hedda_foil
hedda_foil's JournalWhy some experts recommend upgrading to N95 masks to help fight the delta variant
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/wellness/n95-mask-delta-variant-kn95/2021/07/23/ee849e6c-eafe-11eb-97a0-a09d10181e36_story.html
The debate over masks is heating up again, with increasing calls for all Americans, regardless of coronavirus vaccination status, to return to wearing face coverings in indoor public places to help thwart the spread of the highly contagious delta variant. But some experts say the recommendations should specify the kind of masks people should be using.
Delta is so contagious that when we talk about masks, I dont think we should just talk about masks, Scott Gottlieb, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said during a recent appearance on CBSs Face the Nation. I think we should be talking about high-quality masks, such as N95 respirators.
In an interview with The Washington Post, Monica Gandhi, a professor of medicine and an infectious-disease expert at the University of California at San Francisco, expressed a similar sentiment: We cant say were going back to masks without discussing type of mask.
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Not all masks are created equal
The efficacy of a mask is based on its material and fit. Medical-grade respirators, such as N95 masks, can provide greater protection from infectious coronavirus particles than surgical masks or cloth masks, said Linsey Marr, an aerosol expert at Virginia Tech who studies airborne virus transmission. And because the delta variant is much more easily transmissible than previously circulating strains of the coronavirus, we really need highly protective masks along with everything else, Marr said. Where a simple cloth mask was helpful before, its not helpful enough now, particularly for people who remain unvaccinated.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/wellness/n95-mask-delta-variant-kn95/2021/07/23/ee849e6c-eafe-11eb-97a0-a09d10181e36_story.html
Why Capitalism Didn't Free Americans -- It Exploited Them
https://medium.com/@umairh/why-capitalism-didnt-free-americans-it-exploited-them/
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It seems to me that Americans are becoming some of the least free people in the world. That will sound like a contentious, bewildering statement to many, especially Americans, so lets examine it. Nobody nobody else in rich countries is trapped in barbaric decisions that essentially boil down to your money or your life, your life savings or your health, chemotherapy or little Johnnys college fund. And yet its also the case that even many people in poorer countries, by now, dont live perpetually hounded by debts theyll struggle with their whole lives long, or having their kids shot at schools, or having to pay the equivalent of a middle-class career just to educate a child, and so on the majority being poor in a poor society is a natural limitation, but the majority being poor in a rich one can only really be the outcome of socially normalized and culturally sanctioned mass exploitation.
Americans are free, largely, to choose between different flavours of capitalist exploitation this form of poverty, that form of isolation, that kind of fear and anxiety. But they cannot choose, very much, lives free of those things to begin with. Which one is genuine freedom? Theyre caught, like prey, in between capitalisms pincers because it pays them barely enough to subsist as producers, yet demands more from them as consumers, as borrowers, every year and the result is a new kind of deprivation, poverty in a rich country, powerlessness in a powerful country, a wealthy land of the broke and hopeless. Hence, the majority of Americans, 80%, now live at the edge, perpetually no matter what they do, how much they earn, however much they try to save, what they accomplish. But living at the edge of ruin every day of your life, no matter what you do, isnt freedom. Its something closer to peasantry.
So what is freedom? Thats the nub of the question. Now, American thought, which is a feeble and barely existent thing to begin with, frames freedom around the idea of coercion. Coercion is a childs idea or a patriarchs idea of freedom: hey, bro, nobodys holding a gun to your head! Ah, but does someone have to hold a gun to your head to shrink away your freedom? Or can they do it without a gun? With threats, like taking away your means of making a living, or saving for the future, or obtaining medicine, that are every bit as powerful as a bullet? If they can, then coercion is a meaningless notion, and so a society built atop such a childish idea will never be a free one.
And yet we dont have to think much further than a bully to see that a lack coercion isnt a valid litmus test of freedom: I dont need a gun to intimidate, bully, and make you do my bidding, if I can take away your livelihood, shelter, safety, make you watch your kids starve and your spouse suffer an illness. If I control your subsistence, in other wordsand that way have power over your very survival I will never a gun in the first place. That is why the American idea of freedom has failed hence, Americans live something suspiciously like exploited neo-peasants, bullied by a new class of capitalist robber barons, and all that is said to be all that freedom is, the chance to choose between forms of exploitation . But no one in their right mind should accept such a upside-down definition of freedom, which is an abusers one to begin with, calling cruelty kindness.
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American society is built upon an omnipresent, relentless, and constant form of compulsion the loss of ones subsistence. Underneath all the niceties and myths about America as the land of the free, there is the perpetual, looming threat of true disaster and catastrophe: that one might no longer be able to put bread on the table, afford medicine, have shelter, and so on. In short, American life is governed by the threat that one might lose the most basic elements of human subsistence altogether. And that threat never really wavers, or shrinks, much less vanishes. If anything, it seems to grow. American life is based upon society, culture, and the economy constantly threatening the survival of that very life.
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Freedom!! Today is two weeks since my second Pfizer shot!
Gonna kick up my heels and go see the grands. I may even get REALLY get adventurous and visit the grocery store.
OMG, now they're replaying the angry remarks of Dems that don't feature "fight."
They're just filling the time they can't fill with anything concrete.
My daughter's stimulus check was scheduled to be mailed 1/6. Still not delivered. Anyone else?
Mine was deposited in my checking account but my daughter, who's been staying with me since March, hasn't received her check. The IRS site says it was supposed to be mailed on January 6. We're in the Chicago burbs. Has this been happening to others here? She's getting worried.
Thanks
Hedda
Donald Trump tells all. Must see!
Why didn't Hillary's team file for recounts in MI, WI and PA in 2016?
DU would have been all over that at the time but the site was down for nearly 3 weeks. The margins in those states was razor thin. Why did they just let the pig claim them all.
Kristen Welker deserves great credit.
He's definitely tripping on dex The man who normally can't walk up stairs -- did!
2 flights of stairs no less. He's flying high. I'm looking forward to the crash when it's withdrawn and he's intubated.
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