I've been feeling like those who ... those who make the world worse are booming with energy.
I don't. I feel that they're losing an epochal war, sleepwalking into a generational recession, and deathmarching into another lost election.
"tell me something good".
When you write that, are you thinking of the song? I just found out it was written by Stevie Wonder, which now seems like something I should have figured out a long time ago.
Probably vaguely! Tell me that you love me.
(Tell me that my youngest won't get kicked off of his soccer team and kicked out of afterschool care for behavior issues. The soccer coach wrote us an email that was extremely formal - I'm documenting Infraction #1, and describing the Consequence Applied to Situation. I'm documenting Infraction #2, and describing the Concsequence Applied. Jammies took it as the coach laying the foundation to kick Rascal off the team, the way you document things before firing someone. He's really rattled by this, and I'm a little rattled that he's rattled.)
Lee Scratch Perry's version of Tell me something good on Return of the Super Ape is a song I return to over and over again.
Norma Frazer's version of "The First Cut is the deepest" also very good.
I was going to make this a guest post, but:
You would assume that if COVID weakened immune systems in the long term, it would leave people who had had COVID in the past more susceptible to flu and other non-COVID infections, right?
Danish study with a cohort of 2,430,694 individuals 50+ years old, using national surveillance data Jan 2021-Dec 2022, finds no relationship between COVID and hospitalization for non-COVID infectious diseases.
930k infected, 1.5m uninfected. And the uninfected, surprisingly, were a higher mean age!
I guess one of the critiques is that many of the uninfected could have had it undiagnosed in 2020 before tests were plentiful.
One impressive part though: the infected were 10% less likely to be hospitalized for any infection. Odds ratio 0.88 to 0.92 at 95% confidence interval. (Individual disease classes like upper respiratory infection were mostly insignificant - though also
This year looks like it may have been the historic peak of power sector CO2 emissions, as wind and solar rollouts have hit the growth rate they need to for the IEA's net zero target:
That would be good news! I guess there will have to be other studies but I hope it's true.
It doesn't make sense covid would make the immune system stronger though? Maybe that data doesn't mean anything.
Unless covid killed people with the weakest immune systems -/would that make the group of people who got covid but didn't die hardier?
As for people doing things to help others--it's a mixed bad. So my husband is one of these people and he's working with various others on housing justice--they are not flagging at all.
For people who work for justice on policy and economic and structural issues, sometimes I honestly think they aren't so different from businessmen in certain ways. They get focused on goals. The way a capitalist guy is jazzed by achieving profits they get jazzed by any improvements they can achieve...Justice is their job, and they enjoy figuring out ways to succeed at it. It's an application of skills to a cause but if you have those skills, there's some enjoyment in the struggle if you might win. And people still do win sometimes.
When it becomes impossible, then it will be harder to keep the energy up. But many people have this kind of energy.
Overall our situation is depressing, even horrifying but I am encouraged by nose to the grindstone workers on issues, with an eye to building good things.
The harder work is the one where you confront human suffering directly. There are some very fierce people all over the world doing this work in an unflagging way but confronting human suffering directly does cause a lot of people to burn out.
There's so much suffering, so much bad stuff happening. Some people successfully compartmentalize but it seems to take a toll eventually.
You probably do have to ignore cruelty and threats in certain work, such as work for LGBTQ and work against racism. Now people who work in institutions like schools, libraries, hospitals, and so on are facing something I can barely imagine facing. Even a woman running a private business was stabbed to death for her pride flag.
The reason for the threats and harassment is to slow people down and to destroy their motivation altogether. We need to support these people, and defend them.
Although many people get worn down, lots of others see something essential is at stake. So I don't think all the energy is on the side of destruction. They are just more screechy and get more airtime.
11.1-2-3: It's possible, of course, that it's not truly a null result, but rather study design that couldn't catch whatever it was. So maybe there's a marginal effect that didn't show up. But what I think the study does clearly show is that there's not a major effect: the hospitals are not being flooded by people with COVID-weakened immune systems. That the study would've caught.
Similarly, we're on surge #6 or whatever that hasn't come to pass. Not to say that no variant will ever again cause widespread illness, but at least on our county's dashboard, it's been 6 months of essentially nothing, with a number of bumps in wastewater load that haven't had any subsequent rise in loads or hospitalizations.
9: Does the study account for the people who would have been to the hospital, but can't, because they are dead of covid. That might explain why the covid-survivors hospital infection rates are lower..... a lot of the members of that cohort who would have been most susceptible to infections have already been killed off.
12.2: We have technically had rises in hospitalization, but not to anywhere near previous levels. California seems to have just peaked in its summer wave at about 1,500 hospitalizations. The winter 2022-23 peak was 5,000. The winter 2020-21 peak was 22,853.
Unless covid killed people with the weakest immune systems -/would that make the group of people who got covid but didn't die hardier?
It says people who died for any reason were left out of the analysis, so technically possible. Of the COVID-infected people, 16,634 died or 1.8% of the infected population they had started from, vs. 89,052 of the rest, or 5.9% of the uninfected. (Probably because the uninfected averaged 5 years older.)
The ambiguity of comment 3 has caught my attention.
6.1: I love you, heebie!
(hope you weren't on tenterhooks waiting for my response. I was distracted by my silly job.)
13: I'm not sure what you mean -- a significant number of people getting a second COVID infection and dying and thus not showing up (e.g.) in the flu totals? Wouldn't there have to be a big bump in COVID detail to account for that?
"Tell Me Something Good" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cm_cFzVAoo8
Was it here that I learned that YouTube had fixed their comments?
One of the original "don't read the comments" sites, but now -- at least for my use case -- the comments are astoundingly wholesome. Somewhere I was reading that YouTube had invested a lot of resources in cleaning up the cesspool that their comments had become, and it worked! About the meanest thing that I see when I scroll down is "Why don't they make music this good anymore?" Far more often, there's a story of kindness by the musician (this one has Chaka Khan pulling the commenter, who was little at the time, onto stage at a rehearsal and singing directly to her) or of how much the song meant to someone who has passed on. So yeah, that's something good.
This little web arcade game was extremely funny.
So what should I add to my list of orientalizing pop songs? I've got "One Night in Bangkok," "Year of the Cat," and "China Girl." There's bound to be more.
20: 'Rock the Casbah', 'Walk like an Egyptian'. Frank Ocean's 'Pyramids', kinda?
No, but people keep asking if I speak Hindi.
Those are all good! (I presume, since I don't know "Pyramids." I trust Moby's recording the Hindi version.)
20: Alex Chilton "Bangcock" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKyuPKDC4Gk
TMBG "Ana Ng" (maybe): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xN-EixplPOY
Steve Martin "King Tut" satirizes the genre : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYbavuReVF4
tell me something good
I had some fun parodying The Dead in the The Dead thread?
All the songs George Harrison made with a sitar. And half of the extended Wu Tang Clan discography.
Personally, life is going great -- after the forced inactivity of Covid, vacation balances are topped off and we're finally ready to take more than a weekend. The last week of September my wife and I took off for a 4 day vacation in Santa Cruz and biked all over - from Wilder Ranch to Capitola and back. I popped back into work for a day, then visited a roleplaying game convention for the next 4 days.
Later this month I'm looking forward to seeing my brother in his new house in Florida - he moved during the pandemic; this will be the first time we're seeing each other in years.
After that, it'll be much quieter and back to the grindstone - but for now, I'm really looking forward to the time and visit. Hopefully you're getting to enjoy more far-flung friends and family again too. (I know you made the long drive earlier this year, but it feels like the barriers to visit and travel are diminishing... enough that my wife and I are talking Europe again, after putting that on pause 5 years ago.)
Speaking of orientalizing, apparently the only art I can remember has more issues than I knew.
I have not read this, but the abstract and table of contents look good.
28.1 is delightful. GenCon? Origins?
I'm still humming the song as I walk around.
Going to Glacier for an extended birthday weekend. Already signed up for Medicare.
20: "Hong Kong" by Screamin' Jay Hawkins
I feel like I undersold the link in 30.
Tell me something good.
Tonight AB & I are going to see Patton Oswalt, with whom she went to MS & HS. Not just "was in class with", but, like, "on the literary magazine with." I've always known this, but when it first came up, 20+ years ago, I didn't even know who he was. He's since become quite a big deal, and this is the first time either of us have ever seen him.
That's not the good thing. The good thing is that I @'d him on Twitter, and he immediately DM'd me "I'd love to say hi to you and A (née B, I presume?)." He even offered us tickets! So he still remembers her, and it'll be fun to meet him, and it'll be a nice Friday night.
So cool about Patton Oswalt. He always seems like a solid guy and so funny. Your comment also led me to find out that for some reason I can see his twitter feed, even though I have never had an account. Seems very unpredictable when I do or do not get locked out of viewing things on xitter. Have fun at the show!
You should find him on Bluesky. I can give you a code if you want.
37 is very cool!
31: I went to Big Bad Con - https://www.bigbadcon.com/ -- lots of very cool small press and play test games, and a very solid LARP track that I never take enough advantage of.