I’ve experienced brain fog, and no thank you very much

A few weeks ago, I had what is called a transient ischemic attack — don’t worry, it was brief, hasn’t returned, and the doctors examined me inside & out with embarrassing thoroughness, and have given me a clean bill of health — but it was terrifying. For a whole ten minutes, I couldn’t focus on a simple and familiar task on the computer. I knew what I had to do, if I was thinking normally, and I couldn’t figure out how to find basic, abstract functions on the screen in front of me. When it passed, then click-click-click it was a second’s work, and I couldn’t understand what had happened.

Today I read Ed Yong’s latest, and dear god, it is chilling.

On March 25, 2020, Hannah Davis was texting with two friends when she realized that she couldn’t understand one of their messages. In hindsight, that was the first sign that she had COVID-19. It was also her first experience with the phenomenon known as “brain fog,” and the moment when her old life contracted into her current one. She once worked in artificial intelligence and analyzed complex systems without hesitation, but now “runs into a mental wall” when faced with tasks as simple as filling out forms. Her memory, once vivid, feels frayed and fleeting. Former mundanities—buying food, making meals, cleaning up—can be agonizingly difficult. Her inner world—what she calls “the extras of thinking, like daydreaming, making plans, imagining”—is gone. The fog “is so encompassing,” she told me, “it affects every area of my life.” For more than 900 days, while other long-COVID symptoms have waxed and waned, her brain fog has never really lifted.

Of long COVID’s many possible symptoms, brain fog “is by far one of the most disabling and destructive,” Emma Ladds, a primary-care specialist from the University of Oxford, told me. It’s also among the most misunderstood. It wasn’t even included in the list of possible COVID symptoms when the coronavirus pandemic first began. But 20 to 30 percent of patients report brain fog three months after their initial infection, as do 65 to 85 percent of the long-haulers who stay sick for much longer. It can afflict people who were never ill enough to need a ventilator—or any hospital care. And it can affect young people in the prime of their mental lives.

AAAAAAAAAAAAIIEEE! That’s what I experienced…for ten minutes. But that’s one of the possible symptoms of long-COVID, and people go through it for months? I can’t imagine it. I wouldn’t want to go through that.

For example, Robertson’s brain often loses focus mid-sentence, leading to what she jokingly calls “so-yeah syndrome”: “I forget what I’m saying, tail off, and go, ‘So, yeah …’” she said. Brain fog stopped Kristen Tjaden from driving, because she’d forget her destination en route. For more than a year, she couldn’t read, either, because making sense of a series of words had become too difficult. Angela Meriquez Vázquez told me it once took her two hours to schedule a meeting over email: She’d check her calendar, but the information would slip in the second it took to bring up her inbox. At her worst, she couldn’t unload a dishwasher, because identifying an object, remembering where it should go, and putting it there was too complicated.

That’s exactly what I was trying to do! I was trying to put a presentation I had to give on my calendar/email, and somehow I couldn’t figure out where anything was or what steps I had to take. Even my brief experience with that was intolerably frustrating. It was so awful that immediately after I recovered my ability to act again, I checked into a hospital, despite feeling totally fine once it passed.

Thanks, Ed Yong. Now in addition to worrying about respiratory failure and death, I can dread losing my brain. I’ve managed to avoid getting COVID at all so far, and now I’m motivated to be even more scrupulous in my preventive efforts. It’s too bad my employers, a fucking university, has so little concern about the minds of their faculty and students.

Gotta admit, Al Franken is one hard-hitting advocate

More like this, please. Al Franken interrupted a Republican apologist when she started to lie, and reduced her to stammering incoherence by simply demanding that she back up her claims of historical legitimacy for packing the court with incompetents by citing examples and evidence. This is how we have to deal with Republican dishonesty, by hitting back hard.

“I disagree with what the chief justice said. The legitimacy of the court was undermined when they wouldn’t take up Merrick Garland. And you’ll remember that [then Senate Majority Leader Mitch] McConnell said it was because it was during an election year. And you remember Lindsey Graham pledging that if a vacancy came open during an election year in 2020, that he wouldn’t vote for — they wouldn’t take up a nominee,” Franken said.

“They’ve stolen two seats: The one that Merrick Garland wasn’t given a hearing for and the one that [Amy Coney Barrett] was, where she was seated a week before the election. That destroyed the legitimacy of the court.”

Acosta tossed it to CNN political commentator Alice Stewart — who worked on Mike Huckabee’s campaign when he ran for president in 2015 and was also a campaign communication director for Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann at various times — saying that the Court has become “titled to the far right.”

“To throw some accuracy in what Al said there, Merrick Garland was held up because we had divided government, a Democrat in the White House, and Republicans in control–,” she started, only to be interrupted and corrected by Franken.

“That’s not what McConnell said,” Franken argued. And the back-and-forth arguing began.

“But that’s the way historically this has been. When you’re in close to an election year and you have divided government–,” Stewart said, only to be interrupted by Franken’s, “No, that’s not the way it’s been historically done. Tell me when this happened before. Tell me when it happened before.”

“Well,” she started, “Merrick Garland is certainly one. When there’s a–”

Again, Franken, popped in. “No, before Merrick Garland. Tell me when it happened before. You said this is what happened historically. Tell me when it happened before.”

“I can’t give you an exact example when this happened in the past,” she answered.

“You know why you can’t? Because it hasn’t happened before,” Franken shot back.

She attempted to divert the subject, but he wouldn’t let her.

“This is total hypocrisy,” a fired-up Franken said. “And actually, I’m surprised that you’re claiming this, and you can’t come up with an example because there is none.”

She tried to respond and get back to what she called “the point of the conversation,” but Franken stepped on that with a boisterous “This is the point!”

This is a general problem with conventional rules for debate. There’s a habit of insisting that both sides must get equal, uninterrupted time, even when they start spinning out absurd lies — don’t let them do that. If they make a claim, insist that they must back it up. Don’t give them 5 minutes to compound their lies into a tangle that will take hours to un-knot, which is what they want.

Yeah, he was rude. Ruder still is the privilege that gives liars unquestioned opportunities to make stuff up.

Rebranding the Necron Empire as the good guys

The latest from Émile Torres focuses on how longtermists have effectively focused on PR and advertising. They have a truly odious philosophy, so they emphasize whatever element will get them the most money. The core of longtermism is the idea that in the far future there could hypothetically be many, many trillions of hypothetical “people” (who would mainly be artificial intelligences of some sort), and that therefore we should make any contemporary sacrifice we can to maximize the population of machines in the unimaginably distant future. There’s a lot of weebly-wobbly rationalizations to be made since nobody has any idea what strategies now will lead to conquest of the galaxy for human-made computers in some imaginary fantasy future, but somehow the current popular ones all involve sucking up to disgustingly rich people.

Ironically, it grew out of the goal of ending world poverty.

Longtermism emerged from a movement called “Effective Altruism” (EA), a male-dominated community of “super-hardcore do-gooders” (as they once called themselves tongue-in-cheek) based mostly in Oxford and the San Francisco Bay Area. Their initial focus was on alleviating global poverty, but over time a growing number of the movement’s members have shifted their research and activism toward ensuring that humanity, or our posthuman descendants, survive for millions, billions and even trillions of years into the future.

If you asked me, I would have thought that building a stable, equitable base would have been a sound way to project human destiny into an unknowable future, but hey, what do I know? The longtermists gazed into their crystal ball and decided that the best, and probably most lucrative, way to defend the future was to pander to the elites.

Although the longtermists do not, so far as I know, describe what they’re doing this way, we might identify two phases of spreading their ideology: Phase One involved infiltrating governments, encouraging people to pursue high-paying jobs to donate more for the cause and wooing billionaires like Elon Musk — and this has been wildly successful. Musk himself has described longtermism as “a close match for my philosophy.” Sam Bankman-Fried has made billions from cryptocurrencies to fund longtermist efforts. And longtermism is, according to a UN Dispatch article, “increasingly gaining traction around the United Nations and in foreign policy circles.”

After all, haven’t billionaires already proven that they will do their all to spread their wealth? OK, maybe the past is a poor guide, but once they’ve perfected brain uploading and have a colony of serfs on Mars, then they’ll decide to let the rest of us have a few crumbs.

The article is largely about one guy, MacAskill, who is the current Face of the movement. His entire career is one of lying to make his philosophy palatable to the masses, but especially delicious to wealthy donors. From day one he was shaping the movement as manufactured public relations.

But buyer beware: The EA community, including its longtermist offshoot, places a huge emphasis on marketing, public relations and “brand-management,” and hence one should be very cautious about how MacAskill and his longtermist colleagues present their views to the public.

As MacAskill notes in an article posted on the EA Forum, it was around 2011 that early members of the community began “to realize the importance of good marketing, and therefore [were] willing to put more time into things like choice of name.” The name they chose was of course “Effective Altruism,” which they picked by vote over alternatives like “Effective Utilitarian Community” and “Big Visions Network.” Without a catchy name, “the brand of effective altruism,” as MacAskill puts it, could struggle to attract customers and funding.

It’s a war of words, not meaning. The meaning is icky, so let’s plaster it over with some cosmetic language.

The point is that since longtermism is based on ideas that many people would no doubt find objectionable, the marketing question arises: how should the word “longtermism” be defined to maximize the ideology’s impact? In a 2019 post on the EA Forum, MacAskill wrote that “longtermism” could be defined “imprecisely” in several ways. On the one hand, it could mean “an ethical view that is particularly concerned with ensuring long-run outcomes go well.” On the other, it could mean “the view that long-run outcomes are the thing we should be most concerned about” (emphasis added).

The first definition is much weaker than the second, so while MacAskill initially proposed adopting the second definition (which he says he’s most “sympathetic” with and believes is “probably right”), he ended up favoring the first. The reason is that, in his words, “the first concept is intuitively attractive to a significant proportion of the wider public (including key decision-makers like policymakers and business leaders),” and “it seems that we’d achieve most of what we want to achieve if the wider public came to believe that ensuring the long-run future goes well is one important priority for the world, and took action on that basis.”

Yikes. I’m suddenly remembering all the atheist community’s struggling over the meaning of atheist: does it mean a lack of belief in gods, or does it mean they deny the existence of gods? So much hot air over that, and it was all meaningless splitting of hairs. I don’t give a fuck about what definition you use, and apparently that means I’m a terrible PR person, and that’s why New Atheism failed. I accept the blame. It failed because we didn’t attract enough billionaire donors, darn it.

At least we didn’t believe in a lot of evilly absurd bullshit behind closed doors that we had to hide from the public.

The importance of not putting people off the longtermist or EA brand is much-discussed among EAs — for example, on the EA Forum, which is not meant to be a public-facing platform, but rather a space where EAs can talk to each other. As mentioned above, EAs have endorsed a number of controversial ideas, such as working on Wall Street or even for petrochemical companies in order to earn more money and then give it away. Longtermism, too, is built around a controversial vision of the future in which humanity could radically enhance itself, colonize the universe and simulate unfathomable numbers of digital people in vast simulations running on planet-sized computers powered by Dyson swarms that harness most of the energy output of stars.

For most people, this vision is likely to come across as fantastical and bizarre, not to mention off-putting. In a world beset by wars, extreme weather events, mass migrations, collapsing ecosystems, species extinctions and so on, who cares how many digital people might exist a billion years from now? Longtermists have, therefore, been very careful about how much of this deep-future vision the general public sees.

The worst part of longtermist thinking is that what they’re imagining, in the long term, is a swarm of digital people — none of whom exist now, and which we don’t know how to create — is the population that our current efforts should be aimed at serving. Serving. That’s a word they avoid using, because it implies that right now, right here, we are the lesser people. Digital people is where it’s at.

According to MacAskill and his colleague, Hilary Greaves, there could be some 1045 digital people — conscious beings like you and I living in high-resolution virtual worlds — in the Milky Way galaxy alone. The more people who could exist in the future, the stronger the case for longtermism becomes, which is why longtermists are so obsessed with calculating how many people there could be within our future light cone.

They’ve already surpassed the Christians, some of whom argue that there are more than 100 million (100,000,000) angels. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, remember, so sacrifice now to make your more numerous betters.

You will also not be surprised to learn that the current goal is to simply grab lots and lots of money by converting rich people to longtermism — this is also how Christianity succeeded, by getting a grip on the powerful and wealthy. Underdogs don’t win, except by becoming the big dogs.

So the grift here, at least in part, is to use cold-blooded strategizing, marketing ploys and manipulation to build the movement by persuading high-profile figures to sign on, controlling how EAs interact with the media, conforming to social norms so as not to draw unwanted attention, concealing potentially off-putting aspects of their worldview and ultimately “maximizing the fraction of the world’s wealth controlled by longtermists.” This last aim is especially important since money — right now EA has a staggering $46.1 billion in committed funding — is what makes everything else possible. Indeed, EAs and longtermists often conclude their pitches for why their movement is exceedingly important with exhortations for people to donate to their own organizations.

One thing not discussed in this particular article is another skeevy element of this futurist nonsense. You aren’t donating your money to a faceless mob of digital people — it’s going to benefit you directly. There are many people who promote the idea that all you have to do is make to 2050, and science and technology will enable an entire generation to live forever. You can first build and then join the choir of digital people! Eternal life is yours if you join the right club! Which, by the way, is also part of the Christian advertising campaign. They’ve learned from the best grifters of all time.

Optimism must be tempered with realism…and dread

Portrait of Victory!

Tragedy and waste, that’s all anyone will get out of the war in Ukraine. It seems to have entered a phase where exhausted, demoralized Russians get to run away.

In the end, the Russians fled any way they could on Friday, on stolen bicycles, disguised as locals. Hours after Ukrainian soldiers poured into the area, hundreds of Russian soldiers encamped in this village were gone, many after their units abandoned them, leaving behind stunned residents to face the ruins of 28 weeks of occupation.

“They just dropped rifles on the ground,” Olena Matvienko said Sunday as she stood, still disoriented, in a village littered with ammo crates and torched vehicles, including a Russian tank loaded on a flatbed. The first investigators from Kharkiv had just pulled in to collect the bodies of civilians shot by Russians, some that have been lying exposed for months.

Russia has announced that they are regrouping in the face of the Ukrainian surge.

Ukraine’s counter-offensive in the north-east of the country has inflicted an extraordinary defeat on Moscow, prompting the Russian army to pull back thousands of troops after suffering a series of battlefield defeats.
Ukraine appears to have regained control of the two key cities of Kupiansk and Izium after a major counteroffensive in the Kharkiv region in recent days, after wrongfooting Russian forces with a much-publicised Ukrainian southern offensive to distract Russia from the real one being prepared in the Kharkiv region.
Photos published by the Ukrainian security forces showed troops raising the national flag in Kupiansk, an important logistical hub for Russian forces in eastern Ukraine, where rail lines linking Russia to eastern Ukraine converge and which, in the last months, has supplied Russian forces in north-eastern Ukraine.

Nobody has won. Russia is spasming and continues to rain missiles on civilian targets. Ukraine has retaken narrow strips of land that were theirs to begin with. Putin must react savagely to this embarrassment; there are whisperings of discontent among the militaristic factions in his country, and he will be deposed if he loses his strongman reputation. I want Ukraine to win, to be honest, but let’s be willing to face the facts and see every bloody step forward as an action that will demand more blood.

That other Pennsylvania candidate

No Dr Oz today. There’s an even worse guy running for office in Pennsylvania: Doug Mastriano wants to be governor, and he’s a certifiable nutcase.

The Republican nominee for governor of Pennsylvania has done any number of things that would doom to Hades the political prospects of any mortal politician: wearing a Confederate uniform, doing business with a white nationalist website, calling Roe v. Wade worse than the Holocaust, associating with militia figures from groups such as the Oath Keepers, appearing at the Capitol during the Jan. 6 insurrection, and sharing QAnon conspiracy ideas, anti-Semitic propaganda and anti-Muslim hatred.

But though he walks through the shadow of the valley of defeat, he fears no evil — because he has his very own campaign prophet! Her name is Julie Green, and she personally receives messages directly from God, “sometimes … twice a day,” she says, when He instructs her to turn on certain recordings and then speaks to her through the music’s “frequencies.”

Yes. English grammar.

This is not that unusual in America since every conservative president seems to adopt a personal god-walloper. For many years — most of my life, it seems — it was Billy Graham. Julie Green, though, is particularly weird.

Pennsylvania Republican gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano has promoted and campaigned with Julie Green, a “prophet” who has claimed that God will execute political figures “for their planned pandemic, shortages, inflation, mandates and for stealing an election.” The Mastriano ally and fringe religious commentator has also alleged a variety of conspiracy theories, including that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “loves to drink the little children’s blood”; the government is conducting “human sacrifices” to stay in power; and President Joe Biden is secretly dead and an “actor” is playing him.

…

Green’s prophecies are badly performed pro-Trump fantasies in which God has “chosen” Trump to be his “Moses” to “deliver the people out of the hands of these nowaday pharaohs.” In this telling, the “majority” of states will decertify their 2020 election results, Trump will “take back his rightful place of power,” and God will send his “Angel of Death” to take the lives of people who stole the 2020 election, among other alleged misdeeds.

Green’s prophecies justify the coming deaths of elected officials by alleging vast conspiracy theories. For instance, she claimed Rep. Ilhan Omar is “a spy sent from your land to get everything you could to give it back to the nation that you serve”; she said that Sen. Mitt Romney’s “fingerprints will be found all over the fraud of the 2020 election”; and alleged that Govs. Gretchen Whitmer and Brian Kemp were also involved in stealing the 2020 election.

Her prophecies have a special place for Mastriano and Pennsylvania. On February 28, she prophesied: “Doug Mastriano, I have you here for such a time as this, saith the Lord. I know it seemed like I had forsaken you, all your hard work, and all the time you put forth to get to the truth in election integrity. You know the truth, and you have seen so much evidence of what really happened. It is now time to move forward with the plans you have been given. Yes, Doug, I am here with you. I will not forsake you. The time has come for their great fall and for the great steal to be overturned.”

I had to look to see what this Julie Green is all about…and I’m sorry, she is the most uncharismatic evangelical preacher I’ve ever seen. She has this rather flat delivery of nonsense, and her videos…well, I include one here just so you can see what I’m talking about. It’s strange. It’s random animal videos with Green in a corner, talking, but her voice is completely out of sync with her mouth. Don’t watch the whole thing, it’s boring and poorly done, and if you watch a few minutes (or seconds) of it you’ll have captured the flavor of her entire video catalog.

What’s also strange is that while she has 10 times the number of channel subscribers that I do, hardly any of them watch her video — the number of views is typically in the hundreds. It’s like how an American majority may claim to be church members, only a small minority actually attend church on Sunday. I think there are a lot of fanatical far-right old people who see a sermon by her on Facebook, click on subscribe, and then don’t bother to look up her work at all regularly.

To put it in perspective, my maggot video has had more viewers than most of Julie Green’s boring prophecies. I don’t know why no governors have attached me to their election campaigns. Hey, Tim Walz, for a small fee, I could feed you a steady supply of cool spider videos! Call me.

Oh wait — an explanation. Julie Green Ministries has said they have no videos on YouTube (for good reason, they’re banned), and the videos I saw were all made by some rabid fan who steals the official videos on Rumble and Telegram and Truth Social and hacks them up and splices audio recordings of her sermons with what seems to be an arbitrary recording of her face. If you check out those sites, there are no cute animal videos, her voice is in sync, and the number of views is much more representative of her popularity among the Q wackos. The content is still flat and boring, though.

Let’s bash Oz some more

It’s fun! He is such a bad doctor and a dishonest candidate. He also tortures and kills puppies. That’s almost comically villainous.

In 2004, complaints about Dr. Mehmet Oz’s dog experiments were cited in a report from an internal investigation into allegations of poor animal care made by Dr. Catherine Dell’Orto, a post-doctoral veterinarian. See also individual reports of Dr. Oz’s dog experiments. According to the report, “highly invasive and stressful experiments” on dogs were performed without a “humane end point.” AWA violations included a litter of whelped puppies killed by painful cardiac injection:

“The screams of these puppies could be heard through closed doors. All of these puppies, lying in a plastic garbage bag, were killed in the presence of their litter mates.”

Subsequent applications for grants to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) by Dr. Oz have been denied. In 2004, Columbia paid $2,000 in fines to the USDA.

I have to make a significant caveat to that accusation, though. Almost all the sources are from PETA, and PETA is not trustworthy. I haven’t been able to find a source outside PETA for the claims (there is an NYT article from that time, buried deep behind a paywall), but that NIH cut his support is a more significant fact…but on the other hand, a $2000 fine is kind of insignificant. I also have no idea what the purpose of the experiments was — why was a TV doctor doing that?

True confession: I’ve euthanized puppies in the past (not in over 40 years, though!), and why would you do it with cardiac injection, and why would you do it en masse? Something is wrong there. Ask a vet who has to put animals to sleep — you do it quietly, respectfully, and with a sedative injection that lets them die peacefully. Screaming animals means you’re doing it wrong.

But then, Oz has always been an ethical nightmare. He has been featured in the AMA Journal of Ethics, and not positively.

Columbia’s affiliation with Oz had been under fire long before he launched a surprise Senate run in late November. In 2015, when Oz testified before the Senate about his endorsement of shady “miracle” cures, a group of some of the country’s top medical professionals sent Columbia a blistering letter demanding the renowned medical school fire the Oprah-blessed daytime star.

“Dr. Oz has repeatedly shown disdain for science and for evidence-based medicine, as well as baseless and relentless opposition to the genetic engineering of food crops,” the physicians wrote. “Worst of all, he has manifested an egregious lack of integrity by promoting quack treatments and cures in the interest of personal financial gain.”

Columbia University has also severed all ties with him (rather murkily, unfortunately).

After years of criticism, Columbia University Medical Center has finally—quietly—cut public ties with celebrity doctor turned Republican Senate candidate Mehmet Oz.

The acclaimed teaching hospital, where Oz held senior positions like vice chair of surgery and director of integrated medicine for years, stripped his personal pages from their website in mid-January.

I had no idea Columbia was in Pennsylvania, though.

Can we all forget Oz after the November elections? I look forward to that.

The daily Oz skewering

It’s not really going to be a daily event here.

But jeez, Oz provides a target-rich environment.

Can I just say that the claim that “life begins at conception” is sufficiently absurd in all of its particulars that anyone who says it needs to be laughed off the stage? Life doesn’t “begin” at conception, and the question is not whether the focus is on life (it’s not, or these same people would be against the death penalty and eating meat or any living thing at all), it’s about when human personhood begins, which is a much fuzzier and poorly delimited thing altogether. Except we know it doesn’t happen at conception.

Is demographics destiny?

This is fascinating, and I have no idea what the consequences will be. The populations of many countries are rapidly shrinking, and it defies simplistic explanations.

Is that good? Bad? I don’t know. Reducing the human population is good for the planet overall, but how these countries will respond is an open question. Also, modern capitalism seems to be a gigantic Ponzi scheme that relies on continuous growth — what happens when the base of the pyramid shrinks?

The decline in growth isn’t entirely universal. Some countries continue to expand that population base, largely through the mechanism of immigration. Look at the difference between China and the US!

My grandchildren are going to grow up in a different world than I did. We need to accept the fact of change and prepare to adapt with it.