Lazy linking

First of all, I have created a bluesky account – feel free to follow me. I don’t know how active it will be, but I will try to give it a chance.

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In These Times has reprinted two works by Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison on Fascism and Censorship

In this reprint of “Peril” and “Racism and Fascism,” Toni Morrison warns of the creative depths of fascism’s reach.

From 1977 to 1979, June Jordan and Toni Morrison were both a part of The Sisterhood, a group of Black women writers who met in a New York City apartment to eat and drink together while discussing liberation. Whether addressing genocide, imperialism or the American literary establishment, the writers in the group, which included Alice Walker and Ntozake Shange, saw their work as a means to make interventions against dominant narratives of colonialism and oppression.

Their words ring prescient.

In ​“Peril” (2008) and ​“Racism and Fascism” (1995), reprinted below, Morrison recognizes what the creep of fascism looks like, particularly the censorship of dissent. Found here, in an excerpt of the essay ​“Life After Lebanon” (1984), Jordan reflects on the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 (funded by American taxes, of course), the backlash she faced after publicly condemning it and the fearless women who supported her in spite of it all. And in an excerpt of ​“Waking Up in the Middle of Some American Dreams” (1986), Jordan underscores the dire need for coalition-building across differences.

The article (and the excerpt I copied) also links to June Jordan’s works

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In the upcoming times, some of this might be useful for people

Anonymous — The Uber-Secret Handbook Version 3.0

This is not an endorsement of Anonymous, a group too undefined for me to have an overall opinion about, but rather a reference to a bunch of advice and practices that can help you stay safer on the internet in a changing future.

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Journalists flock to Bluesky as X becomes increasingly ‘toxic’

Journalists are finding more readers and less hate on Bluesky than on the platform they used to know as Twitter.

It is early days yet, but Bluesky seems like they take moderation seriously, and they allow you to filter messages on a much more fine-grained level than Twitter ever did.

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Concern Grows Around Billionaire Peter Thiel’s Period-Tracking App

Peter Thiel — the billionaire venture capitalist, Gawker destroyer and top dollar conservative campaign donor — is now backing a “femtech” app called 28, according to Vice News.

The app, created by a controversial women’s publication called Evie Magazine, claims to be a “cycle-based” nutrition and wellness program that helps women “reclaim control of [their] bodies, in the most natural way possible.”

This is important. Thiel is a big funder and backer of both Trump and the draconian policies to remove female autonomy

Neither the billionaire’s venture firm Thiel Capital nor Thiel himself are strangers to health and life science investments, but funding a fertility startup is a bit of a turn, especially at a moment during which a lot of Americans have just lost, rather than reclaimed, a significant degree of bodily autonomy.

And a closer look at the app, and those who made it, illuminates a powerful political intersection between tech, health, the wellness industry, and modern conservatism in which conspiracy theories and dubious pseudoscience are feeding a growing counter-counter-culture.

For starters, the science is sketchy. The core premise of the app appears to get women off modern birth control methods, like the hormonal pill or an intrauterine device. Its website is almost comically vague on what the alternative might be, but a focus on “cycles” suggests that it’s essentially the rhythm method, which basically entails attempting to avoid sex during ovulation. That’s fine in principle, but the rhythm method is statistically quite ineffective, with about a quarter of couples using it accidentally becoming pregnant over the average year.

The publication behind the app raises even more questions. Evie appears to be somewhat of a Cosmopolitan-meets-MindBodyGreen-meets-Tomi Lahren situation: makeup, workout, and holistic wellness tips and tricks are sandwiched between transphobic essays and anti-vaxx arguments. Its anti-birth control cycle-tracking app — which, yes, requires that women input potentially incriminating menstruation data — seems like a natural extension of that apparent mission: the rejection of a very specific version of “feminism” in order to embrace an old-meets-new version of traditional femininity.

The app seems like an attempt to gather data, while providing a pseudo-scientific method of birth control. It is easy to foresee a future where the app data will be used to force people to give birth in pregnancies which was caused by people trusting the method promoted by the app.

Thiel, and the companies he control, should never have access to any kind of health or personal data!

 

Lockdowns and Teen girl brains

There is currently some news going around that Covid lockdowns prematurely aged girls’ brains more than boys’

Adolescent girls who lived through Covid lockdowns experienced more rapid brain ageing than boys, according to data that suggests the social restrictions had a disproportionate impact on them.

MRI scans found evidence of premature brain ageing in both boys and girls, but girls’ brains appeared on average 4.2 years older than expected after lockdowns, compared with 1.4 years older for boys.

This certainly sounds like something we should be worried about, even if it is not clear what the effect of these differences are.

There are two things that should make you stop up, before getting two worried. It is the fact that the study is based on “MRI scans” and that it is about COVID political measures. MRI studies are rife with problems – as explained in Annual Research Review: Current limitations and future directions in MRI studies of child- and adult-onset developmental psychopathologie

The widespread use of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in the study of child- and adult-onset developmental psychopathologies has generated many investigations that have measured brain structure and function in vivo throughout development, often generating great excitement over our ability to visualize the living, developing brain using the attractive, even seductive images that these studies produce. Often lost in this excitement is the recognition that brain imaging generally, and MRI in particular, is simply a technology, one that does not fundamentally differ from any other technology, be it a blood test, a genotyping assay, a biochemical assay, or behavioral test. No technology alone can generate valid scientific findings. Rather, it is only technology coupled with a strong experimental design that can generate valid and reproducible findings that lead to new insights into the mechanisms of disease and therapeutic response

The subject the review focus on is not the one that the prematurely aged brains study fall under, but the same general problem exist.

And then there is the fact that the study is linked to COVID political measures. Any time this is the case, we have to stop up and be extra careful. There are a lot of biases related to this subject, both from the scientists and by the people reporting on the study.

Unsurprisingly this is also the case here. As epidemiologist Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, the Health Nerd, explains:

Lockdowns Didn’t “Prematurely Age” Teen Girl’s Brains

Why the new viral study is extremely misleading

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The study in question is a neurological examination of teen brains. The researchers put a bunch of adolescents aged 9-17 into MRIs before the pandemic, and then looked at their brains again a few years later. They used this data to look at what had happened to the brains in the interim using a variety of statistical techniques.

The Health Nerd goes through the study, explaining the setup and limits of the study. Unsurprisingly, it is a small study, and it is hard to make broad conclusions based on it. And when it comes to the effect of lockdowns?

Which brings us to an interesting point – what does any of this have to do with lockdowns?

Simple answer, really: nothing. The study does not, in any way, examine the effects of lockdown on teen brains.

Rather, the study shows that teen girls’ brains after the pandemic were different to the expected trends from brains before the pandemic. This could be caused by many things. Maybe the virus itself, which can cause some changes to brain chemistry, is to blame. Perhaps it was the global disruption brought about by a novel pandemic. Maybe the girls were more vulnerable than boys to things like relatives dying of COVID-19. We have no idea, because the authors didn’t do anything to investigate these myriad explanations. They don’t even report that the children in the study were present in Washington State for the lockdowns, nor whether they experienced similar lockdown impacts (i.e. school closures).

To make any inferences about lockdowns, the authors would’ve had to find some control group who’d had a different exposure to their intervention. Perhaps MRIs from kids in Florida, which had different COVID-19 restrictions, or a longitudinal sample from before the pandemic. These would all be inadequate samples for one reason or another, but they would’ve at least given some insight into whether lockdowns were associated with the cortical thinning seen in the research. As it stands, the study tells us nothing at all.

So, this is a somewhat doubtful study, which doesn’t tell us what is claimed about the study. The claims however are not sensational reporting by the press, but directly made by the scientists:

You can’t just blame the media here – the authors put the word “lockdown” into their study. It’s the second word of the title of their paper. Despite the paper having nothing to do with lockdowns.

This is, in a word, bad. Bad science. Poorly thought-through. Inadequate in a very serious way.

The Health Nerd  explains how such a paper could be published in PNAS.

This is why supplements need to be regulated as well

It is a common problem around the world that supplements are not regulated as heavily as medicine and food in general, which causes some serious problems from time to time. Here is the latest example from Japan:

5 dead, 114 hospitalized from recalled Japanese health supplements

In the week since a line of Japanese health supplements began being recalled, five people have died and more than 100 people were hospitalized as of Friday.

Osaka-based Kobayashi Pharmaceutical Co came under fire for not going public quickly with problems known internally as early as January. The first public announcement came March 22.

Company officials said 114 people were being treated in hospitals after taking products, including Benikoji Choleste Help meant to lower cholesterol, that contain an ingredient called benikoji, a red species of mold. Earlier in the week, the number of deaths stood at two people.

Some people developed kidney problems after taking the supplements, but the exact cause was still under investigation in cooperation with government laboratories, according to the manufacturer.

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The company’s products have been recalled — as have dozens of other products that contain benikoji, including miso paste, crackers and a vinegar dressing. Japan’s health ministry put up a list on its official site of all the recalled products, including some that use benikoji for food coloring.

The ministry warned the deaths could keep growing. The supplements could be bought at drug stores without a prescription from a doctor, and some may have been purchased or exported before the recall, including by tourists who may not be aware of the health risks.

Kobayashi Pharmaceutical had been selling benikoji products for years, with a million packages sold over the past three fiscal years, but a problem crept up with the supplements produced in 2023. Kobayashi Pharmaceutical said it produced 18.5 tons of benikoji last year.

Some analysts blame the recent deregulation initiatives, which simplified and sped up approval for health products to spur economic growth.

Note the last line – there has been deregulation initiatives for “health products”. I hope they are rolled back quickly, or this will not be the last time something like this happens in Japan.

Get well Marcus Ranum

Marcus Ranum is offline due to a health issue – he has written about it on his blog. I wish him a speedy recovery.

Offline

Even though the hospital visit seems to have futile, I am glad that Marcus Ranum didn’t ignore the symptoms, but instead got medical attention.

This hits rather close to home, as one of my close friends is currently in hospital due to a blood clot in his brain. He fortunately recognized the symptoms, and called an ambulance, which took him to the hospital straight away. Now, he is recovering, but he will have to relearn some motor skills. If he hadn’t recognized the symptoms and called the ambulance, the outcome would have been completely different.

Science Vs limiting their output

I have listened to the Science Vs podcast for a while, but had somehow missed the fact that they had become exclusive to Spotify. This is not a good situation to be in for a podcast promoting the understanding of science, and the host/producer Wendy Zukerman and the editor Blythe Terrell have taken the consequences and are now limiting their output to shows that debunk stuff released on the Spotify platform

Zukerman, the host and executive producer for “Science Vs,” and Terrell, an editor for the science podcast, plan to limit their production on new episodes because they do not believe Spotify’s rules regarding misinformation go far enough.

“Until Spotify implements stronger methods to prevent the spread of misinformation on the platform, we will no longer be making new Science Vs episodes, except those intended to counteract misinformation being spread on Spotify,” they wrote in a letter to Ek, posted on Twitter on Monday.

“Science Vs,” which is exclusive to Spotify, looks at the science behind topics including pandemics.

They have already started doing this, with their latest episode Joe Rogan: The Malone Interview, which you can listen to here.

I applaud the principled stance that they have taken. You can find their twitter feed here.

Engadget have a few more details in Spotify’s ‘Science VS’ podcast will only fact-check misinformation being spread on Spotify

Quitting Spotify Premium

The Neil Young ultimatum to Spotify about the Joe Rogan podcast, and the afterwards removal of Young’s music from the platform has gotten me to do something which I had considered several times before – cancelling my Spotify Premium account.

I am not a fan of neither Neil Young as a person nor of his music, but he is right that Spotify helps spread dangerous misinformation, and we need to show them that it is unacceptable.

I have been using Spotify, either the free version or the Premium version, since I was on a project in Sweden in 2008 or so. Back then, Spotify was only available in Sweden, and they checked your location when you signed in, so I could only use it when at work. Later the service became available in the rest of the world.

In the past, I have considered cancelling Spotify due to their fairly low pay to the artists (of the big streaming services, YouTube is the only one that’s worse), but one of the reasons I’ve stuck around has been the lack of alternative, and the lack of a definitive push. Well, promoting Joe Rogan is definitely a definitive push, so I guess I will be looking for a new streaming platform to hear music on.  I have heard good stuff about Tidal so I will be checking that streaming platform out.

If you want a good explanation why Joe Rogan is so problematic, I highly recommend listening to the Joe Rogan episode of the Decoding the Gurus podcast.

 

Lazy linking

One of the clear signs that US society doesn’t work probably, is the fact that people have to do fundraisers to cover medical costs and increasingly, to cover basic costs of living. One of the big platforms for these fundraisers, is GoFundMe. Now, the CEO of GoFundMe is speaking out, pointing out that this is wrong

GoFundMe CEO: Hello Congress, Americans need help and we can’t do your job for you

Coronavirus surge of fundraisers on GoFundMe shows why Congress must pass emergency aid for monthly bills, restaurants, small businesses and food.

The opinion piece in USA Today doesn’t tell us anything that most of us didn’t already know, but it is good that a CEO of a company, which is benefiting greatly from the current situation, is speaking out.

The Burger Flipper Who Became a World Expert on the Minimum Wage

As a 16-year-old kid flipping burgers at a Seattle McDonald’s in 1989, Arindrajit Dube was earning the state minimum wage of $3.85 an hour. “I remember feeling privileged that I was going to go on to college, while there were many older workers working at that wage,” he recalls.

He still thinks about the minimum wage, only now it’s from his perch at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he’s possibly the world’s leading authority on its economic effects. Dube’s research is guaranteed to get a bigger audience as Democrats in Congress attempt to make good on President Biden’s pledge to raise the federal wage floor to $15 an hour by 2025.

Intuitively, it makes sense that increasing the minimum wage, would force companies to increase prices, drive down sales, reduce company profit, and will even force companies into closing. Fortunately, as with many things, intuition is wrong in this.

This is for a few reasons:

  • Wages only form a portion of the costs, and the costs can be spread over many items. E.g. in the classic example of a burger joint, the employer sells many burgers per hour, meaning that the price increase per burger will be minimal.
  • Increasing minimum wages will allow people to work fewer hours, and not e.g. two jobs as we see all too often now, thus opening the job market up for more people.
  • It will give minimum wage employees more money to spend, thus increasing the demand on goods.

Yes, there might be companies surviving on the very margins, which can’t increase their sales, which will close, but my guess is that many of those companies already have closed during this pandemic.

Further reading: Home Articles Making the Case for a Higher M… SHARE: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call Making the Case for a Higher Minimum Wage by Arindrajit Dube

Big Tech as an Unnatural Monopoly

Interesting piece by Tim Brennan in the Milken Institute Review, where he takes a look on Big Tech as monopolies, why they defy the current anti-trust laws, and what can actually be done about Big Tech.

Further reading: Rethinking Antitrust by Lawrence J. White (also in the Milken Institute Review)

This COVID-vaccine designer is tackling vaccine hesitancy — in churches and on Twitter

Immunologist Kizzmekia Corbett helped to design the Moderna vaccine. Now she volunteers her time talking about vaccine science with people of colour.

Kizzmekia Corbett’s twitter feed can be found here.

It is a low bar that President Biden has to clear, but I find it so nice that the US now has a president who is willing to thank people for their hard work

 

Bette Midler should stay in her lane

I am generally not a great fan of people telling actors that they should stay in their lane, but occasionally they really should stay in their lane. Bette Midler demonstrates a clear example of this.

It all started with a tweet by Dr. Jen Gunter

Which caused Bette Midler to write the following

It is hard to surprise me these days, but I must admit I hadn’t considered Bette Midler attacking Dr. Jen Gunter as being alt-right as one of the missing ingredients of 2020. Bette Midler’s defense was much appreciated by Marianne Williamson

Unsurprisingly, Dr. Jen Gunter actually knew what she was talking about.

Bette Midler is probably not going to admit that she is wrong about Marianne Williamson, but hopefully this will be a lecture in humility, making her actually do a little research before tweeting, and especially before accusing someone like Dr. Jen Gunter as being alt-right.

Migrant workers hit hard by pandemic

If there is one thing you can be sure of, is that every time a pandemic hits, it is the poorest among us that suffers the worst. COVID-19 is no exception. And it is clearly demonstrated in Singapore, where the poorest people are, as often is the case, the migrant workers.

Covid-19 Singapore: A ‘pandemic of inequality’ exposed

Once lauded for its containment of the virus, Singapore’s success crumbled when the virus reached its many foreign worker dormitories, something activists say should have been seen coming a mile off.

Now months on, Singapore is reporting single figure daily cases in the local community. People are going back to work, cinemas have reopened and laughter can be heard coming out of restaurants again.

But many of Singapore’s lowest earners remain indoors, facing uncertainty.

The dormitories are overcrowded, with too few facilities for the number of people living there. A ripe place for a virus to spread rapidly, and so it has done.

COVID-19 cases in Singapore

COVID-19 cases in Singapore (image source: BBC)

As the above image of COVID-19 cases in Singapore in general versus among people living in dorms shows, the difference is stark. A lot of the differences is that the people in the dorm are quarantined until they have been tested. Or as the BBC article explains

The authorities decided that the dormitories would have to be sealed off.

Around 10,000 healthy migrant workers in essential services were taken out to other accommodation – a skeleton staff to keep the country running.

But the majority were trapped in the dorms – some not even allowed to leave their rooms – while mass testing was carried out. Infected workers were gradually removed, isolated and treated.

It was a remarkably different experience to the lockdown the rest of the country was going through, with shopping allowed, daily exercise encouraged and every type of outlet offering delivery. These people were well and truly locked down, with only basic meals delivered to them.

“Once the lockdown was in place, we were not allowed to come out of the room. We were not allowed to go next door too,” Vaithyanathan Raja, from southern India, told the BBC.

This is an inhuman way to treat people, and it makes it a certainty that everyone in a dorm would get infected if anyone in it, is infected.

We have seen similar things happen in US jails and ICE detention centers. I would guess that it has also happened among the many migrant workers in India, who were severely affected by the sudden shutdown of India.

It seems like the pandemic are forcing some employers in Singapore to provide better places for foreign workers. Hopefully this will last. And hopefully, it will lessen the impact of the next pandemic.

The mother of all super spreader events

One of the things we learned early about COVID-19, was that a lot of the cases comes from so-called super spreader events. Events where a lot of people got infected, and then spread the virus after going home.

So far, the biggest super spreader event has probably been the Atalanta-Valencia Champions League match in February, which is thought to have pretty much been the reason for the rapid spreading in Italy. It could probably be considered a number of super spreader event. The actual football match at the stadium, where a lot of people got infected, but also the many gatherings of people watching the game, where many people undoubtedly got infected.

Back then, people at least had the excuse of not knowing any better. The virus was not yet well known in Italy, and few cases, if any, had been identified. This changed rapidly after the match, where Italy became one of the worst hit countries.

The same excuse cannot be made by anyone now, especially not in the US, which is one of the worst hit countries.

This is one of the things that makes this year’s Sturgis Motorcycle Rally such a baffling event. Who in their right mind would think it would be a good idea to gather nearly half a million people during a pandemic? Many of these people not even doing the simplest measures, e.g. masks and social distancing, to avoid the spreading of the COVID-19 virus.

Sadly someone obviously thought it was a perfectly acceptable idea, and allowed the event to go ahead.

Now, a study, The Contagion Externality of a Superspreading Event: The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally and COVID-19 (pdf), has evaluated the results of the rally, and have estimated that it has resulted in up to 219,000 infected people since the start of the rally, which is approximately 19% of all cases in the US during that period. Due to the diverse geographical origins of the participants of the rally, the spreading is not just in South Dakota where the rally took place, but in the surrounding states as well.

On top of looking at the spreading of the virus, the paper also estimates the financial costs to society. The paper estimates that the rally has cost more than $12B so far.

In other words, the human and financial costs of the rally is truly staggering, and is probably only going to grow, as time goes on.

Will this event be a lesson for other organizers and local authorities? One would think so, but sadly there is nothing in past behavior to indicate that this will be the case