Varia Bortsova, Founder of Soviet Visuals - The New York Times
Stephan: From 1981 until 2003 I and a small group of other Americans did everything we could to help Russia become a democracy. The rise of Putin and Russia's reversion to authoritarianism was one of the most tragic things I have ever witnessed. I say this to give context to why I selected this essay by a Russian woman. Watching the culmination of the Putin era revert to a form of Nazis imperialism is the predictable end of Putin's reign, but no less tragic for all of that. What does the future hold for Russia and the Russian people? I hope Varia Bortsova is correct in her assessment.
Credit: Hanna Barczyk
When the first McDonald’s restaurant appeared in the Soviet Union in 1990, my parents bundled my 9-month-old sister up and waited in line for hours in the brisk Russian winter so that they could get their first taste of a Big Mac and those famed French fries. The line snaked all around Moscow’s iconic Pushkin Square: Reports say that 30,000 people showed up on opening day alone.
It was a very exciting moment, my parents tell me: the first taste of liberty, a glimpse of what eating out could be like beyond the Iron Curtain, a symbol of bigger change to come.
Less than two years later, the U.S.S.R. ceased to exist, opening the door to all kinds of democratic freedoms. The Russia I grew up in came with dubbed Disney cartoons and Argentine soap operas. Everyone suddenly had a crush on Leonardo DiCaprio. My mom’s new eye-shadow palette encompassed every shade of neon. I went to concerts, bought posters and cassette tapes and, unlike my parents, did not have to wear […]
Stephan: Not much has been said about Chernobyl, now under Russian control, but I saw this report and realized that this may be a first account describing what could become a vast disaster. If radioactivity is released for some reason at the damaged nuclear plant the winds could blow lethal radioactivity over Russia and other countries endangering until millions.
An operator’s arm-chair covered with plastic sits in an empty control room of the 3rd reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear plant, in Chernobyl, Ukraine, on April 20, 2018. Credit: Efrem Lukatsky / Associated Press
Ukraine’s parliament said in a statement Monday that satellite imagery had revealed at least seven fires in the forested area around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. These fires are within 6.2 miles (10 kilometers) of the defunct plant itself, making them particularly “dangerous,” according to the statement. The parliament said Ukraine firefighters have been unable to beat back the blazes due to Russian presence in the region.
The parliamentary statement blamed Russian shelling as a likely cause of the fires’ outbreak. Russian forces moved into the region around the power plant in early March and have occupied it since, forcing some staff to do their jobs for three weeks at gunpoint as hostages and stoking fears that important safety protocols will be neglected. On Wednesday, the Ukrainian government said that Russian forces had destroyed a lab at the site dedicated to monitoring radioactive waste.
Stephan: The general gestalt seems to be we are past Covid. We are not. One thousand people a day, mostly the unvaccinated, are still dying each day, and the new study reported in this article suggests there may be long-term issues. So I would say we are far from out of the Covid pandemic.
Citation: The two new studies were published in the journal Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience (1, 2).
The research affirms objective and measurable cognitive differences can be found between long COVID patients and those with no history of infection Credit: Depositphotos
“Long COVID has received very little attention politically or medically,” said Lucy Cheke, senior author on the new studies. “It urgently needs to be taken more seriously, and cognitive issues are an important part of this. When politicians talk about ‘Living with COVID’ – that is, unmitigated infection, this is something they ignore.”
The new findings come from an ongoing project called The COVID and Cognition Study (COVCOG). The study recruited nearly 200 COVID-19 patients across late 2020/early 2021 and around the same amount of demographically matched uninfected controls. The goal was to “map the terrain” of cognition in post-acute COVID-19.
Around two-thirds of the COVID-19 cohort experienced symptoms of long COVID, defined as a symptom lasting longer than 12 weeks beyond initial date of diagnosis. Among those experiencing long COVID the new research found 78 percent had difficulty concentrating, 69 percent suffered brain fog, 68 percent reported forgetfulness and around 40 percent […]
Stephan: It is becoming clearer week by week that the world simply is not taking climate change seriously enough. THe one good thing, if I can call it that, to come out of the Ukraine war is that it will stimulate countries to speed up the transition out of the carbon power era. But as matters stand it looks like millions of people are going to suffer because this change is not being faced as it should be.
“There are no exceptions; all nations need to begin a rapid and just phaseout of existing production,” declares a new report. Credit: Shutterstock
Dire new research published Tuesday estimates that rich countries must end oil and gas production entirely by 2034 to give the world a 50% chance of limiting warming to 1.5°C by the close of the century—the Paris accord’s most ambitious climate target.
Assembled by experts at the United Kingdom-based Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, the report finds that “immediate and deep cuts in the production of all fossil fuels” are needed worldwide to avert the worst of the ongoing climate emergency.
“Oil and gas boosters claim more fossil fuels are the answer, but nothing could be further from the truth.”
“There are no exceptions; all nations need to begin a rapid and just phaseout of existing production,” the analysis states. “There is no capacity in the carbon budget for opening up new production facilities of any kind, whether coal mines, oil wells, or gas terminals. A transition based on principles of equity requires wealthy, high-emitting nations […]
Stephan: For the past 10 years I have been warning that rural manifestations of the American illness profit system are collapsing. (See SR archives) Covid has now brought that into clearer focus than ever before. To a point, as this article describes, that I don't know how much clearer it could be made. Particularly in rural Red states if you live in one of those regions you are getting not just second rate, but 37th rate healthcare. We need to restructure medicine in this country to universal birthright single-payer healthcare so that no matter where you live you can get comparable care, just as is the case in Canada and the rest of the developed democratic world.
A graveyard outside the shuttered Haywood County Community Hospital in Brownsville, Tenn. Credit: Rory Doyle
By the time Covid-19 hit Haywood County, it was too late to prepare.
The rural county in the Tennessee delta, near the Mississippi River, had its health care system ground down in the years leading up to the pandemic: Ever since the 84-year-old Haywood County Community Hospital closed its doors in 2014, the numbers of doctors and other health care professionals dwindled. Residents who once were on a first-name basis with their care professionals were left to book appointments at facilities miles from where they’d raised their families and grown older.
Haywood County — with its flat land and fertile soil, generations of proud farmers but low per capita income of about $22,000 — is something of a poster child for rural America. It’s also a prime example of the decline of rural health care — and how rural areas are suffering disproportionately in the worst public health crisis in a century.
Some of the biggest disparities in the Covid-19 crisis aren’t just among […]
