Following agriculture, infection, dialectical biology, and the practice of science. Author, "Big Farms Make Big Flu" and "The Fault in Our SARS"
Joined September 2010
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Dad here. Thirteen years later and the kid is graduating. Still playing music. Any chance for a quick note of encouragement, @Johnny_Marr? No worries if no. Always big fans here. :)
While Gonsalves skewers universities providing resources and venues to well-funded right-wing COVID denialists and Walker debunks Florida's bogus vaccine recommendations, my piece addresses the Biden end of the broken COVID response. truthout.org/articles/florid… 8/8
Consider it a companion piece to Gregg Gonsalves's latest in The Nation and Chris Walker's note in Truthout. thenation.com/article/societ… 7/
"[Establishment epidemiologists] track disease only up to the point the political class can bear, helping bury the problem when it’s inconvenient." 6/
"In actuality, the time series of COVID outbreaks stateside in no way represents [what Hanage suggests is] the kind of evolutionarily predictable seasonal variants we find in endemic influenza... 5/
"The Times also interviewed epidemiologist Bill Hanage to the effect scientists were themselves confused and that allowed him the freedom of an argument by ex falso quodlibet, a principle from which any proposition can be derived from a contradiction... 4/
"But such a gesture at the gap in reality that the newspaper itself helped condition offers the ruling class that effectively ended the COVID campaign permission to continue to ignore the duly noted failure... 3/
"Noting that recent COVID deaths in the U.S. were double those of last spring, this Times piece from August took a meta view of the failure to see, observing that we no longer observe: “We Have Largely Moved on From Covid, but Covid Isn’t Done With Us”... 2/
Here's my second piece of the weekend. It's a #COVID update for @truthout that unpacks the cycle of public manipulation in which many of our more established epidemiologists are partaking.
truthout.org/articles/expert… 1/
"One could model the relationship between the speed of the onset of the systemic chaos that punctuates [the cycle of] accumulation's end and the depth to which AI is adapted whatever its proximate uses, fintech scavenging, or existential damage to our ecology and society. 4/4
"It's an old story. The Luddites understood it well. They didn't object to technology. They objected to the way communal decision-making was folded away into the logic of a sociophysical object the capitalist alone controlled... 3/
"That's perhaps why the focus on AI-ing the shambles of the public commons and infrastructure beyond the general population's capacity to observe. Even as AI proponents–like their public health counterparts–shamelessly name the true nature of the damage... 2/
But it depended place-to-place. A geographically weighted regression showed such protection differed in direction, magnitude, and variable combination across clusters of 50-km tiles. 4/4
Our follow-up paper mapped how such modes of ag production helped set county COVID incidence the first year of the pandemic. Our general model showed the more regenerative counties less likely to be badly hit. mdpi.com/2220-9964/12/5/195 3/
We mapped a continuum in ag production across all 1055 Midwest counties based on a combo of variables we developed with farmers. We also mapped 9 clusters of food production across the region. Clearly much more going on than "regenerative" in this bin and "conventional" there. 2/
The editors of "Land" awarded our Midwest Healthy Ag team first prize for Best 2022 Paper. mdpi.com/2073-445X/11/3/437 @kinparaluchav 1/n
"Unpacking how agribusiness imprints upon the ontologies we all still subscribe to will take the kind of time and effort that went into new forms of agriculture to begin with. When and where does the agricultural object of the farmer turn back into a subject?" 8/8
"You see it there, you’re captured by it, but you can’t step into it. There is no “the kid stays in the picture”. 7/
"But I’d like to argue here that even upon such tweaks, farmers are scrambling for suitcases of money that exist only in productivity logics from which they’ve been excluded as much as any audience member from a movie. 6/