Me, in the checkout lane, to the woman ahead of me who's wearing a mask: "Nice to see someone else wearing a mask!"

Her: "I've got a cold, so..."

Me: "Well thank you for wearing a mask when you're sick!" (wondering, Did you bother testing for covid, or just assume?)

Her, sounding annoyed at herself: "I wish I'd been wearing it last week!"

In all my circles, somebody has some respiratory illness. It's definitely covid for one neighbor. I thanked them for testing. Good luck out there, y'all.

#CovidIsNotOver

#AmReading Empire of #AI by #KarenHao. There's a chapter on environmental costs. Another on the exploitation of Global South folks.

And this quote from MIT economists & Nobel laureates Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson: "Technologies are not inevitable. The ability to advance them is driven by a collective belief that they are worth advancing. The irony is that for this very reason, new technologies rarely default to bringing widespread prosperity . . . Those who successfully rally for a technology's creation are those who have the power & resources to do the rallying. As they turn their ideas into reality, the vision they impose -- of what the tech is & whom it can benefit -- is thus the vision of a narrow elite, imbued with all their blind spots & self-serving philosophies. Only through cataclysmic shifts in society or powerful organized resistance can a technology transform from enriching the few to lifting the many."

This is a gorgeous remembrance. What a clarion call to justice.

Remembering Dolly Parton and Her #LGBTQ+ Allyship: ‘Why Wouldn't I Stand Up for Everybody?'

'That's the part of Dolly that's going to get flattened if we let the tributes run on rhinestones and Dollywood and "9 to 5" alone. She wasn't doing allyship as brand extension. She was talking about an actual family. Hers.'

https://pridesource.com/article/dolly-parton-tribute

#DollyParton #PrideSource

2/2

"When Mother Jones inquired as to why the newspapers neglected to report the facts about child labor in Pennsylvania, she was informed that the employers of those children had stock in the newspapers. Her response, 'Well, I’ve got stock in these little children and I’ll arrange a little publicity.'”

https://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/content/philadelpian-mill-children-march-against-child-labor-exploitation-1903

I keep thinking of this from cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky, on the Aug 19/26 episode of the Trevor Noah podcast: "The things that we think are possible, are often just the things that we're used to."

1/2

This #KimKelly interview from #MovementMemos #podcast (I can't recommend this podcast highly enough):

"Kids have always been treated as expendable little products if they were the wrong color or came from the wrong place, or spoke the wrong language or looked the wrong way. . . . I live in Philadelphia. Every time I go to City Hall I walk by a plaque memorializing her [Mary Harris "Mother" Jones's] 1903 March of the Mill Children wherein she took hundreds of mill workers who were children on a march from Philly up to Long Island, where President Theodore Roosevelt had his summer home. Their goal. . . was to publicize the harsh conditions of child labor and to demand a 55 hours work week for the kids who worked in those factories. . . . 55 hour work week was like their pie in the sky goal."

https://truthout.org/audio/labor-history-can-help-us-learn-to-fight-like-hell/

#LaborDay

My class on degrowth/post-growth is doing fabulous things for my morale and general outlook on life and the future.

I haven't figured out my elevator pitch for talking about it yet, but it'll include "Our current economic system is based on infinite growth, which is not compatible with a finite planet," and this from one of the instructors: "It solves the climate crisis, the affordability crisis, and the extreme inequality crisis at the same time."

Here's a 20-minute video intro to some basic concepts:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48G3ox90wss

#degrowth #PostGrowth #climate

Reminder to folks in the USA that if you buy books from this link, you're helping small indie bookstores, and the ILWU Local 5 Strike Fund... thus fighting oppression in 2 directions simultaneously!

#union #BookshopOrg #books

ILWU Local 5 Bookshop
https://bookshop.org/shop/ilwulocal5

Been meaning to post a thread about Indigenous-authored books I've been reading that focus on various Indigenous economic systems, and how much better they are for ordinary people's wellbeing than the status quo we're all suffering under now. Just haven't had time to sit down & do it.

#degrowth course, taught by a Black guy and a South Asian heritage woman, suggested donation $350 but nobody turned away for lack of funds (you can change the amount on the registration page). The BIPOC-focused version started this morning but I was able to sign up tonight anyway (there will be recordings of the live classes).

Scarcity conditions (eg competing with each other for scraps that fall from the tables of the Epstein class) are imposed on us by people invested in or benefiting from the status quo. Fuck 'em. We can build better.

https://wedegrow.us/

2/2
https://respectingourelders.org/what-we-do/

Also, given skyrocketing food prices, folks in Marin with larger vehicles may want to volunteer with this org to do deliveries to clients, cuz "all volunteers have the opportunity to get food for themselves, with the majority of the food going on to the designated recipient locations" (see their How You Can Help" page).

Very partial list of food that I have seen show up just in the past few weeks: Urban Remedy salads, no-nitrate chicken sausages, coconut yogurt, organic dairy yogurt, vegan and dairy frozen treats, tons of baked goods (pies cakes breads rolls croissants cupcakes, gluten-free bagels/breads), organic broccoli/kale/lettuce/radishes/collards/sprouts, cut pineapples/melons/mangos/coconut/papaya, frozen Amy's vegan pizzas (full disclosure: those do not show up often)...

The lack of food for marginalized (ie, exploited) people is artificial, and imposed by the systems of domination we live in.

1/2
Brand new book, The Best Solution to Hunger In America: How to Set Up and Run an All-Volunteer, Community Food Rescue Organization, written by the founders of local Marin County nonprofit Respecting Our Elders. One of my gigs is helping a disabled woman get food from this org, which picks up from Safeway, Whole Foods, restaurants like McDonalds -- there's so much good fucking food that would otherwise go into landfill (creating methane, which is a way more potent greenhouse gas than CO2). I've had this gig for 2 years and I'm still amazed at how much delicious food (often organic, Fair Trade, vegan, etc) these places get rid of every fucking day.

#Marin #MarinCounty #hunger #food #SNAP #volunteer #FoodRescue

https://www.amazon.com/Best-Solution-Hunger-America-All-Volunteer-ebook/dp/B0G4XJ86DP?ref_=ast_author_mpb

2/3
"Sheryl . . . like most of the leaders at Fb with younger children, severely limits her kids' access to screens, let alone social media accounts. And she never shares images of her children on sociai media. Silicon Valley is awash in wooden Montessori toys and shrouded in total screen bans. Parents at work talk about how they don't allow their teens to have mobile phones, which only underscores how well these executives understand the real damage their product inflicts on young minds."

"Totalitarian regimes move the line on what's admissible. Something that seems safe to post on FB today -- support for some idea or leader or book or musician or movie -- could change tomorrow or in a year & users would pay the very steep price. Whatever we & they believe today may not be the case tomorrow. There is no security for anyone to rely on in a regime like this."

1/3
#AmReading #CarelessPeople, by Sarah Wynn-Williams ---> I've finally scheduled my moribund FB account for deletion (haven't logged in for years). Y'all should check out her book from the library, as a F U to FB, cuz she's facing bankruptcy due to every 50,000 pound fine she has to pay when she speaks up about how terrible FB is (eg genocide-abetting, dictator-butt-licking). And she's a funny, incisive writer -- I binged it like a great novel (and she reads the audiobook herself, beautifully).

About Sheryl Sandberg: " It's just Sheryl, in an arbitrary flex of power. . . . unpredictable, keeping us all on edge. Never quite knowing when she'll strike, so we're never tempted to push any boundaries, even the simplest ones. Strict rules, selectively enforced, and the baseline of ever-present fear. It ensures we obey in advance."

(hmm sounds familiar)

3/3
Chrissi Kelly, AbScent: "[Smell] just doesn't get the credit it deserves as a bellwether for human health . . . Our sense of smell is completely bound up with our sense of self. . . . Imagine all the things that you do to soothe yourself when something goes wrong. Cup of tea, bubble bath, scented candle . . . If you want to make yourself feel better, it will almost always involve some sort of olfactory experience . . . People who lose their sense of smell show a reduction in olfactory bulb volume, & . . . once messages stop going into the olfactory bulb & the olfactory bulb starts to lose its volume, . . . depression sets in. It doesn't set in immediately. What sets in immediately is the anxiety. [Good news is, the] brain response to a reduction in the signals that are sent to the olfactory bulb can be counteracted"

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1835170/episodes/11172179 (fyi, I don't recommend this Long Covid Podcast whole-heartedly, due to some subtly antivax guests. But this episode is good)

https://abscent.org.uk/about-smell-loss/covid-19/

2/3
From the study: "Decades of research have found that verified olfactory dysfunction is a strong early factor associated with neurodegenerative disease, often preceding diagnosis by years.14 Cognition and olfactory function are intricately linked. The olfactory system is closely connected to brain areas involved in memory, emotion, and decision-making."

And if future cognitive deterioration isn't a strong enough motivating factor, there can be immediate & day-to-day quality of life effects, according to AbScent, a nonprofit dedicated to helping people connect about and recover from loss/deterioration of smell . . .

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2839325

#CovidIsNotOver

1/3
I've heard nothing about loss of smell from covid for the past 2 years, but here's a study that collected olfactory data from Oct 2021 - May 2025 & found that a majority of study participants, who said they'd fully recovered from their covid infection, just didn't notice it had fucked with their sense of smell.

This Week In Virology podcast, Oct 4/25, ep 1258, minute 29: a study of people who'd had covid infections, "with and without self-reported change or loss of smell & taste were offered olfactory testing, performed at 83 sites in 35 US states & territories . . . . Among 1393 infected with self-reported change or loss, 80% had hyposmia (decrease in ability to smell) . . . Among 1563 infected participants without self-reported change, 66% had hyposmia. So the majority of people said "Oh I was fine!" [but] a majority of people had issues. And 8.2[%] had really severe, and they didn't even notice! https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-1258/

Losing smell IS a big deal, cuz...

#CovidIsNotOver #TWIV #ThisWeekInVirology

#AmReading (re-reading, technically) Pollution Is Colonialism by Max Liboiron (Métis/Michif), which quotes Sandy Grande (Quechua): "Both Marxists and capitalists view land and natural resources as commodities to be exploited . . . capitalists for personal gain, and . . . Marxists for the good of all."

"Good of all" is of course theoretical, because people with patriarchal, colonizer, and other dominator worldviews arrogate to themselves the right to define what's "good" for perceived subordinates. So it's fitting that Liboiron's last chapter says, "If colonialism is a mode of domination where settlers and colonial forces have access to Land for their goals . . . then community peer review is a way to cockblock that entitlement."

(Liboiron has put a footnote on "cockblock." Don't miss this book's footnotes, which are cheeky & fun & discombobulate the entire stuffy colonizer enterprise of academic so-called objectivity and omniscience.)
#MaxLiboiron #PollutionIsColonialism

I registered for this: This Wednesday, May 28, in-person and on zoom, Indigenous actors including Gary Farmer (Cayuga; known for his roles in Resident Alien and Reservation Dogs) perform a piece on #LongCovid published in The Atlantic by Rebecca Nagle (Cherokee). (Nagle's podcast This Land made clear to me how settler environmentalists need to support Land Back everywhere to truly, deeply, block fossil fuel destruction at the roots. If you only have time for 1 episode: Season 2, Ep 5 "Pro Bono" )

https://theaterofwar.com/schedule/long-covid-showed-me-the-bottom-of-american-health-care

#CovidIsNotOver

#tariffs #Canada #feelgood

https://www.rmoutlook.com/canmore/us-woman-shows-solidarity-with-canada-amid-trumps-threats-buys-food-for-canmore-bakery-customers-10355938