Echinocentric @Echinocentric@social.cleverlibre.org

Masks were turned into a culture war issue by the same big money interests that gave us the Tea Party.

It’s the absolute silliest thing to get mad about, but people are absolutely rabid in opposition. They feel they’ve been duped — and they have, but not in the way they think.

For a meal at a restaurant
a cocktail at the bar
and the illusion of normalcy
hundreds of daily deaths
are an acceptable trade off
at least to those
who are confident that they
will never be counted amongst
those hundreds.

Thinking about Stevie Nicks and what a difficult day this is for her and all of Christine McVie’s loved ones. 💔

@browncarol @foobarsoft @estebanmoro

Are you following?
@Teri_Kanefield
@democracydocket
@marcelias
@juddlegum
@wendysiegelman
@zoetillman
@emptywheel
#USPolitics
#climatechange
Also big list of journalists (some are not very active) here >>> https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14vfonxtyy0JFDxu5dZOZo-yAJrRXcu2lZ33atkFb7GM/edit?usp=sharing

#twittermigration #politics

The Respect for Marriage Act was passed by the Senate today. It is, in so many ways, an imperfect bill. It is also going to protect millions of LGBTQ families, and I’m grateful to Senator Tammy Baldwin for leading on it.

I wrote about the bill here: https://charlotteclymer.substack.com/p/i-hate-the-senate-bill-and-we-need#details

The opportunity to debate easily observable things with someone demonstrating a deliberate unwillingness to observe them is not as enticing a proposition as some people seem to think.

Whenever somebody dares say "maybe the people with the power to fix broken things should at least try to fix that broken thing," invariably someone demands a full detailed plan of operation—not as a way of figuring out how to make that aspiration come to reality, but as a way of quickly shutting the aspiration down; it's like they're self-appointed middle managers for useless politicians.

A question: what is the relationship between clinical medicine and public health? I know the textbook answers about individual patients and populations, but think it's a complicated history and unsimple present. This piece by Amy Fairchild, dean of OSU's school of public health, along with Linda Fried, dean of Columbia's SPH, charts out a story of how the two fields relate to each other, and some of it is not pretty.

#publichealth #medicine #epidemiology

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2791244/

We are extremely happy to kick off the first edition of the "Incorporating paleogenomes into evolutionary genomics studies" course with @AndrewFoote , Marie Louis, & 20 students attending the course from over the world

This course is funded by the ADAPT @eseb Project

Brad fixed me a sandwich. And it’s delicious, because he fixed it for me. Hello London! Are you ready for me?

When they hear you say
that you
are sick and tired
they will ask
if you mean it
literally or figuratively
to which you are free to reply
with a simple: yes.

When I hear him say
during the pandemic
in the past tense
I no longer bother replying
that we are still
during the pandemic
it’s not that I’ve given up
but that I’m tired
just that I’m very tired
of having to remind him
that the pandemic
isn’t over yet.

See the attachment for Josh Marshall's apt description of "both sides" journalism.

As I've said before, "both sides" is not primarily a truth-seeking practice, but a refuge-seeking one.

"Press bias avoidance" as Josh calls it, is not about depicting what happened. Not in the main, I mean. Rather it's a pre-response by journalists to criticisms they have anticipated or internalized.

@joshtpm

#journalism #bothsides #journalists #mediabias

Mississippi is America’s Blackest state. It’s mostly white MAGA Govt annually rejects $1B in Federal $ for Medicaid. Now the last hospital in a rural part of MS is about to close—devastating Black & low income people.

MAGA racism & cruelty on full display. Like the old saying goes. Republicans claim government doesn’t work—then they get elected and prove it.
https://nbcnews.to/3EMk43p

I was just chatting with a friend about this, and we were both saying that we’re not even Jewish and the recent mainstreaming of antisemitism in the Republican Party, from Trump to Kanye to the GOP House to Musk’s flirtations with the far right — are absolutely chilling.

It should be a much bigger scandal that the Biden administration has abdicated its responsibility to protect the public from a deadly, debilitating virus that can kill long after infection.

Hell, they’re not even warning the public about those long term risks.

The administration is leading with politics and concern for the economy, not public health. And unfortunately, our leading public health officials aren’t willing to push back, in a display of profound cowardice.

It’s government failing

Beyond deaths, there’s the issue of long COVID. Estimates of prevalence vary, but Census Bureau data suggests the condition could impact 7.5% of the U.S. population.

That’s about 25 million people.

If China matched that percentage, it would mean 105 million suffering.

Say what you will about zero COVID, we are in no position to critique it.

Here's a Moon phase you can never see from Earth: It's a crescent of the lunar farside, viewed from the Orion capsule aboard Artemis I. https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasa2explore/52521604633/in/album-72177720303788800/ #Orion #astronomy