Quiet Comprehending

A pretty song for our times form Bo Burnham: 

Female Colonel Sanders, easy answer, civil war
The whole world is at your fingertips, the ocean at your door
The live-action Lion King, the Pepsi Halftime Show
Twenty-thousand years of this, seven more to go . . . 
That unapparent summer air in early fall
The quiet comprehending of the ending of it all . . .
Hey, what can you say? We were overdue.
But it will be over soon. You wait. 

A blogger buddy, "Mound" told me about Deep Adaptation and Dark Mountain ten years ago, and I thought it was all a little extreme. But now I'm at a weird place in which the people I once thought were completely off the wall, I now understand as prescient. Alternatively, it's entirely possible I have merely joined them in their lunacy. One or the other, and I'm not always confident of which. The fact that I still think Covid is enough of a concern that I'm provoked to wear a mask everywhere and refuse dinner invites puts me pretty squarely in the latter camp by many people's estimation. Most of my friends, definitely, but luckily not my children. Yet. 

Four years ago I wrote that all that Dark Mountain doomer stuff was a bit much because, "what if it's not all over, and there's still time to do something?!"

But then last Friday, the CO₂ on our little planet hit 425 ppm for the first time in human history. That's considered a vital sign by NASA. It was just 420 last month. Previously, it was in the 200 range for thousands of years, and hit 300 in the 1950s. Keeping it below 350 ppm was a goal for a long time. MIT says that we need to stay below 430 ppm if we hope to avoid overshooting the 1.5° rise in temperature.

This should be front page news, but it's not.  

Social Darwinism and "Useless Eaters"

Some people are arguing that the removal of mask mandates in hospitals is a form of eugenics. Tamara Taggart, President of Down Syndrome BC, said on "This is Vancolour," 

"This is eugenics, like 100%. So now we don't care about people. . . . All those people are expensive. I mean, it's a harsh thing to say, but it is true. . . . My kid with a disability, he's expensive in the grand scheme of things. A disabled person in the hospital? They're expensive. So why else would we remove masks? Elderly people at long-term care facilities? They're expensive!"

That's about $400,000 in today's USD.

In an older Tyee article, currently recirculating, "My Daughter Shouldn't be Sacrificed to 'Get Back to Normal,'" Laesa Kim writes,

"Our family has learned more about ableism and eugenics throughout this pandemic than we should have. We have witnessed both individuals and institutions shrug as COVID more heavily affects marginalized communities.  . . . Dr. Rochelle Walensky said on Good Morning America that 'the overwhelming number of deaths of vaccinated individuals, over 75%, occurred in people who had at least four co-morbidities. So really these are people who were unwell to begin with and yes, really encouraging news in the context of Omicron.' This is eugenic. . . . Public health directions are subtly promoting the same thought: It is fine to allow a virus to spread through the population, largely unchecked and unchallenged, because the assumption is that is will only kill certain demographics of people." 

And I also used that term originally in the title of a recent post, "At What Point is Inaction a Form of Eugenics??," showing the similarity between our dismissiveness of the disabled and elderly and children now and the experience of gay men with AIDS in the 80s. 

But then I changed it. It's not quite eugenics as we think of it now. It's potentially genocidal. 

Chris Hedges on Our Current State of Paralysis

Hedges writes on Substack now, if you haven't been able to find him lately, and his piece today is excellent. 

He starts by pointing out the growing rich-poor divide that is seeing the top earnings increase by almost 90% in the last decease in the states, while the lowest struggle to find an apartment they can afford. The government is doing nothing about poverty, climate, infrastructure, health care, and violence by police or fearful neighbours. He says, 

Democracies are not slain by reactionary buffoons like Donald Trump, who was routinely sued for failing to pay workers and contractors and whose fictional television persona was sold to a gullible electorate, or shallow politicians like Joe Biden, whose political career has been devoted to serving corporate donors. These politicians provide a false comfort of individualizing our crises, as if removing this public figure or censoring that group swill save us. Democracies are slain when a tiny cabal, in our case corporate, seizes control of the economy, culture and the political system, and distorts them to exclusively serve its own interests.

This analysis helps to explain how many corporations have so easily walked us back to pre-New Deal years, stripping away workers' rights, ignoring environmental regulations, focusing on basic facts while eroding the critical thinking of the humanities in public schools and universities, and removing useful health protections in hospitals. We're already not a democracy, as Hedges has said for years, invoking Wolin's inverted totalitarianism. Today he quotes research from professors Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, 

Earth Day #53: Simple Solutions

As a social science teacher talking about climate change, I'd often get students who raise the fact that there are just 100 companies, worldwide, producing over 70% of all GHGs. Therefore, they reason, if we petition or protest or rally to shut down those 100 companies, then climate change will be over! It's a very simple solution, and it would be great it if worked. But it won't.

First off, we experience a lag time between mitigations and effects, so even if we stop producing GHGs on a dime, things will continue to get worse from all the things we did yesterday. And climate change is in the works already hitting tipping points and likely unable to completely stop or reverse, but it will slow down the effects, for sure, so we should definitely do all we can. 

Next, let's look at what those companies do. Most are in the fossil fuels business, which we should keep in the ground as much as possible, but if we shut it all down today, how will you heat your home or take a bus or buy a new phone or anything with plastic in it or get food that isn't grown within cycling distance? It's all so integrated and complex and global that it takes a while to get everyone to understand that things won't change without it affecting us significantly. We also have to change the way we live. We can do that right now, but it would definitely be easier with government mandates, and subsidies in the right direction, and an authentic, global unified path that comes with consequences if ignored. 

So then I get this argument: It's just the rich people that need to change how they live. 

Forced Exposure in Hospitals

If you're feeling unwell, McMaster is advising you to NOT go to a hospital because they no longer require masks there, and they don't want people in there spreading their diseased germs around. Wha...?? Some doctors and nurses are excited to ditch their masks, despite the potential harm that could come to their patients. 

Of course this message blatantly ignores the over 30% of people who have an asymptomatic case and have no idea that they're carrying and spreading a brain-invasive vascular disease, which is how it spreads so brilliantly and why masks are so useful just in case!!

Transphobia is the New Homophobia

Natalie Wynn, one of my favourite YouTubers, came out with a 2-hour long video, basically a feature-length film, her first in 10 months. This one is on J.K. Rowling, whom she discussed two years ago (and I wrote about here if you need to catch up on the controversy). 

This time she goes further into the connections between the homophobic and transphobic movements, comparing Anita Bryant in the 70s to Rowling now, to show that the more things change, the more they stay the same. I remember Bryant's commercials for orange juice from my childhood and my parents' reaction to her religious campaign to save children from the gays: Religion shouldn't be used to perpetuate hatred against a group of people; that misses the whole point! Bryant's argument is that gay people get special privileges if they are given extra rights (like, to live free from discrimination) that go against the rights of "normal Americans," and since they can't procreate, they "reproduce through recruitment." They hold hands in public to get your children to try to join them!! 

But then Bryant was blacklisted for "defending children from being recruited by homosexuals" and lost her job as spokesperson with Florida Orange Juice. Wynn questions, Was she cancelled?? Or was she just reaping the consequences of being a bigoted person in a progressive society?

Wynn looks more deeply at Bryant's effect on society, quoting Lillian Fadermen, from The Gay Revolution:

"A mass movement can get along fine without a god, but it won't get along at all without a devil. For gay people all over the country, Anita Bryant became that devil."

Still Hopeful

I went to a book talk via Zoom tonight to see Maude Barlow talk about her recent book, Still Hopeful: Lessons from a Lifetime of Activism. I last saw her in person, seven years ago, when she worked to try to get Nestle out of Guelph. This time her book is about all the things, and how to keep up our spirits while fixing a broken system. She does book talks online now because travelling is taxing, and she's 75! 

She started writing this book after being at a talk in June 2019, at the start of Covid, in a packed church full of lots of young people there to see her and David Suzuki and Avi Lewis. She spoke about having hope while facing facts and the Green New Deal, and then at the end, a couple grade 12 girls told if that if she hadn't talked about hope, they would have given up.

Her definition of hope is, 

"the commitment to protect all that is good for the future generations and the planet, knowing that you can't control the outcome, but put your hand out anyway and touch the universe when you can, and have faith that others are doing the same--faith that you're not alone."

Here are her three major lessons somewhat paraphrased:

At What Point is Inaction a Form of Genocide??

This impressive and prescient thread worthy of saving is from Miles W. Griffis. He interweaves a speech from Vito Russo, AIDS activist, back and forth with current headlines on Covid-19 to show how easily we write-off a group of people when they become inconvenient:

Vito Russo's 1988 ACT UP speech "Why We Fight" has many parallels to the continuing Covid-19 pandemic currently causing 1,000+ deaths per week plus mass disability. Russo delivered "Why We Fight" during an ACT UP demonstration at the Department of Health and Human Services, D.C. on October 10, 1988. 

"My family thinks two things about my AIDS diagnosis. One, they think I'm going to die, and two, they think that my government is doing absolutely everything in their power to stop that, and they're wrong on both counts." 

"'A slow-moving glacier'" NIH's sluggish and often opaque efforts to study long Covid draw patient, expert ire." (Stat, March, 2022)

"If I'm dying from anything, I'm dying from racism."

"People of color less likely to receive Paxlovid and other Covid-19 treatments, according to CDC study." (CNN, October, 2022)

We're Not Ready for This

I'm waiting to write my last exam of the term. It's supposed to open at 8:00, and we have 90 minutes to write it, online, multiple choice, open book. I set aside 8-9:30 am today to write, and asked my kids to stay in their rooms until I finished. Except it's not up yet. I checked the date and time repeatedly, then I emailed the prof. No answer. I really hope she's okay! I'm not too worried, though, because this kind of thing has been happening all term. I've taken it upon myself to be the unsolicited student secretary for my profs, opening myself to potential thanks or subtle retaliation for being that person that's annoyingly on the ball, as if I'm showing them up when really I just want to get through these courses!! I've chalked many of the problems up to poor tech training on the online platform they're made to use. But...

While waiting, I went down a rabbit's hole of brain studies and random analysis. 

Age of Absurdity

We're skipping gleefully into the most absurd period in history. 

The philosophical notion of the absurd came from Camus. It grew legs with existentialists after WWII when the youngest and fittest men were sent to be slaughtered in war. The streets of Paris were full of widows and grieving mothers and broken men. The question of the day was, How can we make sense of our lives and our place here and our idea of justice with all this going on?  

I wrote more about it at length as I struggled with decisions foisted on me during my cancer years that left me with chronic issues. The answer from Camus is to stop trying to make sense of it all. Embrace the absurdity of our lives. We always have the option of leaving it behind, so if we choose to stay - famously if we choose coffee over suicide, then we have to acknowledge the world despite the weight of our knowledge pushing us to escape it through self-deception and cultural deception. All our choices are always a crap shoot, and at the same time, they're always our responsibility even though we can't possibly know how things will turn out, which, at the same time, takes the weight of that decision being the best choice off our shoulders. Outcomes are all out of our control, but we must try to do right anyway. We're taking a test without every having taken the course.

Looking for the Enlightened

The season finale of The Last of Us, "Look for the Light" (see what I did there?) sets up a great deontological v. teleological conundrum with the big question (tiny spoiler), which ends up being an episode-long trolley problem: Is it right to kill one person if doing so could save multitudes? (The brilliant Just an Observation explains how the entire season sets up the problem.) In a utilitarian view, of course we should sacrifice one person to potentially save all of humanity. It would be absurd not to see this and ensure the safety of all! But it doesn't pass the categorical imperative sniff test. We can't support intentional harm coming to people, any people, no matter how few, even if it will help many others.

Kant's famous rule: "I am never to act otherwise than so that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law," so killing a person to help others is necessarily wrong. It's not a numbers game since "the moral worth of an action does not lie in the effect expected." And we have to treat each person as an end in themselves, never as a means to an end.

Or, as the great Mitchell & Webb make clear, killing some to save others is just plain wrong "because it's offensive and evil."

And people will do absolutely anything to save the children they love if they turn out to be the sacrificial lambs in question.

Liquid Life and the Myth of Government Protection

Liquid life is a concept some Buddhist cultures had of the young and old, typically those under 6 and over 70, whose lives weren't seen as quite solid due to the greater likelihood of death at either end compared to the middle. This book discusses, among other things, some of the rituals involved in Buddhist Japan around the shift from liquid to solid and back again. But then things got much better for the littles.

I've used a life expectancy graph here a few times now that shows how our life expectancy has decreased significantly since Covid to make it clear that we're going through a seriously decimating crisis that's being largely ignored. But that's just the tail end of this graph below, which shows life expectancy over the last few centuries:

It's interesting to consider the differences that came in this very, very brief time in human history in which we successfully got most people to make it past 70. The lower life expectancies that came before the industrial revolution don't indicate that older people were dying off younger, but that more younger people didn't make it to old age. There are two things (at least) going on here: First, infant mortality improved dramatically thanks to better medical know-how and a huge thanks to sanitation AND vaccinations.

Where We're At: It's Still Here!

Several people have been screaming into the void about how Covid works, how bad it is, and what we need to do to stop it now that we're dealing with another dominating variant: We're on to Arcturus now (XBB.1.16), guardian of the bear. I've collected three threads here explaining the current situation and desperately trying to correct ongoing misinformation.

Tl;dr version: Covid is a vascular disease that stays in the bloodstream potentially coming back to cause more harm later - we don't know longterm how it will affect people. (Chicken pox becomes shingles decades later.) It's getting worse and will continue to get worse the longer we ignore it and allow it to spread and mutate into more evasive variants that no longer respond to our current meds, and it can cause dangerous brain effects that go unnoticed. We need to wear masks until we have really clean air in every public building evidenced with CO2 monitors on display showing 700ppm or less. (Actually we need to wear masks until we have eradicated the virus, but that might never happen, so it's nice to have an endpoint to rally behind.) 

Here's @1goodtern explaining the big problem with the reality that this virus causes brain damage:

So one of my friends/colleagues tests before they go to see their elderly mother, which was the only reason they found out they had a new covid infection. They stayed at home and said they have actually felt great for the first ten days of their infection, except every single one of their messages has multiple typos and disjointed sentences, when they're normally very precise. And the messages themselves are full of inaccuracies and contradictions and misrememberings.

Hey ho. At least they feel great.

Just imagine if that was your pilot or surgeon, or a truck driver, radiologist, gas engineer, politician, cardiologist, air traffic controller, judge, paramedic, sewage handler, biochemist, nuclear plant engineer, rail engineer, pharmacist, armed response unit... 

Feeling great and not realising they aren't great is not a good scenario for restricting spread of the disease. 

Step By Step: Engulfed by a Lack of Sensitivity

Marian Turski, Auschwitz survivor and Polish historian, made a ten minute speech in December 2021 that has become a more and more timely reminder to pay attention to how we think about harm to one another.

He explains the slow and slippery way a government can get us to accept evil in society. Here it is in full, and it just takes four minutes to read, but I've bolded some important bits:

Let's use our imagination and our thoughts to get to the early 1930s, to Berlin. We find ourselves in the Bavarian district. It's just three stops away from the tier garden, the zoo. There is a station of the metro there; there is park. And one day in those early 1930s, you can read an inscription on the benches: Jews must not sit on these benches. You could say it's unpleasant; it's not fair; it's not right, but after all there are so many benches around you can sit somewhere else. Of course you can. 

That district was inhabited by intellectuals, by the intelligentsia German of Jewish origin. Albert Einstein used to live there, Nelly Sachs the Nobel Prize winner, the politician and industrialist who was minister of foreign affairs. There was a swimming pool and over its door an inscription that read: Jews are forbidden to enter. You could say but there are so many places in Berlin where you can take a bath or swim, so many lakes, canals. It's nearly like Venice. At the same time, you can read somewhere else: Jews must not belong to German singing associations. So what. All right, they want to sing. They want to make music; let them just meet somewhere else. They will do their singing. all right.

What comes up later is an order, really, more of an order than of an inscription: Non-Aryan children must not play with Aryan children, with the German children. All right they'll play on their own. And then you read, we only sell bread and food to Jews after 5 p.m. Right. Less choice: this makes your life harder, but after all after 5 p.m you can still do your shopping. Now I warn you, I warn you, I'm getting used to that thought that someone may be excluded becomes mediated into our lives, the thought that somebody can be stigmatized, that someone may be alienated.

And that's how it is done: step by step, slowly. 

Being Athletic as a Pre-existing Condition of Long Covid

Novelist Alisa Lynn Valdés connected the dots between her personal observation that athletes are getting Long Covid (LC) more often than sedentary people and capillarization. The number of small blood vessels a person has in their muscles (capillaries) can triple in elite athletes. I think she's on to something:

Long Covid is a disease of the capillaries. Most people I know with LC were athletes, like me. I was a fitness trainer, runner, dance teacher for decades. Turns out athletes have 200% more capillarization than sedentary folks. Maybe the truth is, LC is more common in fit people. People at higher altitudes also have greater capillary density. And...whaddaya know? People at higher altitudes are far more likely to develop Long Covid.

It's the capillaries. 

Long Covid is vasculitis. Infectious, inhaled, airborne vasculitis. In horses, coronavirus is literally called Equine Infectious Vasculitis. 

How many of us have hands that look like this now?

That's vasculitis. 

Long Covid also seems to be linked to an overly enthusiastic immune response rather than a weak one. People in medicine and science need to take a moment to recalibrate their minds to be open to new possibilities, with humility. 

After the truth began leaking out in 2021, the media quickly stopped covering it. This is a major problem in pro sports. 

The take home message here is not to sit on the couch more! It's to do all you can to prevent getting Covid and inadvertently giving it to someone elderly, immunocompromised, or in great shape! This virus is taking out our peak performers and destroying the brains of some of our brightest minds. 

Please wear a mask whenever you're inside a public building until we can clean the air and have CO2 monitors attached to the walls that consistently show under 700ppm.

International Long Covid Awareness Day

Now we have a delegated day, today, to remind the world of the number of people who have lost their lives or livelihoods to this ever-mutating virus. Worldwide, about 1 in 1,000 have died so far, and almost 1 in 100 are living with long Covid. 

That's not 1% of the people who got Covid, or 1% of people who got long Covid, but 1% of all people in the world, or 65 million people. There is NO cure, so we have to focus on preventing cases of Covid.

Last month, a Wall Street reporter warned, that for months Federal Reserve officers insisted that the dwindling supply of workers from Covid was elevating inflation levels, then they suddenly decided to stop tracking it. She reported,

"It's premature to say that Covid is no longer an economic issue when long Covid has such a significant effect on America's workforce, economists and health care officials say. . . . The bottom line is that long Covid is why the labor force participation rate has not recovered to pre-pandemic levels"

Where is My Mind? On Freud and Neuropsychology

Freud got some things right, and this isn't a post to slam him. But he understood the whole concept of the unconscious mind upside-down. It's a lot like Aristotle's science, with the cause and effect going in the wrong direction. It's still pretty impressive how far they got as they laid the foundations for entirely new fields of study. I assimilated most of what's below from neuropsychologist Mark Solms's 2019 Wallerstein Lecture. It's fascinating, but over three hours long, and he talks really fast! I'm just a novice in this field of affective neuroscience, and I don't know enough to be sure his confidence in this theory is warranted, but it's a really interesting way to understand ourselves.  

Here's the gist of it.  

Freud figured that the conscious part of our mind, the part that's aware of our world and ourselves, was something that could be located in the brain, but he placed it in the cerebral cortex, the outermost area that does all the thinking. That makes sense because it's how we connect to the outside world. However, according to Solms, the conscious part is actually way in the innermost region of our brain at the upper part of the brain stem. This has been backed up with studies on people with encephalitis that have found that it's not essential to have a cortex in order to have emotional responses and an awareness of the world and self. When neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp had his students guess which rats didn't have a cortex, they guessed incorrectly because the rats missing this intellectual part of their brain were friendlier, more lively and interactive; they didn't have a cerebral cortex inhibiting their movement toward total strangers much like happens with the subdued inhibitions of friendly drunkenness.  

In the News...

A couple unnerving things happened recently that I'm just catching up with. First, the CDC quietly added an update for guidance around certifying death from Covid last February. The controversial bit is here:

And then the NACI announced that bivalents are waning in effectiveness, and people really need two doses, BUT the only people allowed a second one are the immunocompromised and over 65. The funny thing is that it doesn't appear to be because there aren't enough to go around, since so few people are getting the shots at all anymore. For those who actually want more protection, you might not be allowed to get it. Once the bulk of us are over five months from a vaccine, we're all basically back to pre-vaccine times. 

For the love of all that is good in this world, please wear a mask when you're in a public place!!

In other news, Ford raised $6 million in the biggest political fundraiser in Canadian history that was also one of the first to be completely closed to the media, so that's not sus at all. And the Antarctic sea ice is at the lowest levels ever recorded! 

Tra-la-la.

It's not just that we're facing enormous problems that's frustrating, but that we have the solutions, so many books and conferences and accords on how to prevent climate change and the Delphi Consensus telling us exactly what to do to prevent the spread of Covid, but we're just not going to do those things. 

It's a funny world. 

And I'm just doing the math trying to decide if I should take CPP at 60 or 65. For me the pivot point, when you get more money for waiting, is at age 72. So the big question is, what are the odds I can survive the next 15 years?? 

Understanding Long Covid

A couple days ago, Martin Kulldorff, a Swedish biostatistician, was at a White House roundtable discussing Covid when he said, 

"We knew about [infection-acquired immunity] since 430 BC, since the Athenian plague until 2020. Then we didn't know about it for three years, and now we know again."

Many classicists online jumped all over that for two reasons: The first, that the Athenian plague virus was one and done, closer to Ebola than a Coronavirus. People didn't seem to get it twice, so getting it once was protective IFF you survived that one case. 

The second issue is that 25% of people died from it within three years, including Pericles, their leader.

(For context, Socrates was about 40 at the time, and Plato was born just after it had run its course. At the end of this post, I included Thucydide's record of the time for a terrifying comparison to our current situation.) 

On the same day as the roundtable, an episode of The Agenda discussed how we should understand Long Covid in order to best address this healthcare crisis, and nobody advised getting it in order to avoid getting it. Guests included Dr. Fahad Razak, the former scientific director of Ontario's Covid-19 Science Advisory Table, Internist at St. Michael's Hospital, and Associate Professor at the University of Toronto, Dr. Raywat Deonandan, Epidemiologist and Professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Ottawa, and Dr. Jennifer Frontera, Professor of Neurology at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, and of the World Health Organization brain health neurology and Covid-19 forum. They were all more or less on the same page, so this brief summary of the video doesn't clarify who said what:

The Whale and Love

I used to write about films a lot, and then I just stopped. But for the first time in a long time, I'm compelled to say something about a film, mainly because so many reviews I read or watched seemed to get it all wrong. I have to wait for Thomas Flight (brilliant take on The Banshees of Inisherin) or Just an Observation (check out how he explains Barry) to take a stab at it.

The Whale is about the intersection of five people's lives over five days: Charlie, an online college English teacher, Liz, his friend, Ellie, his daughter, Mary, his ex-wife, and Tom, a random missionary that happened to knock on the door as Charlie was having a heart attack. It's about religion in a way that's being missed by the reviews I've read so far. 

*** SPOILER ALERT ***