Happy Funtime Politics

Full Transcript at the link; 3-minute listen.

Quote:

By taking biopsies from long COVID patients before and after exercising, scientists in the Netherlands constructed a startling picture of widespread abnormalities in muscle tissue that may explain this severe reaction to physical activity.

Among the most striking findings were clear signs that the cellular power plants, the mitochondria, are compromised and the tissue starved for energy.

"We saw this immediately and it's very profound," says Braeden Charlton, one of the study's authors at Vrije University in Amsterdam.

The tissue samples from long COVID patients also revealed severe muscle damage, a disturbed immune response, and a buildup of microclots.

This article mentions that ME/CFS is a "similar complex condition" but that's DEEPLY underreporting the similarities. The phrase "post exertional malaise" (now researchers are trying to replace it but this article uses that phrase) was INVENTED for ME/CFS. It's the only known condition, before "long covid", that causes these kinds of symptoms after exertion!

It's good to know for sure that it's the same mechanisms at play when the inciting viral infection is Covid and not, for instance, Epstein-Barr or RSV, but half the time it doesn't seem like researchers are making comparisons at all, just reinventing the wheel and acting like "long covid" is a totally new phenomenon with no previous point of comparison. There are literally drugs in human trials to try to treat the mitochondrial dysfunction in ME, this dysfunction is well-established and fairly well understood and I feel insane when ppl report on long covid without mentioning that there is already a named and studied condition that accounts for this subset of symptoms!!

SOME researchers are drawing comparisons but they're largely ME researchers who everyone else is largely cignoring because of the widespread perception that ME is a fake disease for lazy women.

That same perception btw is why "graded exercise therapy" (GET), or exercise gradually increasing in intensity, cwas for years the go-to treatment despite MOUNTAINS of evidence that it makes ME patients sicker. Some end up permanently bedbound and unable to even eat or drink without a feeding tube/IV because the damage is so bad! The GET recommendation was finally changed only in the past few years in the US and the UK, and many doctors hate that they're not allowed to recommend it anymore, because they insist despite the evidence that ME/CFS is psychological and ME patients are just "deconditioned" and too lazy to do anything about it.

Now the same kind of "treatment" is being recommended for long covid patients despite evidence showing exercise is having the same kinds of cellular effects as it does in ME patients. "Taking PEM into account" sounds gentler but I'm deeply concerned about the reinvention of GET for patients who meet all the criteria for an illness that's been shown definitively to become permanently worse with GET. This mitochondrial damage is progressive in ME, and there's no reason to believe patients who meet all the criteria of ME after Covid won't experience the same progression if they force themselves past their energy envelope in such a systematic way.

The additional finding that T cells — part of the immune system's arsenal — had infiltrated the muscles of long COVID patients also caught Iwasaki's attention, possibly indicating "an autoimmune response within the muscle cells."

If you’ll all pardon my Americentrism for a moment, the amount, visibility, and flamboyance of Pride merch available in clothing, home goods, and comestibles stores is a DIRECT reflection of how safe it is to be queer in public in the United States.

How? Simple. Out groups aren’t profitable. If you’re not “acceptable” in the current social climate, big franchise businesses will not market to you. (Prime example - Look how quickly Target dropped all their Pride merch after having been wall-to-wall rainbows every June for almost a decade prior.)

Sure, capitalism sucks and being viewed as an exploitable marketing demographic isn’t a fun concept.

HOWEVER.

The grim truth is that being normalized enough to be considered profitable by corporations IS A GOOD THING in terms of the barometer of social acceptance.

Same thing goes for smaller businesses that throw kitschy Pride events or even just put a token rainbow flag in the window or somewhere inside the shop. That’s a level of acceptance that DID NOT EXIST thirty years ago, and I can tell you because I was there.

The fact that we can scoff and bitch about being an exploitable marketing demographic nowadays means we have made GIGANTIC strides since the 1990s. It also speaks to the fact that the drive and the conversation surrounding LGBTQ+ rights and acceptance are continuing. And getting louder.

You can be cynical about it if you want. But I will take a store that puts out lip-service rainbow merch over a world that pretends we don’t exist any day of the week. Because that will always mean something.

Yet, when they start being included, they are like “well, that’s just capitalism taking advantage of us, so it doesn’t count.” Like, you can’t use your EXCLUSION from something as evidence of general societal marginalization and then claim that once you’ve started to be included, it is politically meaningless. You don’t really get to have it both ways. That’s moving the political goal posts.

I get that we shouldn’t consider Target pride merchandise as like the pinnacle of queer politics or even the pinnacle of queer inclusion. I get that inclusion in capitalist intuitions is a very ambivalent form of social progress. But the truth is, capitalism is a big part of what creates our social reality right now (unfortunately).

Capitalism makes TV shows, and movies, and books, and ads, and greeting cards, and toys, and clothing, and, and…

When every single aspect of commercial social reality excludes queerness, that DOES create a real sense of social alienation. I don’t love that capitalism is responsible for creating so much of our collective social reality. But granting that it does, I think we’re forced to accept that our inclusion in it IS politically and socially important.

This is what's so fucked up about "nothing that requires the labor of others is a human right".

The labor is already being done under capitalism. The laborers are already being underpaid under capitalism.

When you propose removing the greedy profiteers and paying the workers a reasonable wage, people call that "slavery" while they have no problem with the current system.

it's like he didn't read his own book

Wambalo and other digital workers spent eight hours a day in front of a screen studying photos and videos, drawing boxes around objects and labeling them, teaching AI algorithms to recognize them. Human labelers tag cars and pedestrians to teach autonomous vehicles not to hit them. Humans circle abnormalities in CTs, MRIs and X-rays to teach AI to recognize diseases. Even as AI gets smarter, humans in the loop will always be needed because there will always be new devices and inventions that'll need labeling.

 Humans in the loop are found not only in Kenya, but also in India, the Philippines and Venezuela. They're often countries with low wages but large populations — well educated, but unemployed.

The pay for humans in the loop is $1.50-2 an hour.  "And that is gross, before tax," Wambalo said.  Wambalo, Nathan Nkunzimana and Fasica Berhane Gebrekidan were employed by SAMA, an American outsourcing company that hired for Meta and OpenAI. SAMA, based in the California Bay Area, employed over 3,000 workers in Kenya. Documents reviewed by 60 Minutes show OpenAI agreed to pay SAMA $12.50 an hour per worker, much more than the $2 the workers actually got, though SAMA says what it paid is a fair wage for the region.

It's destroying the environment. It's taking advantage of people who're desperate. It's traumatizing them for dollars an hour--if they're lucky and they aren't denied their pay for no reason. I think about this a lot, that these people were made to look at awful and disgusting and illegal things for the sake of training these stupid AI.

"I looked at people being slaughtered," Wambalo said. "People engaging in sexual activity with animals. People abusing children physically, sexually. People committing suicide." Berhane Gebrekidan thought she'd been hired for a translation job, but she said what she ended up doing was reviewing content featuring dismembered bodies and drone attack victims. 

[...]

SAMA says mental health counseling was provided by "fully-licensed professionals." Workers say it was woefully inadequate.

It's just absurd and disgusting and infuriating. Yes the good applications are worth humans working on. It's not a bad thing--if the people employed to do the work are compensated appropriately and cared for. But so many of the uses are just unnecessary.

Clothing company Patagonia is currently sueing drag queen Pattie Gonia for "irreparable” harm to their brand.

To be clear; Pattie named herself after the region in South America.

So Pattie is asking people to politely ask Patagonia to drop the lawsuit.

I'm extending the invitation to all of you, because sueing a drag queen for 'infringement' in the current political cultural landscape is vile. Especially a drag queen who has raised millions of dollars for non-profits, uses her platform to raise awareness for climate activism, and fully aligns with Patagonia's apparent climate-conscious mission statement.

They're claiming they're sueing for $1. They're actually asking her to stop using her name, and pay over $1 million in legal fees. They're straight up harassing her.

In contrast, drag queen Jan Sport has a Jansport bag line. It's that easy to just... work with a queen.

Anyway. Be respectful(ish), but feel free to be annoying on Patagnoia's socials, asking them to 'DROP THE LAWSUIT'

This is being discussed heavily on Bluesky, such as here.

I’m a law student specializing in Intellectual Property, which includes Copyright and Trademark. I’ve studied these subjects and the law is clear that everything y’all said about Patagonia “losing the trademark” if they don’t sue Ms. Pattie is absolute bullshit.

Trademarks are only lost if they are abandoned by the user or if the product made by the company becomes so ubiquitous, everyday, and common that people start calling all types of that product by the trademark name. This is called genericide, because the trademark has become so generic, it is no longer an indicator of one singular source. Think Band-Aid or Thermos; we use those terms to refer to the generic products they’re associated with. We call pretty much all sticky bandages Band-Aids and all containers used to keep things warm in Thermoses.

What Patagonia is doing is actually closer to suing for trademark infringement based on tarnishment, which means the infringer is using the trademark name in a way that makes the company look bad or associates the company with things like drugs or pornography. Queen Pattie Gonia is someone who raises awareness for climate and environmental activism. Nothing about Miss Gonia’s use of the name tarnishes Patagonia’s brand.

The only possible argument the company has is that Miss Gonia’s queer identity could be seen as not “adult-friendly” but that very quickly slides into homophobic and moralistic territory that will absolutely be shot down by the court based on First Amendment rights. People are allowed to use “not safe for work names,” based on caselaw that states that “labels that are disparaging or morally offensive” are a violation of free speech because it’s people’s choice to say and use those names. For example, an all-Asian band applied for the trademark name “The Chinks” because they were taking the racially disparaging name and reclaiming it. The Trademark Office attempted to refuse to grant the band’s trademark, and when the band sued, the Supreme Court sided with the band.

That got off on a little bit of a tangent, but the long and short of it is this: Patagonia has absolutely no basis for a trademark name. Any IP lawyer would say the same. The reason Patagonia is getting away with a frivolous suit like this is because they know their target is a member of a vulnerable minority. Miss Gonia is 100% correct that they are trying to bully her because they know she doesn’t have the money to withstand a years-long expensive lawsuit.

It’s because of idiotic bootlickers who kiss companies’ asses like this that big corporations can get away with hurting independent creators. Patagonia does not have any chance at winning, but they know that just by filing and announcing their lawsuit against Miss Gonia, they are putting pressure on her to give up. If this lawsuit goes on, even if it doesn’t make it to court and just goes to a judge for a quick summary judgment, Miss Gonia would still have to pay for a lawyer to defend her and lawyers cost more money than the average person has. Miss Gonia would win, but because Patagonia set the damages for $1, even if she did win, she’d still end up in debt because in America, the typical rule is that each party pays for the cost of their own attorney’s fees. The only time the opposing side would pay your lawyer’s fees is if you have a contract with them that says so, and that’s usually only used in contracts between businesses or high profile individuals.

Over fifty years of data show a peak in PFAS (also known as "forever chemicals") content in seabird eggs in the 90s, followed by a decrease as regulations went into effect. The most recent findings show a 70% decrease of most common PFAS.

Paxton wins Republican nomination for Texas Senate seat

Ken Paxton has won the Republican nomination for Texas’s open US Senate seat, after receiving Donald Trump’s endorsement last week.

The scandal-ridden state attorney general was competing against four-term incumbent John Cornyn.

He tried to broker a deal so nobody got hurt. ICE answered with an armored vehicle, a line of armed agents, and less-lethal rounds fired into the crowd.

Kim threw his arms up in a stop motion and put his own body in the gap. They sprayed him anyway. "It's just burning," he said while volunteers poured water into his eyes.

Here is what the cameras did not show you.

Delaney Hall is run by the GEO Group, a private prison corporation that holds a 15-year, billion-dollar contract to cage human beings on our dime. Last year they posted a record $254 million in profit, roughly a 700 percent jump from the year before, riding Trump's deportation machine straight to the bank.

And people connected to GEO funneled about a million dollars into a pro-Trump PAC.

The investment paid off.

So here is the arrangement. A company gets rich locking up people who, by the government's own leaked numbers, mostly have no violent record at all. The food spoils. The care disappears. And when fathers and mothers refuse to eat in protest, the answer is not a hearing. It is chemical spray in a parking lot.

When the governor of New Jersey asked to inspect the place, she was turned away at the door. When a Senator asked questions, he got a faceful of pepper spray.

If they will do this to people with that much power, in front of that many phones, picture what happens to the people locked inside where there are no cameras at all.

The DHS Secretary dismissed the whole thing as a "political stunt" for "fundraising clicks" and insisted there is no hunger strike and no bad conditions, without bothering to call the Senator who was standing right there.

This was never about paperwork or borders. It is about whether we are still a country that flinches when the people in its custody are starved and gassed.

If that reflex is gone, the rest of us should be terrified of what comes next.

The Trump news cycle is built to bury this by Thursday. Don't let it. The fight for immigration justice must continue.

Do not use biometrics to unlock your shit. Cops cannot make you give them the passcode to your phone. That is protected by the Fourth and Fifth amendments. Cops can hold your phone up to your face to unlock it and then use anything they find inside of it against you.

Wrong!!!

I think that Asylum seekers and Migrant workers and The Undocumented and Everyone Else should get free healthcare too