Awaiting Our Ship
Waiting ... waiting ... waiting ...
Covid may have killed one strain of the flu, we learn in Ars Technica.1
The pandemic coronavirus' debut wrought universal havoc—not even seasonal flu viruses were spared. Amid travel restrictions, quarantines, closures, physical distancing, masking, enhanced hand washing, and disinfection, the 2020-2021 flu season was all but canceled. That meant not just an unprecedented global decrease in the number of people sick with the flu but also a dramatic collapse in the genetic diversity of circulating flu strains. Many subtypes of the virus all but vanished. But most notably, one entire lineage—one of only four flu groups targeted by seasonal influenza vaccines—went completely dark, seemingly extinct.
Researchers noted the absence last year as the flu was still struggling to recover from its pandemic knockout. But now, the flu has come roaring back and threatens to cause a particularly nasty season in the Northern Hemisphere. Still, the influenza B/Yamagata lineage remains missing, according to a study published this week in the journal Eurosurveillance. It has not been definitively detected since April 2020. And the question of whether it's truly gone extinct lingers.
We caught Covid this past March and the aftermath was enduring and brutal, but we’ve not had a cold or flu since 2019. That’s a ship we’d as soon not see, but tourists inevitably bring in all sorts of cold-weather crap. A half dozen if by sea, maybe one if by flight. Light the lamps, Revere, and keep your mask on.
Covid killing the flu is a good ship, setting aside the million-plus dead souls to date in the U.S. alone, whom so many of the living are are so eager to set aside.
Who was it said they view children as nothing but little disease vectors? (Not W.C. Fields.) Whoever it was seems to have called it.2
Epidemiologists warn that a bad winter cold and flu season could be around the corner, with many kids’ natural immunity weakened as a result of recent Covid-19 mitigation measures like masking and avoiding crowds. Covid-19 is also still very much in the mix.
Bad ship. Bad ship. Bad ship.
People have different ships. Inflation is a ship for some corporate honchos.3
THE CEO OF Iron Mountain Inc. told Wall Street analysts at a September 20 investor event that the high levels of inflation of the past several years had helped the company increase its margins — and that for that reason he had long been “doing my inflation dance praying for inflation.”
People have been arguing of late whether corporations have been using inflation to pad their profits, with a “profiteers are profiteering” side and an “of course not, they would never” side. This would seem to settle the dispute and, curiously, the vice-chair of the Fed also comes down on the profiteering side.
Lael Brainard, the vice chair of the Federal Reserve, did make reference to the issue of corporate price increases in a speech earlier this month. “Reductions in markups,” she said, could “make an important contribution to reduced pricing pressures.” She continued:
Overall retail margins — the difference between the price retailers charge for a good and the price retailers paid for that good — have risen significantly more than the average hourly wage that retailers pay workers to stock shelves and serve customers over the past year, suggesting that there may also be scope for reductions in retail margins. With gross retail margins amounting to about 30 percent of sales, a reduction in currently elevated margins could make an important contribution to reduced inflation pressures in consumer goods.
Iron Mountain isn’t a retail business, but guessing that their profit margin is outstripping any wage increases is probably safe. The article by Jon Schwarz, one of our long-time favorite writers, and youthful assassin Ken Klippenstein notes that the Fed officer suggests no remedies for the issue, and Fed chair Jerome Powell is full speed ahead on the tried and true “fuck labor let’s have a recession” scheme.
So we have two ships there: the inflation ship benefitting corporations, and the Fed ship about to grind workers into tasty sausage with its giant propellers.
Good ships. This surprised us. Researchers have found that onion extract in combination with the common and dirt cheap Type 2 diabetes medication Metformin dramatically lowers the blood sugar of mice. The duo seems to work best at a dosage of 400-600mg/kilogram of onion extract, which would be a shit-ton of onion extract for husky people if it’s shown to work in humans. No word on whether the control mice recoiled from the onion-ingesting test cases.4
In a similar vein (literally), scientists have discovered that the kind of fungi found in different types of cancer cells might further the development of a blood test which could screen for cancer based upon what kind of fungal DNA is found in the blood. 5
There has been very limited research until now on fungi in tumors, and scientists had assumed that its occurrence was rare. “We were surprised to find that it’s actually more common to find tumors with fungi than without,” said Dr. Ilana Livyatan of the Weizmann Institute of Science.
Her team created a groundbreaking “atlas” dedicated to this topic, and says it could be used to create new screening methods.
As DNA from fungi can be detected in blood, the scientists hope that blood analyses could one day be used by doctors to spot cancer.
One kind of fungus to detect your cancer and another to lift the subsequent depression.6
A very good ship: New British Prime Minister Liz Truss was meant to be the second coming of Margaret Thatcher but has shown herself to be less in the Iron Lady mould and more in the way of a foil replica.7 The Shropshire Star (“Shropshire” pronounced “Dave” in the English manner) reports.
Conservatives will attempt to shift the focus away from the economy following the humiliation of two U-turns on income tax cuts for the highest earners and the date of a new fiscal plan.
Keynote speeches at the Tory conference in Birmingham on Tuesday by Home Secretary Suella Braverman and Foreign Secretary James Cleverly will aim to set out the Government’s plans on immigration and commitment to support Ukraine.
Liz Truss will be keen to get the annual gathering back on track after she and Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng abandoned their plan to scrap the 45% rate for earnings over £150,000 in an astonishing U-turn to stave off a Tory revolt.
Imagine having a marginal tax rate of 45% to scrap! Would that we had one. Imagine a conservative revolt against plans to scrap it! Would that we could. Britons are still fucked, mind you, but at least for the moment slightly less so than they were before the weekend. This was a much more virulent assault on labor and other less than wealthy humans than even our Federal Reserve could dream up, barring a demonic possession by Paul Volker.
The downside is that Truss & Co. have so greatly boosted the electoral prospects of a Labour party the leaders of which aren’t all that fond of labor, and who now have less incentive than before to court them.
Our ship … we don’t know what it could be. 100 paid subscribers could be a ship. Not the big ship, though, not the life-altering one. (We distinguish between life-changing and life-altering. The latter suggests greater permanence to us.) 100 paid subscribers would be life-changing, but our brain could regress to its recent prolonged state of incapacity and chase them away.
But we wouldn’t turn it down. If you know anybody who might be interested in the newsletter, please feel absolutely free to share.
We assume ships have come in for some of our readers. Love, gratifying work, ships that perhaps had gone previously undreamed of. Want for nothing but a better world. Which, can I sell you a subscription to Jacobin?8 (We're not selling subscriptions to anything but us; only recommending.)
We’ve been remiss in not including Dissent among your socialist/leftist publication options. They've a whole menu of subscription plans.9
We’ve enjoyed “Cocoa Sugar,” a 2018 effort from Young Fathers, for some time now, and Sun Ra’s “Lanquidity” much longer than that. Last night “Lanquidity” played us all the way out. Fontaines D.C., who are not from D.C., if you’re wondering, and whom we may have mentioned before, helped wake us up with “A Hero’s Death.” They’re a punk-adjacent band, but “A Hero’s Death” is mellow. The The’s “Dust” is likewise on the mellow side, though a bit more melancholy. John Brown’s Body sees us through with “Kings and Queens.”
And with that, comrades, we’re outta here.