DOGE

Das makes a good case for the destructive nature of DOGE and points out the fact that government delivers public goods and does so fairly efficiently. Trying to run government like a business perverts the incentives.

Yves Smith suggests that 

Das is downplaying the severity of the US slide, please read this Fortune story ‘The Big Short’ investor who predicted the 2008 crash warns the market is ‘underestimating’ the economic impact of DOGE’s mass spending cuts (hat tip resilc). Representative bits:

[Danny] Moses argued investors are already beginning to see disruptions in consumer confidence—which last month saw its steepest drop in four years—and will continue to hear similar trends in upcoming earnings calls. These slowdowns have yet to be priced into the market, he said…

The tell-tale signs of the weakening economy will be seen in small businesses and “private contractors that are doing legitimate work services that are now being forced to make decisions on their business,” Moses said.

DOGE and Musk could be Trojan horses for dismembering government capabilities and decreasing regulatory constraints on business. Actions to date have significantly weakened bodies responsible for oversight and enforcing legislation. This would allow interests associated with the President to loot the nation. 

COVID and the immune system

Kids are getting sicker

This season, H1N1 and H3N2 are both circulating at high levels, with the US experiencing the worst flu season in at least 15 years. 57 children have died. Meanwhile, on January 14, CBS reported that the norovirus wave had already hit more than double last year’s peak, with no end in sight.

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Parents are continually urged to keep their eyes out for illnesses on the ever-growing list of “spiking” and “surging” diseases, though the tone of reporting in the media is one of calm reassurance. 

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At no point in this article are parents urged to wear masks, investigate the air quality at their local schools, or stay home when ill. It’s unclear, what, exactly, “watching out”, lacking any public health interventions or guidance whatsoever, is supposed to accomplish.

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Immune dysregulation and autoimmunity are considered to be major factors underlying the pathogenesis of Long COVID. A January 2024 article in Science titled “Immune Damage in Long COVID” states: 

Patients with Long Covid display signs of immune dysfunction and exhaustion (1), persistent immune cell activation (3), and autoimmune antibody production (1), which are also pathological features of acute COVID-19.

The article goes on to explain that the complement system, part of your innate immune system, is activated during acute infections and is remaining activated in Long COVID patients. The recent piece Solving the Puzzle of Long COVID also lists immune dysregulation and autoimmunity as a leading hypothesis for the underlying pathogenesis of the condition.

How Musk engineered the coup

NYT reports

How Elon Musk Executed His Takeover of the Federal Bureaucracy

The plan for his Department of Government Efficiency was mapped out in a series of closely held meetings in Palm Beach, Fla., and through early intelligence-gathering efforts in Washington.  …. The team is now moving faster than many of the legal efforts to stop it, making drastic changes that could be hard to unwind even if they are ultimately constrained by the courts. Mr. Musk’s associates have pushed out workers, ignored civil service protections, torn up contracts and effectively shuttered an entire agency established by Congress: the U.S. Agency for International Development.

A month into Mr. Trump’s second term, Mr. Musk and his crew of more than 40 now have about all the passwords they could ever need.

His swift success has been fueled by the president, who handed him the hazy assignment of remaking the federal government shortly after the billionaire endorsed him last summer. Flattered that Mr. Musk wanted to work with him, Mr. Trump gave him broad leeway to design a strategy and execute it, showing little interest in the details.

COVID five year retrospective

What was known, mismanaged

And some explanations.

the current pandemic has killed more than 20 million people worldwide.

What follows is an attempt to put COVID-19 in context based on a focused consideration of a coronavirus literature that has become quite large (and intractable) in the past five years.  My priors are that the only way to address a scientific problem correctly is to go back to the beginnings so that the foundation of current research is as strong as possible. 

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Research is beginning to show that T-cell exhaustion and long-term immune system damage follows SARS-CoV-2 infection, especially in people with long Covid.  Moreover, the proper testing of candidate SARS and by extension SARS-CoV-2 vaccines would require an animal model that reproduces severe coronavirus disease in humans.  During the initial research on a SARS vaccine, macaques were used after being used to confirm Koch’s final postulate that SARS-CoV is the etiologic agent of SARS. [4]  However, these monkeys did not always recapitulate the disease state in humans.  Early research on the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines used rhesus macaques as the experimental nonhuman primate.

Where do we go from here?  None of the foregoing is meant to cast aspersions, but it must be noted that the current COVID-19 vaccines are a rushed and unlikely technical fix for a problem that did not necessarily have to exist.  COVID-19 is the third serious coronavirus outbreak since 2002.  As has been noted by many, there was every reason to expect another coronavirus outbreak, one that could be worse than SARS or MERS.  So far, SARS-CoV-2 is the agent of a worldwide pandemic, and new mutations that make the virus more transmissible and/or virulent have been identified.  Given the apparent unpredictability of the course of a coronavirus infection (the sniffles of a common cold, enduring widespread and long-term organ damage, death) there is no good reason that coronaviruses have not remained a continuing commitment in biomedical research since the original SARS outbreak.

Musk, policy in the guise of efficiency

Social Security

Is in the crosshairs 

What is going on should be obvious. Musk wants to cut off your benefits and then have Congress use the savings to give himself a gigantic tax cut. But Social Security is incredibly popular, so he can’t be open about his intentions. Instead, he is trying to convince Americans that our Social Security system is overrun with massive fraud. The truth is the opposite.

More on long COVID

Twitter w link to the Gauntlet

in

this article aims to outline the basics of Long COVID. What the term refers to scientifically and colloquially, how it can present, hypotheses as to its pathogenesis/es, and where we go from here. It presents some broad definitions, explores some subcategories, and leaves you with the open questions and debates researchers and patients are asking, exploring and living out. There are still many things we don’t know yet. But what we do know, should be shared. 

Although a more severe infection increases your risk of Long COVID, most Long COVID cases- over 90%- began with a mild infection, due to the much larger number of mild infections. And recent studies have found that the risk of developing Long COVID is cumulative, meaning that three infections are more dangerous than one, five more dangerous than three, and so on. 

Immunity to SARS-COV-2 is short-term, and new variants are constantly arising because of our collective decision to continue spreading the virus. Since we must all expect, in the current “new normal” of recurrent SARS infections, to continue to be exposed to COVID, we must all learn the risks of exposure our government has failed to inform us about.

Can everyone have a good life?

needs-based poverty research

Suggests that it’s not the resources, it’s the distribution 

Neoliberal mythology on education and wages

Bad schooling is NOT the cause of low earnings

Nasal spray defense against COVID

Roundup of commercial products

Betadine is the standard but availability is limited now

Iodine plus a viscous agent like carrageenan.

Povidone diluted with saline is a diy method but doesn’t provide the barrier that the carrageenan has.

I’ve used enovid/ Sanotize which is a nitric oxide nasal spray.  I don’t think I have ever had COVID since but also avoid crowded indoor spaces with shared air, and mask frequently.

I think I have had COVID zero to three times. Never tested positive but have had symptoms .  Best guess is once, March 2020, when Cynthia definitely had it.

Neoliberalism’s “ quiet coup “

Book review

Can neoliberalism explain everything?

neoliberalism continues to thrive on a steady diet of scholarship, commentary, and invective. In The Quiet Coup: Neoliberalism and the Looting of America, Mehrsa Baradaran is the latest to anatomize the neoliberal octopus. Baradaran, the author of pathbreaking books on systemic inequality in the United States’ banking system, limns a bleak history of modern American politics. Since the 1960s, she argues, American law and public policy has been reshaped around corporate interests – a transformation that has rippled out into U.S. society and culture.

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the sweep and breadth of Baradaran’s account—touching on everything from empire to civil rights to campaign finance and antitrust—raises the question of whether neoliberalism can explain everything. Is there a unitary system of political, legal, and economic thought, crafted into laws and public policies by a set of ideological actors, that explains our world since the 1960s? It’s a seductive prospect: master this one equation, and you render perfectly legible six tumultuous decades of history.

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For every green industrial strategy, there is a crypto bubble. Moreover, for all that left-leaning and liberal commentators now critique the conditions of neoliberalism, it is unclear whether these critiques are rooted in durable political coalitions. Baradaran makes the provocative, highly astute point that if the 2020s are a decade of transition, it is worrying that figures on the Right traffic in “utopian” appeals far more fluently than do liberals or the Left, from emergent post-Trump populists to Silicon Valley’s sinister philosopher-king Peter Thiel.

Money, economy, why no one knows anything…. MMT adjacent

Doug Lamont goes on a rant.

What is happening today, as a series of unexpected events and crises have unfolded, is that people have been unable to cope in an emergency - especially an extended one. It drives people around the bend. Uncertainty means fear eats away at hope and reason.

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Neoliberal / Neoclassical ideas.

These fundamentally libertarian ideas - which include assumptions and mathematical models of different parts of the economy, claim to describe how the mechanics of the economy work. They don’t.

The fundamental assumption that neoclassical / neoliberal economics gets wrong is related to the creation of new money in an economy.

Institutionalized slavery as the “cure” for homelessness

Business wins with cheap prison labor

In the 1970s, the US began loosening restrictions on prison labor while simultaneously starting to attribute homelessness to mental illness and addiction (and ignoring economic factors). Forty-plus years later and those two parallel tracks of neoliberalism are merging and resurrecting the 19th century Victorian workhouse.

With the number of homeless continuing to rise in the US, municipalities, states, and the national government are faced with the task of doing something about a problem that’s apparently just too hard to solve. As with most any response to the fallout from neoliberalism here in the land of the free, the US comes equipped with a hammer in search of a nail that will profit the powerful and well-connected. And so it is with the “homeless problem” as we see the outlines of consensus beginning to form around solutions that involve incarceration — and therefore forced labor.