Spooky

News blues…

In April 2020, two studies on Covid-19 came out identifying obesity as a significant risk factor for serious illness and death. Doctors were scrambling to understand why coronavirus gave some people mild symptoms and left others so sick they were gasping for air.

[Many countries are ramping up action] as officials begin to recognize diet-related diseases such as obesity, hypertension and diabetes have made their citizens much more vulnerable during the pandemic. Some states in Mexico recently went as far as banning junk food sales to children— on top of the country’s existing taxes on sugary drinks and fast food. Chile was already deep in its own crackdown on unhealthy products, having imposed the first mandatory, national warning labels for foods with high levels of salt, sugar and fat along with a ban on marketing such foods to kids.
[In the US] there has been no such wake-up call about the link between diet-related diseases and the pandemic. There is no national strategy. There is no systemswide approach, even as researchers increasingly recognize that obesity is a disease that is driven not by lack of willpower, but a modern society and food system that’s almost perfectly designed to encourage the overeating of empty calories, along with more stress, less sleep and less daily exercise, setting millions on a path to poor health outcomes that is extremely difficult to break from.
Read “Diet-related diseases pose a major risk for Covid-19. But the U.S. overlooks them” >> 

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COVID-19 still rages, but some US states reject federal funds to help. As the resurgent COVID-19 pandemic burns through the rural U.S. state of Idaho, health officials say they don't have enough tests to track the disease or sufficient medical workers to help the sick. 

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The Lincoln Project: Anti-American  (1:10 mins)

Healthy planet, anyone?

Will COP cop to climate-related challenges? Or will it be just more blah, blah, blah?  …

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There Is No Reason To Trust Brazil’s Climate, Deforestation Pledges 

The U.S. has held on-again, off-again talks with [Brazil’s] Bolsonaro government over climate and deforestation since the beginning of the Biden administration, which sees its attempts to bring Brazil back to the table on environmental concerns as a centerpiece of its efforts to reestablish the United States’ own leadership role in global climate efforts.
But Brazil’s “new” pledges are far less ambitious than they seem at first glance, experts say.
The emissions goal is “just a correction” to a previous policy that far-right President Jair Bolsonaro’s government outlined in December, said Marcio Astrini, the executive secretary of São Paulo-based Climate Observatory.
The 2020 target would’ve allowed Brazil to emit 400 million additional tons of carbon than it would have under pledges the country made in 2015. The new pledge merely puts Brazil back on the same path it had already plotted six years ago, when then-President Dilma Rousseff signed the country onto the Paris Climate agreement.
“They just aligned the numbers to have the same emissions pledges for 2030 that the country already had in 2015,” Astrini said. The Bolsonaro government, he added, is “running to the past while the world is no longer the same, the climate emergency has [worsened] and countries are being called to look to the future.”
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There is little, if any, reason to trust that the Bolsonaro administration is serious about curbing greenhouse gas emissions or stopping the razing of the Amazon, the world’s largest rainforest. Much like former President Donald Trump, Bolsonaro has turned his nation into a global pariah on climate issues. He didn’t even show up for COP26 in Glasgow.
Read the article  >>

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

As mentioned in an earlier post - Alaska has high rates of vocal anti-vaxers… and high rates of Covid-19 infections - among the highest rates in the US.
A family member who lives in Anchorage – fully vaccinated with three doses and masked when in public – reports Sunday night’s neighborhood Halloween party was hosted by a man infected with Covid-19. He was inside the house while party goers cavorted outside… and the party was well attended.

Babes in the woods?

The following Covid numbers compare today with the numbers 7 weeks ago, Week 61, Day 427, on the eve of my departure from South Africa - after an unplanned stay of 1.5 years. Still grim.

Worldwide (Map)  

July 22, 2021: 191,945,000 confirmed infections; 4,126,300 deaths
May 27, 2021: 168,418,000 confirmed infections; 3,499,000 deaths
Tracker for worldwide vaccination rate >> 

US (Map) 
July 22, 2021: 34,226,300 confirmed infections; 609,900 deaths
May 27, 2021: 33,190,300 confirmed infections; 592,000,000 deaths

SA (Tracker) 
July 22, 2021: 2,327,475 confirmed infections; 68,200 deaths
May 27, 2021: xx ,645,600 confirmed infections; 56,100 deaths

News blues

New study presents most comprehensive picture yet of true toll of pandemic in India, finding the true COVID death toll is likely in the millions .
Read in The Guardian >> 

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An unbelievably large segment of Americans refuse to accept a free, life- and community-saving vaccine. Meanwhile, millions of people around the world would love, love, love as easy access to a vaccine that so many Americans eschew.
Again, Americans display to the world their myopic, self-centered and self-absorbed, navel-gazing worldview.
Science, medicine, and, yes, growing experience show that Covid-19 breakthrough infections do happen, are preventable, but that it's going to take a big effort to stop them. 

Question is, how? 

As long as charlatans masquerade as news journalists on Fox and Republican politicians promote distrust about the vaccine, all people, Americans foremost, but all people across the world, are exposed to the high likelihood of more virulent variants in the future.
Read more >> 

America’s vaccination rates have fallen off a cliff, and nothing seems to help. 

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The Lincoln Project Fox is killing us  (0:57 mins).

Healthy planet, anyone?

The heatwave in one of the world’s coldest regions has sparked forest fires and threatened the Siberian city of Yakutsk with an “airpocalypse” of thick toxic smoke, atmospheric monitoring services have reported.
High levels of particulate matter and possibly also chemicals including ozone, benzene and hydrogen cyanide are thought likely to make this one of the world’s worst ever air pollution events.
Local authorities have warned the 320,000 residents to stay indoors to avoid choking fumes from the blazes, which are on course to break last year’s record.

Read more >> 

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

It’s not easy, in California, to take a page from Italy’s playbook and siesta during the hottest hours of the day. Here on the river, the hottest hours of the day are about noon to 6pm. That’s most of the day. I can't siesta for most of the day: too depressing.
Swimming cools things down. So does regularly wetting my t-shirt or tank top. In the end though, it’s a losing game: small boat, hot sun, drought, and, oh yes, runaway climate change with no constructive response by politicians and destructive response by corporate apparatchiks.

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One thing for certain: help is hard to find. While I was still in South Africa and since I’ve returned, I’ve tried to find a carpenter-type handyman-type to fix the bathroom floor in my apartment that the last tenant destroyed. No dice. People advertise their availability, sometimes even makes appointment to evaluate the work, then simply never show. Turns out this is a feature, not a bug, of carpenter- and handyman-types all over the planet. Is that called a “lifestyle”?
Similar trend at the marina. Lots of talk, no follow through. I did, however, finally get someone stronger than me to lift the too-heavy-for-me small 15 hp outboard motor onto my Sea Eagle inflatable. Took me weeks to get to this point. Now I’m “girding my loins” to install the sun canopy and then start the thing – with a pull rope.
Sometimes I wonder what the *** I’m doing, trying to live a quiet life on an elderly houseboat. I’d say I’m a babe in the woods, but I’m not a babe. More like, senior citizen in the woods or bright-eyed senior citizen in a circus.

Ponderings

News blues

Delta variant now has been found in up to 98 countries and it’s spread hobbles global efforts to lift COVID-19 restrictions. Vaccines that reduce hospitalizations and deaths are tempering economic concerns — but not in poorer, less-inoculated countries. 

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Health service buckling as third coronavirus wave fueled by Delta variant sweeps across South Africa. 
In Iran, Covid-19 has killed more than 84,000 people out of over 3.2 million infections. These figures, according to authorities, do not account for all cases.

Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, has expressed fears that Iran will be hit by a new wave of Covid-19 due to an outbreak of the Delta variant in the Middle East’s hardest-hit country.
“It is feared that we are on the way to a fifth wave throughout the country,” Rouhani told a meeting of Iran’s anti-virus taskforce, warning the public to be careful as the Delta variant had entered the country from the south and south-east.

Read more >> 

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A month ago, even as President Biden laid out a goal to vaccinate 70% of American adults by today, Independence Day,  he conceded the U.S. would need to overcome “doubters” and laziness to do it. “This is your choice … It’s life and death.”
That goal has yet materialize – among humans, that is.
Zoo animals, however, are a different story.

Tigers Ginger and Molly were the first two animals at the Oakland Zoo to get the vaccine this week, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Saturday. The doses were donated and developed by veterinary pharmaceutical company Zoetis in New Jersey.

Healthy planet, anyone?

ExxonMobil, cont’d…

0ver the past decade, Exxon Mobil Corp. ― once the chief funder of think tanks that sowed lies about how burning fossil fuels affects the planet’s temperature  ― abandoned its denial of climate change and embraced economists’ favored solution: putting a tax on carbon emissions.
But on Wednesday, a veteran lobbyist at the nation’s largest oil producer was secretly recorded on video seemingly confirming what many environmentalists had long suspected ― that Exxon Mobil believes a carbon tax is politically impossible, and thus has supported it as a ploy to prevent lawmakers from enacting more popular climate policies.

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New oilfield in African wilderness threatens lives of 130,000 elephants 

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Yellowstone’s most famous geyser could shut down, with huge ramifications If temperatures rise 10F by the century’s end as projected, Old Faithful could stop erupting, and the snowpack that feeds rivers throughout the west may disappear.

Read more in The Guardian >>  

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

Yesterday was the first day, since I returned to California last month, that wispy clouds overhead softened relentless heat. A perfect day on the Delta. Friends visited to celebrate Independence Day – one day early to avoid crowded waterways – with traditional BBQ/”braai” and untraditional cuisine: roasted veggies and corn/”mealies”, lamb, couscous … and, naturally, dairy-free ice-cream. Plus, swimming. And friendship. Perfect.
Keeping alive the tradition of non-traditional on this boat, today I intend to apply my new battery-operated hand saw to the half-sheet of plywood recently purchased from the Eco-Center (specializing in good-value-for-money recycled materials) and create a rolling storage shelf. And swim.

An observation about my “internal process”: I grew up in what family psychologists would call “a non-nurturing environment.”
Unconsciously – I was nothing if not unconscious – holding that that non-nurturing environment would not sully my chosen life path of discovery, I elbowed my way with bravado through situations where caution might have been wiser. 

Wiser with age and burdened by guilt, these days I’m more cautious. 

Perhaps over-cautious? Yesterday, my anxiety peaked. First, I’d forgotten how to light gas cookers; experimenting with potentially explosive gas is anxiety-provoking. Then I abandoned my intention of installing onto the transom of the Sea Eagle inflatable, the electrical trolling motor and battery. I’d purchased both before the pandemic – 2 years ago – and never used them. Yesterday, fear of dropping either or both into the river predominated. Perhaps smart to wait, it’s also disappointing. Back in the day, heedless youth barging through barriers ignored any anxiety and caution so heedful senior years acknowledging both is a sign of developing a healthier psyche. It is also disorienting… which creates further anxiety.
The human. A bundle of contradictions.
I ponder, therefore I seek balance?
The good news? Collective action with friends helping to figure out the gas cookers succeeded in producing a delicious meal… while enjoying a beautiful river, amazing bird life, and the luxury of friendship.
Life is good – if one allows it….