Letter from a British Prison: An Experiment with the Truth

 I write more about Covid than climate because we can actually dramatically decrease the problem with rampant viral transmission in the next few years with tools on hand if we make a global concerted effort. The climate is much, much more complex and multifaceted and just maybe beyond our most intense efforts. 

But check out Roger Hallam's letter sent over a phone from prison. He just started a five-year sentence. 

"This is not about five nice white middle-class people being banged up for 'protest' on 'the climate.' It's about a few million not-so-nice white people deciding to have a few hundred million brown people die. Just for starters. This is not about 'climate change'; we agree with the judge on that. It is about murder. At scale. Forever. And that is a bad things, a very bad thing, and evil thing. When the United Nations recently said we have two years to save the world, that they are not being 'melodramatic,' that economies will be 'devastated,' they mean it. Not in some distant future. In the next 10 to 20 years, that's what 1,000 public statement have said. It's what 10,000 peer-reviewed papers have said. It's coming. It is what it is. At some point, you'll be stepping over body parts on the way to work, going 'well, you know.'"

We're going to see a dramatic upswing in climate refugees, and at some point we'll all close our borders as we gather around the last bits of agricultural land that's still viable and not been paved over. As the watering hole gets smaller, the animals look at one another differently.

Hallam takes on both sides of the political spectrum:

"Conservatives are the bad guys and liberals are the bad guys who pretend to be good guys, and the latter are the worse, which is why historically they are held in more contempt. They knew, but they did nothing. As Martin Luther King said in a letter from a Birmingham jail, it's the moderates that repress, distract, sabotage the resistance to injustice."

I think they all know. I can't believe that all those conservatives see the floods and fires and still don't think something is happening to our climate and connect the dots. I could be wrong, but I believe they're more corrupt than naive. Ford, for instance, is stripping the province for parts, and lining his pockets so he and his family will be well protected for the coming collapse. The liberals are open about knowing, and then don't do anything substantial to change things, for sure. Even the NDP advocate for more pipelines. They said we're not ready for the big transition, but that transition's coming, ready or not.  

The fact that people largely don't say that climate change isn't happening, or even that it's not human caused, because both of those have been largely debunked, shows that it's not ignorance but greed that fuels them. The new denialism from those with ties to fossil fuels now say that climate solutions don't work, climate science is unreliable, and climate impacts aren't that bad. We're all just alarmists! 

Hallam writes,

"This trial was not about 'the right to protest.' It is not about 'a cause,' 'an issue.' It's civil resistance against the biggest death project in human history, the greatest ever act of criminality. This trial was an experiment with the truth. . . . We continue to speak even when the judges shouted at us to stop, had us dragged from the dock, banged up in jail. This is what evil looks like. It's what it does. And it's just the beginning. Integrity at the present time is resistance. . . . Integrity is a hard path. Your ego has to burn in a fire that destroys its desire to control. Integrity is humiliation, failure, being forgotten. As the greatest soul of the 20th century, Simone Vale [sic - Simone Weil], said: When you have an important decision to make, choose the most costly option." 

Simone Weil is one of the greatest souls to have ever lived! 

This is all about caring more about larger things than yourself, and that's not something most of us were taught in our current society. Instead, we've learned to laugh at that lesson, to scoff at people who want to protect others, who bike instead of driving and don't fly on vacation and avoid eating meat or buying anything they don't need. We've been trained to see them as weirdos because environmentalists are very bad for profits. 

But so is climate change, as we'll soon find out. 

Suffering from Premature Emaskulation?

You don't have to be an athlete or movie star to care about your health. You, too, can wear an N95 to keep viruses out of your body. This latest mutation is extremely contagious, leading to very high case numbers right this minute. If we want to stop Covid from mutating further, we need to stop transmission, which we can do if we wear masks -- especially in health care settings and schools, where transmission tends to be higher. 

The article at that link says, 

"It's very, very contagious, that's why we see a lot of cases at the moment. . . . If you don't want to get sick on vacation, you might have to take some preventative measures, like wearing a mask on a plane."

It's World Brain Day!

The WHO announced it on twitter with a list of things to do for a health brain: be active, eat well, sleep well, stimulate your mind, look after your heart, and wear a helmet. Hmmm.... it feels like something's missing!!

Just last Tuesday, the CDC Report on Disability indicated another brain issue: Covid. From McKnights Long-Term Care News: 

"Cognitive disability emerged as the most prevalent disability in the United States in 2022, affecting 13.9% of adults."

No mention of masks or cleaner air in there, of course. They're still all about vax and relax, despite it being so obviously ineffective on its own.

Then last Friday, Time Magazine featured an article on Covid's effect on the brain:

"Covid-19 is associated with possibly long-lasting changes to the brain, potentially contributing to cognitive problems like brain fog, mental fatigue, and memory loss, as well as neurological and mental-health issues. The virus seems able to damage blood vessels and support cells in the brain and may kickstart changes to the immune system that also affect brain function. . . . There are people in their 30s and 40s who have neurocognitive deficits that look like mild dementia. . . . Covid-19 can hinder cognitive performance among adults of all ages, even those who ostensibly recover fully . . . particularly on measures of memory function, executive function--for example your ability to decision-make and plan--and reasoning. . . . The results equated to about a 3-IQ-point deficit among people who recovered completely from COVID-19 versus those who'd never had it. Among people with unresolved Long Covid symptoms and those who'd been admitted to the ICU, the deficits jumped to 6 and 9 IQ points respectively. . . . The cognitive risks of Covid-19 are yet another reason to stay up-to-date on vaccines adn avoid infection if at all possible." 

Where There's Money, There's Masks

"They only insist on unmasking you and your kids because you are not valued by the powers that be. Be smarter and mask up" (from Dr. Spela Salamon)

On film and series sets, the actors are not expendable. They must stay healthy for sake of everyone's paycheque. So everyone on sets still wears a mask around them.

And athletes are not expendable. They must be protected. So the Tour de France now has mandatory masking for everyone, including the audience. And some Olympic teams are masked. It's years and years of training to get there. It's foolish to give it up because a mask is a bit inconvenient or uncomfortable. This WILL be an advantage for the Belgium team. I wonder if others will join them, or if others will claim it's an unfair advantage. That wouldn't surprise me in the least these days!!

Unmasking the Real Villain

The Tour de France is now mandating masks after several riders got Covid and had to leave the race. 

But so many other reports of people getting physically sick still attribute illness to bizarre causes:

People love to feel safe and secure, so it's comforting to think we just need to stave off loneliness to avoid having a stroke in our 20s or 30s. But it's causing harm to refuse to acknowledge that COVID is a vascular disease causing microclots in the bloodstream and definitely affecting rates of heart attack and stroke. 

Professor Danny Altmann gives an excellent interview here, explaining the seriousness of SARS-CoV-2:

He explains that we still don't have answers to know for sure how to slow down the damage much less anything close to a cure. We're particularly bad at working with viruses. 

Covid leads to organ damage. There's a UK Biobank that has tracked normal healthy people for 15 years to provide correlate so we can see clearly the brain changes from Covid. From the video: 

"If you have SARS-Cov-2, even mild SARS-CoV-2, it changes your brain. It changes the way your brain MRI looks, and it makes you more stupid! Sorry to say it so bluntly. That's why I mask everywhere." 

After acute symptoms, the virus doesn't get fully cleared. This is the Persistent Viral Reservoir Theory. There's a lot of evidence for this including post mortem studied that find it everywhere hiding in tissues. It's in our feces, so wastewater surveillance is a very useful tool (that Ontario is getting rid of this month). And it's got massive overlap with ME/CFS, long thought to be a psychological problem. Despite all this evidence, some doctors are still gaslighting patients with ME/CFS and now Long Covid too, insisting they should just get out of bed! 

Even without Long Covid, just mild or asymptomatic Covid can our increase risk of diabetes, heart attack, myocardial infarction, stroke, and more. We saw a huge wave of Parkinson's disease after Spanish flu, so viruses could be causing more than we currently understand, like many more cancers. It can reactivate latent viruses in the body that set up house in a person and never leave, leading to Epstein Barr and multiple sclerosis. He worked with John Patcai at the University of Toronto, who had treated SARS-1 patients, and he said SARS-2 patients are almost identical. But, when he did twenty years follow-ups on his SARS-1 patients, he found,

"None of my patients ever got their lives back, none ever got their jobs back. Even those who tried to switch to lighter jobs or part-time jobs found those hard as well!"  The outlook over the next 20 years looks very serious."

So, I don't know about you, but I'm going to keep wearing a mask to protect myself from this!! And I'm feeling less alone now that Y'all Masking went viral. Even Eminem and Kid Cudi put out these lyrics:

"Bunch of halfwits up in office.
Half of us walking around like a zombie apocalypse.
Other half are just pilss off and don't want to wear a mask and they're just scoffin'.
And that's how you end up catchin' the shit off 'em.
I just used the same basket as you shoppin',
Now I'm in a fuckin' casket from you coughin'." 

Maybe we're realize what's happening and what needs to be done on a grand scale!! Some days, it actually feels possible.

This is a good graphic to understand the use of CO2 monitors - but remember CO2 is a proxy for the virus. The more CO2 in a room, the more you're breathing other people's lung backwash, and the more likely you are to pick up a virus if just one person is an asymptomatic carrier, or even if someone's coughing up a lung but on the other side of the room. It crosses a room in minutes and hangs in the air for hours. But N95s work to dramatically reduce the risk of transmission.

We are currently living through TWO of the five most massive pandemics. We just might want to actually do things to protect ourselves and others. 

Covering Up a Pandemic

Earlier today, Salvatore Mattera wrote this piece about the media silence -- or censorship -- around Covid. Otherwise known as propaganda by omission. This rest of this post is entirely from that thread:  

The 1918 flu is called the "Spanish flu" because in most places, the media censored it. Except Spain, where they reported honestly. This isn't a conspiracy theory - it's a historical fact. And I think it is occurring right now again with COVID: 

This article in The New Republic - "How America’s Newspapers Covered Up a Pandemic" - provides an overview of what happened in 1918. In short, the media either avoided talking about the flu altogether, or they blamed something else for the damage the flu was causing:

"the big-city newspapers...sugarcoated the truth, practicing an alarming level of self-censorship. Any article or headline suggesting more than casual concern about the disease would be open to attack. . . . Only by putting together the tiny headlines on page 11 of the Boston Post could a dutiful newspaper reader get a sense of the full extent of the epidemic"

Is this happening again right now with COVID? I think for the first few years of the pandemic, most of the press covered it honestly (indeed, some articles at the time noted the contrast between the media's early coverage of COVID and the censorship of 1918). But as time has passed, there's been a shift towards censorship. Articles that should obviously mention COVID now rarely do. In some cases, this is debatable, like a story on student absences. But for coverage of health trends, this is inexcusable. 

Ethics of Risk Taking

If you were having a lot of sex with various people -- or even if you just had a quickie with one person without any protection, then having unprotected sex with the next person becomes a moral issue. 

Maybe it's just the case for those of use who came to age when AIDS was finally getting some public health recognition. I wonder how much that concern has dropped. Right now it's still illegal to have unprotected sex if you know you're HIV+, but ethically, having prior unprotected sex means getting tested before having unprotected sex again. Just in case. Because you can never know if you've picked up something along the way -- not just the big one, but any number of sexually transmitted infections. 

Y'all Masking: The Solidarity in Safety

It's taken off so much, it's making Twitter almost unusable for anything else. Picture after picture after picture of people wearing masks in their daily life. 

At first it was just a fun little thing - let's all post pics of ourselves in masks! There have been several other times a bunch of people have done this, but this time it's really different. I think it's because of the mask bans:

The fight is more focused now. It's no longer a gentle encouragement that masks can help stave off illness, but a revolt against barriers to preventing the spread of disease. 

Just for posterity, I think OmniAstral started it all on July 3. 

And it actually affects me seeing person after person in my feed in a mask when I see literally nobody in real life wearing a mask outside my own family. My kids are absolute rockstars for ignoring peer pressure and continuing to protect their brains!! It doesn't just bolster my spirits to see such solidarity, it warms my heart that there are people who care to prevent the possibility of unwittingly infecting others in public places. 

CDC Protecting Interests Instead of People

 The CDC finally acknowledged that Covid is still here, which is amazing, but they still can't nail the comms:

Dr. Lucky Tran added the corrections on this one to obliterate the two tiers of prevention. The CDC still have hand-washing as a priority despite also acknowledging that the VIRUS IS AIRBORNE. It's great to get vaccinated and stay home if you're sick, but we can still get and spread Covid when vaccinated, and about half of transmission is from people who feel perfectly healthy at the moment. Also, lots of people just can't stay home because some companies demand they come to work despite being sick. Treatment would be great, but it's largely inaccessible or ineffective. However, down there in that second tier, MASKS WORK! We can stop this virus (and others) in its tracks if more people wear a well-fitting N95 whenever in public. That should be number one, but that will affect the economy or some-such bullshit. 

Avoiding the Consequences

Our inability to measure long term consequences from short term gains will be the death of us. Covid,  climate change, and conflict are holding a mirror to our collective behaviours.

Henry Madison wrote about the shift back to normal that's essentially pushing us off a cliff towards the default normal we had prior to this century:

"As Max Planck famously observed, social change mostly happens not because of thought and innovation; it happens because one generation dies with its ideas, and the next then gets to run with its own ideas. (The reason institutions are so crucial is that they allow ideas to transcend generations.) So during that great peace and prosperity post-WW2, whole generations forgot what created it: Massive public investment and action. The new elite generation that came to power in the 1970s forgot that and began a process of erasing all of those 19th and 20th century public health and welfare actions: What we now call the birth of 'neoliberalism' and libertarian politics. Just names really; you need to zoom out to see the true social movement it represents. It's societies' most common form throughout all of human history: feudalism topped by some form of monarchial figure. That monarch can be a president too. The US presidency is the most regal figure of power in the world today; populism has transformed that democracy back into the social form the US had desperately tried to escape. The main point is that Covid inaction is just one further part of this same movement that's been going on for over 50 years: The removal of the 'public', an invention of the late-19th and 20th centuries, to restore societies to the form they'd had for centuries previously."

I've recently written more about that we've barely ever managed to creep out of feudalistic systems before we're swept back under again. It seems to be too much of a draw for the powerful to sacrifice the many for their own overwhelming gains, so the people have to continuously work for equity. If we relax for a second, we go under.

Movie Stars Wear Masks

Lots of people are still wearing masks. It can feel a bit like we're the only ones at the store, getting pointed at or coughed on despite intentionally and conscientiously reducing the spread of a brain-invasive disease. 

But entire industries, like film sets, are maintaining masking to protect their employees (i.e. movie stars). The boss perceives them as irreplaceable. (What does that say about the rest of us??) And many famous people are masking in public. 

Wil Wheaton

Hope for Long Covid in IgG Study

Professor Akiko Iwasaki and team just put out a pivotal paper showing that "passive transfer of IgG from patients with Long Covid into mice recapitulates increased pain and other symptoms." IgG stands for Immunoglobulin G; it's the most common type of antibody found in blood circulation. Without enough of them, you get more infections!

The paper is titled, "A causal link between autoantibodies and neurological symptoms in Long Covid." Last September, they started by looking at Long Covid sufferers with neurological symptoms, and compared their antibodies and autoantibodies with people recovering and with uninfected people. Autoantibodies are antibodies produced by the immune system that attack a person's own proteins and can cause autoimmune diseases (lupus, MS, colitis...). 

Avoid the Best to Avoid the Rest

Covid is amazing for harming the immune system, right up there with HIV. Even mild and asymptomatic cases of Covid harm the body's ability to fight off infections, and makes us susceptible to other viruses and parasites. Yale made a poster about it:

Statement from Yale School of Public Health (sources here):

"Five years with SARS-CoV-2 in our midst, and the CDC reports that 43 million Americans have experienced Long COVID. Some have recovered, but roughly 17 million - the same number of people who have cancer in the U.S. - still deal with the condition, and that number continues to grow. At Yale, Dr. Akiko Iwasaki's laboratory is investigating how the virus can create long-lasting impacts on the immune system. And with many left incapacitated by the novel condition and at risk from rolled-back mitigations, the desperate need for answers grows. 

Chomsky's Passing - NOT

Noam Chomsky passed today at 95.  --- Actually, he's still alive. He was just sent home from the hospital after a stroke, and people feared the worst!!

His efforts to dig beyond the surface level of propaganda in the media is needed now more than ever. I try to follow his call to act in such a way so you can look yourself in the mirror each night, and his unwavering optimism amid his deep dives into atrocities. Here's Jacobin's farewell and one from Yanis Varoufakis. I summarized some of his words in these posts over the last dozen years or so. 

On Chomsky (summary of Understanding Power)

Chomsky's Forward to Albert's Realizing Hope: Life Beyond Capitalism

On Chomsky's Driving Forces in US Foreign Policy

Requiem for the American Dream 

Nader Interview with Chomsky on the Requiem for the American Dream (with Ralph Nader)

Inconceivable! His Dinner with Chomsky (interview with Wallace Shawn - I don't get enough credit for my post titles!)

Chomsky's Optimism: On Climate. Change, Nuclear War, and Activism (podcast with Truthdig)

The Future of the Left with Natalie and Noam (interview with flippin' Contrapoints)

Chomsky's Lessons from 2021 (interview with Yanis Vanoufakis)

And a bunch of iconic quotes:

Ignorance and Apathy and Unwillingness to Act

Three articles came out in the past few days that should remind us that Covid is really here, and maybe we should act on it. But all the facts in the world can't penetrate the wall of hopeful denial.

Lynn Parramore interviewed Dr. Philliip Alvelda in Institute for New Economic Thinking. I wrote about the first part earlier this month. 

"Contrary to public belief, he warns, Covid is not like the flu. New variants evolve much faster, making annual shots inadequate. He believes that if thinks continue as they are, with new Covid variants emerging and reinfections happening rapidly, the majority of Americans may eventually grapple with some form of Long Covid. . . . Some people can get Long Covid, and maybe it ages them a little bit, but it doesn't change them very much. But for others, their lives are devastated. . . . Only 22% fully recover within a year. Others remain stable or get worse. . . . There are all kind of weird things going on that could be related to Covid's cognitive effects. . . . traffic fatalities increased by 19%. . . . .

The Art of Helping

"A little learning is a dang'rous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again."
~ Alexander Pope

Is it, though? 

We're in a mental health crisis and people need more access to help. How much learning is necessary to help one another, and is it dangerous to listen and offer another perspective or even some suggestions without an advanced psych degree? In old movies, people told their stories to bartenders, hairstylists, or cab drivers for the price of a beer or trim or trip to the airport. They just needed a captive audience willing to listen to their worries Now we want people with credentials as if that will provide more certain results.  

But not all credentials are created equal. 

Last year BetterHelp got in the news for allegedly sharing confidential health data to social media sites, and was fined $7.8 million. TV writer Mike Drucker wrote:

"EVERY BETTERHELP AD: 'We're like therapy but cheaper and easier! We have people for every problem so you get care just for you!'
ACTUAL BETTERHELP: 'We're gong to set you up with a confused therapist that will ghost after two sessions. Also we told Facebook about your assault.'"

More recently, the New York Times had an article on scams in the wellness coaching industry, describing scenarios in which the new recruits were bilked out of massive amounts for "tuition" made up of a few hours of videos, and then were never helped to find clients. 

"Business is booming. . . . The number of coaches increased 54% between 2019 and 2022. Because the industry lacks standardized accreditation, it's most likely larger -- one of the dangers of life coaching is that anyone can claim the title of life coach. . . . [One coach] has spent an extraordinary amount of money on the certification and clung to the dream that had been sold to her . . . found herself short of clients and scrambling to make any income. . . . There is a problem in the industry of coaches who coach coaches to become coaches. . . . Life coaching attracts people who are vulnerable to exploitation."

Best Explanation of Reagan's Neoliberal Policies

Just this from xeviuniverse.

Here's the link in case embedding doesn't work. 

@xeviuniverse

I didnt have time to cover all the other vomit inducing things he did

♬ original sound - Xevi

Good News: You CAN Be Saved!

The CDC put out some crappy comms with an image with a mask photoshopped upside down, with "N95" shopped onto a KN95, and only on the patient, not the doctor, which suggests that doctors don't need to wear them. I almost feel bad for how hard they failed on this except that disease prevention is THEIR ONLY JOB, and their incompetence has cost so many lives. 

And now North Carolina is banning masks during protests and adding to the punishment if a mask is worn in a crime, but they added in a health exemption - after people protested - that allows medical grade masks to prevent spreading illness. However, the law still allows law enforcement and property owners to ask anyone to remove their mask for identification despite the reality that sunglasses obscure identity more than masks and there are no laws banning sunglasses during protests. 

Coming Soon to a Hospital Near You

The Minden ER closed June 1, 2023. A recent article in the Minden Paper explains why this should worry all of us.

Jeff Nicholls said,

"After we analyzed the decision-making processes before, during, and after the closure of Minden ER, our team audited teh audited financial statements of every hospital in Ontario. . . . For FY22, 25% of Ontario hospitals posted a deficit . . . For FY23, 75% of Ontario Hospitals posted a deficit. . . . Their average deficit was $5.9 million. . . . One healthcare system -- Mackenzie Health [in Richmond Hill] -- posted a $93 million surplus. . . . 

Living in a False Reality

Without testing or wastewater data warning us of rising cases of viruses in our regions ahead of time, we can only look to excess deaths after the fact. Bleak times.

This is a graph of Finland's excess deaths relative to pre-pandemic levels. Pay attention to that blue line.  It's the excess deaths of children aged 5-9. The dip in 2021 is when kids all wore masks and fewer died of  RSV and the flu. The current excess death rate for kids is 2.4 times pre-pandemic levels. More than twice as many kids are dying, and we're still not acting on this. 

Schools are the number one vector of infection. If we can halt transmission there, it will make a huge difference. We could have CO2 monitors in every room that beep at 500 ppm to alert the teacher to open doors and windows. And we could have super quiet and super cool CR boxes that run on computer fans. The CO2 monitor is a one-time buy at about $200 - likely far less in bulk, and the CR boxes are under $300 fully assembled or under $200 if you make them yourself - again, far less if in bulk. Those changes would be cheap and doable today, except opening windows and having CR boxes in class will get you in trouble in my neck of the woods. If we actually wanted to spend money protecting kids - and the rest of us by extension - we could add upper room UV!!