Some years I couldn’t put a Thanksgiving meal on the table because we didn’t have money to buy food. Many families experience that same hardship. Today, in particular, I think about those who are struggling. Showing empathy and generosity is one way we can all show our gratitude.
— Secretary Deb Haaland (@SecDebHaaland) November 25, 2021
Wonderful photo essay — well worth the click:
‘We are still here’ – Native Americans dispel myths by living their truth https://t.co/rC1wSgZtSy
— Dana Hedgpeth (@postmetrogirl) November 19, 2021
Perspective | It’s time for a history lesson — one that doesn’t leave out America’s native people https://t.co/gn9mUUbkf9
— Dana Hedgpeth (@postmetrogirl) November 23, 2021
Check out this piece I wrote for the @thelilynews: "My grandfather founded the National Day of Mourning to dispel the myth of Thanksgiving. I'm carrying on his legacy." https://t.co/MLTUnvTVoo
— Kisha James (@Kisha890) November 24, 2021
Speaking of worthwhile links — if you’re not a subscriber already, the Washington Post is offering a Black Friday special, $9.99 for an entire year.
Lapassionara
Thanks, AL. Good reminder of the myths we live with.
NotMax
For any who are into it, Black Friday (and Cyber Monday) central.
JPL
@NotMax: Except for DIL, my shopping is done. She promised me a list soon though. If the Gund Kissy the Penguin pops up on sale, I might give the imp an extra gift.
lgerard
Not a Black Friday person, but I did the WAPO thing this morning.
James E Powell
@lgerard:
What is the WAPO thing?
Dog Dawg Damn
Happy Thanksgiving to everyone. Even Omnes Omnibus. Hope you all were stuffed with good food.
I’ve been sick with a cold for 10 days but managed it to make it dinner with family as it seems to be tapering off. Food was good. Only Trumper outburst was old crank proclaiming that Alec Baldwin murdered a woman in cold blood.
Steeplejack (phone)
@James E Powell:
I believe it’s the ultra-cheap subscription deal in the last paragraph of the post up top.
lgerard
@James E Powell:
Washington Post subscription 9.99 for a year
I had let my subscription expire a month or so ago
Origuy
Also in the WaPo: The mysterious death of Squanto. We all learned about Squanto, the friendly Indian who helped the Pilgrims survive after their first disastrous winter. There’s more to his story.
dopey-o
So there were civilizations here for thousands of years. And now many of them are reduced to hunger and poverty. In the wealthiest culture that ever existed.
WTAF is wrong with this place???
Another Scott
ICYMI, …
Thread.
Ding was worried about Delta very early on…
:-(
(via LOLGOP)
Cheers,
Scott.
Chetan Murthy
@Another Scott: I’m not worried; I have an IMMUNE SYSTEM!
Chetan Murthy
@Another Scott: boy howdy, this is ugly: https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1463925612402429952
IIUC, that “thin blue line” at the right end, is B.1.1.529 cases, as they become dominant, eclipsing Delta. zomg!
raven
@Chetan Murthy: Maybe Michael Flynn is on to something.
debbie
@Another Scott:
That kind of contagiousness can’t be good.
Joe Falco
@dopey-o:
White supremacy
S. Cerevisiae
People do need to learn the real history, painful as it is. Up on my Rez we all put on a big feast on thanksgiving because we like big meals and family get togethers. In our tradition we should give thanks every day.
Raven
@debbie: so what happened to them?
Chetan Murthy
@Raven: WaPo: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/11/24/hong-kong-valve-face-mask-covid/
TL;DR no more than we already know, and no news of the course of these two patients’ infections, good or bad. There are a few links in the article — SCMP, the HK govt — but nothing gives more info.
It does seem that one patient was wearing a valve facemask, and the hotel had inadequate ventilation in the corridor. All sarcasm aside [b/c I can’t manage it] I think we can expect the same (or worse) in our country, so that doesn’t seem like reason to relax. Ah, well.
Raven
@Chetan Murthy: I don’t get the vaccine part. They got it even though they were vaccinated. So, if they got it but didn’t get sick or die then the vaccine did what it was supposed to do? (I realize there must be more to it or the scientists would not be freaked.
eddie blake
@Another Scott: well, that’s depressing.
happy holidays!!/
eta- and i thought i hadda bad thanksgiving….
Chetan Murthy
@Raven: Two thoughts:
In the absence of any other way to know, I think scientists are looking at contagiousness as a proxy for all other bad indicators: b/c the other ones take too long to measure, and a low-contagiousness variant is simply less-worrisome all-around.
It makes sense, yes? After 2yr of this, of the bug surprising us quite a few times, it makes sense to default to “an abundance of caution”.
Sigh.
Benw
@S. Cerevisiae: word.
raven
@Chetan Murthy: Thanks. We just finished season 2 of “The Morning Show” and it’s the first show we’ve seen that chronicle the pandemic from the beginning. I don’t know if it’s just selective memory or being old but I have to really think about it to remember what it was like when it started. My friends all tell me I was the first in our group to say “bend the curve”.
Anoniminous
fuck it comment deleted
realbtl
@Raven: I think it’s likely that scientists working on covid would be freaked out by any robust seeming variant, it’s sort of what they do. Then investigate. Any competing variant is worrisome.
Chetan Murthy
@Anoniminous:
This infection happened in a quarantine hotel, with both people taking precautions — obviously insufficient precautions. It’s not just a plain old infection out in the world. And it’s of sufficient concern that the UK has already stopped flights to Southern Africa. The way it’s out-competed Delta in one of the provinces of SA is …. pretty troubling.
raven
@Anoniminous: How does that differ from the Ding tweet?
eddie blake
@Chetan Murthy: article says the guy who spread it was sloppy with his masking protocols and wearing a vent mask. so he was puffing out clouds of covid with every breath.
dude who caught it was over sixty and right across the hall.
the thing they’re really worried about imo, is the viral density. he was breathing out a LOT.
Fair Economist
@Raven:
Most people who get COVID recover without serious long-term problems. Two people coming out OK is not much evidence. The concern is that Nu really looks like we’d think an escape variant would look, plus it seems to be spreading very quickly among a decently resistant population in S. Africa.
If it’s an escape variant vaccination will provide little protection vs. infection and substantially reduced resistance to serious disease. Without aggressive measures, this looks likely to infect nearly everyone. Remember 0.6% mortality of everyone is 2 million dead people in the US. Very bad.
Chetan Murthy
@Fair Economist: In that Feigl-Ding twitter thread, there are a bunch of tweets from other researchers, all saying variations on the same thing: all proxy measurements they have for prevalence of B.1.1.529 are going vertical, and, it would seem, in all regions of South Africa.
This thing appears to be dramatically more-transmissible than Delta. And as you say, some people think it can evade immunity. Maybe we’ll be lucky, and it won’t be able to evade vaccine-induced immunity. Gosh I hope so, b/c this one appears truly to be the one that’ll get us to “you’re either vaccinated, recovered, or dead”.
phdesmond
@Origuy:
good Correction on that article:
CORRECTION
A previous version of this story mistakenly referred to the Pilgrims as Puritans.
eddie blake
@Chetan Murthy: figure mask composition will change, (like, we’ll all end up looking like we’re in the trenches in 1915) the pharm corps will tumble out new vaccines to wrestle with the new variant and we’ll be ok if we keep our distances and keep our mask protocols.
in nyc, at least for the last month, places have been on point about demanding proof of vax for entrance and making sure patrons are masked.
so one can hope we can improvise, adapt and overcome this new variant.
Fair Economist
@Chetan Murthy: Another concern is how quickly we need to get a vaccine into wide use given the very good chance it’s an escape variant. We have maybe 6 months to get shots into the arms of most Americans. That’s going to need a heroic effort on a number of areas, including regulatory and messaging. We were lucky with Delta in that the pre-Delta vaccine still provided decent protection vs. Delta. That won’t always be true; and indeed B.1.1.529 may already be the first time it isn’t.
(There will still be T-cell protection so the vaccines will still help vs. severe disease. But probably less, and it’s not perfect anyway.)
Chetan Murthy
@eddie blake: I’m sure we will do as you describe. And those of us who want to live, will do what we must. I do wonder how much more of this the general population can take, though: it seems like even here in SF, people are just done with the pandemic, even though it’s not done with them.
Ah, well. I just remind myself that I can’t shake my fist at the tornado; all I can do is get into my shelter and batten the hatches. If it looks bad, I’ll stop going out again, even masked. Ah, well.
Chetan Murthy
That Feigl-Ding thread has a lot going on. It’s about B.1.1.529, but there’s also mention of the C.1.2 variant, too. Apparently for the last few weeks, it’s been rapidly trending upward in prevalence in SA, too, displacing Delta. But then B.1.1.529 came in, and seems to have displaced both Delta and C.1.2. The emergence of two high-transmissibility variants seems troubling.
eddie blake
@Chetan Murthy: what you said reminded me of something. pacific rim.
“you see a hurricane coming, you have to get out of the way. but when you’re in a jaeger, suddenly you can fight the hurricane. you can win.”
replace “jaeger” with “mask and variant-booster compliant,” and yeah, we’ll be ok. (the people who DON’T comply with the new protocols, like the schmuck in hong kong, will cause problems, but then they’ll die off or be long-covid-incapacitated, and not be prowling our neighborhoods.)
MOST in nyc are well aware that as tired as they are, 40-50,000 of their neighbors died ugly and they don’t want, we don’t want any part of that. masking is GREAT on the MTA, and like i said, every place, venue, theatre or restaurant is checking vax status.
like the guy said in the OTHER movie, “if you want to live, come with me.” replace “come with me” with “mask the fuck up and get your booster”, and i think the people who WANNA get through this will.
eddie blake
(OFFICIAL numbers are in the 30,000’s, but you KNOW there was an UNDERCOUNT.)
Fair Economist
@Chetan Murthy:
I personally don’t get that. We all face limitations and problems and how we deal with them affect our outcomes, sometimes in big ways. I have knee trouble. I’ll love to rollerblade or ski as I used to but – the reality is that those actions have a very good chance of serious immediate pain and possible additional knee damage. Sure, I’m “tired” of not being able to do those fun activities, but that’s just the way it is, and will be for the rest of my life.
Likewise if I have to mask/distance/booster to keep my COVID risk tolerably low then – I have to mask/distance/booster. I’ll get tired of it, sure, but if it’s got to be done, it’s got to be done.
Chetan Murthy
@Fair Economist:
You and me both, but, uh, case rates stopped declining, went back up, and are now on a plateau. Clearly a lot of people have given up.
debbie
This virus is fucking diabolical.
Anne Laurie
To pandemic-amped readers: DON’T PANIC.
Eric Feigl-Ding is notoriously quick to discover Armaggedons hiding around every corner — he’s predicted a new, world-breaking coronavirus strain several times I can remember over the past two years. Which isn’t hard, if you take every note of every potential variant as ‘this is where the Contagion movie script starts.’
This *could* be a new, overwhelming variant — or it could fizzle out, as a number of potentially terrible variants already have. It was picked up quickly, because Hong Kong had the victims under medical survellance, and therefore further transmission was blocked. That’s the good news!
My personal twitter threat-indicator, which you can also follow, is Laurie Garrett’s twitter feed. She was considered a bit of a professional worrier before this pandemic — someone who predicted twelve of the last two serious threats — but she’s been really, really useful during this one, because her experience & her contact list have let her highlight the real dangers while avoiding needless terror.
Betty
@Raven: There seems to be real fear that this one evades the vaccine-induced immunity, to say nothing of the immunity from previous infection. The nightmare absent a new vaccine.
Another Scott
@Anne Laurie: Thanks for the reminder. It’s also good to note the while the two people infected had “high” viral loads, they were fully vaccinated (Pfizer) and asymptomatic. The best course is to continue to try to get everyone vaccinated.
Ding isn’t a prophet and nobody knows the future. Maybe it won’t displace Delta for some reason.
My hope is that people don’t panic, but they understand that the pandemic is still raging and that evolution is relentless. The virus will keep changing as long as community spread is high – it’s math.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Bonnie McDaniel
Re: the Washington Post offer
I had signed up last year for the $29 special and was going to cancel and re-sign for the cheaper price with another email. But when I checked the “too expensive” box and continued to the next screen, they also offered me the $9.99 special to re-sign for a year. Apparently, just threaten to leave and they’ll hop to ?