#Covid-19 and media trends | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

whokilledjared · 8 months ago

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the sluttiest thing a man can do is be himself. (& takes on social media)

Hi.

I'm lonely.

The moment I got "two weeks off school" in sophomore year, life went to 4x speed & I can't turn it off no matter how hard I try.

Maybe COVID-19 adolescence did numbers on me. Somewhere between the iPhone 5c and ChatGPT, 14-hour screen times have live-streamed to me a steady, homogenous death of culture.

Nothing is cool anymore. Nothing is sacred. Every movement is a trend, and every cult classic a sequel.

The value we place on things being beautiful, on being "cool," and our gatekept appreciation of how hard these things were to find: it's been co-opted, or perhaps stolen. It's been stolen by the new merchant class. "Disruptors" and "innovators" turning our lives into a burgeoning black mirror prequel. Soon, we'll graduate too, and we'll wring every morsel of value in each others' lives dry for cash.

Plain and simple, I think we're being manipulated.

Your dates are an algorithm. Your music is a social signal. And Zuck knows when you sleep.*

God. What the fuck are we doing???

“Individuation is becoming the thing which is not the ego, and that is very strange.” — Carl Jung

Recently, I deleted Instagram. My first impulse was to post a story or something, announcing my departure. But then, I thought that would be lame.

I got rid of my account, too. Kinda. Over 1 year, over 800 followers removed, and what remains of me is a little grey icon, and "JM_0000000010" where my name and face used to be.

yay.

There were many people I wish I could have been friends with, but I wonder, too, why I find myself so drawn to the validation of others. Does social media affect me worse, or do we all just choose to ignore it, languishing in private?

At any rate, this last year has almost felt like re-learning how to be a human being.

Personally, I think one of the biggest markers for maturity is when you become willing to disappoint the people you know in favor of what feels right to you, when you start to unravel the stories you’ve told yourself (or been told) about who you are and what you should be. In short, the sluttiest thing a man can do is be himself.

And sometimes, I think about every college student that has ever lived. My grandmother, my dad, and so on. Just consider for a moment all kids who graduated before 2010:

What was it like for the ones in 1940? To walk around, before a campus had computers? In 2006: To meet someone pretty, but forget their number? In 1999: To cram into dorms, and watch Seinfeld live on-air?

Would I, like my dad in 1988, have braved cold night, brisk wind, & landline phone-call just to knock and see if my friends were too busy to hang?

What stories could I tell if there was even the slightest chance of getting lost on the way home from a party?

Humans are social creatures. We crave our friends like water. To me, the clearest difference between Dasani and Instagram is that one of them comes in a bottle.

Yet despite these distractions and comforts we have in 2024, somehow, we still have engineering students. People who carve out time in their day to sit down, look at paper, and solve differential equations. But then, that's not so hard, is it? It just takes time. Precious, fucking, time.

At Meta, leagues and leagues of these engineers power behavioral scientists, who are competing for the highest salary. Their benchmarks? Your FOMO. Guilt. Anxiety. Obsession. The worse you feel, the more you engage with their content. The more you engage with their content, well, you're starting to get the point.

Try something for me: Open up Instagram, but don't tap anything. What happens? How many little animations? How many tiny nudges prompting you to get lost? Our home-pages are billion-dollar diving boards, hoisting us over engineered catacombs of subconscious quicksand.

My homepage is my FOMO, my envy, and my crushes. The pain and struggle of trying to be someone who I am not. My little existential crises, bundled-up, packaged, and shipped with a like button.

To abandon your social networks entirely, however, requires a safety net of close friends. After all, your friends are online, and you'd be miserable without them.

This is the problem with our monkey brains. Millennia of sociological natural-selection have made us quite great at feeling terrible. We're damn good at making tribal status games to play with, too.

Seeking refuge in quirked up septum piercings and boygenius listeners, my time in counter-cultural, alternative "scenes" between St. Louis and Tampa has shown me that even the weirdest of folks and the most removed can accidentally find themselves reduced to nothing more than high-school popularity contests. Even if I love them. Even if they're amazing people. We're human.

We can't "quit social media" as much as we can't "quit bottled water" Sure, we can, but it's inconvenient. And even without a bottle, we're still drinking water.

So I lost touch with my friends. I got no new updates on their lives. I forced myself into the inconvenience of not having a phone to reach for in fleeting moments of boredom. Suddenly, I was out of the loop. Suddenly, I was bored. And suddenly, nobody missed me. My only friends were the ones I had the time to text. Everyone else ... does not exist.

Weekends have become more valuable than ever. Without the empty social calories of seeing my friends' pictures, I find myself planning hangouts as often as my schedule allows. I have more lunches, more study sessions, and more is done in the company of less.

And I have the time to breathe.

And in this calm, I think I found my answer: it's my misplaced ambition. These fears of anxiety and people I thought I would miss, they seem represent something I want to see more of within myself. Something I want to develop, lean into more deeply, as an individual. And I think that's quite normal; to look out into the world and feel attracted to things we want to see more of. This is, I think, how everyone develops their own definition of beauty — and of coolness. It's largely the intersection of what we find most interesting, and what we want to see more of in the world. Because beauty and coolness, by definition, are rare and hard to find. If they were everywhere, nothing be beautiful, nor would anything be cool.

When we all turn into wrinkles and cataracts, bad backs and heart attacks, for a brief, glorious moment, our lives are going to flash before our eyes. In this moment, you'll see your story. The ultimate progression of you.

How much of that will be skibidi toilet and reaction clips? How much of that will be arguing on the internet? Can you tell me, just how much of your life will you have skipped over to pacify your intentionally-lowered attention span?

That girl whose number you couldn't find Those passing questions over coffee that you couldn't search on Google The boredom of a subway ride

Those are not inconveniences, they're what the older generations refer to as "life."

* (oh, but if you can't sleep, consider this aside: Google knows the angle you walk at, how fast you're walking, and they've got crowdsourced pictures of everywhere around you at all times of the day. fun bedtime thoughts <3)

#scene #alternative #social media #social justice #instagram #college #coming of age #writing #blogpost #blog takes

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covid-safer-hotties · 3 months ago

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Key points you should know:

=Mainstream media coverage of mask bans has given space for politicians’ false claims that masks are associated with wrong-doing, like crime and antisemitism, while overlooking that bans are, in many ways, an effort to suppress the reality of COVID-19. =There are 21 states and numerous municipalities with laws against masks or disguises on the books. People who wear masks would benefit from knowing exactly how they are worded and any legal precedents, as police are often under-informed. =Both Republicans and Democrats are pushing more severe mask bans than ever before in history. Democrats are more likely to give lip service to health needs without offering meaningful protections. Masks can and will be criminalized by police regardless of the language of the law, as arrest trends follow social trends. Police are also permitted by the Supreme Court to make mistakes in enforcing laws.

On August 5, Nyss Fayrchyld traveled from New York City to Nassau County in Long Island with other organizers to testify against a local bill to ban masks. The next few hours were “traumatic” and “volatile,” they recalled, with supporters of the bill “yelling obscenities” at immunocompromised people who testified in masks, calling them ”pro-Hamas thugs and terrorists.”

Police also directed enforcement at people in masks. One masked attendee was arrested on several charges, including second-degree assault, a felony, facing up to nine years in prison. Fayrchyld insists that the person was de-escalating conflict, which seems corroborated by video evidence. Supporters of the ban were also given more time to speak.

Nassau County’s bill passed with a vote of twelve Republicans in favor and seven Democrats abstaining. The law includes a vague medical exemption but also gives police expansive powers to stop, unmask, and arrest people.

Fayrchyld witnessed the type of state-sanctioned hostility that has become increasingly common for people who wish to stay safe during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Nassau County is just the latest jurisdiction to pass a mask ban, after North Carolina and Washington, D.C. early this year.

New anti-mask bills were also recently introduced in Chicago, the New York State legislature, and the federal House of Representatives, which proposes a sentence of up to 15 years. Leaders in New York City and Los Angeles have discussed possible future bans, and other states are enforcing pre-existing anti-mask laws on the books. The University of Virginia has banned masks on campus, unless the person can show documentation of medical need.

While mainstream media stories about mask bans often mention that immunocompromised people might be harmed, these stories also give unskeptical space to politicians’ claims that increased mask-wearing has contributed to all kinds of wrong-doing, from crime to antisemitism. In reality, mask-wearing is increasingly rare compared to early in the pandemic. There are countries with far less violence than the U.S. where wearing a mask is normalized. One analysis found no correlation between mask bans and crime rates. Many pro-Palestine protestors are masking explicitly to prevent spreading COVID-19.

Most media coverage fails to connect the new wave of mask bans to the ongoing political efforts to minimize COVID-19. Overblown concerns about facial recognition and protestors are only possible with a concurrent effort to downplay the threat of COVID-19 and erase signs of it from public life — now a priority for most mainstream politicians.

While the conversation around mask bans has focused on new laws and bills, 21 states and many municipalities have laws banning masks and/or disguises in different settings, which is more than other organizations have reported. Even where these bans have apparent limitations or exemptions, the finer language of the laws leaves all COVID-conscious people vulnerable. And the historic practices of police endanger people even in states with no legal bans.

“We have come so far downhill when it comes to protecting one another that [supporting mask-wearing] is a controversial opinion to have these days,” said disability activist and author Imani Barbarin. The political climate, she said, “creates this perfect storm where it’s going to further criminalize Black and Brown people who need masks to survive.”

The politics and propaganda of mask bans Historically, mask bans tend to come in waves. This current wave has been led by Republicans, with Democrats following closely behind. While Democrats tend to pay slightly more lip service to health needs, their actions undermine their promises.

The Republican effort to ban masks started before the COVID-19 pandemic, with a series of bills aimed at antifascist protestors. In 2011, Occupy Wall Street protestors were arrested for wearing masks. Republican leaders reignited their efforts in early 2023, introducing bills that sought to end the COVID-19 era of masking altogether.

Republicans insist mask bans have been around for a long time. But their recent efforts go further in criminalizing masking than ever before. North Carolina’s new law requires members of the public to “remove the mask upon request by a law enforcement officer,” for any reason, for as long as police want. Previously, the state’s law limited this demand to traffic stops and when police believed someone was committing a crime.

The new provision “smacks of blatant authoritarianism,” said Corye Dunn, Director of Public Policy for Disability Rights North Carolina. North Carolina’s mask ban also adds a new provision requiring a person wearing a mask to “temporarily” remove it at the request of an “owner or occupant” of a “public or private property.”

“Occupant doesn’t mean anything” in state law, Dunn said. She’s concerned that this “dangerous” provision will “embolden bullies and set up people with disabilities to face hostility” from fellow citizens demanding mask removal.

Elaine Nell, who co-founded the group Advocates for Medically Fragile Kids NC, is “angry, sad, and scared” about how the law might be enforced when it takes effect in October, especially in public spaces: “You get jury duty [and you] may not be able to wear a mask.” Nell is also concerned about her medically vulnerable children, who already lead restricted lives. “This may just take away even more,” she said.

Meanwhile, the conservative Manhattan Institute for Policy Research recently proposed a mask ban template focused on protests that don’t include any health exemption. While the Institute doesn’t pretend that COVID-19 is over, the template outlines a grim scenario: “Someone who wears a mask for health reasons probably should not be congregating in large groups of people.”

This statement suggests that immunocompromised people shouldn’t have the right to protest, work, or exist in crowded spaces, harkening back to the “ugly laws” that once forbade disabled people from being in public.

Democrats in the New York legislature proposed a mask ban bill similar to the Manhattan Institute’s template, with a medical exemption that only applies during a “declared public health emergency.” On paper, the federal government ended the COVID-19 emergency in 2023.

Across the country, Democrats are proposing mask bans based on flimsy and inconsistent logic, often citing incidents in which the main aggressors weren’t even masked. New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a former police officer, might be the one Democratic leader willing to make the subtext clear. He has expressed the desire to “go back to the way it was pre-COVID” by banning masks on subways, in stores, and in “other areas where it is not health-related” — as if there are any locations where health is not an issue.

Adams articulated out loud the Biden administration’s consistent priority: to erase the signs of COVID-19, or, as the podcast Death Panel calls it, the “sociological production of the end of the pandemic.” This started in the spring of 2021 when the CDC proposed that vaccinated people no longer need masks. The administration has also steadily chipped away at COVID-19 data collection efforts.

Mask bans are the latest step towards that goal, further disincentivizing the public from wearing them for protection. Biden administration leaders have explicitly associated mask-wearing with unnecessary, humiliating, and “fringe” behavior. And Biden recently insisted that he “ended the pandemic,” just before he reportedly caught COVID-19. His administration has been able to erase almost all signs of COVID-19 besides the viral illness itself.

How police criminalize masking On August 22, Disability Rights New York filed a lawsuit challenging the Nassau County mask ban by invoking the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). But mask ban enforcement won’t rely on the determination of the courts alone. Political propaganda against masking is likely to influence how police criminalize masking, as arrest trends follow social trends more than laws.

Before COVID-19, mask bans were among the obscure laws rarely enforced by themselves, though police have long used face coverings, particularly ski masks, as a pretext to stop and search people. Elijah McClain was stopped by police in 2019 in large part for wearing a ski mask, or “looking suspicious,” and was killed while in custody. Yet Colorado has never had any kind of mask ban, giving police no justification for the stop.

Supreme Court decision Helen v. North Carolina (2014) allows police to be “reasonably mistaken” in their understanding of the laws they are hired to enforce. Police commonly arrest people for legal knives and other weapons due to poor training and bias. People may lose days, weeks, or months of income while in jail — and exposure to a deadly and disabling virus — before prosecutors or judges catch up to police mistakes.

It doesn’t help that anti-mask laws have always been ambiguously written, contributing to “reasonable” misunderstandings and decades of legal testing in the courts. New York’s proposed law would ban masking during “lawful or unlawful assembly or riot.” But “New York, unhelpfully, does not define a local assembly in law,” said Allie Bohm, Senior Policy Counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union of New York.

Bohm is concerned that D.C.’s new law — which outlaws masking while committing a crime or “threats to do bodily harm” — is “just giving police freedom to stop anyone in a mask,” even without justification. Similar laws exist in Arizona, California, Michigan, and many other states.

Bohm’s fears were confirmed by the D.C. law’s sponsor, Councilmember Brooke Pinto, who said the law was intended to give officers “a basis for a stop, for articulable suspicion.” D.C. police officers were sent a memo summarizing the new law without additional formal training, according to emails from the Metropolitan Police Department.

Bohm identified a fundamental legal problem with most mask bans: “We will always be in the position of law enforcement deciding whether the person in front of them is masking for a ‘legitimate’ reason.” Most anti-mask laws assume that police can properly judge “intent” and behavior despite studies showing that such judgment is colored by racial and other biases.

Dunn recalled one North Carolina legislator saying in a hearing, “Nobody is looking to go after ‘meemaw’ at the Walmart,” referring to an older woman. The statement explicitly identified the kinds of “selective enforcement” likely to happen around masking, Dunn said. She has coached the family of one North Carolina Black teenager, whose immune system is suppressed from leukemia treatments, on how to balance his health needs with staying safe during a police interaction — what she calls a “horrifying choice.”

What should people who wear masks do now? (Nadica suggests reading up on illegalism. sorry for interrupting.) Unfortunately, marginalized people might not be able to rely on all of the organizations that have historically fought for their rights. Both the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in New York and the National Urban League support New York’s proposed anti-mask law.

People who wear masks should consider learning the finer details of the laws and precedents in their states and cities, given that police may not be well informed. Does your state require “intent to disguise” your identity for masking to be illegal, as in D.C.? Then you can cite the law and try to assure police that your intention is health-related.

Bohm advises people who wear masks in New York, if confronted by police, to state that they are worried about COVID-19 and ask if they can leave, as there is no current mask ban in effect. Dunn recommends North Carolinians invoke their desire to “prevent the spread of contagious disease,” citing the language of the new law’s very narrow medical exemption. Disclosing a medical condition might seem like a good strategy, but it’s worth keeping in mind police bias: half of people killed by police are disabled.

More broadly, activists need to build solidarity among all of the groups affected by mask bans, including disabled people, pro-Palestine protesters, religious minorities, people of color, and LGBTQ+ people. Some of the laws that ban disguises have been used against trans people.

Barbarin even thinks it would be smart to “hop on personal liberty” as a way to associate masking with American freedom, which she acknowledges is not “in vogue” on the left. The Klan has long been a plaintiff in lawsuits to end mask bans, and Proud Boys, a right-wing extremist group, often cover their faces.

In order to further broaden support against mask bans, the public needs to understand that COVID-19 is still a serious risk. Beyond that, the media needs to communicate that stopping legal bans — or adding medical exemptions — won’t be enough to protect people from police. It will take changing the political discourse around masking altogether.

#stop mask bans #mask bans #covid #mask up #pandemic #covid 19 #wear a mask #coronavirus #sars cov 2 #public health #still coviding #wear a respirator

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beardedmrbean · 1 year ago

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What’s an acceptable tip for a driver who delivers a $20 pizza?

A TikTok video purporting to show a DoorDash delivery driver in Texas swearing at a customer over the $5 tip she gave him has gone viral, sparking fresh online debate over tipping culture in the U.S.

“I just want to say it’s a nice house for a $5 tip,” the driver can be heard saying as he walks away from a home in the door camera video posted to TikTok earlier this week by a user under the name Lacey Purciful.

“You’re welcome!” the resident says, appearing surprised by the remark. “F--- you,” the driver responds before walking away.

“So how much should I be tipping for a $20 pie?” Purciful, who, in a separate post said she herself has worked in the service industry for over 10 years and tips “very well,” wrote in a caption.

Purciful, who did not immediately respond to an overnight request for comment from NBC News, said the driver was fired by DoorDash following the incident.

A DoorDash spokesperson confirmed that the worker had been removed from their platform. They said the company had also reached out to the customer regarding the incident.

“Respectfully asking for a tip is acceptable but abusing or harassing someone is never acceptable,” the spokesperson said.

“Our rules exist to help ensure everyone who uses our platform — Dashers, customers, merchants — have a safe and enjoyable experience,” they said. “We expect everyone to treat others with respect and we will enforce our rules fairly and consistently.”

The video added fuel to a growing debate in the U.S. over tipping culture, with some complaining current trends may have reached a tipping point.

“Tipping is out of control,” one social media user said, commenting on the video. They said they felt $5 for a $20 order was “more than” enough.”

“I doordash and most (not all) pizza delivery orders don’t tip. That was a Rockstar tip,” another user said.

Not everyone agreed, however, with some branding Purciful a “Karen” for contacting DoorDash over the incident.

One poster said they felt the driver should not have lost their job over the exchange, writing: “What he said was not right, but he didn’t have to lose job over it. Everyone is trying to make a living.”

Another commenter noted that the driver may have been concerned about mileage, writing: “Maybe $5 wasn’t enough.”

The COVID-19 pandemic brought consumer willingness to give tips, particularly during times of hardship, into fresh focus, with many ponying up to pay higher gratuities during the crisis, according to research.

Figures provided earlier this year to NBC News by payment processor Square showed the frequency of gratuities at full-service restaurants grew 17% in the fourth quarter last year from the same period in 2021. Meanwhile, tip frequency at quick-service restaurants, such as coffee shops and fast-food chains, rose 16%, according to the company’s data.

The apparent rise in tipping came despite a period of record inflation, which has eaten away at many consumers’ discretionary income.

While the pandemic appeared to spur widespread changes in tipping culture, the growing use of point-of-service, or POS systems, to process payments also appear to have made it easier than ever for customers to provide — and for businesses to ask for — tips.

In a survey of restaurant executives by industry group Hospitality Technology, 71% of respondents said using data to “understand guest preferences and behavior” was their primary reason for facilitating POS system upgrades, while for 57% enabling new payment options was the priority.

A recent Lending Tree survey found that 60% of Americans felt they were tipping more, NBC Boston reported. Around 24% said they felt pressured to tip when the option was presented, while 41% said they had changed their buying habits due to gratuity expectations and 60% felt tipping expectations had gotten out of hand. _________________

Door dash fired him, your opinion on tips aside that's not how you act to customers unless they are directly rude to you.

#nunyas news

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olderthannetfic · 2 years ago

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I wasn't an anti but I logged back into tumblr after a few years of not using it (2018-19 exodus), and that's when I first heard about the anti vs proship deal. When I was a teen I often read incest/underage/gore/abuse/rpf whatever category of things that are supposed to be brain rotting for you and I never thought twice about it. I never felt guilty, I didn't think it was wrong, and it never crossed my mind to think "this royed fic is depraved and the author a sicko". But when I logged back in, I started reading arguments from both sides.

While going through my blog, to my horror I discovered I had long ago reblogged some rick and morty ship fanart, the grandpa/son messed up relationship version. I thought what if someone finds this blog and connects it to me irl? How would I explain this? Why do I even like this? I thought they would think I was a pedophile. I quickly deleted all of it that I could find.

I also came across a bunch of kylux fanart. I had recently been seeing posts about how that was racist because of course some background white dude with two lines is in a more popular ship then the leads of color, right? Racism. I deleted those, too.

And now I feel so stupid for getting caught up in it. I never outwardly expressed any of this but it was an internal I have to be careful about what I reblog, what art I appreciate, and what I write. I chalk it up to being a year into covid and being isolated, wishing I could be physically in my uni classes, and being incredibly burnt out. I thought what people filled their heads with was really important- because so many people were not wearing masks and covid was overloading hospitals. I was incredibly worried about killing my immunocompromised coworker by giving them covid and resented everyone who wasn't following distancing guidelines (which was a lot of fellow students, my roommate, the public). And I thought if people considered more about what information they shared, and realised their capacity to harm, then this wouldn't be happening.

Plucking the potentially "harmful" things from my life felt like I was helping something. Though I'm not acting like I was operating selflessly. A lot of it was fear of how others would judge me.

After reading what you specifically had to say about kylux I realized how stupid I was being. Because the whole appeal of them is hot kylo ren and the BDSM villains fucking each other in leather. There is no other ship combo in the prequels that delivers that as naturally. It really is super lamentable that m/m juggernaut pairs trend white but it really is 1. lack of nonwhite main characters in popular media in the first place, and 2. lack of nonwhite woobies and characters that fit into that shippable mold. And these things being controlled by the profit margins of hollywood. I thank you for pointing these things out, and snapping me out of being an idiot.

A lot of people my age seem to believe you can change the world by sharing an infographic on instagram. Or here. I don't want to be too harsh on people for clinging so hard to the power of the internet for positive change!! during the most isolated moments of this pandemic, but I really recommend 1. killing the cop in your head and 2. seeing what sort connection you can make with the people in your area. I love logging off and being around people, and I love logging on to read my favs banging with tags that would make a priest infarct.

That feeling of impotence during a time of ongoing stress is exactly what gets people reaching for the fake activism. They've got to do something, and all the actually productive things are out of reach so...

Emotionally, it's just how we're built, I'm afraid.

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mariacallous · 8 months ago

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SONNEBERG, GERMANY—First, in true German fashion, the rules were outlined: no alcohol on site, flagpoles capped at three meters, no protesting past 8 p.m. The demonstration followed, with hundreds congregated in the town square shouting insults at the incumbent government; cracking jokes at the expense of refugees, the LGBTQ+ community, and the media; and waving a sea of German flags, with a few Russian ones dotted among them.

“Anyone who dares call us Nazis will be reported to the police,” one of the protesters shouted from a makeshift stage propped up outside Sonneberg’s City Hall, a white mansion built between the world wars. “Germany first,” the protester continued, beckoning the crowds to join in singing the national anthem under a rainy, dark sky.

At 8 p.m. sharp, the crowd quickly dispersed—but they’ll be back next Monday, as they are every week. During the COVID-19 pandemic, they rallied against lockdowns. Now, they call for the overthrow of the current government coalition, and in recent months, the numbers of agitators have started to swell. Many are affiliated with the right-wing party Alternative for Germany (AfD), and although members say they strongly reject what Nazi Germany stood for, a regional chair of the party, Björn Höcke, is on trial for concluding a 2021 speech with the phrase “Everything for Germany”—a slogan widely used by the Nazis. (Under German law, the use of speech, propaganda, and symbolism associated with the Nazi Party and other terrorist groups is prohibited.)

Sonneberg district, home to 56,000 people, is where AfD has celebrated its biggest success to date: Last year, Robert Sesselmann, 51, was elected as the district administrator in a runoff with 52.8 percent of the vote, making Sonneberg the first county in Germany to elect a far-right candidate since the Nazi era. But Thuringia’s AfD branch—where Sonneberg is located—has already been questioning the legitimacy of state institutions and asserted that the Federal Republic of Germany is not a sovereign state, but rather controlled by external powers.

The Thuringia branch of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution has legally classified the AfD’s Thuringia branch as “right-wing extremist,” and the federal office is now deciding whether the party may be classified as a suspected case of right-wing extremism on the national level.

The question is pertinent, since the AfD is gaining in popularity not just in Thuringia, but nationwide. This trend picked up around the time of Germany’s last federal elections in 2021. Nationally, the AfD’s support base has grown to 22 percent, compared to 10.4 percent in 2021. Three states in the east—Thuringia, as well as Brandenburg and Saxony—head to the polls this fall, and a win for the AfD looks likely, as it’s polling around 30 percent in all three states.

“This is a stress test for Germany, and 2024 is a defining year,” said Olaf Sundermeyer, an editor at the Berlin-Brandenburg Broadcast (RBB) and longtime expert on right-wing extremism in Germany. Sundermeyer said that since the AfD was founded in 2013, “the party has continuously radicalized.”

Initially starting out as a euroskeptic party that primarily criticized the European Union’s handling of the eurozone crisis, the party—and its leadership—have continuously shifted toward more nationalist and populist positions, especially since 2015, when former Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed around 1 million refugees into the country.

The legacy and shame of Nazi Germany continue to influence the nation’s politics, and until the AfD’s rise, German society strongly rejected far-right ideologies. But the economic impact of both the 2008 financial crisis and the 2015 refugee crisis have—at least partially—resulted in shifting public perceptions.

“The AfD has successfully managed to alter people’s perception of right-wing extremism, moving it away from its historically charged stigma of Nazism and thus effectively rendering it socially acceptable,” Sundermeyer told Foreign Policy. This, he said, is exactly what has happened in Sonneberg.

The AfD’s new heartland, a remote part of the countryside, was part of the communist German Democratic Republic until reunification in 1990. Surrounded by hills in the Thuringian Forest, Sonneberg’s cobblestone main street and stately houses date back to the Wilhelminian era before the First World War. The nearest major highway is about a half-hour’s drive.

Since reunification, scores of people have migrated westward, leaving many homes empty. Residents say that young people here struggle with drug abuse; that there are few places for them to hang out; and that public transport isn’t adequately connecting the district’s farther, remote villages, making it more difficult to access educational and job opportunities. Since reunification, the country’s east has been catching up to the former West Germany in terms of economic opportunities, but in Sonneberg—and throughout former East Germany—many people continue to feel acutely disadvantaged.

A group of young men lingering after the demonstration echoed these complaints as they chain-smoked Marlboros and packed up whistles and flags. They had opted to move into practical professions—such as construction work, plumbing, and roofing—one explained, to help “build Sonneberg, and Germany overall.”

Attending the demonstration wearing their company uniforms—grey overalls and work pants—the men were initially hesitant to speak to the Lügenpresse, or “lying, mainstream press,” as they described it. “No names please,” they asked politely after agreeing to talk. (“Lügenpresse,” a term used by the Nazis, has resurfaced in Germany’s right-wing circles, as well as among allies of former U.S. President Donald Trump.)

“People call us ‘rats,’ just because we support the AfD,” one of the men said. “There’s no freedom of speech here, no freedom of thoughts. Our country gets involved in wars we don’t want to be part of. The government manipulates the press, our German culture, and our traditions are vanishing due to mass immigration—food and energy prices have skyrocketed. It’s worse than during the German Democratic Republic, and we desperately need change—we need an alternative.” He paused to take a long drag on his cigarette, then added: “Germany is for Germans first—we can’t help others if we’re not helping ourselves.”

“It’s a possibility that the party drifts too far to the right,” he said, “and that’s certainly not what we want. We don’t want a return of Nazi times, but we need change.”

The party’s policy platform is unabashedly far right. For instance, AfD’s stance on immigration is that “the ideology of multiculturalism is a serious threat to peace and to the continued existence of the nation as a cultural unit.” The party advocates for a “German dominant culture” based on the values of Christianity instead of multiculturalism. Africa, the party’s website states, is a “house of poverty,” arguing that migration from the continent needs to be capped.

During a covert meeting last November, uncovered by independent German investigative outlet Correctiv, AfD politicians, together with neo-Nazis and several wealthy business owners, discussed the “remigration” of millions of people—including German citizen—on the basis of racial and religious criteria.

The group of young men in Sonneberg who spoke with Foreign Policy talked about the need for the “remigration” of immigrants, too, and some even had written it on signs. After the rally, though, they headed to dinner at the only restaurant still open: a kebab house owned by an Iraqi Kurd. Their waiter was a Syrian man who arrived in Germany three years ago.

According to the Federal Statistical Office, at least 28.7 percent of Germany’s population—more than 1 in 4 people—have a migration background, meaning that they immigrated to Germany themselves or were born into families with a history of migration. Migration is on the up, with 2.1 million people arriving in Germany in 2015, and 2.6 million in 2022. Germany’s coalition government has said it aims to attract 400,000 qualified workers from abroad annually to tackle labor shortages and demographic imbalances.

The desire for strong leadership is also on the rise in Germany as Russia’s war in Ukraine continues. Several of the AfD’s members have called for a separation from NATO and even the EU; many have turned to Russia, at least rhetorically, arguing that Germany needs to work with its neighbors. Sundermeyer told Foreign Policy that “the AfD is deeply anti-American but pro- Russian; anti-NATO and -EU, but in favor of turning toward alternative government structures such as authoritarianism.”

Meanwhile, German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser continuously calls right-wing extremism the “greatest extremist threat to Germany’s democracy.”

Still, for all the Sonneberg residents who voted for the AfD’s candidate, Sesselmann—who did not respond to interview requests by Foreign Policy—there are almost as many people who did not. And unless it’s during the weekly Monday demonstrations, people don’t usually flaunt their political opinions. The day after the weekly protest, at a food stall selling bratwursts during the lunch hour, conversations revolved around work, the weather, increased food and energy prices, and even Germany’s reunification—“before it, everything was better,” several people agreed.

“In Sonneberg, many voted AfD out of spite, while others don’t take an interest in politics but cast their votes for the AfD regardless,” said Regina Müller, a 61-year-old Green Party voter who owns an organic store decorated with anti-war slogans.

But, she added, “what many here don’t see is that [the AfD] are wolves in sheep’s clothing.”

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tomorrowusa · 7 months ago

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Bad news for Republicans: violent crime is down across most of the US.

Donald Trump and far right media want people to believe there is a massive crime wave sparked by hordes of bloodthirsty migrants charging in waves across the southern border. In fact, the spike in crime which began with Trump's botched response to the COVID-19 pandemic is over.

To hear the latest version of Donald Trump’s “American carnage” narrative of a country lost without him, you would think law-abiding citizens are cowering in their homes or stockpiling weapons to deal with a massive crime wave that’s due to illegal border crossings caused by various nations emptying their prisons and by leftist “Soros-funded” prosecutors gleefully opening our own penitentiaries. The idea of an ongoing crime wave is incorporated into all sorts of MAGA rhetoric, including claims that prosecutors pursuing cases against Trump in New York, Atlanta, Florida, and Washington, D.C., should instead be frantically trying and jailing predators who are cavorting on the streets. The alleged threat of murderous “animals” who entered the country illegally has been crystalized by Republican agitprop about the tragic death of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley, who was murdered while jogging, allegedly by an undocumented Venezuelan migrant. But graphic, horrifying anecdotal evidence does not an actual crime wave make. And the more we learn about what’s actually happening in our major cities, the clearer it is that the surge in violent crime that did occur during the COVID-19 pandemic continues to subside. The COVID crime surge largely ended in 2022. Then the incidence of murder and other violent crimes dropped significantly in 2023, according to preliminary federal data, as CNN recently reported:

Fact check: Trump falsely claims US crime stats are only going up. Most went down last year, including massive drop in murder

To the degree that migrants are involved in criminal activity can now be attributed to Trump's blockage of border security legislation in the House by his spineless minions on Capitol Hill.

Bipartisan border deal hits legislative wall as Republicans say they will block bill

Republicans are now officially the owners of border chaos – not the solution to it.

Back to the featured article...

[W]hen a long upward trend in crime during the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s — a true crime wave — finally came to an end, then dramatically reversed. The current numbers are beginning to show that we’re more than likely in a long period of stable (and, by past standards, relatively low) crime rates that were briefly interrupted by the many dislocations the pandemic caused in American life (and police effectiveness). So the myth of a deadly threat to Americans stemming from liberal policies on the border and in the justice system is mostly just that. Perceptions of public safety, of course, aren’t always in line with objective reality, and violent crime is horrifying even if it’s not as prevalent as law-and-order demagogues suggest. An October 2023 Gallup survey that coincided with growing evidence of dropping crime rates showed 77 percent of Americans agreed there was “more crime” in the country than in the previous year.

Spectacular crime stories are always going to grab headlines. If it bleeds, it leads has been one of the mainstays of American journalism for centuries. You'll never see a headline in the NY Post like Murder Rate Plummets!.

One thing that is often overlooked is that the "long upward trend in crime during the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s" mentioned in the article came to an end in the 1990s during the Clinton administration.

For ideological reasons, Democrats have been too restrained about publicizing their own law and order successes. As with the 1990s, another drop in crime is taking place under a Democratic administration – despite GOP attempts to exploit individual incidents of crime.

Donald Trump himself is a "one man crime wave".

youtube

#dropping crime rates #law and order #crime #murder rate #donald trump #american carnage #trump border chaos #trump covid-19 spike in crime #trump administration's botched response to covid-19 #trump is a one man crime wave #republicans #election 2024 #vote blue no matter who #Youtube

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notwiselybuttoowell · 1 year ago

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In Europe, Pringles has 34 active flavours in seven can sizes (one of which is called “David” for reasons no one can explain). Not all of these flavours are available in every European country – prawn cocktail only really sells in the UK and Ireland, while bacon is found in most places except Belgium, the Netherlands and strongholds of vegetarianism Austria, Denmark and Sweden. Salt and vinegar has spread everywhere except Norway and Italy. “They don’t have the habit of doing vinegar on their crisps; they just eat them plain with salt,” says Julie Merzougui, lead food designer at Kellanova. If an employee in Italy wanted to explore bringing salt and vinegar to the market, they could – they’d simply have to ask. As of yet, they haven’t.

Multiple times a year, Pringles releases limited-edition flavours known internally as “insanely accurate analogues” – Merzougui and Peremans come up with these for Europe. “People think we have the dream job,” Merzougui says (she has dark hair, round glasses and an easy laugh, a personality akin to an experimental flavour – perhaps a chorizo Pringle). Peremans, who has worked at the company for 26 years, has a salt and pepper beard and a Salt & Shake personality. He speaks quietly and pragmatically, but has a subtle playful streak: “My young son, he wants to become my successor.”

Like Lay’s, Pringles starts with data – in Asia, the company uses a Tinder-like tool with 200 consumers at a time, asking them to swipe left or right on potential flavours. Lucia Sudjalim, a senior Pringles developer in Asia, says she does a lot of “social media listening”, observing trends among influencers and bloggers. Kellanova also uses AI, which Merzougui says can predict trends up to 10 years in advance. Things aren’t always this sophisticated though – both Lay’s and Pringles also look at what’s on the shelves in countries they want to break into, copying flavours and identifying gaps to fill.

Yet just because the world wants a flavour doesn’t mean it’s made. In December 2020, scotch egg sales soared in the UK after Conservative ministers ruled the snack a “substantial meal” (providing punters with an excuse to be in the pub under Covid-19 lockdown rules). Peremans was challenged to make scotch egg Pringles and pulled it off; Merzougui says they tasted “really authentic”. Ultimately, however, the potential order volume was not high enough to justify a production run. (This, incidentally, is why it’s hard to get Salt & Pepper Pringles in the UK, even though they’re delicious.)

Another unreleased flavour was part of a collaboration with Nando’s that petered out for reasons Peremans is unsure about. Sometimes, logistics get in the way: the perfectly blended seasoning might clog the machines or create too much dust, causing sneezing fits in the factory. Belgian legislation mandates that every seasoning has to be put through a dust explosion test – it is set alight in controlled conditions to ensure it won’t blow up.

Inside the plant, manager Van Batenburg shows me giant cube-shaped bags of seasonings that arrive ready to be cascaded on to the crisps. At the end of his video presentation, he made a passing comment that rocked my world. We were talking about other crisp companies, big name competitors. “In essence,” he said, “they’re using the same seasoning houses we do.”

I leave Belgium with the names of three seasoning houses Pringles work with. At home, I discover that their websites are obscure – they speak of flavours and trends, but don’t even mention Pringles. I haven’t so much stumbled upon a conspiracy as been invited into it, but I am still shocked. After two months’ cajoling by the Pringles team, two representatives from a seasoning house agree to speak – but only on the condition of total anonymity, in line with their contractual obligations.

“It’s quite secretive,” food scientist Reuben admits via Zoom, wearing a pink shirt and a thoughtful expression (the only crisp I can compare him to is a Quaver). “Everyone has their own crown jewels that they protect.”

As a marketer, Peggy has always found the company’s secrecy “strange”. She speaks clearly, in a way that is reminiscent of a teacher or a steadfast multigrain snack. “It’s always been a bit of a puzzle to me … I was like, ‘Why aren’t we shouting about this?’ But I was told, ‘Oh, no, we have to keep it very quiet.’”

This is because – just as Van Batenburg hinted in Belgium – the seasoning house Reuben and Peggy work for provides flavours for Pringles and Lay’s, as well as other brands. When asked whether their clients know, Reuben says, “They do and they don’t.” “It’s just not really talked about,” Peggy adds. However, this doesn’t mean that a Salt & Vinegar Pringle is flavoured with the same seasoning as a Salt & Vinegar Lay’s. In fact, the seasoning house is strictly siloed to guarantee exclusivity. Reuben’s team work on the Pringles account; the team making flavours for PepsiCo is in an entirely different country. “So the recipe, if you will, of the Pringles salt and vinegar can’t be seen by the other team,” Reuben says.

#excerpts #food science #potato chips

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market-insider · 2 years ago

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Contrast Media Injectors Market 2022 | Injector Systems Accounted Largest Share

The global contrast media injectors market is expected to reach USD 1.65 billion by 2030, registering a CAGR of 4.83% during the forecast period, according to a new report by Grand View Research, Inc. The market is expected to grow because of the rising demand for minimally invasive surgical procedures, along with the increasing usage of consumables for several diagnostic procedures, which are supporting the market growth of contrast media injectors.

COVID-19 had a significant impact on the contrast media injector market, in 2019, with around a 30-40% reduction in sales due to the imposed lockdown and rapid decline in imaging case volume. However, the market is expected to return to peak levels of 2019 by 2022. This is due to the launch of COVID-19 vaccines and ease in restrictions, import & export of raw materials have resumed; therefore, the market is expected to grow at a significant rate over the forecast period.

Gain deeper insights on the market and receive your free copy with TOC now @: Contrast Media Injector Market Report

Technological advancements such as IT-enabled solutions for contrast media injectors, along with growing demand for minimally invasive surgical procedures, are expected to boost the market during the coming years. Furthermore, the large number of intraoperative imaging procedures being performed has further enhanced the demand for these injectors, propelling the market growth.

The key players provide a broad range of advanced devices through their strong distribution and supply channels worldwide. In addition, leading players are involved in mergers & acquisitions, new product launches, strategic collaborations, and regional expansions to gain the maximum revenue share in the sector. Mergers & acquisitions help companies to expand their businesses and regional presence. Some prominent players in the global contrast media injectors market include Bayer HealthCare LLC; Bracco Group; Ulrich Medical; Guerbet Group; Medtron AG.

#Contrast Media Injectors Market Size & Share #Global Contrast Media Injectors Market #Contrast Media Injectors Market Latest Trends #Contrast Media Injectors Market Growth Forecast #COVID-19 Impacts On Contrast Media Injectors Market #Contrast Media Injectors Market Revenue Value

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hadesoftheladies · 5 months ago

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my country started this year with a rise in femicide. those were the trends in january. young women being brutalized, raped and killed left and right. this is due to an increase in poverty due to a corrupt government. the government is now trying to tax things like computers, digital content (like making a viral tiktok will mean you owe the government money) and pads. pads are already too fucking expensive for most poor women and girls to afford. yesterday, so many young people, rich, poor, middle class--they ALL took to the streets in multiple counties to protest. they were shot at with colored water cannons, gassed, and one guy even died from police brutality.

i didn't know it was happening because i've been limiting my social media a lot and i don't usually watch the news for the sake of my cortisol, so i found out about it when i woke up to hear people shouting and whistling at a distance.

the finance bill that the government is trying to impose on us is going to kill what small infrastructure we have in economy, because they owe BIG MONEY to IMF (fuck IMF btw).

but what scares me the most is the fact that with these harsh taxes on already desperate and struggling people, violence against women will shoot up again, like it did during the economic depression caused by covid 19. femicide WILL go up and domestic violence WILL increase. street killings will abound. i think it will be worse than we've ever seen because the current economic crisis is just . . . the US will fucking BLEED US. it was precarious for me to walk outside my neighbourhood in the evenings or mornings. now it will be impossible.

i'm so angry and tired. i'm so angry and tired of being herded into a corner by greedy men. i'm so tired of being terrorized by both white and black rich dicks. i'm so fucking exhausted. i'm tired of the wars and i'm tired of watching people starve. i'm angry that old people are coming out of retirement just so they can eat. and what do these millionaires and billionaires do? sit on their fucking arses and make the common people pay off their debts.

i can't afford to be cynical, but i can't help but think that until people grasp the PRINCIPLE of why these MEN specifically have power, we may have momentary relief only for whoever comes after us to face the same fight again. assuming we're not facing extinction in the future based on trends.

feminism has become so much more important to me. the only way i can imagine surviving this is by relying on my sisters. i think that's how i'll be living in the future. it's the only way.

#mine

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hit-song-showdown · 1 year ago

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Year-End Poll #71: 2020

[Image description: a collage of photos of the 10 musicians and musical groups featured in this poll. In order from left to right, top to bottom: The Weeknd, Post Malone, Roddy Ricch, Dua Lipa, DaBaby and Roddy Ricch, Harry Styles, Future and Drake, Maroon 5, Maren Morris, Lewis Capaldi. End description]

More information about this blog here

This is when the polls start to put me in a weird position. Because since we're currently in the current decade, it's hard for me to make assumptions about what this decade is going to sound like. But I'll try my best.

To address the elephant in the room first, this was the start of the Covid 19 pandemic (if you forgot). Are we able to see the impact of the pandemic on the charts? Maybe not in lyrical content (sadly, PlagePop didn't become a thing 😔), but we can see its influence when it comes to chart performance. With the lockdown making it impossible to (safely) tour and promote their music, many musicians had to find other methods. With social media now being the main way people listen to and discover new music and the rise of bedroom pop, this wasn't impossible. But still, many artists either postponed or shelved their releases this year. Which is odd, because the charts were moving incredibly fast in 2020. A song could make it onto the charts one week, and disappear shortly after. So not everything got to stick around, but the stuff that stuck really stuck. The Weeknd's Blinding Lights, for example, was the most-streamed song on Spotify in 2020, and to this day it still holds the record of the most-streamed song of all time. But that might seem odd to some people, since Blinding Lights was not released in 2020.

This isn't unusual. Due to how trends work and the way Billboard releases their charts in December, songs released later in the year often don't chart high until the following year. But I'm bringing this up because the chart of 2020 doesn't look like 2020. Like I said, Blinding Lights was released in November 2019, which isn't that unheard of. But then we have songs like Post Malone's Circles (2019) and Lewis Capaldi's Someone You Loved (2018). Rockstar and Life Is Good are the only songs featured on this poll that were released in 2020.

And as far as the sound of the 2020's goes, it's too early to say but from what I can see so far, the pop sound of the year 2020 centers more around homages to previous decades. We can see this with the synth wave influences in Blinding Lights, the nu-disco in Don't Start Now, the light funk of Adore You, and the interpolation of Pachelbel's Canon in Memories.

#billboard poll #billboard music #tumblr poll #2020s #2020 #2020s music #the weeknd #post malone #roddy ricch #dua lipa #dababy #harry styles #future #drake #maroon 5 #maren morris #lewis capaldi

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covid-safer-hotties · 3 months ago

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As COVID Surges, the High Price of Viral Denial - Published Sept 3, 2024

COVID is surging once again and, if you live in British Columbia, you probably already know someone sick with fever, chills and a sore throat.

As of mid-August, about one in every 19 British Columbians were enduring an infection, with or without symptoms.

Although the media routinely dismisses all COVID infections as an inconsequential nuisance, that’s not what the science says. The virus remains deadlier than the flu and repeated infections can radically change your health.

An important new Nature study, for example, has now proven that the spike protein of the virus can bind with a blood protein, fibrin, setting off a chain of blood clots resulting in chronic inflammation and brain damage. Fibrin can actually form a mesh impeding blood flow in arteries to multiple organs in the body.

The Tyee is supported by readers like you Join us and grow independent media in Canada Repeated studies show in the bluntest terms that the initial acute infection is only the tip of the iceberg. Even a mild bout of COVID can leave a legacy of blood clots, heart failure, diabetes, decreased brain function (see sidebar), long COVID (now affecting 400 million people worldwide) and immune damage that increasingly makes people more vulnerable to a plethora of infectious diseases and possibly cancers.

These problems can erupt three years after an infection and are especially prevalent in patients who’ve been hospitalized by COVID.

Which is why the U.S. immunologist and COVID specialist Dr. David Putrino emphasizes, “There is no such thing as a SARS-CoV-2 infection that does NOT have prolonged consequences.”

And yet the estimated daily level of infection in Canada now hovers around the highest points reached during the Omicron variant’s peaks in January 2022 and October 2023.

That’s the finding of University of Toronto infectious disease expert Tara Moriarty, whose team bases the latest COVID-19 Hazard Index on a combination of wastewater data and modelling. In a discursive and highly valuable X posting Moriarty adds “there’s not a fresh vaccine in sight.” In fact, they are weeks away.

That means about one million infections are occurring every week and that this “severe” level of infection translates like clockwork into more than 1,000 deaths per week from COVID-19 in Canada based on five-week average trends. Ultimately these infections will result in more cases of long COVID in both younger and older populations.

There is more bad news: on an annual basis COVID infections still account for 20 times more deaths than influenza.

The data is not complete but this death toll likely made COVID the second or leading cause of death in the country last month.

According to Moriarty’s data, the number of COVID deaths per infection remain highest in Newfoundland, New Brunswick and Saskatchewan because they have older populations often compromised by serious medical conditions. They are also served by shrinking health resources.

Alberta, whose population is Canada’s youngest on average, claims the lowest infection fatality rate yet has already reported more than 700 COVID deaths this year. B.C. ranks somewhere in the middle.

These grim trends mirror COVID’s permutations south of the border. In the United States COVID infections hospitalized nearly five out of 100,000 Americans during the week of Aug. 4 to 10.

Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, one of North America’s leading COVID researchers, notes that, “This crucial, yet lagging indicator hasn’t been this high since February 2024.” In addition, spotty U.S. data indicates that COVID has hospitalized twice as many people than the flu since October last year.

Rocking the system

Meanwhile Canada’s hospital emergency rooms, many already stretched before the pandemic, continue to open and close with troubling frequency across the country due to chronic staff shortages and sick workers.

With little surge capacity, the continued presence of highly infectious COVID variants continues to leave many health-care systems in shambles year after year.

According to Moriaty’s data, Canadian hospitals are now spending about $37 million dollars a day on COVID hospitalizations, which averaged more than 1,500 people a day two weeks ago.

Here’s some more damning math: “On average, since the beginning of Omicron, people needing hospitalization for COVID-19 account for 14 per cent of hospital bed capacity (seven per cent if you admit only half of people needing hospitalization).”

The resulting bed shortage has created a circular crisis, says Moriarity. “A constant annual seven-per-cent increase in hospital beds required for COVID-19, in a very low surge capacity environment with a serious health-care workforce labour shortage, can have profound upstream and downstream effects on health care and health.”

The evidence is everywhere. Five Interior B.C. emergency rooms closed over the long weekend. In the last week five rural hospitals temporarily closed in Alberta, including facilities in Swan Hills, Fairview and Rocky Mountain House. In Ontario some rural citizens refer to ER closures as an “epidemic.”

Dr. Alan Drummond, a Quebec rural physician, adds that the disruption of “emergency medicine delivery in Canada continues unabated as our political leaders fail to recognize and declare the obvious crisis that it is. They do nothing, they pray for divine intervention, they obfuscate, they lie through their teeth.”

‘A recipe for forever burn’

The subject of how to respond to a slow burn pandemic remains taboo because most public health officials have already declared the emergency over. They’ve also stopped collecting critical data. COVID-19 deaths in Canada are not reported in a readily publicly accessible fashion. And most of the media pretends that an immune-destabilizing virus that can harm the functioning of your organs including your brain has little more import than a benign cold.

As a consequence, authorities can’t now turn around and admit to the breadth of their mistake, let alone acknowledge the growing disorder in public health. Nor do they dare collect critical data documenting the scale of their errors including the relentless march of long COVID.

Meanwhile the virus continues to out-evolve our response and vaccines. Two months ago, when new COVID cases exceeded 100,000 a day in Japan, the research scientist Hiroshi Yasuda imagined the following discussion in a hospital.

Nurse: COVID hospitalizations are increasing again. Doctor: I know. N: Are we fighting an endless, losing battle against SARS-CoV-2? D: No, you are wrong. N: Oh, you have different ideas, doctor? D: We are not even fighting. N: [Nods in agreement.]

Richard Corsi, the noted Texas indoor environmental engineer and creator of the Corsi-Rosenthal box, has summed up this predicament as a profound public health failure. “The general response to COVID-19 remains reactionary over precautionary. Wait until the fire gets hot and starts to burn rather than taking very simple steps to not fuel the fire in the first place. This is a recipe for forever non-containment, forever burn.”

He then points out: “The solution’s been with us since day one of the pandemic. We’ve [generalized] just lacked the will, determination and grace to make it end. Reduce inhalation dose of virus-laden respiratory aerosol particles. It’ll never end if we continue to run in the opposite direction, folks.”

The problem with running in the opposite direction, however, is that we increase the chances of landing in the arms of another COVID infection. And the reasons for avoiding such viral encounters just grow stronger by the sheer weight of evidence.

Why infection prevention still matters

Nobody sane really wants to play Russian roulette, but that’s how we should view every COVID infection. Although most people will get away with just an unpleasant biological disruption of daily life, others will take a bullet to their heart, brain, gut or immune system for reasons not fully understood.

No COVID infection is completely benign because each infection plays a role in deregulating the immune system. Even a mild infection, as one recent study noted, can increase “autoantibodies associated with rheumatic autoimmune diseases and diabetes in most individuals, regardless of vaccination status prior to infection.”

According to an increasing number of researchers, immune deregulation triggered by COVID probably plays a significant role in the dramatic global upticks in infectious diseases. The suspects include RSV, a variety of herpes viruses, whooping cough (now burning up the charts in Canada and England), scarlet fever, dengue fever, fungal infections and tuberculosis. Forty-four countries have now reported a 10-fold increase in the incidence of at least one of 13 infectious diseases compared to trends prior to the pandemic.

Although vaccine hesitancy, climate change and permissive travel have also played a role in this microbial wave, researchers strongly suspect that COVID’s disruption of the immune system has made it harder for many people to fight other infections.

Putrino, a COVID specialist at New York’s Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, recently explained the situation this way. “For the longest time we’ve told people that if you get an illness and you recover, it just makes you stronger. What we’re seeing over and over again is that’s not the case with COVID. Every time you get a COVID infection, your immune system seems to suffer.

“It’s kind of like a boxer, every fight takes a little bit more out of them. And they’re not getting stronger with every fight, they’re not getting stronger with every hit that they take. Every single time there’s an increased chance that something bad is going to happen to the immune system and I think that this influx of illness that we’re seeing is related to that.”

Another significant risk posed by playing Russian roulette with COVID infections is that each one could result in long COVID, which has sidelined 400 million people around the world at a cost of a trillion dollars. Some manifestations of long COVID include heart disease, diabetes, myalgic encephalomyelitis or chronic fatigue syndrome, and a raft of autoimmune diseases that may last a lifetime.

The risk increases with the severity of acute infection but the majority of long COVID sufferers have had a mild infection. The more times one is infected, the likelier the next infection will trigger a bout of long COVID. “Cumulatively, two infections yield a higher risk of long COVID than one infection and three infections yield a higher risk than two infections, explain researchers published in the journal Nature.

Here, then, is where we’ve arrived. We’ve entered a vicious cycle where more infections generate more COVID variants. The new variants have become more immune evasive. At the same time society has generally abandoned masks, testing and basic public health messages.

We could slow and suppress the cycle by facing the challenge squarely. For example, by cleaning dirty air the way we once tackled the disease-ridden spectre of cholera-infested water.

But public health officials are afraid to talk about clean air let alone the obvious: avoiding infection.

Beating back COVID requires hard work, communal wisdom and clear policies that markedly reduce the level of infection in society.

To date we have chosen viral denial, dirty air and a triumphant reign for long COVID. [Tyee]

#covid #mask up #pandemic #covid 19 #wear a mask #coronavirus #sars cov 2 #public health #still coviding #wear a respirator

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theculturedmarxist · 1 year ago

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Although many Canadians act as though the pandemic has ended, the airborne virus that causes COVID-19 continues to evolve at an amazing pace with devastating consequences for both individuals and the public at large.

The pandemic may no longer be a major conflagration but it still kills about 140 Canadians a week while morphing into a steady viral blaze sustained by dirty air, waning immunity and overt political indifference.

What was once a giant wave of acute illness has become a series of often unpredictable wavelets driven by ever-changing variants that can cause chronic illness. Long COVID, a disabling health event that can affect multiple organs and destabilize the immune system, now affects millions and continues to claim new victims.

A 2023 Danish study recently confirmed that about 50 per cent of those diagnosed with long COVID fail to improve 18 months after infection regardless of the variant.

Long COVID has taken a huge toll among health-care workers. Anywhere from six to 10 per cent of Quebec’s health-care workforce, for example, has been derailed by long COVID.

Seventy-one per cent of health-care workers impaired by long COVID reported that their state of health now interferes with their ability to function. Another 16 per cent said that they are often unable to work. Multiply this data across the country and then ask: How sustainable is this trend?

The cost of living in a ‘viral soup’

While the media focus concern on the potential next big nasty viral wave, evolutionary biologist T. Ryan Gregory says that threat seems less likely than before, but the current reality is nothing like normal.

“We are not dealing with Omicron-like waves but a viral soup,” Gregory told The Tyee. “We are seeing a near-constant high level of hospitalizations that falls just below overwhelming them but is nonetheless unsustainable. More health-care workers are getting sick and that just adds to the strain on the whole system.”

What worries Gregory, an expert on the evolution of COVID variants at the University of Guelph, “are the long-term effects of multiple infections and the sustained pressure on the health-care system and well-being.”

Yet the current impact of COVID — measurably higher than at some previous points during the pandemic — remains largely ignored or poorly reported.

Tara Moriarty, a University of Toronto infectious disease expert and co-founder of COVID 19 Resources Canada, recently tallied the imperfect data, and it is bracing. She calculates that about one in every 23 Canadians is now infected with COVID. We are not at the low point of the pandemic in Canada. To the contrary, compared with a previous time during the pandemic, infections are 25 times higher and the rate of long COVID is 19 times higher. Meanwhile the hospitalization rate is 13 times higher and deaths are 25 times higher.

In the middle of October, Moriarty calculated that COVID patients occupied about nine per cent of intensive care beds and 21 per cent of hospital beds across the country. (The average hospitalization rate during the pandemic has been seven per cent.) The estimated cost of this sustained viral assault is $274 million a week.

Governments peddling denial

Most governments seem intent on diminishing or hiding these realities. They avoid any talk about the effectiveness of masking in public places or the value of improved ventilation and filtration in schools and workplaces. It’s a demonstrated fact that the virus travels through the air in tiny smoke-like aerosols that can infect people at much greater distances than six feet, but the natural responses to this reality are not encouraged by our leaders.

Alberta, for example, now pretends that COVID is just another mild respiratory disease and reports its doings along with influenza and RSV activity.

Despite this push for “normalization,” only one disease stands out as a routine killer and dominant occupant of hospital beds on the province’s “respiratory virus dashboard.” And that’s COVID. COVID also dominates outbreaks in Alberta’s hospitals and long-term care facilities where masking and attention to ventilation have become haphazard practices.

Lumping COVID in with other respiratory diseases is also patently misleading. A recent Swiss study compared hospitalized patients infected with COVID and those infected with the flu. Those with COVID had a 1.5-fold higher risk of dying in hospital up to 30 days after infection than patients infected by influenza A. The death rate was even higher for unvaccinated people.

A 2023 Swedish study also found the death rate from Omicron greatly surpassed that of influenza patients.

And next comes the increased risk of cardiovascular problems. Medical researchers have long observed strokes and acute myocardial infarctions in patients after respiratory infections, such as influenza. But COVID breaks the mould here. Compared with patients with the flu, the risk of stroke is more than sevenfold higher in COVID-19 patients.

This is likely tied to the fact that COVID can inflame the vascular system through which the body’s blood travels. New non-peer-reviewed evidence suggests that even a mild infection can temporarily damage endothelial cells that line the interior of blood vessels.

COVID may begin with the symptoms of a cold or flu for most people, but it often ends as thrombotic or vascular disease in a small percentage for reasons researchers don’t clearly understand. The virus can therefore infect multiple organs from the brain to the kidneys.

Immune systems and long COVID

COVID can also unsettle the immune system by damaging T-cell response, as recent studies have illustrated.

These findings make all the more illogical the current, widespread blasé attitude towards the ever-evolving virus.

Let’s begin with diabetes, which itself stresses the immune system and makes it less effective.

Early in the pandemic, researchers suspected there might be a connection between having COVID and later developing diabetes. Now it’s confirmed. Earlier this year the Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai organization in Los Angeles found that a COVID infection dramatically increases the risk for developing Type 2 diabetes and that this risk continues with Omicron variants.

“The trends and patterns that we see in the data suggest that COVID-19 infection could be acting in certain settings like a disease accelerator, amplifying risk for a diagnosis that individuals might have otherwise received later in life,” noted Susan Cheng, a senior author of the study and a professor of cardiology.

Another study found that the incidence of diabetes in Black and Hispanic youth has increased by 62 per cent since the pandemic. The authors noted that COVID can bind to receptors in the pancreas, resulting in damaged cells.

A Canadian study also found steep increases in diabetes after COVID infections. University of British Columbia researchers examined a large population of British Columbians (more than 600,000) and discovered that people infected with COVID had a 17 to 22 per cent higher risk of developing diabetes within a year compared with uninfected people.

Concluded the researchers: “SARS-CoV-2 infection was associated with a higher risk of diabetes and may have contributed to a three per cent to five per cent excess burden of diabetes at a population level.”

Related research has also demonstrated that COVID infection can trigger or lead to a variety of autoimmune disorders.

One recent Lancet study that looked at nearly a million people who were unvaccinated between 2020 and 2021 found that COVID cases experienced much higher incidence of autoimmune disease than non-infected people.

These autoimmune conditions included rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus, vasculitis (inflamed and swollen blood vessels), inflammatory bowel disease and Type 1 diabetes mellitus.

A similar German study, which has not yet been peer reviewed, evaluated a cohort of 640,701 unvaccinated individuals with PCR-confirmed COVID infection during 2020 for the risk of autoimmune conditions. The researchers identified “a 42.6 per cent higher likelihood of acquiring an autoimmune condition three to 15 months after infection” compared with a group of 1,560,357 individuals who weren’t infected.

The researchers also found that a COVID infection “increased the risk of developing another autoimmune disease by 23 per cent” in individuals with pre-existing immune conditions.

The autoimmune studies confirm that COVID can be a significant immune deregulator. The Yale University immunologist Akiko Iwasaki, who has dedicated her lab to studying long COVID, notes that “there's misfiring of the immune response happening in the severe COVID patients that lead to pathology and lethality.” Even a mild infection can lead to this misfiring and long COVID, and this group tends to be women between the ages of 30 and 50.

Reinfection is no trifle

The autoimmune studies, of course, don’t tell us anything about the current crop of variants and what autoimmune or cardiovascular diseases they might trigger in the future. But the precautionary principle would suggest avoiding infection.

The highly regarded U.S. epidemiologist Ziyad Al-Aly, who also studies long COVID, has been very clear about the hazardous consequences of reinfection in terms of chronic disease such as diabetes, brain inflammation and heart disease: “Two infections are worse than one and three are worse than two.”

His most recent research shows that people with mild infections are still at risk for chronic disease two years after the fact. Patients who were hospitalized with COVID were at even greater risk for chronic complications.

“The concern here is that this pandemic will generate a wave of chronic disease that we did not have before the pandemic,” Al-Aly, chief of research and development at Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System, recently told Euronews Next.

“Even when the pandemic abates and is in the rear-view mirror, we will be left with it after the fact in the form of a chronic disease that for some people may last for a long time or even a lifetime,” added Al-Aly.

The Tyee has repeatedly reported evidence that immunity to COVID from natural infection or vaccination is not long-lasting because of the nature of the virus.

The research now confirms that infections can even leave some people more vulnerable to reinfection. A startling Canadian study published this year looked at 750 vaccinated elders at long-term care facilities where COVID deaths continue to be high. They found infection with Omicron in its first wave actually made these inmates more susceptible to reinfection in subsequent waves. Counterintuitively, these people were more prone to reinfection than patients who had never experienced COVID.

“Our current vaccine schedules are based on the assumption that having had an infection provides some level of protection to future infections, but our study shows that may not be true for all variants in all people,” noted Dawn Bowdish, an immunologist and one of the study’s authors.

What our health leaders should be saying

The implications of these findings are plain enough. The pandemic has a long tail, and it can be found in a growing population of people experiencing chronic disease. Therefore, limiting transmission is still the most important public health goal.

We know how to do that but are reluctant to employ the tools. Masking in crowded public spaces or poorly ventilated buildings during periods of high infection is a proven viral risk reducer. Cleaning dirty air in workplaces and schools removes the virus and other pollutants such as wildfire smoke and should be an urgent public health crusade.

We might all take inspiration from what happened at one Australian school. Concerned parents studied airflow and then installed HEPA filters with the result that improved air circulation stopped COVID transmission dead.

Rigorous surveillance testing is also essential to inform citizens of the advancing or retreating COVID risks.

Vaccinations play a role because they can significantly reduce the risk of hospitalization, death and long COVID. But current vaccines will not stop transmission. Or end the pandemic.

In a recent study a group of U.S. researchers modelled a variety of paths that COVID might take in the future.

If repeat infections and vaccinations actually work to improve immunity and dent the pandemic over time, then models suggest infections and the incidence of long COVID should decline too.

But as Omicron demonstrated, community immunity is unlikely to be achieved via existing vaccines and especially at a time when vaccine hesitancy is rising.

In one pessimistic scenario the researchers posited that “a first infection may provide partial protection against a second infection” but the combination of new variants and complexities surrounding immune responses “could then increase the susceptibility to tertiary and quaternary infections.”

That means a good proportion of the population could end up with long COVID in the absence of effective public health measures and the development of a durable, transmission-blocking vaccine.

“More pessimistic assumptions on host adaptive immune responses illustrate that the longer-term burden of COVID-19 may be elevated for years to come,” added the researchers.

#covid #covid 19 #pandemic #long covid #public health

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