sport of sacred spherical cows

That's what the earlier technical names for Long Covid, PASC (Post-Acute Sequelae of Covid infection) and PACS (Post-Acute Covid Syndrome), were in reference to. It's not a singular disease with a definitive biomarker. There's no diagnostic test with a binary result. It's the term we use for how increasingly predisposed to subsequent disorder and illness each serial covid infection leaves every organ in the body. Evident, for instance, in U.S. Labor Bureau statistics, which show over-16 disability climbing at over twice the rate, in the past six years, as it had during the prior twelve. For a baseline context, see also research around younger generations (as in Gen X and later) suffering higher incidence of a wide variety of health conditions at earlier ages, with trends predating our current pandemic. Conditions compound, making us progressively more vulnerable. 4/6 #LongCovid #CovidIsNotOver #PublicHealth

The Oddcube Kickstarter, for a stylish, maintainable, 10" furnace filter-based, PC-fan driven air purifier, launched yesterday, and is already fully funded: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpA7-EJpKWU The cuboctahedron Corsi-Rosenthal box! Available as a kit or as 3d printer files for personal use. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joelcreates/oddcube-air-purifier-kit #CleanIndoorAirNow #CleanTheAir #CovidIsNotOver #CovidIsAirborne

"This is a kind of thing that just happens" is pure unexamined cope. This being a sentiment that Rachel Carson penned a notorious polemic against. (See K. Walker's retrospective on same.) It's how such patterns are taken as normal in the same way that younger generations have no conception of what it was like to have swarms of flying insects literally everywhere, dead bugs smeared all over car windshields, because they've grown up in a time when that was no longer a thing. We're all aging into an era where more anecdotal sickness "just happens" to more people, more often and sooner than would have been expected in the eras that came before. We may not have a Laplace daemon's etiology for every known disease, but most certainly ought know, in now the seventh year of an ongoing pandemic, that nothing "just happens" in isolation from preceding conditions. That's not, as the kids say, how any of this works. "I think it is just bad luck." This is cope. 5/6 #LongCovid #Anthropocene #PublicHealth

Per Maarten Steenhagen, in his 2022 essay against health supremacism, "Health is one of the most contingent facts about us human beings. Every one of us is always one infection or accident away from acquiring an illness or disability." Health supremacism, importantly, includes the tendency to dismiss certain managed or "mild" conditions as not being "any of the risk factors" for subsequent health conditions, so to maintain ideation of the (even if "flawed") healthy abled body: disability is other people. This a formulation that ought be front of mind when offering commentary on health conditions of other people we happen, however justifiably, to not like or respect. Careful, lest vulnerable people (to wit, all of us) catch strays. "It's, like, ironic..." Yes, indeed. Irony is the term we use for the mismatch between the actual and the apparent. It's not just coincidence. Not "just bad luck". 6/6 #HealthSupremacism #ableism

You know what else is linked with latter onset autoimmune disease? Is among "any of the risk factors"? That's right, prior covid infection. Some of us still remember CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky's confident proclamation that it was "very encouraging news" that only folk suffering adverse health effects from covid were "people who had at least four comorbidities, so really these are people who were unwell to begin with". (He was "sick this whole time", you say?) Where comorbidities included things like an immunocompromised condition (e.g. Hashimoto's), autism, ADHD, learning disabilities, sleep disorders, even a history of childhood abuse, and interestingly (though perhaps not relevant here, for reasons of chronology), according to the CDC's updated list, blood stem cell transplant. Health impacts interrelate. Preceding health conditions ramp up predisposition to subsequent adverse health outcomes. We've known this since the 1918 flu and the subsequent rise in disability, which rise fed a certain politics in the era that followed. 3/6 #LongCovid #HealthSupremacism #PublicHealth

The Labor Bureau's 'Current Population Survey (Household Survey)' saw a nearly 1.14 million increase between the end of the recession in 2008 and the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. This amounting to an average increase in the disabled population of less than 94 thousand a year. For the period from April 2020 to date, that figure has climbed nearly 1.24 million, for an average increase in the disabled population of over 200 thousand a year, with no sign of slowing. Disability has climbed faster in the past half dozen years than it had in the previous dozen. Another way to say all of this is that disability has been increasing at twice the pre-pandemic rate for six years straight, and continues to do so as we enter the pandemic's seventh year. #CovidIsNotOver #LongCovid #covid #covid19

H. Jeong, S. Kim, et al, publishing in Volume 19, Issue 8 of Cellular and Molecular Gastroenterology and Hepatology: "SARS-CoV-2 infection caused dramatic changes to the molecular profile and some _immune_ subsets in this organ. Notably, the gene sets related to metaplasia and gastric cancer were significantly enriched after viral infection.... Our results show that 2 prevalent pathogens of humans elicit a negative synergistic effect and provide evidence of the risk of severe chronic gastritis in the post-COVID-19 era." (Citation via Violet Blue) A study in mice, sure. A study that doesn't, explicitly, call out _auto_ -immunity, admittedly. Nonetheless "Completely unrelated" is a confident overstatement. This being germane to the text overlay correcting Alexandre's "This is a kind of thing that just happens", by admitting that there are links between long-standing endocrinological disorders and latter onset autoimmune disease. 2/6 #LongCovid #gastritis

@datum@zeroes.ca Credit Lily Alexandre for ticking me off enough to write it. Thread mirrors my comment on her youtube video.

I was today years old when I learned that there's a cat cafe on youtube with hundreds of hours of engine-perspective videos of remote-controlled model trains being casually batted off their tracks by resident felines.

"Indeed, when I first entered the corridors of the United Nations in the 1980s, many states then existed that no longer existed when I left in 2023. Did the USSR, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, East Germany, Tanganyika, Zanzibar, and the United Arab Republic have a “right to exist?” No. And neither does Israel. "States come and go, but none of them has a “right to exist.” As a factual matter, this is undeniable. "And yet, some still actively parrot the baseless Zionist fabrication that the Israeli regime somehow possesses it, others accept it without question, some (like Germany) even seek to compel others to declare it, and still others prohibit any attempts to challenge the lie. "There is no “right to exist” for states under international law. Thus, Israel cannot claim such a right. " https://mondoweiss.net/2026/07/no-israel-does-not-have-a-right-to-exist-quite-the-contrary-actually/

"Israeli human rights org @btselem is calling for action to stop POGROMS against Palestinians." https://mastox.eu/@AssalRad/116983171821494845

TL;DR: https://beige.party/@beadsland/116893983962664626

@kzodasnowman@spore.social Can always citationally link to it. Also, this thread happens to mirror my comment on Alexandre's video. Those comments remain open.

@Bad@hsnl.social That's what euphemisms do. They keep the description out of the discussion. Here, so that "common folk" don't have to hear themselves described as actors of power. This, incidentally, being why any invocation of "economic violence" immediately devolves into squabbling as to what counts as violence, as discussed elsewhere in your replies. It's a way to again decenter actors of power without actually talking about those actors of power thus being decentered. It's not "violence" if it implicates me and mine, basically. Violence has to be committed strictly by other people, elsewhere, that don't include anyone in my own social sphere, even as a bystander. 2/2

@Bad@hsnl.social "Words hold power, and labeling things correctly helps give them more meaning." This is undeniable. Moreover, words do things, even especially when we don't mean them to. To wit, "austerity" is about policy. Thus to talk of austerity politics is to talk about what government is doing. Which is to say, the word does the work of centering government, of centering policy makers. On the other hand, "economic violence" is too visceral to be merely policy. Violence puts front and center that there are victims, perpetrators and bystanders. So long as we're talking policy, it's the state that's culpable. Where "violence" lets other "actors of power" into the frame. Those actors of power include both perpetrators and bystanders. "We have enough resources to give everyone a decent life." Yes, but we have enough blame to go around too. (Without even getting into the question of how colonial powers came by those resources.) Words hold power, but they also conceal it. 1/2

@PhoenixSerenity@beige.party It basically is the latest generational iteration on the "Nerds Rule" culture of the 90s. Wounded masculinity of those who used to identify as bullied social outcasts in high school. The ethos has been colonized by a whole other brand of toxic masculinity in the generation since, but it's the same status shittery.

Data unavailable as it's drawn from health records, but this chart presents a comparable story to OP chart based on now eliminated (under the prior administration) public data collection. Sadly, the time horizon of these charts is even shorter than that of the Household Pulse Survey, ending in Q2 rather than Q3 of 2024. Source: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2849452?__cf_chl_tk=cxQLHVSNOwvgS4nbIIMHHD2UPVGOHsaFP4tKsx4SPqY-1780010092-1.0.1.1-uaQBk28cdMUKNtYFSORNVssW5hX2r0ryPk_gsC04rYg "The modest but statistically significant quarterly increases (IRR, 1.003-1.015) represent a 0.3% to 1.5% relative increase per quarter, compounded over a decade (40 quarters), and correspond to a 13% to 81% relative increase in cumulative PASC [i.e., Long Covid] prevalence, underscoring the substantial long-term burden if current trends persist. This pattern reflects ongoing accrual of incident cases from successive infection waves rather than a fixed cohort progressing toward resolution." HT https://bird.makeup/users/ahandvanish/statuses/2060029797284123029 #LongCovid #CovidIsNotOver

Most recent #CDC dataset, updated today, again omits Nowcast for the most recent four-week period, "[d]ue to low numbers of sequences being reported to CDC". Stratus-Eleventy XFG.1.1 appears to gain share in April-May reporting, though under pressure from XFG.23.1.3 / RV and last Spring's LF.7 lineage. Cicada BA.3.2, Nimbus NB.1.8.1 / PQ, and XFZ recombinant, identified as challengers a month ago, now appear to be in retreat. Note that, in absence of robust data from states, CDC has given up modeling historical estimates, instead giving only shares of reported sequences. Raj's dashboard, updated end of March, showed XFG.1.1 at a quarter share, for the last half of the most recent reporting period, while Cicada grandkid RE.2 made a significant appearance. That said, said GISAID data was dominated by paltry submissions from New York (171), Minnesota (85), Maryland (84), Nebraska (53), and Arizona (17). ❖ #ThisIsOurPolio #variants #CovidIsNotOver #dataviz #datavis

@Robotistry@fediscience.org As happened after the 2008 recession, there was a big shift, downward, initially. After which, there was a ramp up. It just happens that this time round the ramp up was more severe and has not, as of yet, leveled off. https://beige.party/@beadsland/116871742758919797 Also, notably, the shift downward didn't last quite so long as the time previous. That said, the history of this data does appear to be limited, so there's not much we can say about that other than go "Hmm".

Most recent #CDC dataset, updated Monday, again omits Nowcast for the most recent four-week period, "[d]ue to low numbers of sequences being reported to CDC". For May-June reporting, XFG.23.1.3 / RV family appears to gain share among Stratus XFG family. Stratus-Eleventy XFG.1.1, now appears to be in retreat. Overall, XFG fam, the sole representative of the FDA-Vaccine-Target LP.8.1 lineage, continue to hold about two thirds share. Nimbus NB.1.8.2 / PQ family appears to lose ground, as LF.7 family holds firm, under pressure from Cicada BA.3.2, and a troubling "Other" category that has exploded into prominence in the latest round of reporting. Note that, in absence of robust data from states, CDC has given up modeling historical estimates, instead giving only "empiric" shares of reported sequences. Raj's dashboard, updated end of March, showed XFG.1.1 at a quarter share, for the last half of the most recent reporting period, while Cicada grandkid RE.2 made a significant appearance. That said, said GISAID data was dominated by paltry submissions from New York (171), Minnesota (85), Maryland (84), Nebraska (53), and Arizona (17). ❖ #ThisIsOurPolio #variants #CovidIsNotOver #dataviz #datavis

@alex@dair-community.social With respect to Kai Decker's observations: The fact that "Do I allow them to record me?" is used with reference to a software notetaking app, a process that does not record, but rather provides commentary upon and then discards the original speech, is frankly astounding. "Where does the data go?" Digital or even analog recorders are still a thing. The data goes nowhere but the device. But that would entail the friction of carrying a separate device. Or even purchasing such a device in a market that obfuscates anything but the newfangled. This, in turn, entailing a "mental model of how you think the world works" that doesn't rest frictionlessly within the immediately convenient and immanently conventional. 1/4

@infobeautiful Uhm... even if this is limited to "continental" North America, there's a glaring omission.

@inquiline@assemblag.es Hmm, had thus far avoided that stuff, as her "back-stories" smells very much of "load-bearing" in her discussion of their being "destabilized". Were it more hauntological rather than architectural, myself might have dug deeper. That said, will see what is said in this latest piece, time allowing, keeping that cannibalism metaphor on hand while doing so. Just read the first two paragraphs closely, having finally had a moment to do so. Starting one's history of Gaza as world event in 1970 is... a choice. Actually, no, in keeping with a narrative of neoliberalist naturalism, "delimiting", as it does, "the horizon within which wrong and its rectification could be thought" (to use her own words from this very text), it really isn't a choice. A choice would be to cast back further, but that would break from too much analytical tradition, and so it is a choice that cannot be made. (Am having to wonder, also, if setting a hard bookend also serves to preserve for Fraser some personal sense that what is happening now is new, even if only half a century new, in a way that going back to the Nakba or even before would not provide the same assurance.)

@mk30 Research on littoral habitats might lead you to discussions, more broadly, on other transitional zones between ecosystems.

Most recent #CDC dataset, updated late Friday, omits Nowcast for the most recent four-week period, "[d]ue to low numbers of sequences being reported to CDC", but does finally acknowledge spread of Cicada BA.3.2. Stratus-Eleventy XFG.1.1 continued to hold out in March-April reporting, as other Stratus lineages lost ground to three-pronged spread of Cicada, Nimbus NB.1.8.1 / PQ family, and seemingly-resurgent JN.1.11 + FLuQE, lead by the XFZ recombinant. Note that, in absence of robust data from states, CDC has given up modeling historical estimates, instead giving only shares of reported sequences. Raj's dashboard, updated end of March, showed XFG.1.1 at a quarter share, for the last half of the most recent reporting period, while Cicada grandkid RE.2 made a significant appearance. That said, said GISAID data was dominated by paltry submissions from New York (171), Minnesota (85), Maryland (84), Nebraska (53), and Arizona (17). ❖ #ThisIsOurPolio #variants #CovidIsNotOver #dataviz #datavis

@inquiline@assemblag.es Yet not when they are readily mistaken for lowercase letters. Here, as much an issue of the typeface design being used as it is that the three-letter rule would prevent two letters, commonly paired together, that have very little to differentiate them upper versus lower case, from being rendered in small caps.

@inquiline@assemblag.es The perverse irony of critical theorists, working in the tradition of historical materialism, not doing history, but instead taking history as axiomatic givens. As for style problems, it usually doesn't stand out so awkwardly, because the abbreviations impacted are longer terms. I mean, it stands out, but it also has an elegance for something like ANOVA or UNICEF to be printed as ᴀɴᴏᴠᴀ or ᴜɴɪᴄᴇꜰ. [Subscript here as approximation for small caps, which typically strikes a happy medium between subscript and standard type.] There's a vulgarity, prominent in English writing especially, to such all-caps, esp. in light of a semiotics of all caps as SHOUTING. This is something myself recall seeing in both undergrad (psych) and grad school (anthro), these being decades apart. Certainly not in every text, but in enough texts for it to be familiar. A quick search reveals multiple guides on how to automate small caps for acronyms, including one that cites to the style guide of The Economist. Wikipedia indicates popular American publications including "Atlantic Monthly" (another platform deadname) and USA Today employ small caps for acronyms of three letters or more.

@inquiline@assemblag.es “Small caps are designed to reduce the size of imposing capital letters in a balanced way, so that they don’t disrupt running text.” —Brown 2018, chap. 4 “Small caps create a better reading experience compared to regular uppercase letters because they blend in and flow with the rest of the text”—(Shoaf 2021, checkpoint #37) https://dev.to/masakudamatsu/abbreviations-in-small-caps-the-definitive-guide-for-web-developers-in-2021-2h82 Brown citation is to a book on typesetting. Shoaf to a "typography master course". This apparently goes back to the 15th century: "The typographic tradition of small caps dates to the earliest decades of European printing. Roman punchcutters and type designers included small caps in their typefaces as a practical solution to a specific problem: how to distinguish names, abbreviations, and headings from body text without using full capitals that would visually dominate the page." https://lettertype.org/blog/small-caps-typography

@inquiline@assemblag.es It looks like a style guide requirement to use small caps. Which have seen elsewhere in academic publishing for initialisms / acronyms. Nonetheless, it is a style choice that has a specific impact here, given the salience of "US" to the conversation. Having only read three paragraphs thus far, am not going to assume she doesn't nod to history before then. Nonetheless, her setup is that something specific happened with what elsewhere in the discourse is historicized as the neoliberal turn. (At least she recognizes, by marking it at 1970, that period that is the unspooling, of the historical blip of the New Deal, begins before the California actor.) But no, my guess would not be that she means that there is an anteneoliberal time of innocence, so much as her theoretical model (the model of cannibalism) requires the last half century to be an exception, a "crisis of capitalism" that is distinct from what came before, and thus the only territory available to her consideration would that which is mapped by said narrative of exception. But again, this is first impression without actually having read the text in full.

@inquiline@assemblag.es Another aside: Noting that a journal identified as the "New Left Review" publishes some articles without a paywall, but then provide two social media sharing methods, Twitter (where have they been?) and Facebook. I mean, sure, they're potentially shoestring operation, what with the "New Left" having been petered out the same decade Fraser uses as a bookmark, but 'tis hard to take seriously any "Left" that is still deadnaming that website, let alone encouraging folk to share articles thereupon. Way to demonstrate one's relevance to the current moment.

@inquiline@assemblag.es Sidenote, is it just me, or are you likewise struck by the New Left Review's typesetting choice for letter abbreviations, such that the initialism "US" is made orthographically small?

@inquiline@assemblag.es Her "circuitous route" essay as "travelogue" suggests it unfolded that way, but myself have yet to sit down and do more than skim a few paragraphs. Granted, she's been criticizing Democratic politics since before now, but coming to a place where she is able to articulate how Gaza is not just more idpol (the very thing H. Clinton DNC has been running from) seems to have taken processing through multiple countries.

@inquiline@assemblag.es K. Now, Nancy Fraser is not a name myself would have anticipated coming out quite so unflinchingly on this issue, even despite being one of the 400, all the more so that she'd namecheck Butler as part of her grounding.

@lzg Myself can't stand coffee, and certainly don't need a computer to disagree with folk, but at least strive to keep it to subtoots hereabouts.

@AdrianRiskin Sent by private mention: https://smsk.dev/2026/04/26/ai-cannot-self-improve-and-math-behind-proves-it/

@AdrianRiskin Looks like it might be, yes. TY Though the way it was framed, by the post sharing such, suggested that this was new research, not something from two years ago.

@alex@dair-community.social My own "mental model of how [myself] think the world works" meets the following with friction sufficient to raise the temperature in the room: "You get the feeling that most people have stopped reading altogether." Myself had that impression over a quarter century ago, only to have it brought home painfully a decade and a half ago. Folk really are wanting to blame the latest technology for a tendency that preceded and ploughed the soil for the cultivation of same. Reading was already too much friction for my anthropology grad school cohort, and already too much friction for my dotcom industry colleagues a decade before that. Students already "could shunt some of that work to" published academic study tools, "reading" strategies that obviated the requirement that one engage with a whole text, and even prefigurative (in the sense of Ricœur) prior knowledge and expectation, well before a software industrial complex entered the mix as a culmination of the praxis which preceded it. 2/4

@paninid@mastodon.world @jalefkowit@hachyderm.io Words do things. Meaning is spandrels, at best.

@AdrianRiskin I mean, maybe it was just someone really excited to have their opinion of AI validated and thus they didn't really worry overmuch about the age of this. It certainly seems to be heavy on math, which was the selling point of the post in question.

@kAlvaro @n_dimension Beyond all that, if there is a "5 years away", then we would all be culpable for letting it continue that much longer, let alone any further intensification.

@jalefkowit@vmst.io Have you seen the screwdriver that comes in packaging that is held together by a literal screw?

@WeirdWriter@caneandable.social Did the possibility of exploring just why you, of all people, would so desperately be wanted back, even occur to them? Which is to say, what do you uniquely offer? Anyone can wake up and go into an office. They want you. What can you do that random office worker cannot, and how is what you have to offer in any way contingent on waking up and going into an office? You're a writer. Press releases. Media communication. How could that not be done, even to a limited degree, which is more than they get from you now, without requiring that you resume life as an office worker?

#Annoplot #dataviz have had only minor maintenance this month. Previous status found here: https://beige.party/@beadsland/116384772463861803 Maintenance to devpie (this chart) #datavis script included new commandline arguments; tweaks to variants script included handling non-standard CDC datasets and rendering of treecharts in orchard chart.

@theleftistlawyer@mastodon.social Fascists are typically a minority. Fascism never is.