Dancing with Viruses

There are several measles cases in Waterloo Region. As of last week there were currently over 60 cases in nearby Wellington/Guelph, and over 1,300 in Ontario since October.

Measles is like Covid in that there's an incubation period in which people have no symptoms but are contagious. Viruses are stealthy! For measles, it's 7-12 days from exposure to symptoms like fever or cough, so it's really important to track cases and isolate if potentially exposed. For Covid, it can be 5-7 days before it's picked up by a rapid test, and you can have it and spread it without any symptoms at all. Both cause serious complications, including brain infection, and leads to death in about 1 or 2 in 1,000 people. 

Both can be prevented with an N95.

The biggest difference between these viruses is that getting vaccinated is extremely good protection for measles, but not for Covid. If you got your measles shots, you're very likely completely protected. Unfortunately, vaccination rates are plummeting. We need to have at least 94% of the population vaccinated to create herd immunity and keep measles at bay, and Ontario is hovering in the 70s since Covid started and anti-vaxx nonsense got a platform. Vaccination against Covid does a lot to keep people out of the hospital, but it doesn't prevent getting and spreading the disease because, like the flu, Covid mutates all the flippin' time. Measles is just measles, but Covid could be delta, or alpha, or one of many omicron variants, or whatever's going on now. It changes so much I stopped keeping track. The more it spreads, the more it mutates, and we're doing nothing to stop the spread. 

Fauci explained all this years ago:

Yes, Covid is still here and spreading. Recently Jeff Bridges said he's managing lymphoma (blood cancer) fine, but on dealing with long term effects of Covid: "My dance with Covid makes my cancer look like a piece of cake." He caught the virus at the facility where he got his  chemo. His is not an unusual case. Nosocomial infections are relatively common now that many hospitals dropped masks in all areas, even where they had worn them for decades, like the NICU. One doctor continues to try to teach her colleagues about the risk as she watches them get sick repeatedly, some with Long Covid. "I believe all doctors have a duty of care to learn about Covid."  

Wearing a mask is simply playing the long game. 

A recent study in BC found that 18.7% of people with Covid had Long Covid symptoms causing work productivity concerns "comparable to the burden associated with chronic migraine, multiple sclerosis, and rheumatoid arthritis." The difference between Covid and these conditions is that Covid is preventable with N95s and air cleaners.

We know all this, but still so many don't really get it. I still get Covid shots every year, and my pharmacists tell me the number of shots I've had, incredulously, and I ask why she isn't also counting and commenting on the number of flu shots I've had in my life. It's the same type of mutating virus with a shot that has a very short duration of effectiveness. 

Erin Biba tells this story: 

Got into a fight with a NURSE who we asked to give us a little distance when we were at a picnic table eating. We told her we’re were trying to be Covid safe because I’m at risk. She said I should have just stayed home. I said at risk people should be socially isolated and lonely? AND SHE SAID YES. AND SHE STARTED FILMING ME. You guys I am so upset. I just want to exist in the world. I just want to be able to have a picnic with my mom. We drove an hour to find a place that wasn’t crowded. And we could be granted even the TINIEST ASK of being given a little space for our safety. 

The world just hates disabled people so fucking much. They just want us to not exist. They don’t want to see us or know about us. We’re just completely worthless to them and worse we’re a hindrance. They just want us to disappear. There’s no room for us in the world. My life has been completely ruined by COVID. Totally destroyed. I have very few friends left. My ability to exist has been diminished exponentially. And now I’m being filmed like some Karen throwing a privileged white lady fit because I asked to have a little distance for my safety. What are my fucking options!!?!!?????!?! What is left for me?!?! I can’t even drive an hour and find a less crowded park? So what I should just die and save everyone the inconvenience of my existence???? I WANT MY FUCKING LIFE BACK I WANT A FUCKING FUTURE I WANT TO BE ALLOWED TO EXIST IN YHE WORLD I just feel so fucking hopeless all the time.And worse because I couldn’t control my emotions and just quietly leave now I’m the one who’s hysterical. I’m the one who they’re laughing and pointing at and calling a crazy bitch. I just can’t take this shit anymore I just can’t. And I’m gonna lose followers now too because every time I post about disability people leave. Because you hate us so much you not only don’t want to see us you don’t want to hear us either.I don’t know how I’m going to get over this.

We're all one Covid infection away from disability. But maskers are not alone. When the indie band Deerhoof went on tour, they posted this on all their social media accounts: 

Indeed, Deerhoof requests that everyone mask at our indoor shows. But! It's not such a bad idea to wear a mask at *any* band's indoor shows, whether they request it or not... Catching covid from your fans means cancelling the rest of your tour, and eating the cost. Not being able to pay your rent. Developing long covid symptoms means not being able to work at all for maybe two years... It's not just about us! We like our shows to be accessible to everyone, including the disabled. Stats say that right now 1 in 40 americans is infectious with covid. Our audience is usually between 150-500 people per night. Please wear a mask.

No Deerhoof isn't special in this sense. It's true we have an immunocompromised member, and that each of us takes care of our elderly parents. But covid is extraordinarily unhelpful to *any* musician's ability to work! The CDC caved long ago to pressure from the Davos set (who still mask at *their own* events by the way) and don't emphasize masks anymore. But until there is a vaccine that actually prevents covid, an N95 is still our best protection... Covid causes heart attacks, brain damage, it destroys the human immune system, and about 1000 americans are unnecessarily dying from it per week. It spreads by catching it... You don't always know if you have it! Sometimes initial symptoms are mild or non-existent. But initial symptoms have no correlation to how severe it will be for whoever catches it from you, nor whether you develop long covid. 

We love compliments. They are so fun. But if you come up to us after the show without a mask, don't be offended if we keep our distance. We want/need to finish our tour and catching covid will make that impossible. Since Biden declared the pandemic "over" in a pathetic attempt to improve polling numbers, bands can't require masks. All we can do is make social media posts. Public health is up to all of us.

We live in pretty weird times when some actors and musicians are on this in ways many medical professions are not.

Please Vote!!

Let's see if we can avoid our own Timbit Trump tomorrow!! If you're not sure of the best candidate to beat the cons in your riding, check out Smart Voting!  

Prime Minister Carney said of Poilievre yesterday, 

"It's easy to be negative when you've never fixed anything. It's easy to be negative when you've never built anything. It's easy to be negative when you're a career politician who has never accomplished anything." 

Taylor Noakes, agrees that Poilievre has accomplished nothing during his twenty years in Parliament:

"This isn't as much a political party as it is a ChatGPT-based slogan-generating algorithm speaking through the mouth of everyone's least favourite muppet. . . . The Conservatives have essentially made 'Fuck Trudeau' their ideology, and the average Conservative voter has made it their core identity. ... The Conservative Party have placed strict limits on who is allowed to ask him questions, and have further tried to prevent journalists from talking to party supporters and local candidates. ... According to a report by LaPress, Poilievre seems to have the loosest grasp on facts and the truth, as the publication found that he lied, embellished or misled far more than any of the other candidates during last week's debate. ... He has voted against the environment and climate 400 times ... against the Canadian Dental Care Plan, $10 a day daycare, the National School Food Program, the Canada Child Benefit, and raising the federal minimum wage ... against a proposed first-home savings account and a proposal to build four million new homes."

The Rise of Unreason

The Ontario Health Coalition put out a press release a couple weeks ago about the sharp increase in people infected with measles here. There were 816 cases from October 2024 to April, then 155 new cases from April 3-11. Our immunization rates are lower than most of Europe -- only 70% of kids have typical childhood vaccinations. Vaccination rates were reduced dramatically in 2020. "This is a Public Health failure that must be addressed with the utmost urgency." 

David Fisman recently wrote about it: 

Balancing Individual Rights and Community Health Requires Knowledge of History

Ontario is in the midst of a measles outbreak, and our Chief Medical Officer of Health (CMOH) is taking a “you do you” approach. No mandates. No strong guidance. Just a gentle suggestion that people make informed decisions…if they choose to. It’s a startling response given public health’s long history of collective action, and at times, authoritarianism. 

That authoritarianism wasn’t a bug of early public health. It was a feature. Modern public health emphasizes individual rights, but those rights can come into tension with the community’s right to health, especially during outbreaks of communicable diseases. Institutional public health grew out of fear. 

Yalom on Approaching Meaning

About 45 years ago, psychiatrist Irvin Yalom estimated that a good 30-50% of all cases of depression might actually be a crisis of meaninglessness, an existential sickness, and these cases require a different method of treatment. We experience this lack of purpose as boredom, apathy, or emptiness. We are "not told by instinct what one must do, or any longer by tradition what one should do. Nor does one know what one wants to do," so we feel lost and directionless. Instead of addressing meaninglessness as the problem, though, we've been merely addressing the symptoms of it: addictions, compulsions, obsessions, malaise. In today's context, it might suggest that even social media issues could be problems with a lack of meaning. 

The last sentences of his lengthy tome, Existential Psychotherapy, sum up his solution: "The question of meaning in life is, as the Buddha taught, not edifying. One must immerse oneself in the river of life and let the question drift away." How he lands here is an intriguing path through a slew of philosophers and psychiatrists. Even without symptoms of a problem, attention to meaning is necessary as it gives birth to values, which become principles to live by as we place behaviours into our own hierarchy of acceptability. 

"One creates oneself by a series of ongoing decisions. But one cannot make each and every decision de novo throughout one's life; certain superordinate decisions must be made that provide an organizing principle for subsequent decisions." 

Yalom doesn't, however, suggest coming up with a list of values that can become meaningful to us, but that we immerse ourselves in life to become more aware of which values we already have. 

WHAT'S THE POINT? IT'S FOR US TO DECIDE

According to Yalom, we've hit this crisis point in meaninglessness because we have the leisure to think and because our work is no longer clearly purposeful, both of which are relatively recent experiences for such a large proportion of civilization. It's no longer just the philosophers of the day asking, What's it all for? What's the point of it all? He takes the existential position that it's up to us to figure it out. 

Orange Monday or MAGA Monday?

Time will tell which name will go down in history books. But April 7, 2025 will be up there with Black Monday (October 19, 1987) and Black Thursday (October 18, 1929).

Trump wants everyone to just calm down, already, in his own ever-weirdly worded way. But he said this just before millions of Americans died of Covid, too. 

So, Tariffs, Amiright?

Round of tariffs for all, except Russia.

I have a friend in the states who isn't worried about any of this stuff. "Big businesses will stop it," she says. She expects 3-6 months of wavering, max, then corporations will push back enough that things will settle down. It's all just posturing. She has a lot of faith in the markets and in this administration's willingness to be pushed. But okay. Maybe.

I suggested the tariff threats have already changed everything, and she was surprised to hear about American products being taken off the shelves or indicated in some way to help us avoid purchasing them, and that travel between our countries is down 70%. We don't want American stuff anymore, and we'll avoid it as much as we can. 

One analogy that rings true: 

"Imagine one of your friends points a loaded handgun at your face, and then immediately goes, 'nah man, just joking lol'. No matter how short a time that was, you're still not gonna ever trust that motherfucker again. It will have permanently altered your relationship. Anyway, tariffs on penguins."

Public Health Needs to be Independent

 David Fisman posted a thread yesterday about problems when big money gets involved in public health.

"During Covid, I experienced firsthand how political pressure twisted science—and nearly destroyed reputations. A short thread on conflict-of-interest theatre, redacted emails, and lessons we still haven’t learned. 

In January 2021, I was publicly accused by Ontario’s Premier of having a conflict of interest due to paid consulting work I did for the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario (ETFO). The suggestion was that I’d influenced school closure advice. What wasn’t shared? Internal emails—later released via FOI—show this was a manufactured controversy. The allegations didn’t reflect what officials knew privately. And that story deserves to be told. 

On Jan 26, 2021, Heather Watt (Chief of Staff to Health Minister Christine Elliott) drafted messaging about the “conflict.” She sent it to Steini Brown—my dean at the University of Toronto, and chair of the Science Advisory Table—for input. Steini replied carefully. He pushed back, noting: “There’s no direct line between David working for ETFO, us giving you advice to close schools, and you following it.” His reply was initially redacted in FOI responses. Journalist Jack Hauen appealed the redaction—and won. He sent me the full, unredacted email when requesting comment. It showed that the internal view did not support the public claims being made about me. Steini also wrote: “He is merely one of dozens of scientists working on a volunteer basis and does not speak for the group in his work for ETFO.” That’s a very different story than what was spun publicly. 

Disappearance of the Rule of Law

Charlie Angus talked about Canada-US relations on Meidas Touch: "We're thinking, if we go down the road with this regime, we're talking about the disappearance of the rule of law, and that's deeply offensive to us." 

Rule of law goes at least as far back as the Magna Carta over 800 years ago. It means that everyone is under the law, including the king. Even a president! Even in the US they overtly seek "the government of laws and not of men," and make that clear in the 5th and 14th amendments. John Adams feared the "vulgar rich": To ennoble the new regime, the most talented must be made to serve their country, rather than their selfish desires. Adams thought offering fancy titles would satiate their quest for power, taking a page from Rousseau: "the role of illustrious offices and signs of rank in countering the popular passion for material wealth." But that's not enough for this crew. They have no respect for rule of law. 

Human rights will always be pushed by those who hope to exploit a situation or group of people, and we need to be there to push back. Over and over and over again. I used this 5 minute explanation of the history of human rights in my grade 10 civics classes:

The important bit is at the end, that we have to KEEP fighting for our rights. There will always be people trying to amass power and override the law, and we have to be ready for that, en masse, to stop it. 

Monbiot on Capitalism vs Commerce

 George Monbiot wrote today, 

"One of capitalism's greatest successes is to shut down our imaginations. With the help of its favoured tools - neoliberalism and fascism - it persuades us that 'there is no alternative'. Our first task is to re-ignite our moral imaginations and name our alternatives. I cannot count the number of times I've been told, 'if you're against capitalism, you must be a communist,' or 'you must be a feudalist'. In fact, as in my case, you can be fiercely oopposed to capitalism, to communism, and to feudalism. It helps if you undertstand what capitalism is. This means recognizing that it's true nature is endlessly disguised. It's a distinct economic system which arose around 600 years ago. In The Invisible Doctrine, we give this definition:

Capitalism is not the same as commerce. The Dutch VOC and the British East India Company were not trading with the people whose land, labour and resources they seized. Nor were the slavers in the Caribbean and the Americas. Nor is investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) commerce: nations are forced to surrender resources to corporations or pay compensations. Nor is conversion of rainforests to cattle ranches or  extraction of deep-sea minerals. No one's freely trading or being properly remunerated in such cases. Yes, colonial looters might then trade the wealth they steal: capitalism can intersect with commerce, and can overrun commerce, but it is not the same. 

Bearing Witness

 Brandon Friedman wrote an important thread about what we do now. Here it is in full:

"This is a German woman being marched past the bodies of Holocaust victims. After World War II, it was common refrain among German civilians: They just didn't know. For that reason, many were forced by Allied troops to bear witness. Like this. 

I bring this up because fascism is now here, in America. 

If you're thinking, "but it doesn't feel like fascism, nothing in my life seems amiss," then congratulations, you have discovered what fascism is like. 

Avoiding the Sausage Machine

click to read

I attended an excellent masterclass on "Trans-Inclusive Philosophy" with Sophie Grace Chappell last week, put on by The Philosopher magazine. She wrote Epiphanies and Transfigured, and this paper will be coming out in a collection soon. She discussed system-building in a way that lit some lightbulbs for me. I was waiting for the video to be posted before writing about it, but, in lieu of that, here's my transcription of it. 

She starts by responding to a call to build a theory of what gender, transgender, and gender identity are, and she clarifies the problems with gate-keeping off the bat. People will demand that before anyone's allowed to claim they're trans, they first have to define male and female, and she likens this to saying before you can sit on a chair and drink some tea, you first need to establish the necessary and sufficient conditions for chair and for tea, which is just ridiculous and very dangerous.

More interesting to me is her second argument, that defining what counts as transgender butts up against bigger problems with any system building. She prioritizing experience over theory because any attempt at an overarching trans theory will inevitably leave someone out. She has her own idea of what fits her, but it won't fit everyone, and other people might have great definitions for themselves, but they don't entirely fit her, either. 

Things May Appear Bleak, And Yet...

Byung-Chul Han's The Spirit of Hope is a beautiful book, the kind you want to treat with care and won't dare dog-ear a page. Anselm Kiefer's illustrations throughout provide a place for contemplative moments between ideas. It's more immediately accessible than The Burnout Society, which took me weeks to wrap my head around, yet no less profound. 

A REVOLUTIONARY POLITICS OF HOPE

We like a secure illusion of control over the world, yet that hasn't gotten us much further along. We recognize something's missing. Han writes, "Amid problem-solving and crisis management, life withers. It becomes survival. … It is hope that opens up a meaningful horizon" (2). 

Han explains how a lack of hope furthers the current neoliberal capitalist trajectory: 

"Fear and resentment drive people into the arms of the right-wing populists. They breed hate. Solidarity, friendliness and empathy are eroded. … Democracy flourishes only in an atmosphere of reconciliation and dialogue. … Hope provides meaning and orientation. Fear, by contrast, stops us in our tracks. … Hope is eloquent. It narrates. Fear, by contrast, is incapable of speech, incapable of narration" (2-3). 

The Flies Have Conquered the Flypaper

Steinbeck's The Moon is Down was first published in 1942, before he was sent off to fight. As a journalist, he enlisted in order to be in the thick of thing to write with authenticity. This may be a book for our times, unfortunately. It's about a town invaded by enemy forces.

It's a short read, but also captured fairly well in the movie, made just the following year, with Henry Travers (Clarence in It's a Wonderful Life). Of course it's a hopeful read as the town fights back, but it's also terrifying for what they endure. 

 

And then I watched Shame, which might be a more realistic depiction of what it is to live with the beginnings of invasion as sides get confusing and people betray one another.  

Possibly I'm looking for instruction of how to be when another country threatens invasion, what it looks like to be courageous in the face of real danger, but I may well be just torturing myself! I'm also reading Byung-Chul Han's The Spirit of Hope as a healthy antidote to the gloom.

Still Not at the Finish Line

Jon Douglas, who wrote In It for the Long Haul, shared a series of papers that were discussed at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) that just wrapped up this week. A few caught my eye, but Douglas summarized tons at that link:

French researchers analyzed blood samples from 100 Long Covid patients, 60 recovered Covid cases, and 60 uninfected controls to identify immune and metabolic biolmarkers that diagnosed Long Covid with 99% accuracy. 

Researchers in the Netherlands treated 16 severely immunocompromised patients with persistent Covid-19 using off-label nirmatrelvir/ritonavir, and 75% had viral clearance within 28 days. 

Barcelona researchers studied 130 children and young people three months after Covid-19 and found that those with Long Covid had more autoantibodies and inflammatory markers, suggesting immune system involvement. 

Researchers in another study used brain MRI to compare 23 people with cognitive Long Covid to 19 without symptoms, and they found less gray matter in regions tied to memory, speech, and executive function, plus white matter changes in key memory pathways.

Beyond the conference, Pfizer is testing a new Covid-19 antiviral, Ibuzatrelvir, and is currently in Phase 3 trials. It doesn't taste as bad as Paxlovid, has fewer drug interactions, and is designed to be more stable, so easier to prescribe. Hopefully that means more than just those over 65 can access it in Ontario.

Never Again?

All this tariff talk is provoking a recession, which seems to be a feature, not a bug. As the economy falls, companies go bankrupt and are cheap to take over by the wealthy. The very rich will be able to take advantage of desperate times to buy businesses and property, and then are even further ahead when (or if) the economy rebounds. More power. More control. More stuff. The suffering of the citizens is not a concern. At all. 

This entire scheme was kick-started back in 1971 by the Powell Memorandum. Chomsky and Chris Hedges have been talking about this forever. And, of course, Ralph Nader. It's the precursor to disaster capitalism. Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell wrote a memo attacking "extremists" like Nader who was doing things like trying to get cars to add seatbelts to improve traffic safety. The Memorandum is a push to allow unfettered capitalism without any regulations because, as far as Powell was concerned, businessmen really own the country. They pushed for more business involvement in colleges and universities way back then.  

A couple days ago, Senator Chris Murphy clearly outlined the corruption in the White House. It's all out in the open BECAUSE THEY CAN. Like in Russia, few in positions of power dare call them on it. 

"Trump and Elon Muck and their billionaire friends have engaged in a stunning rampage of open public corruption. It's not fundamentally different than what happened in Russia. These are efforts to steal from the American people to enrich themselves, and their strategy is to do it all out in the open. ...  

Over Five Years of Covid

David Wallace-Wells has a piece in the New York Times about hitting the five-year mark with Covid (although it started in 2019, and the first case in the US was reported on January 21st). 

He seems to blame Covid for making America more divisive, but that didn't happen everywhere. Curious. He says Covid turned Americans into hyper-individualists: 

"Isolated, we saw one another first as threats and then as something less than real. Covid unfolded on screens for most Americans, and although the experience was in many ways collective, everyone's screens were different: Some showed overflowing morgues, others revealing a sham. Soon, we began to worry less about how our actions affected others and more about how their affected us--a sense of interdependence giving way to anomie, atomization and entitlement."

On Weaponizing Empathy

Lots of people struggle with boundaries; luckily there are many little sayings along the lines of "not my circus, not my monkey" that help people remember not to get worked up about someone else's problems.

It's a useful strategy to notice when you're getting too invested in other people's lives. It's really handy to be able to let go of how people perceive you or whether or not they like you. We have a strong need for belonging, and we can sometimes be easily guilted into taking on the burdens of others just to get a little taste of perceived connection. So, sure, if it's not your fault or responsibility, then it's not your problem. 

There's a "Let Them" poem (by Cassie Phillips) that blew up then got somewhat plagiarized into a book deal for Mel Robbins. (I actually only clicked on that video because I somehow thought it was about the very funny comedian Mel Giedroyc! The thumbnail looked a bit like her, and, apparently, I didn't actually know her last name! But then I got hooked by the content.) Robbins' daughter used the phrase "let them" to talk her mom out of nosing in to her son's plans for prom. This is a great philosophy to shut down the busybodies in your life, but I can't imagine those two words flushed out into an entire book, and you could get this, and so much more, from books on Buddhism or Stoicism. I'm clearly not the target audience.

Accepting Difference

I recently watched the lovely film, A Real Pain, about two cousins (played by Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin) who travel to Poland to visit their departed grandmother’s home. In the first 20 minutes of the movie we’re shown two dramatically different personalities, both neurotic in their own way, but one more inward and the other laser focused on other people. It’s in our vernacular to understand the characters as introverted and extraverted, but there is still disagreement over what that means and, more importantly, what to do with that information.

I think we’ve veered off course since Jung’s Psychological Types, now over a century old, the precursor to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and more recently the Five-Factor Model (FFM) or “Big Five.” There are lots of other personality inventories like John Holland’s six Personal-Orientation types, Arthur Brooks’ mad scientists, cheerleaders, poets, and judges, and Martin Seligman’s top five strengths, but MBTI and FFM seem to have sticking power.

Neither Lazy nor Stupid, but Unfortunately Conned

Well, this sucks. At times like this, like when Mike Harris got in a second time, I think of Rousseau's bit, "When the opinion that is contrary to my own prevails, this proves neither more nor less than that I was mistaken, and that what I thought to be the general will was not so," and how much I disagree with that sentiment. I don't believe this is really what Ontario wants.

Data from Elections Ontario

Conservatives and Liberals were up a bit, and a few more people voted than last time despite the weather warnings in some areas, yet even with the consistency with the last election, I still can't believe people want the type of government that dismantles healthcare and iconic structures and natural habitat so openly and vividly: 

Democracy Requires Participation

Just 18% of registered voters was enough to give Ford a majority back in June 2022 because so many people stayed home. The polls predict another Con win, but screw the polls! Get out and show them they're wrong!! 

Last time, there was slim pickings all around. This time we have much better choices. Social media and mainstream media has been almost completely taken over by the billionaire class, feeding bullshit to the masses, and Ford is all in with Musk. If Ford wins this time, I think it will be because of people believing their lies because it's all they see. So tell your friends and neighbours about his actual shenanigans. He's not the man of the people; he's in it for himself. 

Some recent highlights:

CANADA-US 

Check out Ford's "strategic alliance" with the US titled Building Fortress Am-Can: He plans to "Pursue enhanced collaboration between Canadian cyber security infrastructure and US counterparts," which includes designating areas of Canada with critical minerals as regions of strategic importance to the national security of Canada and the US. 

If we don't want to make Canada in line with the current US policies, we have to get Ford out of power.