Staying Informed and Sane

 Who I'm reading to get through this mess (among many others):

#1 - Timothy Snyder

Yesterday's piece, "The Logic of Destruction," should be read in full, but here are some important bits:

"The parts of the government that work to implement laws have been maligned for decades. Americans have been told that the people who provide the with services are conspirators within a 'deep state.' We have been instructed that the billionaires are the heroes. All of this work was preparatory to the coup that is going on now. ... The oligarchs have no plan to govern. They will take what they can, and disable the rest. ...They will have bet against the stock market in advance of Trump's deliberately destructive tariffs, adn will be ready to tell everyone to buy the crypto they already own. ... The economic collapse they plan is more like a reverse flood from the Book of Genesis, in which the righteous will all be submerged while the very worst ride Satan's ark. ... 

Trump's tariffs (which are also likely illegal) are there to make us poor. Trump's attacks on America's closet friends, countries such as Canada and Denmark, are there to make enemies of countries where constitutionalism works and people are prosperous. As their country is destroyed, Americans must be denied the idea that anything else is possible. ... [These oligarchs] are possessed, like millennia of tyrants before them, of fantastic dreams: they will live forever, they will go to Mars. None of that will happen; they will die here on Earth, with the rest of us, their only legacy, if we let it happen, one of ruins. They are god-level brainrotted." 

So, yikes! It doesn't look good for us here no matter how you slice it. As long as Trump is in power, Canada is in danger. Snyder calls for Trump and Vance to be impeached, but so far I don't see many standing up to him beyond Sanders and AOC. That's not enough. Beyond that, he calls for government workers to keep working until officially fired to slow the process down. Muddle up the works as long as possible. 

#2 Heather Cox Richardson

If you don't want to read the news, subscribing to her feed gets you the highlights within context and with explanation of who the players are. Yesterday she wrote about Musk's takeover of USAID with the help of six young engineers, one still in college. 

"USAID receives foreign policy guidance from the State Department. Intelligence agencies must now assume U.S. intelligence systems are insecure. ... The majority of staff in the legislative and public affairs bureau lost access to their emails, implying they've been put on admin leave although this was never communicated to them. ... USAID has a budget of more than $50 billion. ... This is money appropriated by Congress, and its payment is required by law."

Then she discussed the eradication of free trade and quotes Trudeau:

"As President John F. Kennedy said many years ago, geography has made us neighbours. History has made us friends, economics has made us partners and necessity has made us allies. .... From the beaches of Normandy to the mountains of the Korean Peninsula, from the fields of Flanders to the streets of Kandahar, Canadians have fought and died alongside you. ... During the summer of 2005, when Hurricane Katrina ravaged your great city of New Orleans, or mere weeks ago when we sent water bombers to tackle the wildfires in California. During the day the world stood still - September 11, 2001 - when we provided refuge to stranded passengers and planes, we were always there, standing with you, grieving with you, the American people. ... Together, we've built the most successful economic, military and security partnership the world has ever seen. A relationship that has been the envy of the world. ... Unfortunately, the actions taken today by the White House split us apart instead of bringing us together."

#3 Robert Reich

He posted all of Andrew Coyne's article on Trump, 

"There is no sense in understanding the depth of the disaster. This is a crisis like no other in our lifetimes. The government of the United States has been delivered into the hands of a gangster, whose sole purpose in running, besides staying out of jai, is to seek revenge on this enemies. The damage Donald Trump and his nihilist cronies can do - to America, but also to its democratic allies, and to the peace and security of the world - is incalculable. We are living in the time of Nero. 

The first six months will be a time of maximum peril. NATO must from this moment be considered effectively obsolete. ... The huge across-the-board tariffs he imposes will tank the world economy ... massive deficits, fueled by his ill-judged tax policies ... will ignite a new round of inflation. ... All my life I have been an admirer of the United States and its people. But I am frightened of it now, and I am even more frightened of them."

Today, Reich explores a potential reason for the tariffs:

"The point is the show -- so the world knows it's dealing with someone who's willing to mete out big punishments. Trump increases his power by demonstrating he has the power and is willing to use it. ... The real reason Trump stopped foreign aid is he wants to show he can. ... If Canada or Mexico retaliates, he'll retaliate against them with even bigger tariffs. ... What makes an abusive parent or spouse, or an abusive dictator, or Trump, especially terrifying? They're unpredictable. They lash out in ways that are hard to anticipate. ... How else to explain the bizarre deference -- cowardice -- we're seeing among CEOs, the media, almost all Republican and even some Democratic lawmakers? Presumably, they're all saying to themselves: "He could do anything, so let's be especially careful." ... Nearly 50 House Democrats support a bill targeting undocumented immigrants. .... We need predictability to be free. ...

The bigger his demonstrable power and the more unpredictably he wields it, the greater his ability to trade some of that power with people with huge amounts of wealth, both in the United States and elsewhere. I'm referring to America's billionaires. ... They give Trump (and his family) business deals, information, campaign money, and positive PR (propaganda). ... I'm also referring to oligarchs in Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia. ... They're eliciting extraordinary deals for Trump and his family."

#4 Paul Krugman

A few days ago he wrote about the tariffs:

"I think you have to see 'fentanyl' in this context as the equivalent of 'weapons of mass destruction' in the runup to the invasion of Iraq. ... It's just a plausible-sounding reason for a president to do what he wanted to do for other reasons -- George W. Bush wanted a splendid little war. Donald Trump just wants to impose tariffs and assert dominance. ... There's a real possibility that Trump's new tariffs will face a court challenge, and that he will lose. ... But even if these tariffs are blocked, or Trump finds some way to declare victory and call them off, the damage will be immense. ... 

In the three decades since NAFTA went into effect, North American manufacturing has evolved into a highly integrated system whose products typically contain components from all three members of the pact, which may be shipped across the borders multiple times. Manufacturers developed this system not just because tariffs were low or zero, but because they thought they had a guarantee that tariffs would stay low. ... Even if the tariffs go away, the private sector will know that they can always come back. ... North American manufacturing will disintegrate, reverting to inefficient, fragmented national industries."

#5 David Moscrop

Yesterday he wrote about his feelings of nationalism as a child that were affected by learning about our violent history. Now the threat from the U.S. is reigniting something:

"I was angry and felt immediately drawn to the cause of unity -- and retaliation. I'm not sure I'd call that a feeling of national pride, but it was one of resolve and solidarity, a feeling that there was indeed something good about this country, something worth preserving and protecting while remaining critical and, where necessary, even ashamed. ... Today, Canada remains as deeply flawed as before in our relationship with Indigenous peoples, with our weak welfare state, with our corporate oligarchy, with our inadequate plan to fight climate change, with so much more we ought to lament. But by God, I care about the peopel who live here, and I believe this is a country worth fighting for. "  

We've seen what the US did to Iraq in order to get unfettered access to their oilfields. Nobody I've read this week has mentioned this, but I wonder how much the threats are in order to get unfettered access to our water. But I suppose it could all just be about money and manifest destiny. More important, will the world come to our aid if we're treated precisely like Iraq? 

The Art of Life

Here's a nice distraction from our nutty lives: I watched this lovely film about Michael Behrens, a math prodigy who studied at MIT, then left it all at 29. Now he's 82, living in Hawaii where he can walk through the forests and swim with dolphins. He says, "I spent 13 years in the university learning how to think, and now I'm spending the rest of my life learning how not to think."

He explains that loving everything that's positive and beautiful is one strain of spirituality, but he practices perceiving everything as beautiful. It's only 38 minutes long, but I'll get to the bits I like below:

We're all separate beings, but we're also all just molecules shifting in space. Both things are true at once. While we need to work to feed and house ourselves, we don't need big goals beyond what we do today.

Norms are for Breaking

Anonymous is urging me to move on away from precautions and towards prior norms of society in a string of comments on a previous post. I had too much to say to the most recent comment, so I moved it here.

from Catherine Flynn

Anon responded for a third time (or a third Anon -- who's to say) to this point from a week ago in which I borrowed the analogy that sharing air unprotected with someone likely carrying Covid is about as wise as having sex unprotected with someone likely carrying chlamydia:

"Analogies often fail with covid. This isn’t really like seatbelts or smoking which are additions to our base state in the world. If we’re going to play analogies, then perhaps this is like setting the right speed limit for cars. People die in crashes every year. We have speed limits to limit harms. What should these speed limits be? Some might want cars abolished. Some might want German autobahns. But here we’ve set certain norms based, ostensibly, on some sort of cost/benefit ratio. The pandemic was like a pile up on the 401. Everyone had to slow down and for a while we were all stuck. But now we're back to normal speeds. Some, though, are shell shocked. “I’m not driving again!” Some are now petitioning to lower the speed limits and to educate others to the dangers of driving. It’s all good. But life goes on and things go back to the norms that were.

Still with the Immunity Debt Claims?

Two competing claims were made in the past few days on whether Long Covid should be a concern for parents of children or if children actually develop greater immunity from getting sick. Still.

In one corner, two Canadians and an American:

Dr. Lyne Filiatrault, Arijit Chakravarty, and T. Ryan Gregory wrote this week on immunity debt: 

"Infections do not build a stronger immune system. There is no lasting immunity to RSV. If you get infected one year, it does not mean you avoid it the next. ... With influenza, the virus in circulation this year is not the same as last year. ... You can get infected over and over with SARS-CoV-2. ... In the absence of public health measure to limit transmission, repeated waves of infection will continually surge through the population driven by the evolution of new variants and the waning population immunity from infection and vaccines. If you are lucky, your most recent vaccine will offer you some protection against being infected, but this protection varies from one person to the next and lasts only for a few months. ... Long-term effects [of SARS-CoV-2] are shockingly common. ... Evidence is accumulating that the virus damages our immune system."

We're Not Invincible

If an attractive person flirted with you, but then mentioned, just by the way, "I've been sexually active with someone with chlamydia, but don't worry because I don't have any symptoms," would you have unprotected sex with them??

Hopefully you're aware that people can carry and transmit chlamydia without having any symptoms of it themselves. That's true of tons of diseases. It's very true of Covid, in which almost 60% of infections come from people without symptoms (pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic). 

Hopefully, you'll also recognize that it doesn't matter how healthy you are, how many supplements or micro-nutrients you take, how much you exercise, or how smart and well-educated you are when it comes to catching an infectious disease. We have a weird association between diseases and people living in filth and squalor and ignorance, but that's likely from poverty making it very difficult to avoid exposure to other people. It's exposure to a virus that determines whether or not you catch it, not your diet. 

And just maybe you're aware that Covid isn't like a cold. It's more like polio or HIV+ or chicken pox or any number of other viruses that hibernate in the body to come out later. With polio, only 0.5% of infected people were disabled by it; most people just felt a little unwell for a bit, yet we went to town to prevent even that small number from lifelong difficulties. I'm not entirely sure why we just don't give a shit about the lowest estimate of possibly 5% of people being disabled by Covid, but there it is. 

Dr. Noor Bari further takes down the invincibility some people feel they have and believe that they can somehow bestow upon their precious children: 

"Here’s the thing. There is a neat pyramid of wood, and a pile of kindling soaked in gasoline at the base. I’m telling you it will burn, and they are telling you “there’s no evidence yet”. That is how obvious the data pointing to blood and blood vessel damage, plus brain inflammation, plus immune system damage etc of C19 looks to me. That it will cause problems. That it is even now causing problems. 

I didn’t need the data we have even now to know this would happen because we already had decades of data from other conditions that do similar things. You tell me something has activated macrophages? I’ll tell you there’ll probably be fibrosis. It really is as simple as that. We did not need to infect the world to count how many fibrosed organs there are. Endless examples (here and here). Upsetting the triad of clotting regulation is another one. 

Anyway. COVID-19 is still a problem, and it’s going to remain a problem, and pretending that your qualifications are going to protect your kid is not going to work unless you use those qualifications wisely and appreciate the whole picture. The whole picture is that humans are not well designed to tolerate chronic C19 exposure or infection. We don’t have the antioxidant and tolerance systems to deal with it for the most part. Our big delicate brains aren’t designed to be assaulted like this."

It doesn't have to be like this. 

Anomy: A Disturbance of the Collective Order

A few articles have come out recently concerned with the trajectory we're taking, particularly choices being made by young adults. But we need to acknowledge the upheaval we're currently living through to have any hope of traversing it well. 

Emile Durkheim wrote Suicide back in 1897, a lengthy report on the four ways people are provoked to give up on life: egoistic, altruistic, fatalistic, and anomic. His discussion of anomy is a useful warning for today: 

"Whenever serious readjustments take place in the social order, whether or not due to a sudden growth or to an unexpected catastrophe, men [he's talking generally of people here] are more inclined to self-destruction. .... Man's characteristic privilege is that the bond he accepts is not physical but moral; that is, social. He is governed not by a material environment brutally imposed on him, but by a conscience. ... But when society is disturbed by some painful crisis or by beneficent but abrupt transitions, it is momentarily incapable of exercising this influence. ... Appetites, not being controlled by a public opinion become disoriented, no longer recognize the limits proper to them. ... The state of de-regulation or anomy is thus further heightened by passions being less disciplined, precisely when they need more disciplining. ... A thirst arises for novelties, unfamiliar pleasures, nameless sensations, all of which lose their savor once known. ... What blinded him to himself was his expectation always to find further on the happiness he had so far missed. Now he is stopped in his tracks; from now on nothing remains behind or ahead of him to fix his gaze upon. ... He cannot in the end escape the futility of an endless pursuit. ... Time is required for the public conscience to reclassify men and things." 

One-Liner Film Reviews for 2024

Most years on New Year's Day I try to remember everything I watched over the year for a round-up, but typically forget most of them. This year I kept track!!  (Next year I'll track my reading, too, but I mainly do that here - although I've definitely read more than eight books this year. I think I'm in the middle of more than eight books right now!) I'll divide the into categories of shows and films, but I tend to binge watch shows in a sitting, so, honestly, I had to look up a few to see which category it fit! They're more or less in the order I watched them, but with ratings out of 4, and I highlighted my top 5 favourites: