This Extinct Dolphin Had Tusks That Fish Were Wise to Avoid NYT. Of course, in Alabama, the tusks are looser.
Killer Whales Are Not Our Friends The Atlantic
The Next Crisis Will Start With Empty Office Buildings The Atlantic
Why It Seems Everything We Knew About the Global Economy Is No Longer True NYT (Furzy Mouse).
Juneteenth
Scapegoating Politics: How Fascism Deploys Race, and How Antiracism Takes the Bait Adolph Reed, nonsite.org
The Propaganda of History, (PDF) W.E.B. DuBois. Chapter XVII of Black Reconstruction in America (1935).
Juneteenth in Lubbock, Texas, Was When Our Men Came Out of the Shadows Jezebel
Life’s little ironies:
With Juneteenth around the corner, the #FBI is flying the Juneteenth flag outside of our headquarters as a celebration of freedom and a reminder that our work is never done when it comes to protecting the rights of all Americans. pic.twitter.com/RjdovAG8jj
— FBI (@FBI) June 18, 2023
Juneteenth celebration horror: 23 shot, 1 fatally, at Illinois event ABC
Father’s Day
A Proclamation on Father’s Day, 2023 The White House
Loneliness hurts not just men’s mental health — it may hurt their bones, too, study suggests FOX
Climate
Swiss voters back net-zero emissions climate bill as glaciers melt France24
Accounting for Carbon Offsets Harvard Business Review
#COVID19
Column: Did Sweden beat the pandemic by refusing to lock down? No, its record is disastrous Michael Hiltzik, LA Times. Commentary:
In the latest issue of @Flamman_ Markus and I have a piece reflecting on how the Swedish Left ended up embracing a pandemic strategy rooted in neoliberal ideology of individual responsibility in the face of collective crisis.
A thread with some translated excerpts. 1/ https://t.co/i4Ot9MibpM pic.twitter.com/RiktfFCbYH
— Nicholas Loubere @ndloubere@toot.community (@NDLoubere) June 17, 2023
A single COVID-19 pandemic or multiple SARS pandemics? John Snow Project
Lambert here: Two and three years ago, a ton of studies went into the pipeline. Now, they’re emerging:
Discovery and characterization of potent pan-variant SARS-CoV-2 neutralizing antibodies from individuals with Omicron breakthrough infection Nature. From the Abstract: “In this study, by using single-cell sequencing technology, we isolated hundreds of potent neutralizing antibodies from the first Omicron breakthrough infection cohort in mainland China. The elite antibodies showed perfect neutralizing activity across variants, including the Wuhan-Hu-1, Delta, and Omicron sublineages.” This seems similar, albeit on a grander scale, to the approach taken by Thailand’s CoviTRAP.
Outpatient treatment of COVID-19 and incidence of post-COVID-19 condition over 10 months (COVID-OUT): a multicentre, randomised, quadruple-blind, parallel-group, phase 3 trial The Lancet. N = 1431. From the Abstract: “Outpatient treatment with metformin reduced long COVID incidence by about 41%, with an absolute reduction of 4·1%, compared with placebo. Metformin has clinical benefits when used as outpatient treatment for COVID-19 and is globally available, low-cost, and safe.”
Tracking SARS-CoV-2 seropositivity in rural communities using blood-fed mosquitoes (preprint) medRxiv. From the Abstract: “Here we evaluate the collection of naturally bloodfed mosquitoes to test for human anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies.” Here in the First World, if we want something “naturally bloodfed,” we use squillionaires [rimshot. laughter].
Finding the infectious dose for COVID-19 by applying an airborne-transmission model to superspreader events PLOS One. From the Abstract: “We probed the transmission of COVID-19 by applying an airborne transmission model to five well-documented case studies—a Washington state church choir, a Korean call center, a Korean exercise class, and two different Chinese bus trips…. Despite the uncertainties in the values of some parameters of the superspreading events, all five events yielded (N0 [the characteristic number of COVID-19 virions needed to induce infection]∼300–2,000 virions), which is similar to published values for influenza.”
Risk of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) among Those Up-to-Date and Not Up-to-Date on COVID-19 Vaccination (preprint) medRxiv. From the Abstract: “Since the XBB lineages became dominant, adults ‘not up-to-date’ by the CDC definition have a lower risk of COVID-19 than those ‘up-to-date’ on COVID-19 vaccination, bringing into question the value of this risk classification definition.” Oh.
Viral infectivity in paediatric SARS-CoV-2 clinical samples does not vary by age Access Microbiology. n = 144 sample. From the Abstract: “At the start of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic, there was much uncertainty about the role of children in infection and transmission dynamics…. We found that age had no impact on the infectiousness of SARS-CoV-2 within our cohort, with children of all ages able to produce high levels of infectious virus.” I’m so old I remember when “we have no data on children” was instantly converted into “Children don’t get infected with Covid. Let’s send them back to school!”
SARS-CoV-2 airborne infection probability estimated by using indoor carbon dioxide Environmental Science and Pollution Research. From the Abstract: “In a typical outpatient setting, the required indoor CO2 concentration at which R0 does not exceed 1 is below 620 ppm with no mask, 1000 ppm with a surgical mask and 16000 ppm with an N95 mask. In a typical inpatient setting, on the other hand, the required indoor CO2 concentration is below 540 ppm with no mask, 770 ppm with a surgical mask, and 8200 ppm with an N95 mask. These findings facilitate the establishment of a strategy for preventing airborne transmission in hospitals. This study is unique in that it suggests the development of an airborne transmission model with indoor CO2 and application of the model to actual clinical practice. Organizations and individuals can efficiently recognize the risk of SARS-CoV-2 airborne transmission in a room and thus take preventive measures such as maintaining good ventilation, wearing masks, or shortening the exposure time to an infected individual by simply using a CO2 monitor.”
SARS-CoV-2 Delta Variant Remains Viable in Environmental Biofilms found in Meat Packaging (preprint) Plants medRxiv. From the Abstract: “Our data provides evidence that SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant remained viable on all the surfaces tested with and without an environmental biofilm. We observed that SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant was able to remain infectious with each of the environmental biofilms….. These results indicate a complex virus-environmental biofilm interaction which correlates to the different bacteria found in each biofilm. Our results also indicate that there is the potential for biofilms to protect SARS-CoV-2 from disinfecting agents and remaining prevalent in meat packaging plants.” This is not a case of fomite transmission, but yikes. I wonder if virus would remain viable through a freeze-thaw cycle.
A non-exhaustive list of activities that spread less disease Aria, Medium
China?
Xi Jinping’s dream of a Chinese military-industrial complex FT
Latest China Test for Western Firms: Consumers Switching to Homegrown Labels WSJ
China bankers told to shun flashy clothes, 5-star hotels in austerity drive Channel News Asia
Indonesia ‘temporarily’ halts visa-free visit policy for 159 countries Anadolu Agency
India
The Modi Government Must Answer for India’s Historic Bank Loss of Rs 12 Lakh Crore The Wire
Error in signaling system led to train crash that killed 275 people in India, official says AP
New Not-So-Cold War
Key takeaways from Putin’s meeting with African Leaders on Ukraine conflict RT. Big reveal:
Yet more evidence that there was a tentative deal to end Russia’s invasion in April 2022, only to be sabotaged by US-UK. Unless someone wants to argue that the document Putin showed is a fake? https://t.co/59Z03NdYyN
— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) June 18, 2023
Head of Zelenskyy’s Office tries to involve Brazil and India in Ukrainian peace plan Ukrainska Pravda. Let me know how that works out….
Ukraine Appears to Make a Small Gain in the South as Counteroffensive Continues NYT
AFU Suffers Horror Breakdowns as Russian Forces Repel New Advance Simplicius the Thinker(s). Interesting, but search on “I managed to compile a video of all the clips people are releasing.” Here they present a number of completely unsourced and undated video clips — also appearing on the @Sprinter, an account that doesn’t believe in sourcing either, which I regard as dodgy — purporting to show military movements across the United States, plus an Internet slowdown. (Really? Has this dude ever experienced the Internet in the United States?) This after preening “I actually follow up and bring the facts,” and such-like. Readers, have you spotted any military movements in your necks of the woods??
Counting Russia’s dead in Ukraine – and what it says about the changing face of the war BBC
Biden’s five mistakes in Ukraine Al Jazeera
Zelensky’s No. 2 Turns to Celebrities as Well as Politicians to Help Ukraine WSJ
BlackRock and JPMorgan help set up Ukraine reconstruction bank FT. Good. I hope they lose everything.
Biden Administration
Power companies quietly pushed $215m into US politics via dark money groups Guardian
2024
Harvard Poll: 55 Percent of the Public View the Trump Indictment as “Politically Motivated” Jonathon Turley
Spook Country
Snowden Ten Years Later Michael Tsai
Digital Watch
Plagiarism Engine: Google’s Content-Swiping AI Could Break the Internet Tom’s Hardware. “Instead of highlighting links to content from expert humans, the “Search Generative Experience” (SGE) uses an AI plagiarism engine that grabs facts and snippets of text from a variety of sites, cobbles them together (often word-for-word) and passes off the work as its creation. If Google makes SGE the default mode for search, the company will seriously damage if not destroy the open web while providing a horrible user experience.”
AI could replace humans in social science research (press release) University of Waterloo. “AI models can represent a vast array of human experiences and perspectives, possibly giving them a higher degree of freedom to generate diverse responses than conventional human participant methods.” Autocoprophagic Social Science, or, less elegantly, GIGO.
The Bezzle
Read this before signing up for Amazon Clinic FOX. As I thought: The EULA….
Our Famously Free Press
Rogan/RFK v. Hotez:
Squillionaires piling on (1):
It’s now a trend.
If you’re willing to spend a relatively small amount of money, you can open up discussion on an important topic. pic.twitter.com/5aS0NXn4CJ
— Balaji (@balajis) June 18, 2023
$150,000 is “a relatively small amount of money”? Welcome to our planet!
Squillionaires piling on (2):
Way to talk in generalities Joe. Not saying there aren’t a lot of fucked up things about pharma. That’s why we created https://t.co/jYSNkP7amr. But to ignore that the same industry has saved who knows how many lives is bullshit and you know it.
It’s also disrespectful to all… https://t.co/bUawoBgbH6— Mark Cuban (@mcuban) June 18, 2023
Waiting for Rogan/RFK to condemn this excess of zeal:
Ugh I just was stalked in front of my home by a couple of antivaxers taunting me to debate RFKJr. Of course I was looking my Sunday best in our brutal heat wave. What is it with people? Well at least Houstonian’s now know I support the team…#GoTexans pic.twitter.com/d0NIgNElKN
— Prof Peter Hotez MD PhD (@PeterHotez) June 18, 2023
Health Care
Hospitals will be ‘rare exception’: What healthcare will look like in 100 years Becker’s Hospital Review. “Hospitals will be the rare exception and not the norm for care.” A gaggle of hospital administrators reminding me of librarians who hate books.
Gunz
Students Create Gunshot Detection Tech for School Security Government Technology
Using loophole, Seward County seizes millions from motorists without convicting them of crimes KLKN (KS). The deck: “One of every three state civil asset forfeiture seizures happen in this county, pop. 17,962.”
The South is fast becoming America’s industrial heartland The Economist
Class Warfare
Airline fined $15,625 after worker ‘ingested’ into engine at Montgomery airport AL.com
Death on the Job: Texas Says “NO” To Water Breaks in the Heat KKCN (KS).
How Companies Are Tackling Job Misery WSJ. More money?
From “The Anthology of Funny” Matt Taibbi, Racket News
Antidote du jour (via):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
