Cat Contemplating Quarantine

I thought that for this Saturday I’d share some pictures of my cat engaging in his third favorite activity. Then I couldn’t figure out how to upload the images, so you’re getting it today instead.

His Holiness Saint Ray the Cat had a troubled childhood. We think he lived under the house our apartment was in, back in Somerville, because whenever Tegan came home from work, there was this tiny, noisy kitten demanding attention.  In time, we ended up taking him in. He had Giardia, worms, and other such things. After taking him to the vet, we realized that as it was late autumn at that point, he was probably a couple weeks away from death. For the first couple weeks, all he did was eat, sleep, and poop. If you’re ever wondering what Giardia is like, I’m pretty sure this tiny little kitten pooped his own weight every day.

He was not a well cat.

The perkiness he had shown in demanding attention vanished as soon as he got inside. I think he decided that he was now safe, and being fed, and could focus on healing, and on his one true passion: sleep.

Once he got out of Giardia/flea quarantine in the bathroom,  he began exploring the apartment. He would toddle slowly for about 5-10 feet, then curl up on the floor wherever he had gotten and sleep for a while. Then he’d get up, get another few feet, and sleep again. It took him a few days to actually get a feel for the place.

One thing is certain – he decided that he was done with being outdoors. I’ve never had a cat that was so uninterested in leaving the apartment. He’ll look at the door if you leave it open. He even managed to get outside once, but he ran right back in. I think he was traumatized by his childhood. He’d been there, he’d done that, and he was committed to living the rest of his days as a very, very lazy indoor cat, a career he has pursued to this very day.

So for him, the only difference from the quarantine is that Tegan’s around more. Like me, he seems to like that.

And what is his third favorite activity? Well, after sleeping and eating (we have to regulate his diet, because his not-so-secret ambition is to become spherical), he likes sitting on the sill of our living-room window and gazing out at the wildlife of Scotland. By this I mean the rather pleasant alley between our apartment building and the one next to it, and the people, dogs, and magpies that frequent it:

The picture shows my cat, St. Ray, looking out the window. He is a cat of solid build, with dark gray and black striped fur on his back, tail, and head. His muzzle, chest, legs, belly, and a collar on his shoulders are snowy white and very, very soft to the touch.He is at the bottom of a door-sized window, seated on the sill, with his tail hanging down in a neat curl. He's looking out at people who cannot be seen in the street below. Outside, parts of a tree are visible, buds still just barely starting to open for the spring. The building across the way has shuttered windows, below stone arches carved with leaves and flowers - I believe they are thistles.

His Holiness gazes upon the unwashed masses

The picture shows my cat, St. Ray, looking out the window at a different angle. He is a cat of solid build, with dark gray and black striped fur on his back, tail, and head. His muzzle, chest, legs, belly, and a collar on his shoulders are snowy white and very, very soft to the touch. He is at the bottom of a door-sized window, seated on the sill, with his tail hanging down in a neat curl. He's looking out at people who cannot be seen in the street below. Outside, parts of a tree are visible, buds still just barely starting to open for the spring. The building across the way has shuttered windows, below stone arches carved with leaves and flowers - I believe they are thistles.

THOSE unwashed masses are BIRDS. St. Ray finds birds to be fascinating.

The picture shows my cat, St. Ray, looking out the window. He is a cat of solid build, with dark gray and black striped fur on his back, tail, and head. His muzzle, chest, legs, belly, and a collar on his shoulders are snowy white and very, very soft to the touch.He is at the bottom of a door-sized window, seated on the sill, with his tail hanging down in a neat curl. He's looking out at people who cannot be seen in the street below. Outside, parts of a tree are visible, buds still just barely starting to open for the spring. The building across the way has shuttered windows, below stone arches carved with leaves and flowers - I believe they are thistles.

In which His Holiness contemplates the deeper secrets of the universe. How long has it been since he last ate? Is it time for food once again? Will we ever know?

Thanks to the COVID-19 outbreak, layoffs have increased, job interviews have been indefinitely postponed, and many places aren’t hiring new workers. All of that means I really need help paying my bills and keeping a roof over my head. Patreon.com is a way for you to help with that, even if it’s just a little bit, and get some perks and extra content in return. You control how much you give, and how long you give it, and every little bit really does help. When lots of people pitch in, it can make a huge difference. Please help if you’re able, and share my work with others. Thank you!

Second depression, same as the first, a bit more tech, and possibly worse?

With everything that has been going on, and the recent announcement that the United States might be hitting 30% unemployment soon, there has been a lot of talk about the Great Depression, and the various similarities and differences between now and then. There are a lot of parallels, and most of them are not comforting. We have a global pandemic that looks poised to kill millions by the end of the year. The economy, after decades of being undermined and redesigned for the sole benefit of the rich and powerful, is collapsing. We’re in the midst of an ecological crisis which, just like the pandemic, is going to get a lot worse before it gets better. The problems caused by the growing inequalities in wealth and power are leading to a rise in extremist far-right political movements, violence, and scapegoating aimed at those with the least power. As the saying goes, history doesn’t repeat, but it sure does seem to rhyme.

So what’s different?

Lots of things. For one, we’ve gotten better at medicine. Even with the disastrous equipment shortage we’re faced with, we have a far better understanding of how diseases spread, how to treat their symptoms, and how to develop medicines that make a real difference. We’re also better at moving stuff around the planet. Equipment, doctors, food, and raw materials can be shipped to where they’re needed much more quickly and easily than they could in the 1920s.

I’ve heard some people worry that, compared to the Great Depression, fewer people have the space, know-how, or pre-existing gardens to grow their own food. I think that is a valid concern, but how much of a concern is probably going to depend a lot on policy. As I mentioned, shipping food internationally has never been easier, and while we can’t rule out massive crop failures with the unstable global climate, it’s been mentioned many times that the world grows more food than is needed to feed everybody already. All that’s lacking is the will to invest in distribution. Likewise, with modern technology, a national jobs program could include investment in the construction and running of indoor/vertical farms, and cities could begin to grow their own food. This could both reduce pressure on the various ecosystems currently used for food production, and reduce pollution generated by shipping across great distances.

Things like that aren’t likely to be “crowdsourced” into existence, but if we’re going to be spending vast amounts of taxpayer money to keep the economy afloat, we might as well be using it to address other problems that need solving. Now is definitely time for the Green New Deal.

And that brings us to the key difficulty. Addressing all of these problems requires placing power in the hands of people who want to address them, and taking power away from those who want to prevent the changes we need. Electoral politics is definitely one of the ways to do this, and I would encourage everybody who hasn’t voted in the Democratic primary thus far to seriously consider voting for Bernie Sanders – the policies he wants are the policies we desperately need, not just for America, but for the good of the whole planet.

But beyond that, there’s something that we had in the 1920s that we don’t really have right now, or at least not the way we need it. The missing ingredients are the socialist and labour movements. When FDR enacted the New Deal in 1933, it didn’t just happen because everyone got together and agreed that it was the best course of action. It happened because America had a powerful, and angry labour movement, and a powerful socialist movement. FDR pushed for the New Deal, but what made it happen was the fear, on the part of what he called “economic royalists”, that if they didn’t give up some of their wealth and power, then America might be the next country to see something like a Leninist uprising, and they would lose everything. Faced with that choice, some tried to overthrow Roosevelt and install a fascist regime, but in the end, we got the New Deal instead.

I think by studying that era, we can see cause for hope, as well as cause for fear. We can see the work that we need to do, and we can see the kinds of reaction we can expect. The Left is weaker than it was in that era, and we need to change that. Unlikely as it may seem, I’d still like to see a President Sanders, but he won’t be able to do much without the ability to point out the window when the oligarchs say “you and what army?” Likewise, if we get someone like Biden, he will only agree to left-wing policies if there’s a massive movement pushing him to do so. Any way you look at it, what we need right now is class solidarity, class politics, and a mass movement by the working classes, which I would argue includes most of the “middle” class, whether or not folks like to admit it.

As with so many other things these days, the amount of damage done to society seems to depend a lot on policy decisions. Having the “Camp of the Saints” crowd in charge seems like a good way to have a lot of people die due to incompetence that can never quite be proven to be deliberate.

If you have time to kill, read up on the labour movement. Read up on the Civil Rights movement. Read up on political change. Two books that come to my mind are The Zinn Reader, a collection of writings by Howard Zinn, and Hegemony How-To: A Roadmap for Radicals. I’m honestly not very well-read on this sort of thing, though I’m trying to change that. There’s also a wealth of information to be found online, and useful stuff from Lefty youtubers and people like Richard Wolff. I’ll try to keep linking anything that seems useful as I continue writing.

Thanks to the COVID-19 outbreak, layoffs have increased, job interviews have been indefinitely postponed, and many places aren’t hiring new workers. All of that means I really need help paying my bills and keeping a roof over my head. Patreon.com is a way for you to help with that, even if it’s just a little bit, and get some perks and extra content in return. You control how much you give, and how long you give it, and every little bit really does help. When lots of people pitch in, it can make a huge difference. Please help if you’re able, and share my work with others. Thank you!

This is your free trial apocalypse.

[This image is a tweet and response. First tweet from Jamie Margolin reads: What will it look like when the world actually decides to solve the #climatecrisis? It will look like the world is now addressing #COVID19. The media covering the issue 24/7. Everyone stopping everything and putting the world on pause to deal with the immediate crisis at hand. Response from Rebecca Auerbach reads: This is your free trial apocalypse. If you do not wish to renew your subscription at the end of the trial period, you must cancel your carbon emissions by 2030. Otherwise your apocalypse will automatically renew for the next million years.]

“This is your free trial apocalypse. If you do not wish to renew your subscription at the end of the trial period, you must cancel your carbon emissions by 2030. Otherwise your apocalypse will automatically renew for the next million years.

I don’t entirely agree with this, just because it implies there is a point at which it’s “too late” to do anything about climate change. That is not the case, and it never has been. There are many “points of no return”, beyond which we can’t stop certain changes, but all that really means is that our efforts to survive and to build a better world have to take new levels and kinds of volatility into account. As long as humanity exists, it’s never “too late” to work towards a better world, and a better version of humanity. Simply giving up, as many would have us do, doesn’t mean “game over”, it means the game continues on under the rule of, and for the benefit of those who made everything so terrible in the first place.

Thanks to the COVID-19 outbreak, layoffs have increased, job interviews have been indefinitely postponed, and many places aren’t hiring new workers. All of that means I really need help paying my bills and keeping a roof over my head. Patreon.com is a way for you to help with that, even if it’s just a little bit, and get some perks and extra content in return. You control how much you give, and how long you give it, and every little bit really does help. When lots of people pitch in, it can make a huge difference. Please help if you’re able, and share my work with others. Thank you!

Sources of aid for those who need it

The response to my request for help has been incredibly uplifting. I’ve got a ways to go before I can really make ends meet, but I’m closer to that than I was, and I know there are a lot of other people who also need help right now. Whatever your walk in life, you have a right to food, water, housing, and healthcare.

To that end, I’ve put together a list of different resources for people who are struggling to make ends meet right now. This is a mix of both ways to see help, and ways to give help to those in need. I will update and re-post this at least once a week while the pandemic and associated economic fallout continue. This is currently mostly focused on the U.S., with some UK resources, but I want to expand it to cover anyone needing help anywhere if possible. If anyone has resources I’ve missed, please include them in the comments and I’ll add them in to the next round. 

Opportunity to help: TAA Mutual Aid Fund for Grad Workers and Families

As part of the TAA’s broader commitment to supporting or most vulnerable and precarious, we have set up a Mutual Aid Fund where graduate student employees can request aid to respond to an urgent financial need. This fund has been seeded with contributions from three incredible members who wanted to see the TAA act to relieve immediate financial needs for its members.

If you are able, please consider donating to this fund to ensure that our colleagues, co-workers, friends, comrades in financially uncertain times can be supported.

And any UW grad student can apply for funds at http://bit.ly/TAAmutualaid.

From Bigdoorbrigade.com, who have done a great job pulling this stuff together. Look at this stuff, but check them out too, because they’ve got more on how to help, how to organize, and so on:

https://www.mutualaidhub.org/ – a map of mutual aid projects and requests around the United States. FYI, McAffee flagged this site as somehow worrisome. I’m not sure why.

https://mutualaiddisasterrelief.org/ – Mutual Aid Disaster Relief – solidarity, not charity. This is an opportunity to help, for now. If I find a way to ask them for aid, I’ll update.

It’s Going Down  is a digital community center for anarchist, anti-fascist, autonomous anti-capitalist and anti-colonial movements. They have a list of mutual aid efforts focusing on the COVID-19 pandemic across the United States as well as some in Canada.

This is a US-based google doc with a huge amount of resources linked, from guides, to counter-propaganda, to existing aid efforts. Tactics and info are relevant across the board, most of the linked aid efforts are centered in the US.

Coronavirus resource list “This kit is a collectivized document that will be updated as more mutual aid projects and resources appear online. Recognizing that not everyone will have access to great internet to access some of these, I encourage you to apply these offline as well as online.”

COVID-19 Mutual Aid UK – Mutual aid resources in the United Kingdom

For those interested, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now did an interview with Dean Spade, who created Big Door Brigade.

Fool.com has some resources on legislation, as well as various programs that provide limited help to some people in the U.S.

Thanks to the COVID-19 outbreak, layoffs have increased, job interviews have been indefinitely postponed, and many places aren’t hiring new workers. All of that means I really need help paying my bills and keeping a roof over my head. Patreon.com is a way for you to help with that, even if it’s just a little bit, and get some perks and extra content in return. You control how much you give, and how long you give it, and every little bit really does help. When lots of people pitch in, it can make a huge difference. Please help if you’re able, and share my work with others. Thank you!

The fossil fuel industry is using the pandemic to continue destroying everything they can

There are multiple ways for people with money and power to gain further profit from major crises. The most straightforward is that when everything goes to hell, those who already have resources can buy more resources cheap. Property, dying businesses, debt, and vital services all get taken over by various oligarchic entities while most of the public is struggling just to get by. People can’t afford not to sell, don’t have the resources for legal battles, and are too busy scrambling to make ends meet to pay attention to what’s going on.

That lack of attention means that corporate interests can use their power to get access to things like natural resources. In this case it’s made all the more easy because of the GOP’s love of filling government positions with people whose loyalties and ideology run counter to the jobs they’re supposed to be doing. What’s the best use of the Interior Department’s time? Why, selling oil and gas leases at bargain prices!

From Maria Caffrey at the Union of Concerned Scientists: 

Secretary Bernhardt is attempting to tackle this unprecedented event by dusting off an old DOI Bush administration-era pandemic flu plan and putting his second-in-command in charge of overseeing the safety of the roughly 70,000 people employed by the Department of the Interior.

So who’s safe hands has Secretary Bernhardt assigned this issue to? That would be former fossil fuel lobbyist turned Interior Deputy Secretary Katharine MacGregor, the newly confirmed deputy secretary who has been recently implicated in DOI policy changes that ignore worker safety and expert advice, and is also accused of working to remove safeguards related to public health and the environment.

So perhaps it is no surprise that earlier this week, in the midst of the pandemic, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management sold just under 14,600  oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico for the bargain price of $100 million over the protestations of environmental groups.

Lest you fall for the Biden fallacy and think that this is somehow unique to the Trump administration, this is straight from the playbook used by the administration of George W Bush when they sold off a huge amount of America’s land and natural resources as they were on their way out the door in 2008. It also makes me think of what’s happening in Bolivia right now. The coup there happened just after the Morales government announced that rather than virtually giving away the country’s natural resources, as the corporate world has come to expect, they would require that those resources be turned into products in Bolivia, by Bolivian workers. It’s also worth noting that if any effort is ever made to reclaim control of resources that were “sold” so cheaply, the corporations and their supporters will insist that it’s their rightful property, as they did with Venezuela’s oil, and use it as justification for political meddling ranging from lobbying, to sanctions, to assassinations and coups.

At a time when we should be doing everything we can to end the use of fossil fuels, and to leave as much of them in the ground as possible, the capitalists of the world continue working to burn every last speck of the stuff, or to empower those who are doing so. They value money over humanity, and so their power needs to be taken away. Like everyone else, they have rights to housing, healthcare, food, water, and freedom of speech. They do not have the right to poison the air and the water, or destabilize the global climate for personal gain. Since that’s how they’re using their power and wealth, they don’t have a right to those either.

Thanks to the COVID-19 outbreak, layoffs have increased, job interviews have been indefinitely postponed, and many places aren’t hiring new workers. All of that means I really need help paying my bills and keeping a roof over my head. Patreon.com is a way for you to help with that, even if it’s just a little bit, and get some perks and extra content in return. You control how much you give, and how long you give it, and every little bit really does help. When lots of people pitch in, it can make a huge difference. Please help if you’re able, and share my work with others. Thank you!

The American government is trying to get rid of encryption services

Congress is working on a bipartisan bill called the EARN IT act that seems to be an attempt to use opposition to child sex trafficking and abuse as a back door to undermine end-to-end encryption in general

Though it seems wholly focused on reducing child exploitation, the EARN IT Act has definite implications for encryption. If it became law, companies might not be able to earn their liability exemption while offering end-to-end encrypted services. This would put them in the position of either having to accept liability, undermine the protection of end-to-end encryption by adding a backdoor for law enforcement access, or avoid end-to-end encryption altogether.

[…]

Riana Pfefferkorn, the associate director of surveillance and cybersecurity at Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society, outlined fears about the privacy and security implications of an earlier leaked draft of the EARN IT Act in January. After a preliminary assessment of the version of the bill introduced on Thursday, she told WIRED that she sees well-meaning revisions aimed at reducing concerns that EARN IT could violate First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendment rights related to speech, privacy, and lawful search. But she says the bill remains fundamentally problematic.

“I see this as being an attempt to cure procedural problems while throwing a bone somewhat to civil liberty, privacy, and security concerns,” she told WIRED. “But looking at the additional language it’s clear to me that this is still going to be a vehicle for the attorney general to wage his war on encryption. And it’s kind of a black box. One of my fears is if this were implemented, what’s to stop China from saying ‘in addition to monitoring for child sex abuse images, turn this on for Uighur freedom activists too.'”

The article contains quotes from Facebook saying they do fine without measures like EARN IT, but it shouldn’t shock the reader that I don’t put much stock in what they have to say. For all the ways Facebook is a massive corporation doing a huge amount of harm in the world, their opposition to this bill does not mean it’s a good thing. Unfortunately, there are many large, powerful entities at work in the world, and most of them don’t hold human life, freedom, and happiness as their core principles. From the blog “A Few Thoughts on Cryptography Engineering“

Over the past few years, the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI have been pursuing an aggressive campaign to eliminate end-to-end encryption services. This is a category that includes text messaging systems like Apple’s iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal. Those services protect your data by encrypting it, and ensuring that the keys are only available to you and the person you’re communicating with. That means your provider, the person who hacks your provider, and (inadvertently) the FBI, are all left in the dark.

The government’s anti-encryption campaign has not been very successful. There are basically two reasons for this. First, people like communicating privately. If there’s anything we’ve learned over the past few years, it’s that the world is not a safe place for your private information. You don’t have to be worried about the NSA spying on you to be worried that some hacker will steal your messages or email. In fact, this kind of hack occurs so routinely that there’s a popular website you can use to check if your accounts have been compromised.

The world is a big, complicated place, and if we’re to have any hope of people having a meaningful right to self-determination, keeping a watch on those with power is a must. They have a history of turning good causes to evil purposes. With the rise in authoritarian politics around the world and the rise in efforts to decrease the power of corporations and oligarchs, I very much fear that the ability to hide communication and organizing from governments will be needed in the years ahead.

Thanks to the COVID-19 outbreak, layoffs have increased, job interviews have been indefinitely postponed, and many places aren’t hiring new workers. All of that means I really need help paying my bills and keeping a roof over my head. Patreon.com is a way for you to help with that, even if it’s just a little bit, and get some perks and extra content in return. You control how much you give, and how long you give it, and every little bit really does help. When lots of people pitch in, it can make a huge difference. Please help if you’re able, and share my work with others. Thank you!

What a difference 10 days make: Italy’s warning to the world, Cuba’s response to the pandemic

“What is happening is much worse than you thought it was. You’ll realize that just being able to breathe air in your own house, it’s something that you should already be grateful for.”

“Stay at home.”

“Don’t fuck up.”

The COVID-19 death toll in Italy has passed China. China has 22 times more people than Italy. The Italians have been trying to sound the alarm to the rest of the world for days now, and while some countries have heeded those warnings, the United States and the United Kingdom have not.

 

In the meantime, health workers in the United States are sounding every alarm they can think of. A hospital in Georgia says they went through five months of supplies in six days, and a pediatric surgeon in New York City has taken to the New York Times to declare that “the sky is falling”, and to urgently call for more resources.

Our health care system is mired in situational uncertainty. The leadership of our hospital is working tirelessly — but doctors on the ground are pessimistic about our surge capacity.

Making my rounds at the children’s hospital earlier this week, I saw that the boxes of gloves and other personal protective equipment were dwindling. This is a crisis for our vulnerable patients and health care workers alike. Protective equipment is only one of the places where supplies are falling short. At our large, 4,000-bed New York City hospital, we have 500 ventilators and 250 on backup reserve. If we are on track to match the scale of Covid-19 infections in Italy, then we are likely to run out of ventilators in New York. The anti-viral “treatments” we have for Covid-19 are experimental and many of them are hard to even get approved. Let me repeat. The sky is falling.

I say this not to panic anyone but to mobilize you. We need more equipment and we need it now. Specifically gloves, masks, eye protection and more ventilators. We need our technology friends to be making and testing prototypes to rig the ventilators that we do have to support more than one patient at a time. We need our labs channeling all of their efforts into combating this bug — that means vaccine research and antiviral treatment research, quickly.

It’s not hard to see that a healthcare system built around annual profits would view the creation of a stockpile or production capacity to meet a massive crisis like this as “needless waste”. Nothing like this has happened since the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, and while it’s my hope that the death toll for COVID-19 will be less than that, it will be more than it needed to be, and it will be higher because of how we’ve designed both national and global production and supply chains.

It’s also not hard to see that in countries like the United States and the United Kingdom, politics revolving around a religious faith in capitalism magically solving everything, plus open scorn for experts and expertise, has made the problem worse. In the US, a huge amount of blame is being placed on the notoriously irresponsible “spring break” crowd for continuing things like mass gatherings at beaches, but until just a few days ago, the White House, various Republicans, and Fox News were actively downplaying the danger of this outbreak, and all of their concern seemed to be for corporations, for the stock market, and for their own wealth.

That’s starting to change as the full scale of what’s facing us becomes clear, but as has been said many times, in a situation like this, delays cost lives. I posted a few days ago about how Vietnam was approaching their pandemic response, and I wanted to showcase another example that seems to be getting things right.

Cuba is often maligned in the United States, and while Barack Obama took steps to normalize relations between the two countries, Trump rolled that back. In the past few weeks, Cuba was brought up repeatedly to attack Bernie Sanders, because apparently it was bad of him to praise Castro’s successful literacy program, while condemning his authoritarian rule. During my very brief stay there in the summer of 2001, I did see a lot of things I didn’t like – people were very careful about what they said, and who they said it around, the authorities seemed to know more about our schedule than we did, and about 50% of the television programming available was a never-ending stream of long Castro speeches, patriotic songs, and cartoons about resisting the evil American empire. I have to say, the more I’ve learned about the United States and its foreign policy over the years, the more sympathetic I am toward that last line of thinking.

As much as they’ve been known as an authoritarian regime, however, Cuba has also become known for its medical system, and for its willingness to provide medical assistance to other countries. That pattern has continued with the COVID-19 pandemic as Alan Macleod reports on Mintpressnews.com:

While the United States government is complicating efforts to treat coronavirus across the world and is using the pandemic to increase pressure on countries already struggling under U.S. sanctions, including Iran, Syria, and Venezuela, the small island of Cuba, itself a target of Washington’s ire, is leading the fight against the spread of COVID-19.

And while the Trump administration slashes the Center for Disease Control’s budget amid an imminent pandemic, China appears to have gotten to grips with the coronavirus outbreak. Beijing reported only 16 new cases of the virus today, and there are now more total cases outside mainland China than inside it.

Integral to reducing the number of deaths is a Cuban antiviral drug, Interferon Alpha 2b. The drug, according to Cuban biotech specialist Dr. Luis Herrera Martinez, “prevents aggravation and complications in patients, reaching that stage that ultimately can result in death.” It has been produced in China since 2003 in a partnership with the state-owned Cuban pharmaceutical industry. Interferons are “signaling” proteins, explains Dr. Helen Yaffe of Glasgow University, an expert on Cuba. These proteins are produced and released by the body in response to infections and alert nearby cells to heighten their antiviral defenses. It is not a cure or a vaccine to COVID-19, but rather an antiviral that boosts the human immune system.

Cuba has used it to fight outbreaks of Dengue Fever, a common occurrence on the mosquito-plagued island. The Castro government was forced to develop a strong pharmaceutical industry because of the constant U.S. embargo. Cuba estimates the decades-long sanctions, continually declared illegal by the United Nations, have cost it over $750 billion.

Today, the Cuban government offered haven to the stranded cruise ship, MS Braemar. The ship has five confirmed COVID-19 cases on board and had been turned away by both Barbados and the Bahamas.

Despite confirming its own first cases, the island is continuing to export medical professionals to the rest of the world. Yesterday, Jamaican Health Minister Christopher Tufton announced that 21 nurses from its neighbor would arrive imminently, the first of more than 100, he hoped. But they have also sent doctors to more advanced nations, such as Italy.

 

I’ve said it before: this crisis, with all of its horrors, also presents us with opportunities to learn, to see how we could build a better world, and to come together to build that world. I think a foreign policy that puts so much emphasis on healing the sick and helping to uplift other countries is something we should aspire to for as long as our species is divided into different nations. The more we are able to work together towards common goals, rather than against each other in competition or outright hostility, the better we will be able to tackle massive challenges like the COVID-19 pandemic or climate change.

The World Health Organization (WHO) advised countries should check all potential cases. “You cannot fight a fire blindfolded. We have a simple message for all countries: test, test, test,” said WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus of Ethiopia. “This amazing spirit of human solidarity must become even more infectious than the coronavirus itself. Although we may have to be physically apart from each other for a while, we can come together in ways we never have before…We’re all in this together. And we can only succeed together,” he added. It is that ethos that has driven Cuba’s revolutionary healthcare system for 60 years.

As I mentioned in my last post, thanks to the COVID-19 outbreak, layoffs have increased, job interviews have been indefinitely postponed, and many places aren’t hiring new workers. All of that means I really need help paying my bills and keeping a roof over my head. Patreon.com is a way for you to help with that, even if it’s just a little bit, and get some perks and extra content in return. You control how much you give, and how long you give it, and every little bit really does help. When lots of people pitch in, it can make a huge difference. Please help if you’re able, and share my work with others. Thank you!

A Call for Support

I’m writing today to ask for your financial support. I’ve been looking for a job for a while now, and it seemed like I was close to getting one when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. While the UK hasn’t gone into total lockdown, people are getting fired, and job interviews are being cancelled or indefinitely postponed for both myself, and my wife. Our funds are running out, and at this point it seems unlikely that we’ll be able to get wage labor to cover our expenses.

More importantly, it looks like it’ll be a couple months before anyone really tries to claim that the crisis is “over”, and a year before there’s a vaccine widely available. There’s an effective hiring freeze right now as people rightly practice social distancing, but that seems more than likely to turn into a long-term economic recession. We’re both working hard to find sources of income, and at this point this seems as viable as any other.

And so I’m asking for people to support me through Patreon.

For those who don’t know how it works, Patreon is a way for people like me to crowdsource funding for work we want to do. People who want to help me in making this blog can contribute a small amount per month, to support the content I make for free, and to get access to certain other perks, depending on how much you contribute. You control the monthly amount, and you can stop your contributions at any time if you feel you can’t afford them.

Beyond supporting my work, patrons get a few additional perks, depending on how much they give. These currently include things like links to additional news and resources I come across while researching my posts, extra articles written just for patrons, the ability to influence what topics I cover, and more.

If I hit 250 monthly patrons, I will write, record, and sing a parody of “Lady in Red” telling the story of Poe’s Masque of the Red Death, accompanied by my wife on accordion. At that point in time I’ll work out what the reward for my next goal will be.

While I’d love for this to be a long-term gig, all I’m asking for right now is support to keep a roof over our heads until we have enough other income to keep us off the streets. When we get to that point, I’ll notify my patrons, and those who were just helping out of solidarity can re-assign their contribution elsewhere if they so desire.

Whether you can afford to patronize my work or not, it would help me a great deal if you could share this post – and other posts I write – with your respective networks, or send friends and family to www.patreon.com/oceanoxia

Times are tough right now, but with a little solidarity we can pull through and keep working to build a better world. Thank you all, and may you and yours live long and prosper.