and invited How-Martyn and Sanger. How-Martyn and Sanger took this opportunity to meet with Gandhi to discuss the use of artificial methods of family planning. Despite their efforts to convert him to their side, Gandhi stood firm in his conviction and rejected the use of artificial methods of family planning, writes Srinivasan.

Jawaharlal Nehru, however, had an opposing view to Gandhi on the matter. He was influenced by the prevailing views on population in the west and was of the opinion that as modern technology made their way to the east, a significant population increase would result in India. Therefore he perceived the rising population of India as a burden that needed to be properly organised. As early as the mid 1930s the National Planning Committee under Nehru set up a subcommittee on population that recommended the gradual increase in age of marriage, the teaching of contraception in medical colleges, the establishment of birth control clinics, provision of free contraceptives and local manufacture of contraceptives, the education of people on the issue of population and the introduction of a eugenic program for sterilisation of people suffering from communicable diseases.

The efforts at population control was halted briefly with the onset of the Second World War in 1939. With the end of the war in 1945 and the Independence of the country in 1947 a new and more invigorated phase of population control plans was ushered in.

One of the earliest efforts at birth control was the formation of the family planning association of India. Its members included pioneers such as Professor Karve, Dr A. P. Pillay, Lady Dhanvanthi Rama Rau, Mrs Vembu and Mrs A. B. Wadia, who were active in family planning programmes before the war and had shown keen interest during the All India Womens Conference held earlier in 1935. Founding of the association was a milestone moment both in the history of family planning in India and the world.

In 1952, during the first five year plan, the government assumed that rapid population growth would be a hindrance in the socio-economic development of the country. Accordingly, it adopted a family limitation and population control programme, arguably the first such attempt anywhere.

However, the programme made negligible progress, partly because there was very little experience to draw from. Moreover, its goal was defined in rather vague terms as that of reducing birth rate to the level necessary to stabilise the population at the level consistent with the requirements of the national economy. But it also reflected continuing reservations about modern birth control methods, writes Dyson in his book, A population history of India: From the first modern people to the present day (2018). Indeed in the late 1940s and early 1950s Rajkumari Amrit Kaur- a former secretary to M K Gandhi- was the countrys minister of health. Although she later changed her views, at that time she favoured family limitation through the practise of sexual abstinence. Much of the budget kept aside for family planning programme at this phase was spent on doing research on the rhythm method(a form of natural contraception by which sexual intercourse is restricted to the times of a womans menstrual cycle when ovulation is least likely to occur) which was largely unsuccessful both in the west and in India.

The second five-year plan involved the opening of 1,430 family planning clinics and birth control services also began to be provided at private healthcare systems (PHCs). Family planning and health came under the jurisdiction of the states and in this regard we see a significant progress in birth control initiatives in the south. In particular, there were efforts at providing sterilisation services. In 1959, for instance, the Madras state government introduced a scheme by which people who were sterilised were given a small amount of money. There were restrictions on who could be sterilised though. By 1960, the states of Mysore, Maharashtra and Kerala also introduced similar schemes.

Influenced by the progress made by the southern states, the third five-year plan made sterilisation services available in PHCs as well. Several sterilisation centres were also established, mainly in the bigger cities. Dyson notes that the number of sterilisations carried out in India rose from 64,000 in 1960 to about 1.8 million by 1967-68.

A notable event in this regard took place in Ernakulam district of Kerala in December 1970 at the instigation of the districts chief administrator, S.S. Krishnakumar. A sterilisation camp was established with much fanfare and quick and safe vasectomies were made available with sizable cash payments to those availing the service. About 15,000 vasectomies were carried out in the event. When a similar event was held once again in July 1971, once again in Ernakulam, it resulted in 63,000 vasectomies. Following this, similar camps were held in most states across the country. It is estimated that about 91 per cent of the contraceptive protection (i.e. against pregnancy) provided by the family planning programme in 197273 derived from sterilizations. Moreover, vasectomies accounted for 84 per cent of the sterilizations performed during 197273, notes Dyson.

However, the 1971 census made clear that despite the many efforts, much to the frustration of policy makers, population growth had continued unabated during the decade. The population of the country rose from 439.2 million in 1961 to 548.2 million in 1971, which was a 24.8 per cent increase as compared to 21.5 per cent rise in the 1951-61 period. This was because the government of the day had fixed very high targets to be achieved in a short period of time. The targets for each earlier five-year plan failed but the government kept keeping higher targets in the consecutive plan, says Srinivasan. Moreover, by diverting so much of time and money to sterilisations, we lost out on resources that should have been used to improve health infrastructure instead, he adds.

In the period between 1960 to 1976 the international emphasis on family planning increased significantly with funding from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Foundations. Among all Asian and Sub-Saharan African countries, Indias family planning programme received the largest chunk of international aid. The international push was so extreme that in 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson refused to provide food aid to Indiaat the time threatened by famineuntil it agreed to incentivize sterilization, writes Prajakta R. Gupte in her article, India: The Emergency and the politics of mass sterilisation (2017).

The mass sterilisation campaign that took off during the Emergency declared by then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi needs to be seen in context of this international pressure on India. These were based, with a hindsight, on the fear of the large populations of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Indonesia increasing very rapidly and posing a global threat to peace and prosperity of the Western world, writes Sreenivasan. In the history of population control in India, this was the only period which saw the use of force.

With the opposition behind bars and the press silenced, several atrocities were carried out during the period of Emergency that lasted from June 1975 to March 1977. The most talked about among them was a forced sterilisation campaign, spearheaded by Gandhis son, Sanjay Gandhi, who held no official post in the government at that time. He came up with a five-point programme which included family planning, tree planting, a ban on dowry, an adult education programme and ending of social caste. In the opinion of Sanjay Gandhi, family planning was to be a way of life in India and he wanted rapid results. For instance, he wanted to control the population within a year, beautify the city in weeks, and virtually end poverty overnight, writes Gupte.

A National Population Policy (NPP), the first of its kind in India, was passed in the Parliament in April 1976. Sterilisation and in particular vasectomy was to be the core of this programme. States such as Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Orissa, Haryana, Punjab, and Himachal Pradesh also came up with their own sterilisation policies, and all of North India came to be known as the vasectomy belt. Each of these states began competing with each other to achieve the highest number of sterilisations.

Vasectomies were held in many government offices, railway stations, and schools. Sreenivasan notes how the vasectomy booths set up in the Churchgate and VT stations in Mumbai became notorious because of its ruthless nature: they gathered the young male passengers getting down the electric trains and made them pass through the vasectomy booths and sterilized them, unless they have a card for already being sterilised.

Further, the government issued circulars to employees stating that their promotions and payments would be held back unless they got sterilised or got an assigned quota of people to sterilise. People had to produce a certificate of sterilization to get their salaries or even renew their driving/ rickshaw/scooter/sales tax license. Students whose parents had not undergone a sterilization were detained. Free medical treatment in hospitals was also suspended until a sterilization certificate was shown, writes Gupte. Those who suffered the most were the poor and illiterate people, picked up from pavements, railway stations, or bus stops and forced to undergo the process.

As a result, the family planning programmes performance in India during the 1976-77 period was the best that any country had ever achieved, with 8.26 million sterilisations. It is worth noting that it was during this period that China too officially adopted the one child policy, and one can assume that Gandhi and her son thought that a similar attitude of force might work in case of India too. However, as Sreenivasan notes, China used UIDs to achieve its goal, which was reversible unlike the case with sterilisations.

Soon enough violent revolts broke out in several parts of India in response to the forced sterilisations. Gupte writes that in Uttar Pradesh alone 240 cases of violent resistance were reported. In Muzzaffarnagar, for instance, people resisted by pelting the police with stones. Again, the police opened fire, killing twenty-five people. After this incident, a curfew was imposed, and law enforcement officers killed violators, she writes. A significant opposition to the programme came from the poorest areas and from the Muslims who thought it was the majoritys way of diminishing their community.

In an attempt to prove her popularity, Indira Gandhi called for fresh elections in February 1977. This was the beginning of the end of her power. The Congress party incurred huge losses both at the centre and in most of the states and one of the key election issues was the governments imposition of a coercive family planning program. A popular saying among the people at that time was that the compulsory sterilisation program brought down the government instead of the birth rate, says Sreenivasan. This is a lesson for any government in India.

Looking back at the approach to population control during the Emergency, Dyson says that what it did was weaken the commitment to family planning. The Australian demographer Jack Caldwell had argued that if Mrs Gandhi had continued with the Emergency then India would have achieved replacement fertility, that is two births per woman, by the 1980s. He may well have been right since India is only slightly above two births per woman now, says Dyson. There was a huge difference in Indias demographic trajectory as a result of Mrs. Gandhi losing the election. Had she won the election, it is interesting to speculate what she would have done with the family planning programme.

The biggest change that took place after the 1977 general elections was that Indias population control policy shifted focus to voluntary efforts. The Indian government now put more emphasis on incentives to attract people to accept family planning instead of coercive measures although the government still gave priority to the rapidly growing population problem, writes sociologist Gabe T Wang in his paper, Population control policies and implementations in India (2019). The name of the programme was changed from family planning to family welfare under the pretext that any population policy would put greater emphasis on maternal and child healthcare as well as nutrition.

A working group on population policy was set up under the planning commission in 1979. The group recommended a long term demographic goal of reaching a net reproduction rate of one by 1996 for the entire country and for the states by 2001. The government also emphasised on indirect measures such as spreading awareness through the use of media, education, giving larger share of central governments assistance to states performing well and the like.

Further, states came out with policies of their own. Some states such as Assam, Odisha, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, for instance, have some form of two-child policy in place to be eligible for certain government jobs. The Uttar Pradesh Law Commission in July 2021 submitted a proposal for barring any person with more than two children from contesting in local polls, applying for promotions in government jobs and from receiving government subsidy.

Visaria says that one of the biggest impacts of the forced sterilisation campaign carried out during the Emergency was that vasectomy or male sterilisation was put on the back burner. Female sterilisation became more popular as women came forward despite it having a negative effect on their health, she says. We came to a stage when Indian doctors, for several years, were not even trained in the performance of vasectomy.

All kinds of incentives for sterilisation needs to be stopped immediately, suggests Sreenivasan. Not only does it impact womens health but also it makes such a dent in fertility that cannot be restored later. China could reverse its one child policy because it did not have so many sterilised people. But in India, a majority of family planning efforts continue to be through female sterilisations he says.

Despite the variegated efforts in Indias family planning initiatives, population continues to be seen as a problem in the country. A 2019 report released by the United Nations predicted that Indias population would surpass that of China by 2027 and that it would remain the most populous country of the world till the end of the century.

That is bound to happen since its built in the momentum of the population. We had until very recently very high fertility levels and all those children born in the 1970s and 80s will want to have one or two children and till that phase of transition is completed the population will continue to grow in absolute numbers, says Visaria.

However, she believes that despite the growth in population the country does not need a population control policy. The latest NHFS data clearly indicates that the total fertility rate is now two, which is slightly below replacement levels. The NHFS surveys have demonstrated that no Indian couple want more than two children, she says. What we need is to ensure that good quality services are available to all regardless of rural, urban, caste or religion.

Srinivasan believes that the condition of population India at present with its demographic diversity is in fact at an advantageous stage. At present different states are at different levels of demographic transitions. For instance Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan are still slightly above replacement level of fertility. Whereas Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Goa, Pondicherry are well below replacement level of fertility, he says. This is an advantage for a country because the labour shortage in one state can be filled up by surplus labour in another state, provided we facilitate internal migration.

He also suggests that any population policy at this stage is bound to recoil because it will appear to be directed towards a particular community. The only form of family planning that he says must be advocated is the kind that was advocated by Margaret Sanger: wherein couples have babies by choice and not by chance.

Further reading:

Krishnamurthy Srinivasan, Population concerns in India: Shifting trends, policies and programs, Sage Publications, 2017

Tim Dyson, A Population History of India: From the first Modern People to the Present Day, Oxford University Press, 2018

Prajakta R. Gupte, India: The Emergency and the politics of mass sterilisation, Association for Asia Studies, 2017

Gabe T. Wang, Population control policies and implementations in India, Journal of Sociology and Social Work, 2019

Matthew Connelly, Population control in India: Prologue to the Emergency period, Population and Development Review, 2006

Read more:
Why experts say India does not need a population policy - The Indian Express

Question: Our practice is fairly new, and we are in the process of developing internal processes to follow going forward.What is the purpose of an audit and how can that help our practice?

Answer: An internal medical coding and billing audit is a process that examines and evaluates the effectiveness and reliability of clinical documentation and the overall medical billing process. This process thoroughly checks health records maintained by the practice and reviews medical billing data submitted to the payors to help ensure that the practice identifies, monitors and corrects inappropriate billing practices.

When going through a coding and billing audit, the auditor collects clinical records, which may include medical records, x-rays, and lab reports; financial records such as entered charges, explanation of benefits (EOBs), and accounts receivable ledger; and policy-related documentation as required by providers or the government.

Audits can be conducted either before claims are sent out to the payors (prospective) or after the fact (retrospective). Some practices follow the rule of conducting new provider audits prospectively, and current provider audits retrospectively.

Scope of Medical Billing Audit

Medical billing audits have a more comprehensive approach than coding audits. Medical billing audits cover all the areas of the medical billing life cycle starting from insurance verification processes, ICD-10-CM and CPT coding, claim submission, payment posting, follow-up, and denial management processes.

Advantages of Medical Billing Audit

Coding compliance: Billing audits provide a way to identify and correct problem spots before the government or insurance payors challenge inappropriate coding. You can rely on billing audits for identifying inaccuracies, providing instructions on ways to correct issues, building confidence among the coding staff, and ensuring to use of up-to-date procedure and diagnosis codes. Those conducting the audit can identify areas where staff education and training are needed to make sure that proper coding protocol isfollowed.

Administrative Benefits: The administrative staff benefits from medical billing audits by confirming that claims are true and accurate and are correctly submitted. Audits set the standard for the office staff and spare them unnecessary frustration by creating a positive, stable work environment and culture of compliance that attracts and retains talented personnel. Under- and over-coding, code overuse, and improper unbundling habits are replaced with appropriate billing for services and procedures. When policies and procedures are set in place and followed correctly, the chance of a visit from an external auditor decreases significantly.

Ensure compliance: Through medical claims audits, the practice can help protected itself against fraudulent billing activity and claims. The audit may identify reimbursement deficiencies and reveal ways in which the practice varies from the national average due to inappropriate coding. Areas for increased reimbursement may be revealed and, in turn, boost revenue. Additionally, the practice benefits when files are processed efficiently, improper payments are reduced and claim payment is optimized.

ReneeDowling is a compliance auditor for Sansum Clinic, LLC, in Santa Barbara, California.

Link:
What is a medical coding and billing audit? - Medical Economics

On the morning of 25 August 2014, a 16-year-old girl arrived at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in a baffling condition. She was short of breath but had no chest pain. She had no history of any lung condition and no abnormal sounds in her breathing. But when the emergency room doctor on duty pressed on her neck and chest, he heard noises like Rice Krispies crackling in a bowl of milk. Spaces behind her throat, around her heart and between her lungs and chest wall were studded with pockets of air, an X-ray confirmed, and her lungs were very slightly collapsed.

The doctors were confused until she said that shed been screaming for hours the night before at the Dallas stop on One Directions Where We Are Tour. The exertion, they hypothesised, had forced open a small hole in her respiratory tract. It wasnt really a big deal she was given extra oxygen and kept overnight for observation and she required no follow-up treatment. But the incident was described in all its absurd, gory detail in a paper published in the Journal of Emergency Medicine three years later. The lead physician wrote that such a case had yet to be described in the medical literature. Doctors were familiar with military pilots, scuba divers and weightlifters straining their respiratory tract, but this case presented the first evidence that forceful screaming during pop concerts could have the same physical toll.This was a novelty news item: an easy headline and a culturally salient joke about the overzealousness of teenage girls. It was parody made real and recorded with the deepest of seriousness, for all time, in a medical journal. I know nothing else about the girl who loved One Direction so much that she collapsed her lungs over it. Her doctor wrote to me that hed asked, at the time, for her permission to tweet at TV host Jimmy Fallon about the incident hed argued that maybe she would get to meet One Direction. But she was too bashful!!!! Classic teenager, he said, adding a laugh-crying emoji.

Ill never know who she is or hear her personal explanation of what made her scream so much. In this specific circumstance, thats because of medical privacy laws, which are good. But its also emblematic of a bigger lack: we have seen so many screaming girls. Every time we see them, were like, Theyre screaming. And thats it. Yet the screaming fan doesnt scream for nothing and screaming isnt all the fan is doing. It never has been.

At Harryween, Harry Styless fancy dress party at Madison Square Garden last year, fewer girls dressed to impress in the fancy sense than in the meme sense, signalling fandom knowledge of in-jokes and stories more than a desire to look attractive. My sister dressed as Harry Styles working in a bakery in England in the 00s, while I dressed as the shrine that one fan erected at the site where Styles vomited beside the 101 freeway in Los Angeles in 2014. Of course, part of my costume was confiscated by arena security because if you let one piece of posterboard into the arena youll end up letting a chaotic amount of posterboard into the arena and no one will be able to see the show.

Reports about screaming girl fans like those from Styless current tour, which kicked off last week in Glasgow have rarely, if ever, noticed these kind of subtleties. When the Beatles visited Dublin for the first time, in 1963, the New York Times reported that young limbs snapped like twigs in a tremendous free-for-all. When they arrived in New York City in February 1964 a little more than a month into the US-radio-chart reign of I Want to Hold Your Hand there were 4,000 fans (and 100 cops) waiting at the airport and reports of a wild-eyed mob in front of the Plaza Hotel.

Nearly all of the writing about the Beatles in mainstream American publications was done by established white male journalists. Al Aronowitz, the rock critic best known for introducing the Beatles to Bob Dylan and to marijuana (simultaneously) in the summer of 1964, reported that 2,000 fans mobbed the locked metal gates of Union Station when the Beatles performed in Washington DC. Then, when the Beatles came to Miami, 7,000 teenagers created a four-mile-long traffic jam at the airport and fans shattered 23 windows and a plateglass door. A plateglass door!

Being a fan is very much associated with feminine excess, with working-class people, people of colour, people whose emotions are seen as being out of control, Allison McCracken, an associate professor and director of the American-studies programme at DePaul University, told me. Everything is set up against this idea of white straight masculinity, where the emotions are in control and the body is in control.

McCracken is an expert on the history of the crooner in American culture and her 2015 book, Real Men Dont Sing, credits Rudy Valle and Bing Crosby with making the blueprint for a pop sensation in the late 1920s and early 30s. McCracken visited the American Radio Archives, in Thousand Oaks, California, to see Valles personal archive of fan letters, dating back to 1928. She was fascinated by the way the women who were writing to him were surprised by their own emotional reactions to his music and were confused by the idea of falling in love with a voice theyd heard only over the radio. They were responding to his voice and saying, I dont understand why Im so happy and joyous and why youre moving me so much, she said. They were writing to him and saying, Can you explain whats happening to me?

Though psychologists had in the early 1900s started describing adolescence as a unique stage of life, the word teenager itself wasnt widely used until the late 1940s, McCracken explained, and the most eager speakers of the term were also marketers. They realised in the postwar boom years that far fewer kids were dropping out of school to earn money for their families and that far more were being given allowances and plenty of leisure time. The 1950s and 60s saw more and more products marketed explicitly to teenagers, often reinforcing the idea that they were a distinct group of people with a separate identity from their parents and with the rise of teen-marketed products came teen-oriented TV shows during which they could be advertised.

So long as teens existed as a lucrative market category, the industry would supply them with a teenybopper idol. When these idols were written about by journalists and critics, it was often with full acquiescence to their marketing, tinged with disdain. This was the case as recently as 2010, when the idol was Justin Bieber. When he performed his first sold-out show at Madison Square Garden that September, the New York Times music critic Jon Caramanica titled his review Send in the Heart-throbs, Cue the Shrieks and wrote that Bieber teased the crowd with flashes of direct emotional manipulation.

Two years later, One Direction were battling Bieber for the No 1 spot on the US charts, and in the hearts of American teenagers, and Caramanica started reviewing the bands output with equal attentiveness. He called their 2012 second album, Take Me Home, a reliable shriek-inducer in girls who have not yet decided that shrieking doesnt become them. He panned the bands 2013 album, Midnight Memories, writing: They play the part almost resentfully, with the mien of people who know better Whether this is transparent to the squealers who make up their fanbase is tough to tell.

This idea that fans are an amorphous mass and that culture is something that happens to all of them in the same way can be traced back to Theodor Adorno, whose 1938 essay, cited in the New York Timess coverage of Beatlemania, described fans at live music performances as empty vessels: Their ecstasy is without content. Adornos work has been the starting point for the past 70 years of pop culture analysis, perhaps right up until the 1990s when cultural historian Daniel Cavicchi spent three years interviewing Bruce Springsteen fans about where their love of Bruce had come from and how it had coloured their lives for his book Tramps Like Us. At the time it was still up for serious debate whether the adoration of a pop star turned a person into an idiot. The cultural anxiety around popular culture then which has relaxed now, even if it hasnt totally disappeared was that it was a homogenising force that turned every participant into a mindless consumer. But in speaking to hundreds of fans, Cavicchi found something different. These people were exploiting the ultra-popular things they loved in order to become more completely themselves. Springsteen fans do not indicate that popular culture is shaping their identity but rather that they are shaping their identity with popular culture, he wrote.

What many commentators couldnt or wouldnt see was that fans have not just passively enjoyed or loudly desired the objects of their fandom. Theyve also edited them and recirculated them and used them as the inspiration for a range of creative works on and offline. The art, the stories, the fan fiction and the in-jokes are as much a part of what it means to be a fan as staking out an airport or memorising dozens of songs. Fans transform their own image by playing with expectations and flouting the rules; dress themselves up in the spirit of Harry Styles indulging in elaborate cosplay as an expression of devotion that is also a prolonged creative exercise. When Styles started wearing blouses and pearls and high-waisted trousers, so did they. They bought old-school rocker platform boots or knitted their own sweaters in the styles of his expensive, designer ones and expressed their fandom through aesthetic iteration.

Theres something else the critics didnt realise: fan girls are funny. In 1964, a group of girls in Encino, California, founded an organisation they called Beatlesaniacs Ltd. It was advertised as group therapy and offered withdrawal literature for fans of the Beatles who felt that their emotions had got out of hand. In a 1964 issue of Life magazine, the group is covered credulously. (The spread on Beatlemania features a full-page image of a girl kneeling on the ground, grass clenched in her hand, tears streaming down her face whether or not she was actually thinking, Ringo! Ringo walked on this grass!, that is how the photo is captioned.) The club is mentioned in a small sidebar, entitled How to Kick the Beatle Habit. What Beatlesaniacs Ltd offers is group therapy and withdrawal literature, it reads. Its membership card immediately identifies the bearer as someone who needs help.

The club was obviously a joke. Its rules included such items as Do not mention the word Beatles (or beetles), Do not mention the word England. But nobody is primed to see self-critique or sarcasm in fans. Seeing them toy with their own image or recognise their own condition contradicts the popular image that has circulated for the past 100 or so years.

Take the story of the shrine to Harry Styless vomit. The facts are these: in October 2014, Styles went to a party at the British pop singer Lily Allens house in Los Angeles. The next morning, riding in a chauffeured Audi, in his gym clothes, on the way back from a very long hike, he requested that the driver pull over. On the side of the 101 freeway, just outside Calabasas, he threw up near a metal barrier, looked up and locked eyes with a camera.

The day they were taken, the photos circulated in tabloids and online, and a few hours later, a Los Angeles-based 18-year-old named Gabrielle Kopera set out to find the spot and label it for posterity. She taped a piece of posterboard to the barrier: Harry Styles threw-up here 10-12-14, she wrote in big letters. The grainy photo she posted first to her own Instagram circled the globe. It is referenced in articles about the moment Harry Styles knew hed made it, which was supposedly the moment someone told him his vomit had been scooped off the ground and was up for sale on eBay.

At the time she took the shot, Kopera was bored: she didnt have the money for a four-year university course so shed stayed home to work and to study at a local community college while most of her friends moved away. Being a fan of Styles and One Direction made her feel as if she had something to do that wasnt a chore.

She was surprised and confused by the way her photo was covered in the media, as if it was something more bizarre than a comedy routine she was performing, primarily with herself as the audience. It was more a joke about my life than his, she told me.

By the end of One Direction, the medias treatment of the bands music and its fans had changed significantly. In part, this was because of a rise in the estimation of pop music among critics and a new focus among content makers on womens websites for celebrating almost everything any girl did as inspiring and empowering. Guilty pleasures were to be enjoyed, not insulted, and it was rude to call them guilty pleasures at all. It is inappropriate now to make fun of girls for screaming or boybands for existing or anybody for liking anything.

You could argue Harry Styles helped drive this cultural change when he appeared in spring 2017 on the cover of Rolling Stone, interviewed by the music journalist and Almost Famous writer-director Cameron Crowe. Whos to say that young girls who like pop music short for popular, right? have worse musical taste than a 30-year-old hipster guy? Thats not up to you to say, he told Crowe. Young girls like the Beatles. You gonna tell me theyre not serious? How can you say young girls dont get it? Theyre our future. Our future doctors, lawyers, mothers, presidents, they kind of keep the world going. He really went for it. Teenage-girl fans they dont lie. If they like you, theyre there. They dont act too cool. They like you and they tell you. Which is sick.

Im happy that he said that, because I know it meant something important to a lot of people. But its hard to celebrate the fangirls coming of age the way Id like to, because it is also being celebrated by the sort of people who will use it to make more money out of us. And its being celebrated by well-meaning people in sort of embarrassing ways as if liking a boyband is a radical political act, the same way wearing well-designed T-shirts with punchy slogans on them is a sincere expression of feminism and Pantone creating a shade of red called Period is empowering for anyone who menstruates. Not all women are our future doctors, lawyers, mothers, presidents, I would love to tell Harry Styles. Not all women keep the world going!

But alongside the overenthusiastic acceptance lies an essential truth: the little indignities and the big disappointments of being young, of not finding the love you want or of not becoming the person youd hoped these things are tempered by fandom. Fandom is an interruption; its as simple as enjoying something for no reason and its as complicated as growing up. It should be celebrated for what it can provide in individual lives. What this is, exactly, is hard to know if you dont bother to ask. Its generally much more than a scream.

Kaitlyn Tiffany is a writer at the Atlantic. This is an edited extract from her book Everything I Need I Get from You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (13.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

Read more:
The truth about screaming fangirls | Pop and rock - The Guardian

In this in-depth interview with Matt Palumbo, author of The Man Behind the Curtain: Inside the Secret Network of George Soros, he discusses the origins of billionaire George Soros and his rise to power as the shadowy figure thats seemingly pulling the strings behind the scenes in American politics. Palumbo describes the purpose of his book as an opportunity to demystify Soros through extensive documentation of his financial sway across multiple spheres of influence in western society.

Palumbo also touches on the inner workings of Soross Open Society Foundation, the interconnected web of foundations and charitable organizations from which most of his philanthropic endeavors are launched. Palumbo provides a few examples from the hundreds of organizations George Soros has contributed to that are listed in his book (Black Lives Matter, Acorn, Defund the Police) as well as a detailed list of media publications that are heavily subsidized by Soros funds.

Our conversation turns towards Soross recent push to promote radically liberal district attorneys and its ramifications on law and order in America, Soross role in the 2020 presidential election, along with his efforts to fund liberal colleges and universities throughout the country.

Stay tuned for our newsletter so you wont miss out on our exclusive videos and private events.

Listen to Podcasts:iTunes Podcast: https://ept.ms/FactsMatterApplePodcastSpotify Podcast: https://ept.ms/FactsMatterSpotifyPodcastGoogle Podcast: https://ept.ms/FactsMatterGooglePodcast

Follow Facts Matter on social media:Twitter: https://twitter.com/FactsMatterRBTruth Social: https://truthsocial.com/@FactsMatterRomanGettr: https://gettr.com/user/factsmatterrbGab: https://gab.com/factsmatterromanTelegram: https://t.me/FactsMatter_RomanInstagram: @epoch.times.roman

Click the Save button below the video to access it later on My List.

Follow EpochTV on social media:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/EpochTVusRumble: https://rumble.com/c/EpochTVTruth Social: https://truthsocial.com/@EpochTV

Gettr: https://gettr.com/user/epochtvFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/EpochTVusGab: https://gab.com/EpochTVTelegram: https://t.me/EpochTV

Excerpt from:
How Soros Spent $18B to Control the Media, Defund the Police, and Elect Liberal Prosecutors - The Epoch Times

Fifteen vulnerabilities affecting Siemens SINEC network management system (NMS) were unveiled this week, according to new research published by security company Claroty.

The bugs affect all versions before V1.0 SP2 Update 1 and Siemens urged users to update their versions as soon as possible.

Noam Moshe, vulnerability researcher with Claroty, told The Record that the most concerning of the 15 vulnerabilities which include denial-of-service attacks, credential leaks, and remote code execution in certain circumstances revolve around CVE-2021-33723 and CVE-2021-33722.

Moshe noted that network management systems are used to centrally monitor, manage, and configure industrial networks with tens of thousands of devices. They are used widely in industrial automation across several industries, including manufacturing, oil and gas, electrical grids, and more.

Most concerning is the chaining of CVE-2021-33723 and CVE-2021-33722, which creates a powerful exploit that could give an attacker elevated permissions on the SINEC system to NT AUTHORITYSYSTEM, full system access, Moshe said.

From there, an attacker could remotely execute code and also compromise other Siemens devices on the network managed by SINEC.

In a report on the vulnerabilities, Claroty showed how CVE-2021-33723 can be used to gain administrative access and CVE-2021-33722 can then be exploited to instigate a breach.

Siemens SINEC is an NMS built for OT networks and designed for centrally monitoring, managing, and configuring Siemens devices. The SINEC system is configured with all the necessary credentials for the devices in the network so it can communicate, monitor and eventually control the remote devices in the network.

Operators use SINEC to perform firmware upgrades or query the status of remote devices in the network from network switches to Siemens PLCs. It is also used to control and maintain other ICS related equipment.

From an attackers perspective, conquering the NMS is key to getting a strong foothold in the network, Moshe explained.

This is because the attacker could use the normal NMS functionality to take control over network devices by changing firmwares, shutting down remote devices, or even moving across the network while hacking the same remote devices that the SINEC system manages.

Some of the other vulnerabilities discovered, like CVE-2021-33727, authenticate an attacker so they can download the profile of any user, allowing them to leak confidential information. CVE-2021-33733 gives attackers the ability to execute arbitrary commands in the local database by sending crafted requests to the webserver of the affected application.

Other industrial control security experts agreed with Moshes assessment that CVE-2021-33723 and CVE-2021-33722 are the most concerning of the 15 vulnerabilities.

Nozomi Networks Roya Gordon said the two bugs are worrying because they are the beginning of the chain of vulnerabilities in which successful exploitation of the two CVEs allows for the exploitation of the other 13 CVEs.

I will say that whenever you see a blog announcing a vulnerability and it includes the vendor advisory, thats a good sign. It means that there is a fix you can implement right away to prevent all possible exploits, Gordon said.

These vulnerabilities allow a threat actor to gain admin rights to the system and pretty much do whatever they want. They can even Live off the Land, which is a technique threat actors use to erase their steps, making it difficult for IR responders to trace their activity. This also makes it easier for the attacker to remain in the system undetected before even executing an attack, because they appear to be a privileged user. A threat actor with admin capabilities lurking in an OT environment is very alarming.

Ron Fabela, CTO of SynSaber, told The Record that the core vulnerabilities are in not only the control system applications themselves, but also with those subsystems that manage them.

If an adversary has network access to industrial control systems, they often do not need to exploit vulnerabilities in order to impact or disrupt operations, Fabela explained.

Fabela added that the NMS in this case could be a treasure trove of information and control, undoing network segmentation that may be in place and allowing deeper infiltration of the control system network.

Jonathan has worked across the globe as a journalist since 2014. Before moving back to New York City, he worked for news outlets in South Africa, Jordan and Cambodia. He previously covered cybersecurity at ZDNet and TechRepublic.

Originally posted here:
15 vulnerabilities discovered in Siemens industrial control management system - The Record by Recorded Future