Covid Causes Clots!!

 A headline in the New York Post: "Why so many people are having strokes in their 20s, 30s, and 40s: We've never had patients so young." 

They report that, "Between 2020 and 2022, there was a 14.6% increase of strokes among people aged 18 to 44." Many of whom were "by all common standards, healthy." Their theories about the increase include birth control pills, stress, long working hours, physical inactivity, caffeine especially from energy drinks, and Adderall (although they add that most studies don't show a strong association between Adderall use and strokes). None of these have been shown to have increased that dramatically since 2020, but something else has. I stupidly read the comments on the article, which are all about "the jab" killing us. IT'S NOT THE VACCINE!!

There is, of course, absolutely no mention about an unmitigated brain-invasive virus doing the very type of damage researchers and doctors warned us about years ago. We knew that Covid stays in the body and forms blood clots since at least 2021, and it became widespread in 2022, which is why some wise doctors ask for a D-dimer test after a patient has problems post-Covid infection to check for clotting issues. Here are just a few: 

Canadian Broadcasting In Crisis

Does saying "Jeeeezus" and "oh my God" over and over as I scroll through the news count as praying? 

It's not just all the bizarre appointments in the US that will chase out any competent people leaving an empty husk as a gift for Russia - or something like that - but the CBC feels compromised. It's been a bit of a problem here and there for decades, but this latest mess of a "balanced" call-in show on Canada becoming the 51st state with flippin' Kevin O'Leary and David Frum hosting, feels like it's no longer Canadian at all. People are calling them, and the producers Quislings, and I think that word will become more and more commonplace. CBC News reported on the backlash and asks that we pretty please watch the show to make up our own mind. No thanks.

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." 

A Tale of Two Studies

I was confronted yesterday with the ubiquitous claim, "Lockdowns destroyed kid's ability to socialize. Now they're committing suicide because of it!!" Let's have a closer look again:

I posted this mini-thread a couple weeks ago that helps to understand the role media plays in propping up this claim:

"A tale of two studies: One study (October 2024 in School Psychology), picked up by the Toronto Star, gauged classroom incivility from anecdotal reports by teachers pre- and post-covid (handy they had data form Fall 2019) to conclude that lockdowns for three months in 2020 destroyed kids' socialization skills in 2022. The other study (October 2024 in an international medical journal), NOT picked up by the Star, assessed kids pre- and post-INFECTION, and against a control to find, 'more severe symptoms of inattention, hyperactivity-impulsivity, opposition, a wide range of emotional and behavioural problems, and poor school function.' Many studies have shown that SARS-CoV-2 affects the prefrontal cortex, which affects behaviour. Until mainstream media starts reporting on better studies, our children will suffer. A timeline of some studies on Covid's effects on the brain are here." 

Cell Phones and Cigarettes

I have some concerns with the new rules for schools as reported by the CBC. The biggest concern is that the funding cuts came Friday, but yet another cell phone ban is the big news, and no money is left for cleaning the air. 

As a teacher, both cell phones and cigarettes being accepted without question and without boundaries is a problem. Well, students aren't officially allowed to smoke on the property, but we created a nice space for them, kids as young as 13, to smoke just on the other side of the property line out back to keep them from loitering on public property at the front of the school, which wouldn't look good. The same thing happened as a student in the 80s. It's still perfectly legal for children to smoke -- it's just illegal to give them cigarettes. That law comes from legislators unduly affected by tobacco lobbying.

Two Steps Forward...

 It's amazing to get so far in our scientific advances, only to have it tossed aside by misinformation. 

A Daily Mail article explained the conclusion of a study that,

"They confirmed that the shots made by Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca are linked to significantly higher risk of five medical conditions - including a nerve-wasting condition that leaves people struggling to walk or think."

And anti-vaxxers are spreading the news far and wide.  

The Big Lie of Covid Herd Immunity

Why do some healthcare professionals still insist that herd immunity will work despite visual evidence to the contrary? 

A nicely explainer came out in Journal of Infectious Diseases March 2022: 

"As commonly understood, herd immunity thresholds are reached when a sufficient proportion of the population is vaccinated or has recovered from natural infection with a pathogen such that its community circulation is reduced below the level of significant public health threat. For example, this threshold has been met with polio and measles circulation in the United States. However, SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, is so different from polio and measles that classical herd immunity may not readily apply to it. Important differences include the phenotypic stability [tendency for the virus to remain the same] of polio and measles viruses, and their ability to elicit long-term protective immunity, compared to SARS-CoV-2."

With measles and polio, once you get it, you won't soon get it again because, as they figured out in 1876, they "elicited long-term protective immunity that reduced or prevented epidemics, until cumulative births resulted in sufficiently large cohorts of susceptible children to support new waves of transmission." So vaccinating everyone as infants was enough to stop the virus in its tracks! With Covid, as we really really know, for sure, you CAN get it again over and over, right away. Some people have had it six and seven times. Some people have had two infections within 30 days. 

The article further explains why herd immunity doesn't always work:

Media Subterfuge

Want to be a respected news outlet? Stop writing horribly misleading headlines.

An article in The Guardian is causing a stir, not because of what the article says, but because of the heading and subheading: 

"Thousands of Covid generation under-fives excluded from schools in England: Nearly half of children in some areas arrive unable to talk and still not potty-trained as lockdown legacy take its toll, data show."

That's not actually what the data shows, however. The subheading is particularly ridiculous since these kids were infants during lockdown. They likely would have been home with mom anyway. 

This type of headline is not in the realm of clickbait or fake news, but it's still bullshitty and annoying, and it's got people on social media arguing about lockdowns now instead of discussing the real issues from the article: cuts to social services. It works to get people to discuss the piece, but few are clicking on it to actually read the thing anyway, so I'm not sure how well it pays off as a tactic. Unless, of course, the tactic is to get them to ignore the content. Can't spur on a socialist movement, now can we!

The article explains that the number of term exclusions in England last year were up 11% higher than pre-pandemic years, at which time they also had a problem with kids not yet school ready:

The Truth is Out There

Because it's harder than ever to discern fact from fiction means we have to work harder. Don't give up! 

Definitely not an example of Art Deco.

I once dated a guy I thought was absolutely brilliant. He seemed to know everything about every topic. He could answer and explain every question I had under the sun, and I had a lot because it was all long before the internet. 

But one day we went to an art gallery. He explained the style and history of each piece of artwork fluidly and confidently. Unfortunately for our relationship, I had spent four years studying art, and I knew that almost everything he said was just plain wrong. I gently corrected a few things, styles off by centuries, descriptions of depictions with no basis in scholarly discussion, but I let most things go. 

When we left the gallery he paid me a particularly arrogant compliment I'll never forget: "It's so nice to finally go to a gallery with someone who knows something about art so I don't have to teach them everything." 

Meanwhile, in my head, I was thinking backwards through all the many things he had "taught" me over the prior few months, trying to undo any damage the likely misinformation might have caused. 

And it got me thinking about Covid and the media. For most of my life I looked at media interpretation of events with a critical eye, but took most facts and sources at face value. I mean, I've been reading Chomsky since Manufactured Consent first hit the scene in 1988. I actually showed the three-hour long documentary on it to my class of 17-year-olds, and they all sat with rapt attention!! (That was also before the internet.) While I followed and agreed with most of Chomsky's claims around media bias, one foot was still in the camp that believes at least the facts presented must be true, right?? Distorted is different than just made up. Surely the big news outlets (distinct from "yellow journalism") aren't making things up!

Ignorance is No Longer a Defence

There is compelling evidence that vaccines work, with few serious side effects, yet they're still being demonized while media continues to suggest Covid ended. 

An Australian 8-year-old went into cardiac arrest but was saved due to her mum's ability to do CPR until an ambulance arrived. The Australian news mention that "cardiac arrest incidents are at the highest ever recorded," but their newscast is all about the importance of learning CPR. The comments on the article were divided. 

Covid Vaccinations Prevent Acute Symptoms

Of over 500 comments at time of posting, the vast majority blamed vaccinations for the heart attacks. They provided no compelling evidence.  

ETA: One recent study of over 4 million people determined the stroke rate after vaccination to be 0.05% which is not significantly different than the average stroke rate of a population tracked before the pandemic.

The Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine this year is being awarded to two people whose work enabled the development of mRNA vaccines, and I won't even hazard a peek at the comments there. 

The Weirdness of Now

This morning I listened to a Naomi Klein interview from this week about her very different type of book, while reading a prescient Geroge Monbiot article that he reposted from last March. There's a striking amount of overlap.

Both are about the new right-wing alliances being formed, and the furthest right political parties we've seen in some time creeping up worldwide. 

George Monbiot:

Monbiot blames the influencers who are feeding the young conspiratorial messages, including Russell Brand (hence the recent repost). 

"He appears to have switched from challenging injustice to conjuring phantoms. If, as I suspect it might, politics takes a very dark turn in the next few years, it will be partly as a result of people like Brand. . . . He wastes his talent on tired and discredited tales. . . . Such claims are not just wrong. They are wearyingly, boringly wrong. But, to judge by the figures (he has more than 6 million subscribers on YouTube), the audience loves them. . . . 

The New CPC

Image from this great Breach article

Remember back when Harper was PM, and he opened Canada's media to foreign ownership despite widespread protests? So now Poilievre all but owns Canadian MSM. Media is backing him and many pollsters are backing him, and Trudeau has little mainstream media on his side. Even CBC seems to be promoting Poilievre. When the polls show that everyone would vote in Poilievre if an election were tomorrow, don't believe it. Unfortunately enough people will believe the polls and then it might be enough to make it actually come true. 

Some people think it doesn't matter because MSM is so last year, but Twitter and FB are also owned by right-wing nutjobs. A friend was randomly barred from Twitter for absolutely nothing she can discern that comes close to breaking any rules, while many many hate-mongering abusive asshats are left to troll freely. 

If Peepee gets in, that online world is coming to a neighbourhood near you!

But we still have Tiktok (so far)!

From Lisa B. (abridged and highlighted below)

How the Media Works

A new study just out that followed 548 people with Long Covid in Spain and found that only 7.6% of them recovered in the two years of the study. People think Long Covid means you're sicker a little longer, but this study suggests that most people possibly don't recover. Yet you can only hear about this if you follow sciency types on social media. It's not a mainstream newspaper headline despite the reality that it's having a huge effect on our workforce.

In so many shows and movies about journalists, someone gets wind of a story, begs their editor for the scoop, has to fight and plead to show that it'll be big, then spends weeks -- the rest of the movie/series -- hunting down the story details. Former journalist Nate Bear wrote a thread that suggests otherwise:

"If I hadn’t spent the last 15 years working in media and public relations, I too would interpret the media silence around covid and new covid research/science as a sign that there is nothing to worry about. But I have. So here are some things you should know:

Google on C-18

 It's a bill, not a virus. 

The gist of it is that it requires American tech companies to pay Canadian news organizations for content that appears on their platforms. The hope is that the law will help Canadian news agencies. But Google and Meta responded that they're just going to block any Canadian news so they don't have to pay for it. That very much sounds like the bill is having the opposite effect as intended. But the legislators knew of this possibility back in February, andAustralia already went down this path and were successful at negotiating the deals necessary to get compensation to their news agencies. It appears to be a waiting game. 

Deputy PM Chrystia Freeland, who negotiated a flippin' NAFTA deal with Trump, commented on the Google/Meta response to bill C-18,  

"I really believe that the way to get a good deal for Canadian journalism and for Canadians is to be firm, clear, polite and at the end of the day to stand up for national interests"

Many people are wary, including John Ibbotson:

"Such boycotts could harm the news operations the legislation was intended to help. And this purported help has probably come to an industry that, in its current form, cannot be rescued. . . . Today, the physical newsroom [at the Ottawa Citizen] is shuttered. A small remnant of reporters and editors work heroically to put out a paper and sustain a website. . . . It's hard to imagine that any injection of revenues from Google, the federal government or anyone else could restore those papers to their former glory. . . . Many magazines are in dire shape. National Geographic laid off the last of its staff writers this week. . . . 

Quality journalism requires more than a few columnists offering opinions, or a few reporters covering local crime and traffic accidents. It can involve weeks or even months of effort by a team of journalists to uncover and document abuse, corruption, conflict-of-interest or other misdeeds. We cannot and should not ask taxpayers to sustain newspapers as they were in the glory days. It may not even be worth asking them to prop up what's left." 

Some people are advocating boycotting the boycotters by using DuckDuckGo, Bing, or Yahoo. I don't expect enough people will be in the know or care enough to have any effect on these international companies. 

I don't know how much it will help, but consider a subscription to any magazine or paper you hope to save. Check out The Narwhal, The National Observer, iPolitics, The Line, The Walrus, The Tyee, The Local, The Trillium, The Logic, and IndigiNews for starters. Also directly follow reputable journalists on social media to access their work. Good news is absolutely vital to a good democracy. We're on shaky ground these days! 

And happy Canada Day from Google!

On Debating Science

Dr. Peter Hotez is a medical doctor in Texas who did his undergrad at Yale and his medical degree at Cornell. He has been successful at creating Covid vaccine technology cheaply and patent-free so it can be distributed to low-income countries. His work has been "nominated for the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize for its innovation in 'decolonizing' the global vaccine ecosystem and making life-saving interventions available to the world."

Robert Kennedy Jr., of the Kennedys, is a lawyer who is adamant that vaccines cause autism.

Joe Rogan is a trained jiu-jitsu fighter and a comedian who did UFC commentary and a stint with Fear Factor before becoming a star and millionaire as a podcaster. His interviews are very entertaining, and clearly, openly, lean to a libertarian position on the far right that misunderstands the nuance of so many things, but he's a comedian. His show isn't news. 

Rogan wants Hotez to get into the ring to debate Kennedy about vaccines, and the twittered demands are along the lines that if Hotez doesn't, then it proves he's wrong! He even offered him $100,000 to a charity of his choice to show up, and Elon Musk got in on it for kicks. But it's not just on-line harassment. Some of Rogan's more unhinged followers came to Hotez's home on Fathers Day demanding a debate! 

I love debating and watching debates, and I used to sometimes adjudicate at high school debate meets. But the problem with all this mess is that scientific research is not something we determine with a debate. Debates are typically about thing like meaty moral issues that we can't know for sure, so the best arguments can win, like Is Populism the Way of the Future? or Is Political Correctness a Form of Progress? Someone who's completely anti-abortion could be swayed by a persuasive debater. We don't debate if gravity exists or if the world is flat. And if someone is swayed on something scientifically verifiable because they heard a good argument, then they missed the importance of the science part of that. 

Unmasked People, Unmasked in Their Own Way

I think masks separate us like the families in Tolstoy's famous opening line of Anna Karenina. You know the one: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Everyone I've met who wears a mask does it for more or less the same reasons: to protect themselves and others from a virus. But there appears to be a wide variety of reasons people won't wear a mask. 

NOTE: When I say masks, I mean NIOSH certified N95s or better - aka respirators. They do signficantly stop the spread of viruses.

I posted on twitter that I was starting to understand some concerns some people have raised about masks and that I think we need a new approach to get more people on board, and I was hit with an onslaught of comments along the line of, "They're playing you," and "I just can't bring myself to care at all about anti-maskers." I think this view is propagated because people against masks who are loudest on social media tend to be of a similar ilk: It's the pro-freedom, anti-everything group that bombards our posts, so they might colour the way mask advocates see anyone unmasked. But I've discovered there are others out there that don't fit the mold. And, if we want to get everyone in masks, then we have to care about anti-maskers enough to try to understand their position and bridge the divide. Instead, people got mad that I could have some compassion for them. 

It doesn't help anyone to lump them all together as sneaky and uncaring. I've argued before that anyone who is able to mask but won't is either misunderstanding the science and doesn't know they present a risk to others (which is totally on public health and our inept/corrupt premier), or they don't care they present a risk (sometimes, in part, because they don't know how serious the risk is, which is again on public health and our inept/corrupt premier). I still think those two different groups exist, but now, after getting tons of emails on masks as a trustee, I recognize there is huge diversity within each category. 

And I think I missed a category.

Viral about that Virus

I posted a mini thread yesterday that exploded about the Delphi Consensus:

It hit a million impressions in just 24 hours, and it's still going strong. I'm so glad I turned off comments early on after I got slaughtered by trolls on a different post yesterday - almost 500 random comments mainly from people with fewer than 10 followers and almost entirely American based, lots of gun-lovers. It's the wild west on Twitter since Musk fired most of the staff. 

Pandemic Amnesia

Someone told me that we need to adapt to Covid faster, and get used to masks and checking air quality much faster for our own survival. They think our problem is our inability to adapt to this new environment. I said that I think we have adapted quickly, but we've done it in the other direction: we've acclimatized to accept that we will know people who have died at a young age or who haven't been able to get out of bed in months. We've adapted to the turmoil instead of the preventative measures. 

Then I came across a thread by Professor Debra Caplan in the U.S. She commented on the lack of films and books on the Spanish flu relative to all that was written about World War I despite the flu taking about six times as many lives in the United States. There are a couple episodes in Downton Abbey. Then there's this 24 min. NFB film, The Last Days of Okak, but she's got a point: so many post-WWI movies that discuss the ravages of war don't mention a thing about the devastation caused by the flu. 

On Entitlement and Unfettered Rage

One of the benefits or downfalls of the internet is that it allows fringe groups to find each other online. When it comes to feeling like nobody in the world knows about climate change or the Myanmar genocide (or philosophy), because nobody in my immediate vicinity is too concerned or interested, then it's invaluable to find clusters of intelligent people writing about them regularly online. Finding people with the same concerns about the world can be a game-changer when you've all but given up on working towards a solution for a grave social injustice.

But it's a tragic downfall of cyberspace when the "social injustice" is that you can't get laid. People in some fringe groups who, as individuals, would all be seen as rare deviants in need of help, are able to find each other now, and cluster together to reinforce and normalize their warped version of reality.

Such is the case with the van killer in Toronto. I won't use his name because I hope it's forgotten and he's forgotten rather than becoming infamous. But we can't forget that he was part of a movement of "involuntary celibates" (incels) who are outraged at their misfortune with women. Instead of blaming their own approach or attitude or maybe something they said along the way, they put all the blame on women for not flocking to them they way they expected would happen.