Filed under: Emergency, Flu, Government, Health, Pandemic, Politics, Predictions, Preparedness, Society, Survival
. . . well, certainly not a babe (in either sense of the term):
Biden says avoid planes, subways; puts out clarifying statement
Vice President Joe Biden said Thursday that he would not recommend taking any commercial flight or riding in a subway car “at this point” because swine flu virus can spread “in confined places.” A little more than one hour later, Biden rushed out a statement backing off.
“I would tell members of my family — and I have — I wouldn’t go anywhere in confined places now,” Biden said on NBC’s “Today” show.. “It’s not that it’s going to Mexico. It’s [that] you’re in a confined aircraft. When one person sneezes, it goes all the way through the aircraft. That’s me. …
“So, from my perspective, what it relates to is mitigation. If you’re out in the middle of a field when someone sneezes, that’s one thing. If you’re in a closed aircraft or closed container or closed car or closed classroom, it’s a different thing.”
Biden has a small problem – he says what he is thinking. Which is dangerous for a pol, and it never ceases to amaze me that he has managed to get as far in politics as he has.
Anyway, it is revealing what he said, even if the White House made him backpeddle. And I think that it is probably fairly good advice at this point. I know that I would have serious second thoughts about doing much traveling on public conveyance at this point. But semi-hermit that I am, that’s pretty easy for me to say (and do).
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI.)
Filed under: Emergency, Flu, Government, Guns, Health, Pandemic, Predictions, Preparedness, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Survival, Weather
“Foraging?”
I chuckled. “Yeah.”
“But I thought you already had like 40,000 rounds of ammo,” said my friend.
“You exaggerate.”
“Yeah, but not by much.” He laughed. “So, what were you foraging for?”
“Oh, just decided to top off some of the usual supplies we have at home. You know how it is.”
He did. He too lives in the Midwest, where a winter storm or spring flood or summer tornado can leave you isolated without power or the ability to get out for upwards of a week. “So, you really think this is the start of a pandemic?”
“Probably not, but it is too soon to say. But even if it isn’t, there could be a panic, which could be almost as bad.”
“Yeah, good point.”
* * * * * * *
WHO says swine flu moving closer to pandemic
BERLIN – The World Health Organization warned Wednesday that the swine flu outbreak is moving closer to becoming a pandemic, as the United States reported the first swine flu death outside of Mexico, and Germany and Austria became latest European nations hit by the disease.
In Geneva, WHO flu chief Dr. Keiji Fukuda told reporters that there was no evidence the virus was slowing down, moving the agency closer to raising its pandemic alert to phase 5, indicating widespread human-to-human transmission.
* * * * * * *
“You know, this is all your fault,” said a different friend.
“What is?”
“The swine flu.”
“How do you figure?”
“I read your book. I know the backstory. This is how it starts, isn’t it?”
“Well, something like this, anyway.”
“So, what’s next?”
“Aliens.”
He laughed.
* * * * * * *
Jim Downey
Filed under: Bruce Schneier, Emergency, Failure, General Musings, Government, Health, Politics, Predictions, Preparedness, Science, Society, Survival, Terrorism, Violence
The annoying cold I mentioned the other day seems to be trying for an upgrade to bronchial infection, perhaps with delusions of becoming pneumonia. So I’m not feeling particularly creative or insightful. Maybe I used up too much outrage yesterday. Anyway, since I am a bit under the weather, let me just post an excerpt from something you ought to read. This is the closing of The Most Dangerous Person in the World?:
Security itself is an illusion. It is a perception that exists only between our ears. No army, insurance policy, hazmat team, video surveillance or explosive sniffer can protect us from our own immune system, a well-intentioned but clumsy surgeon, failing to look before crossing the street, an asteroid randomly hurtling through space or someone willing to die in order to do others harm.
In this sense, the only things that can truly make us more “secure” are not things. They are the courage to face whatever comes with dignity and intention, and the strong relationships that assure we will face the future together, and find comfort and meaning in doing so.
Imagine, then, what might happen if we simply quit listening to the scaremongers and those who profit from our paranoia. Imagine what the world could look like if we made a conscious choice to live out whatever time we have with courage, compassion, service and joy.
Terrorism is an act of the weak. But so is walking through the airport in our socks.
We can make better choices.
Go read the whole thing.
Jim Downey
(Via Bruce Schneier.)
Filed under: Depression, Gene Roddenberry, Health, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Star Trek, Survival
Back in the 1960s, salt was just salt. Known to be necessary for healthy life in most mammals, including humans, people didn’t give it a lot of thought beyond that. Oh, sure, sometimes people would worry about a salt deficiency – I remember taking salt tablets regularly the summer I worked as a hot tar roofer – but otherwise, it was no big deal. In fact, one of the early episodes of Star Trek had the M-113 Creature, as ‘salt vampire’ which killed by sucking the salt out of humans.
Then came the 1980s. And the start of the great salt scare.
Salt was tied to hypertension. Salt was found to be overused in all kinds of prepared foods (since it augments flavor and increases food density – what the industry calls “mouthfeel” by saturating food with more water). We were told that salt kills – and that you had damned well better cut back on the amount of salt you ate. Anyone with high blood pressure or heart disease was told to go on a low- or no-salt diet, using salt substitutes or just going without.
What wasn’t really discussed by the public health officials who got this bandwagon started was that only some people are salt-sensitive, i.e.: react to excess salt in their diet. I’m not going to dig back through all the research papers now, but I remember that it was estimated that for the US this was about 30% of the population. For those people, salt could indeed pose a problem. But most people didn’t have this kind of reaction – their system would just flush excess salt out through normal kidney function. Here’s a passage from the Wikipedia article on salt which addresses this:
Sodium is one of the primary electrolytes in the body. All four cationic electrolytes (sodium, potassium, magnesium, and calcium) are available in unrefined salt, as are other vital minerals needed for optimal bodily function. Too much or too little salt in the diet can lead to muscle cramps, dizziness, or even an electrolyte disturbance, which can cause severe, even fatal, neurological problems.[29] Drinking too much water, with insufficient salt intake, puts a person at risk of water intoxication (hyponatremia). Salt is even sometimes used as a health aid, such as in treatment of dysautonomia.[30]
The risk for disease due to insufficient or excessive salt intake varies because of biochemical individuality. Some have asserted that while the risks of consuming too much salt are real, the risks have been exaggerated for most people, or that the studies done on the consumption of salt can be interpreted in many different ways.[31] [32]
Now, from a public health perspective, it makes sense to try and limit the average intake of salt. As noted, many prepared foods have a *lot* of salt in them. If you can stop 30%, or one third, or one quarter, of your population from developing high blood pressure without causing problems for the rest of the population, then why not? And I think that this is probably the reason and rationale behind the extensive public health campaigns to get people to cut back on salt intake, though I bet it would be difficult to get most public health officials to admit that this was the case.
But . . . what if a decrease in salt presented problems for that other portion of the population that is not salt-sensitive?
Salt is ‘natural mood-booster’
University of Iowa researchers writing in Psychology and Behavior say salt may act as a natural antidepressant.
Tests on rats found those with a salt deficiency shied away from activities they normally enjoyed – a sign of depression.
* * *
The tests carried out by US researchers found that when rats were deficient in salt, they shy away from activities they normally enjoy, like drinking a sugary substance or pressing a bar that stimulates a pleasant sensation in their brains.
Psychologist Kim Johnson, who led the research, said: “Things that normally would be pleasurable for rats didn’t elicit the same degree of relish, which leads us to believe that a salt deficit and the craving associated with it can induce one of the key symptoms associated with depression.”
Now what? Risk hypertension, or fight depression? What is the biggest public health concern?
As I’ve noted before, I *do* have problems with high blood pressure (though thanks to changes in lifestyle – specifically, getting regular sleep and exercise – combined with drug therapy, it is now coming down to close to the “normal” range). But I don’t seem to be salt-sensitive – drastically cutting my salt intake makes no difference in my blood pressure. My doctor doesn’t worry about my salt intake, saying that other factors are likely much more important in dealing with my hypertension.
But what about depression? Or just worrying about whether you’re going to die from too much salt?
I think Gene Roddenberry was right: sucking all the salt out of us is like sucking the life out of us. Or at least the joy of living.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Depression, Emergency, Failure, Government, NYT, Predictions, Preparedness, Society, Survival
for another happy-happy Monday morning post about the economy! Yay! Everyone gather around, and let Uncle Jim tell you a story…
“We’re screwed.”
Did you like my story? Oh, you want details? If you insist.
No, I’m not going to talk about the Dow being down below 7,000 for the first time this century (it’s at 6,900 as I write). Nor about the news this morning of AIG’s additional $61.7 billion loss last quarter. Those are just symptoms.
To really understand what is happening, listen to this weekend’s episode of This American Life, part of which I touched on last Friday. It’ll help explain how and why the fundamental problem is a political one: no one really wants to face the prospect of doing what has to be done to clean up this mess, because it would mean too many powerful interests get burned. Rather, everyone – all the bankers, all the investors, the US and European and Japanese governments – is hoping beyond hope that they can finesse their way through this, and things will skate by on the thin ice and get better sometime, somehow.
Why do I say that? Because, as they said in the “Bad Bank” episode, nationalization of banking systems has been done before. In fact, it’s been done a lot of times. But usually in this or that small foreign country, and under the direction/demand of the IMF as a condition of aid. Nationalization means that the government steps in to protect the overall economy by forcing corrections in the banking system directly – that is, the government takes over (to some degree) the operation of the banks for a period of time. And this means that while the government involved usually has to assume some of the costs, that shareholders and investors take the worst hit. Oh, and the bankers who created the mess usually get tossed out if not tossed in prison. (An aside: someone commented recently that if this were happening in China, that people would be executed. I can’t say that I think that would be a bad idea.)
But the current problem is so widespread, and involves so much of the business/monied classes in the US and Europe, that nationalization is generally considered a ‘nuclear option’, a last resort to be avoided at almost all costs.
Well, we’re seeing what “all costs” means, right now. I do actually want to talk about AIG a bit here. You should read Joe Nocera’s column from last Friday, titled “Propping Up a House of Cards“. Here’s a couple of relevant excerpts:
If we let A.I.G. fail, said Seamus P. McMahon, a banking expert at Booz & Company, other institutions, including pension funds and American and European banks “will face their own capital and liquidity crisis, and we could have a domino effect.” A bailout of A.I.G. is really a bailout of its trading partners — which essentially constitutes the entire Western banking system.
* * *
There’s more, believe it or not. A.I.G. sold something called 2a-7 puts, which allowed money market funds to invest in risky bonds even though they are supposed to be holding only the safest commercial paper. How could they do this? A.I.G. agreed to buy back the bonds if they went bad. (Incredibly, the Securities and Exchange Commission went along with this.) A.I.G. had a securities lending program, in which it would lend securities to investors, like short-sellers, in return for cash collateral. What did it do with the money it received? Incredibly, it bought mortgage-backed securities. When the firms wanted their collateral back, it had sunk in value, thanks to A.I.G.’s foolish investment strategy. The practice has cost A.I.G. — oops, I mean American taxpayers — billions.
Here’s what is most infuriating: Here we are now, fully aware of how these scams worked. Yet for all practical purposes, the government has to keep them going. Indeed, that may be the single most important reason it can’t let A.I.G. fail. If the company defaulted, hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of credit-default swaps would “blow up,” and all those European banks whose toxic assets are supposedly insured by A.I.G. would suddenly be sitting on immense losses. Their already shaky capital structures would be destroyed. A.I.G. helped create the illusion of regulatory capital with its swaps, and now the government has to actually back up those contracts with taxpayer money to keep the banks from collapsing. It would be funny if it weren’t so awful.
OK, still, AIG was just a symptom, even as central a role as it plays in this fiasco. What was the cause?
It’s tempting to say “greed” and just leave it at that. But the problem is bigger than that. It’s “trust”. Trust that housing prices would continue to rise, regardless. Trust that people would act rationally, and only buy homes that they could afford. Trust that loan officers would only loan to people who were qualified. Trust that bank managers would execute proper oversight. Trust that banking executives would exercise due judgment. Trust that credit markets would operate to offset risk with reserves. Trust that rating agencies would rate risk appropriately. Trust that the invisible hand of the marketplace would keep excess in check. And trust that failing any of these, the govermental regulatory agencies would intercede and enforce statuatory limitations.
Well, you can see where trust has gotten us. Take nothing on faith. Over the last couple of decades, regulation was relaxed and business sought to push the boundaries further, creating new financial instruments which the average person can barely understand. The experts told us it was all hunky-dory, and we believed them. But we should have noted that they were the ones to benefit from the whole scheme, and been less trusting. Or, more accurately, we should have demanded that our elected representatives in government were less trusting. But they stood to benefit as well, with the corruption of corporate donations to campaigns and lucrative Board positions once politicians left office.
I must admit to being sorely tempted to come to the conclusion that we deserve what is happening. Very sorely tempted.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI.)
Spent a chunk of this morning working on the care-giving book, and came across this post:
October 23, 2007, 10:22 am | Edit this
Filed under: Alzheimer’s, Health, Hospice, Science, Sleep, SocietyMade a routine trip to the big-box store this morning, to stock up on catfood. I got one of those large boxes of 48 cans of different flavors my cats like. And when I went to put it away, the “easy open” tab didn’t. Instead, I wound up just destroying the whole box, ripping and tearing, so I had access to all the cans included.
It felt wonderful to be so destructive.
There are days like that for all of us. After a trip to the store, dealing with idiots who don’t know how to negotiate a check-out line. Or sitting behind the twit at the stoplight who somehow misses that the light changed and the cars in the other lane are passing him, getting his shit together just in time to slip through a yellow light and leave you sitting there for another cycle. Whatever it is, you just want to take out your frustrations in a safe and relatively sane way.
I have these days a lot. Part of it is just the toll of being a long-term care provider for someone who has a tenuous grip on reality but can be amazingly stubborn and focused in her determination to do something unsafe (or just highly annoying). But part of it is simply the effect of long term sleep disruption/deprivation that goes with providing care around the clock. I’ve known this for ages, and written about it several times. Anyone who has had insomnia, lived with an infant, or just had a bad string of luck sleeping for a few days will understand completely how grumpy and intolerant it can make you.
And I chuckled a little bit at myself. It’s helpful, and part of the healing process, I’m sure. Why? Well, because last week I picked up another such box of catfood. And I carefully, quickly, and with little real thought disassembled the box – not just opening it as intended, but popping the flaps off at each end, so the whole thing would flatten perfectly for recycling. Then I put away the catfood, and folded the box and put it in the bin for recycling.
What a difference 15 months has made.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Daily Kos, Depression, Emergency, Failure, Health, Society, Survival
For the first time since the Dance of Stupidity & Pain I took the dog for his morning walk today. Just got back. And gawds, does my knee hurt. Between the half mile walk and the 18 degree temp out, I feel like someone shot me just below the knee.
As I expected.
But it had to be done.
* * * * * * *
There was a good segment on NPR this morning, with an economic historian who has a new book out about the Great Depression. One of the things that emerged from the piece was his comment about how the current economic situation is frightenly familiar to the situation then. From the NPR website:
Ahamed calls the similarities between our current economic problems and the Great Depression “eerie.” He points out that both crises began with a bubble, and that both bubbles were caused, in his view, by mistakes in federal review policy. And, when both bubbles burst, they eventually led to a banking crisis.
But, he says, the leaders of today can learn from the lessons of the Great Depression: First, he says, we should not let the banking system collapse. Second, we should not go to extreme lengths to try to protect the currency. Third, we need to let the budget deficit expand.
“The problem of the Great Depression was … a failure of intellectual will. The danger this time might be a failure of political will,” says Ahamed. “To bail out the banks is going to cost a lot of money, and the American public are so angry that they are not, at the moment, willing to sign a blank check.”
* * * * * * *
The heating pad helps. And in a few minutes I’ll get up, go find some OTC stuff to take to help the pain. But I expect that it’ll ache for much of the day, and this will complicate my plans to do some conservation work this afternoon (I work standing – always have. Most binders do, since you need to move a fair amount.)
So, why did I go for a walk? It’s been less than a week – I could have easily put it off a bit longer, let the bruised bone heal some more.
Because, as painful as I knew this would be, I didn’t want to let the rest of my body lose too much ground. Oh, I’ve been doing other exercises these last few days, but nothing is as good for me as walking is. Pain isn’t always an enemy.
Understanding that, accepting that, is one of the first steps to maturity, I think. I remember when I first read the passage from Dune where young Paul is tested by the Bene Gesserit to determine whether he is “human”. I was perhaps 9 or 10, and the scene impressed me greatly, gave me a jump start on dealing with the pain which would come to me early in life.
* * * * * * *
As noted in some of my posts here about the economy, I’m more than a little pissed off about how we got into this mess. Quite honestly, I think there’s quite a few candidates for a “Head-on-Pike Award of the Month” competition, complete with categories for “Best Expression”, “Most Deserving”, and “Ideal for Throwing Things At”. That many of these same people still hold elected office, or have been receiving massive bonuses (or complaining about not being able to get the bonuses they ‘deserve’) just adds to my dark musings about appropriate means of getting said heads on said pikes.
So yeah, I’m angry. And yeah, that influences my willingness to just write blank checks to cover the debts that these various and sundry assholes created.
But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done.
* * * * * * *
Anyone who has been through any kind of serious injury or disease knows that there comes a point where you have to make a decision. You have to either hide from the continuing pain as best you can, using drugs or changing your lifestyle, or you have to do your best to get past the pain and do whatever you can to cope with the effects of your injury.
Neither choice is necessarily “right”. But they each come with consequences.
I have made choices each way, depending on the situation. I will not judge the choices that another makes.
Except when those choices have consequences for me. Like this:
Jindal rejects La.’s stimulus share
Louisiana‘s Bobby Jindal, a Republican, became the first governor Friday to refuse officially a part of his state’s share of the $787 billion stimulus bill, while President Obama warned the nation´s mayors to spend stimulus money wisely.
While some governors were subtly backing off previous statements that they wouldn’t take their share of the windfall, Mr. Jindal issued a statement saying Louisiana would not participate in a program aimed at expanding state unemployment insurance coverage.
“Increasing taxes on our Louisiana businesses is certainly not a way to stimulate our economy. It would be the exact wrong thing we could do to encourage further growth and job creation,” said Mr. Jindal, although the Louisiana legislature could override his decision.
No, I don’t live in LA. But this kind of behavior – and similar behavior by other Republican governors elsewhere – will have an impact on all of us, across the country. That it comes from the party that got us into this mess doesn’t make me any more sympathetic. That it comes at this point when states have been sucking up billions of Federal dollars at every opportunity for decades means that I cannot possibly see it as in any way credible. It is just grandstanding, and hypocritical to boot.
* * * * * * *
Well, this has taken longer than I intended. I guess I had more to say than I thought. Or maybe I’m just in more pain than I realized, and am using this as a distraction.
Look, this really is pretty simple. Yeah, the deficits necessary to get us out of this depression are going to hurt. And it is galling that no small amount of money is going into the pockets of people who directly caused it, or to save the bacon of pols who are blathering about how they don’t want it. If you want, you can also be pissed off at those who “bought more house than they could afford” and who may now get bailed out of that bad decision. It doesn’t matter – be pissed at who you want, however you want – so long as this gets done. Otherwise, we will just continue to bleed, to suffer, to experience pain until it consumes us and ruins our lives for decades.
I know which path I’ll take.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to Daily Kos.)
Filed under: 2nd Amendment, Ballistics, Guns, Health, Humor, Migraine, Preparedness, RKBA, Sleep, Survival, Violence
I haven’t mentioned it here yet, but the other day one of the cats tried to kill me, and almost succeeded. Evil little bastard. As I told a friend:
Dance of Stupidity & Pain
My afternoon was filled with a whole lotta screaming and cursing. Well, OK, “filled” isn’t quite right, since it was mostly compressed into one 10-minute period. Which started with me putting down a can for the dog, then turning to try and avoid stepping/falling on the cat coming to investigate. Damned cat. I now have three rather nasty punctures deep into the back of the web of my right hand, along with a ugly bruised big left toe, and a swollen left knee. Oh, and lots of pain associated with all of those, plus the spike in my headache following the adrenaline dump of trying not to kill either myself or the cat.
Well, the headache went on to become a nice little migraine, and the knee is still extremely annoying. Nothing to see a doc about – this is the knee I’ve had surgery on twice, and I know exactly what is going on. I probably broke the last bone in the toe, but the only thing they do with those is to take it easy and tell you to let it heal – I’ve done it too many times to count. Anyway, the low-grade pain has interrupted my sleep the last couple of days, the headache persists, and I’m more than a little grumpy. This may have influenced my appreciation of the movie last night, but I don’t think so – it was dreadful enough in its own right.
But I just came across something to make me chuckle. In one of the gun discussion forums I check out, the topic of “why do you carry” came up. I’ve written about this before, of course, and have my own reasons. Here’s this, though:
Remember the average response time to a 911 call is over 4 minutes.
The average response time of a 357 magnum is 1400 FPS.
Heh. The guy’s numbers are even about right. Well, for the .357. Response times for 911 calls vary widely, but all are measured in multiples of minutes.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Astronomy, Bad Astronomy, Failure, Government, ISS, movies, NASA, Phil Plait, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, Space, Star Trek, Survival, tech, Travel, UFO
This item made the news yesterday:
Scientists eye debris after satellite collision
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – Scientists are keeping a close eye on orbital debris created when two communications satellites — one American, the other Russian — smashed into each other hundreds of miles above the Earth.
NASA said it will take weeks to determine the full magnitude of the unprecedented crash and whether any other satellites or even the Hubble Space Telescope are threatened.
The collision, which occurred nearly 500 miles over Siberia on Tuesday, was the first high-speed impact between two intact spacecraft, NASA officials said.
Wow: two satellites have collided in orbit, destroying both. This is the first time such a major collision has ever occurred.
The satellites were Cosmos 2251, a Russian communication relay satellite that’s been defunct for a decade, and an Iridium satellite, one of a fleet of communication satellites launched by Motorola in the late 90s and early 2000s.
* * *
There have been collisions in space before, but never from such large satellites — the Iridium bird was about 700 kg, and the Cosmos was about the same — and never resulting in a total wipeout like this. Again, if I have my numbers about right, the explosion resulting from the energy of impact would have been about the same as detonating a ton of TNT.
I had to chuckle at this comment in that thread at Bad Astronomy:
But wouldn’t the impact have made a new, ever more powerful hybrid satellite? It would have an over-arching need to communicate and would do so in Russian. The only way to make it stop broadcasting a constant barrage at us would be if it mistook someone for its designer at Motorola and then. . . Oh wait, this isn’t Star Trek.
No, not at all. When you have two large satellites, each moving at something on the order of about 5 miles a second hit one another at nearly right angles, then you don’t get any kind of hybrid. You get a mess. As in a debris cloud of upwards of a thousand bits and pieces of space junk, some of it substantial, most of it still moving at thousands of miles an hour, and all of it dangerous.
I’ve written previously about the threat of real ‘UFOs’ to our space exploration. From the quoted article in that post:
The reason is life-and-death. Since Mercury days, NASA engineers have realized that visual sightings of anomalies can sometimes provide clues to the functioning — or malfunctioning — of the spaceships that contain their precious astronauts. White dots outside the window could be spray from a propellant leak, or ice particles, flaking insulation, worked-loose fasteners (as in this latest case) or inadvertently released tools or components.
Whatever the objects might be, they pose a threat of coming back in contact with the spacecraft, potentially causing damage to delicate instruments, thermal tiles, windows or solar cells, or fouling rotating or hinged mechanisms. So Mission Control needs to find out about them right away in order to determine that they are not hazardous.
Right now the bulk of that debris cloud is about 250 miles higher than the ISS. But it will slowly drift closer (the effect of atmospheric drag – even at that altitude, it will slow anything in orbit, meaning that the item in question will drop to a lower orbit). At some point, this could be a real threat to the space station.
And beyond that, it is a further complication to *any* effort to get into something other than a low Earth orbit. Currently we have something like tens of thousands of bits of “space junk” that have to be tracked – and while all of it will eventually fall back into the atmosphere and burn up, it can present a real danger. If we’re not careful, we could encase ourselves in a shell of so much junk that it would basically eliminate the possibility of travel beyond our planet for decades.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 