The US looks more and more like a third world country

Fraying institutions

People get sorted not so much into red and blue worlds but into different financial systems, living conditions, and educational opportunities. When they get sick, deal with the law, travel—you name it—their experiences are like night and day. They exist in separate spheres. Pretty much the only way for someone in the low-wage sector to break into the affluent one is through a top-notch education—but that path is riddled with obstacles, even if you can find the money.

For most, escape is a distant dream.

The well-educated affluent sector makes decisions, sets the agenda, while the rest are just trying to survive – and getting sicker and dying younger. One cohort makes moves, while the other is caught in the aftermath.

As a rule, here’s what usually happens when a country splits into a dual economy:

• The low-wage sector has hardly any say in public policy.
• The high-income sector keeps wages down in the low-wage area to secure cheap labor for their businesses.
• Social control is used to keep low-wage workers from pushing back against policies that favor the wealthy.
• The main goal for the richest in the high-income sector is to cut taxes.
• Social and economic mobility become rarer.

We see

• Across party lines, the majority of Americans support raising taxes on the wealthy and big corporations.
• Most Americans want to increase Social Security benefits and oppose cuts.
• The majority favor higher taxes on the wealthy to keep Social Security robust.
• Most U.S. adults think the federal government should guarantee healthcare coverage for everyone. The majority favor single-payer – a single government program for healthcare.
• A bipartisan majority of voters want to expand Medicare to cover long-term, in-home care services.

And on it goes. Americans see very little real action from politicians in either party on these issues. In fact, they often see the opposite. Misleading rhetoric won’t make their concerns vanish.

The electorate is not stupid. Most Americans know perfectly well that their wages have not kept up with inflation, no matter how politicians try to spin it. They see the ever-rising costs of essential goods — keeping a roof over their heads, seeing a doctor, and going to college. They realize that the rich are profiting off their hard work and refusing to contribute their fair share in taxes. Black men, in particular, are worse off than they were before the pandemic – and people wonder why they aren’t supporting the status quo as they once did.

Medicine

Makary

Explains a lot about how the practice of medicine can be improved.

He does not call the medical establishment nefarious; rather, he accuses it of frequently embracing a narrative — that stress causes ulcers, for instance — without evidence, ignoring scientific findings that do not support the idea, and blackballing those who question their position.

Medical journals, for example, are a primary way in which doctors learn about new scientific knowledge that informs the medical care they provide. Most journals use a peer-review process, meaning that an article is only accepted for publication if a panel of experts deems it to be accurate and of high quality.

Makary has written more than 250 peer-reviewed articles in medical journals, but he is no fan of the genre. In his view, editorial boards, the gatekeepers of peer-reviewed publishing “tend to be composed of like-minded friends.”

“I have been shocked to see studies so flawed that the results are rendered invalid, yet they were published in prestigious medical journals and upheld as scientific proof when instead they just support a groupthink narrative,” 

Some issues with Medicare Advantage

Problematic

this year 54 percent of all beneficiaries are enrolled in private Medicare plans. 

To those in favor of market-oriented solutions, this would seem like a success story. It would be, except one crucial piece of context: It is costing taxpayers a lot of money. The Medicare Advisory Payment Commission (MedPac), a nonpartisan congressional agency, estimates that the CMS has spent 23 percent more on Medicare Advantage patients than it would have if those patients were in traditional Medicare.

Free market abuses rather than automatic “efficiency “

Monopoly power

Incentives to cheat.

Elinor ostrom and reclaiming the commons

Handling the polycrisis

Some wisdom about how the crises could be resolved but not necessarily a good blueprint for how to solve the political details in order to move forward.

My working thesis is that it cannot be solved without serious disruption, looking to game theory.  Too many people have self interest in near term projects that create benefits for them but impose huge costs on the rest of the world.

the thinking that got us into our current mess, particularly but not solely climate climate change and environmental degradation, is inherently ill-suited to come up with remedies... 

What we are up against is not just neoliberalism. It is a highly complex society, with most occupying very specialized roles, combined with capitalism, which requires a large majority of people to sell their labor to survive. Oh, and worse, sell that labor in a competitive market. That generally means that trying to do things differently as a current or prospective employee is likely to result in not having a paycheck.

Individuals are typically subject to multiple sets of responsibilities, and they often conflict. The number of conflicts tends to increase as societies become more complex, starting with family/tribal, local communities, national, global. Humans have seldom been good at working out how to manage competing levels of responsibility. The tensions and contradictions get greater as societies become more complex.

Conjunctural analysis

How to 

communicate without getting lost in the Overton Window

The problem with information these days is not only its content, but equally its form. The velocity of information is striking, making it near impossible for a concerned person to discern both what is significant and what is true. Providing an excess of information that comes without proper, democratic analysis and is almost entirely controlled by a small oligarchy is its own form of censorship, exhausting the reader and viewer into submission. What is censored is not only information itself, although that does occur more than we admit, but also knowledge and wisdom. The news remains at the level of it happened, without explaining most of what happened at all: it does not explain why it happened, what caused it to happen, or its possible consequences. This form of reporting lies by omission, as events are neither static nor singular but part of a complex process.

Conjunctural analyses are an important tool for understanding that complexity, since they seek to explain the dynamic process of history at a certain point in time. Any given point in time is rooted in a past and a future: the past shapes the present, but the present also presages what may come in the future depending on how one intervenes now. That is why conjunctural analyses, derived from a history of Marxist analysis and from the work of the political and social movements that conduct them, are rooted in four principles:

1. History. Since events do not take place in isolation but are part of a long-term process, there must be a distinction between incidental or occasional events and organic or structural events.
2. Totality. Events are interconnected. They are part of a complex structure that encompasses various possibilities.
3. Structure. Events take place within a lattice that includes economic, political, social, and cultural aspects and within which people are organised into classes and power blocs that interact through institutions and ideas.
4. Politics. Events must be understood in an active way, which means asking how a political force will act to shape the future, rather than passively watching the future unfold. Answering this question requires a close analysis of the nature of class formation, the balance of political forces, and cultural traditions that could advance a certain political agenda.

Anthropic vision of good AI

Amodei presents his vision of how the next generation of powerful AI can help 

COVID

Repeat infections

It’s not like the flu.

even a “mild” case of COVID can throw your immune system into a tizzy as it works to quickly shore up your defenses. And each reinfection is a fresh opportunity for the virus to win the battle.

…

any encounter with COVID can also cause your immune system to “go awry or develop some form of dysfunction,” Dr. Al-Aly tells SELF. Specifically, “immune imprinting” can happen, where, upon a second (or third or fourth) exposure to the virus, your immune cells launch the same response as they did for the initial infection, in turn blocking or limiting the development of new antibodies necessary to fight off the current variant that’s stirring up trouble. So, “when you get hit an [additional] time, your immune system may not behave classically,” Dr. Al-Aly says, and could struggle with mounting a good defense.

Marx

A review of Capital

capitalism’s unprecedented mode of producing for human needs and generating wealth shapes present and future conditions of earthly existence more pervasively and profoundly than anything else humans have made. It affects the entirety of the planet’s surface and crafts both possibilities and challenges for all life upon it. It arrays 8 billion homo sapiens across a wildly uneven spectrum of opulence, comfort, poverty, and desperation. It contours all social relations and subjectivities, from practices of work and leisure to arrangements of kinship, intimacy, and loneliness. In addition to class, it constructs and mobilizes race and gender in continuously changing yet persistently exploitable ways. It powers technological revolutions and scatters the discarded remains of past ones everywhere on earth and in orbits circling it. It birthed the Anthropocene—the epoch in which human and “natural” histories are now permanently and dynamically entwined—and within it, the Great Acceleration: the short half-century in which fossil fuel use intensified so radically as to inaugurate what scientists term the Sixth Mass Extinction. And it incited the development of finance, artificial intelligence, and other practices animated by digital technologies that bode ever more intense and paradoxical ways to both serve and dominate the species that invented them.

Neofeudalism and the panopticon

Neo feudal review

Ukrainian recent history

Wetern destruction of the Ukraine 🇺🇦

Glenn Diesen walks us through the past 20 years 

In political propaganda, it is common to frame a war through a concept that everyone agrees with, such as the need to “help” Ukraine. We all want to help Ukraine preserve its sovereignty, territory and the lives of its citizens. However, instead of discussing what would help Ukraine, such concepts are given a fixed meaning to shut down debates. Any argument can then be framed as either being pro-Ukrainian or pro-Russian. However, what is bad for Russia is not automatically good for Ukraine. Yet, people who can be taught to speak in clichés can be taught to think in clichés. Commentary on NATO policies toward Russia is similarly framed as being pro-Western or pro-Russian, which circumvents an actual discussion about whether these policies are in the West’s interests or not.

Epistemological analysis of the internet

Free speech…

Much of our knowledge of the world comes not from direct sensory experience, but from reliance on epistemic authorities: individuals or institutions that tell us what we ought to believe. For example, what most of us believe about natural selection, climate change, or the Holocaust comes from our reliance on epistemic authorities (scientists, historians). Sustaining epistemic authority depends, crucially, on social institutions that inculcate reliable second-order norms about whom to believe about what. The traditional media were crucial, in the age of mass democracy, with promulgating and sustaining such norms. The internet has obliterated the intermediaries who made that possible, and, in the process, undermined the epistemic standing of actual experts. This essay considers some possible changes to existing free speech doctrine to remedy the epistemological crisis brought about by the internet.

COVID and the brain

Bloomberg surveys the literature

In 2021, UK researchers reported early results from a study comparing brain scans taken before and after the pandemic began. They discovered signs of damage and accelerated aging in the brain, particularly in the region responsible for smell, even in patients who had experienced mostly mild cases of Covid months earlier.

How Does Covid-19 Impact the Brain?

Research has since shown that Covid-related cognitive deficits can persist for years, especially in older adults and those who suffered more severe cases. 

…

Even mild cases of Covid led to cognitive decline, equivalent to an average 3-point drop in IQ. For those with unresolved symptoms such as persistent shortness of breath or fatigue, the decline amounted to a 6-point decrease in IQ.

Some evidence suggests the infection may increase the risk of Parkinson’s disease. This link is supported by the rise in cases of parkinsonism — a collection of symptoms such as tremors, slow movement, stiffness and balance issues — following Covid.