Ukraine warnings

A worthwhile thread

Indoor air quality checklist

For community spaces

When a person has COVID-19, they release small particles that contain the virus when they breathe, talk, sing, cough or sneeze. These are often referred to as respiratory particles. Most of these small particles initially hover around an infected person’s face— that’s why keeping a distance can help reduce infections. But small particles can also move, like cigarette smoke. When someone develops COVID-19 by breathing in small particles that contain the virus, this is often referred to as airborne transmission or aerosol transmission. If a person who has COVID-19 is wearing a good, well-fitted respirator-type mask, such as an N95, this is called source control,because it helps prevent small particles that contain the virus from entering the room. 

Ventilation. In this document, we are using ventilation to refer to the process of bringing fresh air from outside into a building or a room while removing stale air from the same space. If a room feels stuffy or there are a lot of odours, this may be an indication that it is not well ventilated.

Purpose and agency

Even in smallest of life forms

One of biology’s most enduring dilemmas is how it dances around the issue at the core of such a description:, [of] agency, the ability of living entities to alter their environment (and themselves) with purpose to suit an agenda. Typically, discussions of goals and purposes in biology get respectably neutered with scare quotes: cells and bacteria aren’t really ‘trying’ to do anything, just as organisms don’t evolve ‘in order to’ achieve anything (such as running faster to improve their chances of survival). In the end, it’s all meant to boil down to genes and molecules, chemistry and physics – events unfolding with no aim or design, but that trick our narrative-obsessed minds into perceiving these things.

Yet, on the contrary, we now have growing reasons to suspect that agency is a genuine natural phenomenon.

Lots of things going wrong simultaneously

We may be in a 

polycrisis

A polycrisis can be thought of as having the following properties:

(1) Multiple, separate crises happening simultaneously. This is the most immediate and comprehensible feature.

(2) Feedback loops, in which individual crises interact in both foreseeable and unexpected ways. This points to the ways that these separate crises relate to each other.

(3) Amplification, whereby these interactions cause crises to magnify or accelerate, generating a sense of lack of control. The way these separate problems relate and connect works to exacerbate and deepen the different crises.

(4) Unboundedness, in which each crisis ceases to be clearly demarcated, both in time and space, as different problems bleed over and merge. It becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish where one issue ends, and another commences.

(5) Layering, a dynamic Tooze attributes to Yixin’s analysis, whereby the concerns of interest groups related to each distinct crisis overlap ‘to create layered social problems: current problems with historical problems, tangible interest problems with ideological problems, political problems with non-political problems; all intersecting and interfering with one another’ (quoted in Tooze 2021, 18).

(6) The breakdown of shared meaning, stemming from crises being understood differently and from the complex ways in which they interact, and how these interactions are subsequently perceived differently. As each crisis blurs and connects to the other, it becomes more difficult to identify a clear scope and narrative for each distinct crisis, as well as coming to terms with all the interactions between different issues.

(7) Cross purposes, whereby each individual crisis might impede the resolution of another crisis, in terms of demanding attention and resources, and the extent to which they have become tangled together makes it difficult to distinguish and prioritise.

(8) Emergent properties, the collection of these dynamics, which all exhibit a high degree of reflexivity, exceeds the sum total of its parts. The polycrisis is ultimately much more than a collection of smaller, separate crises. Instead, it is something like a socio-political version of the ‘Fujiwhara effect,’ a term used to describe when two or more cyclones come together, morph and merge.

Over the last year, historian Adam Tooze popularized the term “polycrisis.” Previously deployed by Jean-Claude Juncker in to describe the eurozone-Brexit-climate-refugee crises in 2016, and originally attributed to French complexity theorist Edgar Morin, Tooze explored it again in June with his crisis pictures of overlapping emergencies—pandemic, sovereign debt, inflation, GOP risk, hunger—in which the whole becomes more dangerous than the sum of the parts.

We also want to acknowledge a debt to economic analyst Nathan Tankus, who articulated the interconnectedness that we want to track in our project, pointing out that his newsletter was called Notes on the Crises, “for the simple reason that this is not the only crisis we will encounter over the next several decades.”

Notes on the Crises covers the play by play of the current pandemic-induced global depression and how policymakers should respond to it as well as assessing how they actually are responding.

Our goal is to explore those connections, and to identify and amplify others who are doing the same.

Woodrow Wilson’s destruction of socialism

And other things perpetrated using the 

Espionage Act

Incentives drive ill health

Teachable moment    explains why billing codes and other healthcare and food system structures incent actions detrimental to public health 

A system based on billing codes determined by never-ending stays on prescription medications is core to the problem. The business model of healthcare companies relies on long-term sick patients staying in the system- not getting better. Though 90% of the cost of chronic disease reflects diet and lifestyle, prescription drugs are the solution of choice. Physicians who base their practices on diet and lifestyle solutions are gaslighted and wimpified. Somehow diet and exercise are labeled as elitist, ableist, and racist.

Why is it in Government’s interest to keep people sick?

It’s not a conspiracy theory. Follow the money.

Pharmaceutical companies underwrite eighty percent of medical school budgets. Many medical school deans receive six-figure or more payments from the industry.

Industry quality measures predicate how many patients doctors can get on medication and keep them there.

Long-term medical assistance rather than cures are the North Star of industry standards.

Americans’ health suffers in exchange for steady profits flowing into the prescription drug and processed food industries.

Heart healthy enzymes

nattokinase, serrapeptase or lumbrokinase

Landlords of the internet

Daniel Greene lays it out

The physical assets at the core of the internet, the warehouses that store and transmit data and interlink global networks, are owned not by technology firms like Google and Amazon, but by commercial real estate barons who compete with malls and property storage empires. While the infrastructural turn has brought data centers and transcontinental cables further into view in technology studies, the economic life of these massive projects has come under less scrutiny. Granted an empire by the US at the moment of the internet’s commercialization, these internet landlords and their particular business model shaped how the network of networks that we call the internet physically connects, and how personal and business data is stored and transmitted. Under their governance, internet exchanges, colocation facilities, and data centers take on a double life as financialized real estate assets that circle the globe even as their servers and cables are firmly rooted in place. This article relates the history of the landlords of the internet, showing how a fundamental reconsideration of the business model at the heart of the internet changes how we understand internet governance and contemporary capitalism writ large.

…

The physical points of interconnection that knit together the network of networks we call the internet are built and maintained by landlords. They understand themselves to be competing with other real estate empires dealing in storage units, or malls, or apartments, or nursing homes. They extract rents from tenants who send and store large amounts of data, in order to compete with other, heavily-financialized real estate corporations. This market was created by the neoliberal property state during the internet’s commercialization, before growing in the dotcom boom, maturing in the bust as private equity bought up devalued assets, and expanding rapidly through Web 2.0. Their status secured through their transformation into REITs, internet landlords have today expanded across the globe, to the point where the only challenge to their power comes from their most powerful tenants—and even that threat looks unlikely to materialize. Their global reach comes not just from physical networks of warehouses and cables but the IRS-approved reality that those facilities are in fact a rentable part of the internet and a financial asset that circulates between global investors far removed from the physical location.

…

different communities have wished for different internets; that it would be cheaper, faster, cleaner, bigger, smaller, more accessible, private, democratic, open, preserved, or forgetful. Each of these values represents a need of some people somewhere, currently unmet. But the landlord’s internet is not produced for need; it is produced for exchange. 

…

the ease with which the property state handed over the internet, the initiative enterprising landlords took in its early days, and the breadth of their present empire shows that while it may still be different in the future, it seems it could only be this way today. A neoliberal American property state commercialized the internet. 

On the precipice of a financial crisis

Just want to go on record…

Ruffer  is merely one example 

EU is in trouble from Russia sanctions blowback and loss of nordstream 

COVID cases are at a high plateau going into fall/winter 

Worse situation than anything in my lifetime.  Don’t know how to make systemic changes so maybe just get prepared to hunker down again.

Yves Smith discusses…

rapidly accelerating real economy crisis, which is exacerbated by central bank tightening as pretty much the only line of defense against inflation that is almost entirely the result of a a multi-fronted supply shock.1 Needless to say, the Fed raising interest rates (which Bernanke recognized as necessary in 2014 to tame bubbly asset prices but then lost his nerve) does nothing to get more chips from China or magically cure Covid-afflicted staffers so they can show up at work. But it will whack all sorts of speculators and financial firms who have wrong-footed their interest rate positions.

Nouriel Roubini 

thinks we are on the verge, stagflation rampant

Satyajit Das  has similar analysis 

Noise – day-to-day gyrations and speculation- masks the fact that a major re-set, the largest since 2007, may be underway.

The first driver is that magical economic thinking and era of ultra-cheap money is coming to a close.

The second factor is the brutal destruction of ludicrous financial fantasies. Everything and everywhere asset price bubbles, fuelled by decades of debt financed consumption and investments and low cost of funds, now face their most rigorous examination.

few are, for the most part, unwilling to acknowledge conflicting priorities. Additional investment in public services and cost of living assistance is incompatible with lower taxes and sound public finances. Deregulation and interventionism on pet issues are inconsistent. Sacrifices and lower living standards are firmly rejected.

COVID look back

Ed Yong  looks back on lessons learned but ignored.

I was not optimistic about pandemic response but it was much worse and the US systemically is unable to prepare for public health.

Ed blames a lot on the American ethos of rugged individualism 

the Biden administration and its advisers have reassured Americans that, with vaccines and antivirals, “we have the tools” to control the pandemic. These tools are indeed effective, but their efficacy is limited if people can’t access them or don’t want to, and if the government doesn’t create policies that shift that dynamic. A profoundly unequal society was always going to struggle with access: People with low incomes, food insecurity, eviction risk, and no health insurance struggled to make or attend vaccine appointments, even after shots were widely available. A profoundly mistrustful society was always going to struggle with hesitancy, made worse by political polarization and rampantly spreading misinformation.

CDC guidance is not only wrong   but dangerous