Sunday, September 1, 2024

Long Covid is a $16T problem already

We can’t keep ignoring Long Covid & ME/CFS. Well, maybe we can, but the results will be catastrophic. 

Want to know when my disability ramped up? Look at the frequency of my blog posts over time. I still have a file full of ideas for posts from back then. I ran out of energy for blogs/thought experiments. Then I ran out of energy for work. Writing & editing the last two entries knocked me out for a week, with residual effects even now.

I don’t wish this reduced life on anyone.  It’s better than the alternative, because I still have survival money & good days. (If I run low on/out of that I have options for help, but I lose independence. Yes, it’s that bad.) For a problem that feels fixable. I feel like I should be able to recover from whatever is wrong.

So if your health seems on a slippery slope down, barring incidents or accidents, chances are high you’re dealing with the the post acute effects of a virus, or the damage it caused or is causing, or your body’s immune response to the nasty ๐Ÿฆ . We’re slow off the mark in dealing with this despite lessons from the AIDS epidemic, because medical systems aren’t funded or designed around chronically ill patients that aren’t imminently fatal, and like to tell people to fix health issues with exercise. But if you get post exertional malaise, exercise can worsen baseline function temporarily or forever. If you don’t get help from doctors, you stop asking them for help. (Hint for the docs - low exercise levels correlate to bad outcomes *because* unwell people can’t exercise, not the reverse. Performing the activities of wellness doesn’t make one well.) Once “eat right & exercise” has done what it can, that’s when we see a doctor & we need medical interventions, not cliches.

Here are some first round Long Covid interventions. Some are repurposed antivirals from AIDS treatments, some are otc supplements. I started taking atorvastatin today. (I hear statins seem helpful for LC). 

I have been trying grape seed extract (super grapes ‘gummy’ heart chews). They cause, uh, loose stools. Not “explosively ๐Ÿ’ฉ for 6 hours” like I get with metformin*, but a little concerning. Bodies dump a ton of water into our bowels to flush out nasty things, but I don’t know if the nasty thing getting flushed is the met/GSE (from a bad rxn) or the stuff those meds are fighting off (a good indication of effectiveness.) 

 "The urgent need for long covid meds", linked so I can find it again.

a place to mention more of my metabolic med side effects 

Metformin helps clear my brain fog from ultra high insulin levels, but shreds my guts. I can’t physically take it more than 2 weeks at the lowest dose. I gain weight every time I take it because my brain interprets all pain signals from my stomach from level 1-8 as “hungry”. I put up signs saying “you’re not hungry, it’s metformin” but they don’t help enough. When it hits level 9, I get “pain/maybe hungry”. Level 10 is Pain, Not Hungry, ๐Ÿคฎ now.  Than I can’t eat for several days and am in pain. That isn’t great. Let’s try something else, right? But there are surprisingly few options to treat high insulin if your glucose is still in control, which mine is. With my intermittent metformin plan, my A1C went from 5.8 to [5.3-5.6], “ok” is <5.5.

I tried Victoza, but that took my sleep from 9-12 hours/day to 14-18 hours per day (just a mild insulin coma). So I put off trying the not totally dissimilar Ozempic, but I’m falling apart metabolically - all that insulin is shoving fat into my organs like it’s packing a carry on & can’t afford checked luggage. The ozempic does cause me to fall asleep after eating. After getting the 4-hour postprandial coma-naps down to 2-3/month, I was getting at least 2-3/week, to every day but for shorter durations. Having already started trying “intermittent fasting” (stuffing all food consumption for the day into fewer hours,) since years of small frequent snacks/meals hasn’t helped me, I could reduce these unplanned naps by eating less often. My hope was that if Ozempic started fixing my metabolism, the insulin spikes would become lower as they became less necessary. This improvement seems to be happening. (0.25mg every week, or every other week if I forget or need to make sure I stay awake for a crucial appointment.)

So far with Ozempic: I don’t get constant hunger signals, like I did with metformin, & actually feel satisfied after eating a snack or meal. My eye color had started fading. It’s back to being dark & vibrant after a couple weeks. (Maybe also related to getting iron infusions, but iirc it tracked more to Ozempic.) Also, my buffalo hump has gone from being a solid lump of semi-rigid fat to a thinner layer of flexible fat similar to most other areas on my body. It no longer moves as a unit. And I seem to have less post prandial sleeping unless I overdo things like I did with the last entry & the update to the previous one. That KOed me pretty hard.

I mention the buffalo hump, particularly, because that’s one of my “affects appearance/comfort/quality of life but probably doesn’t immediately need attention like brain fog, PEM, non-24, systemic tendinitis & fasciitis, excessive fatigue, coma-naps, pain, & restless leg (& more!)” symptoms. The hump is one of the key side effects that caused people to stop taking one of the earlier AIDS treatments. So it’s not a catastrophic symptom in and of itself, but people have ***risked dying of AIDS complications*** rather that put up with their body having that shape. Which makes me feel great that no one offered any solutions… “It’s genetic” was the best I got. And a YouTube video of upper back strengthening exercises akin to pulsing, appropriately, YMCA arm positions. I don’t know if my spine will straighten up any with it gone, & kind of don’t care as I’m still tall & the bulk is gone. But it’s definitely connected to glucose &/or other metabolic processes, and it went away in less than a month on the lowest dose, not after any amount of physical activity or lack thereof.  

I spend most of my time being horizontal these days. I can still stand and move around on demand if I’m not hard asleep, but I’m always, always looking for somewhere to sit or lay down. It limits my doing anything out of the house. It makes doing things in/to the house tricky. But it’s what I have.  If I could recover more functionality, back to being able to do road trips, or walk around an outdoor festival without feeling doomed, life would improve. But for now, I’ve lost maybe half the metformin weight, my eyes aren’t fading and the hump is, so I’ll take it. 

And hope that something better [is made to] come along.


Thursday, August 22, 2024

Course Correcting, my Monster Wishlist for MVP Harris

 For MVP Kamala Harris. 

I love seeing you and Walz out being joyful. It’s absolutely the right way to go. 

I’d feel better if you could move in public more safely. Please renew efforts to stop the spread of COVID, including tracking, mandatory testing for hospital inpatients at start/end of stay, routine staff testing, and more importantly promote masks, mask alternatives, and filtration of indoor air, with priority to public schools. 

Please also fund and fast track Long Covid research and treatments, excluding testing exercise as a treatment. (Testing to see if treatments help exercise tolerance is fine. Testing to see if exercise helps recovery is not. It has failed every single time for the last 40 years of “research” done on patients with ME/CFS characterized by Post Exertional Malaise. It has confirmed that adding exercise actually damages bodies and minds to the point where recovery is less possible.) People don’t become sick because they’re sedentary. People become sedentary because they’re sick. Medical dogma has this backwards. Making sick people perform wellness doesn’t create well people. Preventing preventable diseases, curing curable ills & mitigating disabilities with gladly provided assistance creates maximally well people. 

Wars are bad for people, the environment, and economies. I wish we’d stop saying that WWII kickstarted US power/wealth when the New Deal (even if applied unequally), social safety nets, putting limits on banks & Robber Barons’ wealth (Billionaires in today’s parlance), investment in infrastructure, and being half a world away from most bombing did it. This shouldn’t need to be said, but help Ukraine fight off Putin & help Palestinians survive. Everyone knows that we, the US,  can stop Israel’s genocide of Gaza. We need to stop it. The best time would have been Oct 9th. The next best time is now. Ceasefire immediately. 

I’m tired of seeing titans of American influence and industry being strip mined for short term shareholder profits. I’m tired of people being bankrupted for education and illness or disability. I’m tired of watching the world burn, and not just kicking the can down the road on how to stop it, but denying the world is on fire at all or denying that we should stop deliberately burning it. I’m tired of re-fighting for the human rights advances of 1865 (all people are people, with rights to bodily autonomy), 1919 (yes, even women), 1968 (yes, even the Black babies), 1973 (yes, even people pregnant with babies), 2010, (yes, even the LGBTQ soldiers, 2015, (yes, even the non-soldier LGBTQ people). 

Every moment we spend re-fighting (needless) fights for bodily autonomy (as they should long since be settled law) is a moment we aren’t planning for our futures. Every dollar spent fighting because we’re allowing Fox News et al to spew their poison for free, is a dollar we’re not spending on the health and education of the nation. Every moment we make catastrophic climate decisions so we can keep oil money propping up the dollar as the world’s reserve currency is a moment we’re stealing from our kids’ futures. 

Progress towards more rights for more people is always acceptable. Yet 1 in 6 kids is food insecure here. We imprison more people by % than any other country. We still haven’t closed out GitMo prisons and the Bush/Cheney/Loo torture doctrine. In addition to being gross, unprofessional, and unproductive, it’s all *embarrassing*. As annoying as it is to keep fighting to insist that marginalized folks deserve equal rights, up until recently, we were gaining. I keep hoping the recent backsliding is an ‘extinction burst’, a last gasp of a failed regime before we step into the future and give equality the old college try. When you win, let’s stop the pathetic rumblings of white supremacy by codifying rights, for real this time (without the prison loophole for slavery) try a Green New Deal, with a little nuclear power, as a treat, and push for a future with clean air, a cleaner climate, and space to have hobbies that don’t have to be monetized for survival. 

The Dem pattern is to get enough people elected to enact an agenda, then let [Harry Reid, Manchin & Sinema] turn coat and stop most Dem progressive agendas, even the too-far-right ones. We can’t keep doing that. We must solidify gains. You & Walz and the next generation of Democratic leaders need to figure out how, after you figure out how to hold the White House when (๐Ÿคž๐Ÿฝ) you win.

My student loans have been paid back for years, but aside from increasing salaries ($25 min wage, including waitstaff & farmhands), cutting private equity out of landlording, curbing the price of groceries, a modest UBI for all resident adults ($3000/month on top of existing social services, for a start), taxing passive income & finance more heavily, and don’t forget stopping both Covid & fixing Long Covid, the single biggest boost for the economy would be cancelling all student loans & making public college & trade schools (including nursing & cosmetology) free for students, well funded by us. 

Millennials control barely 5% of the wealth of the nation. At their age, Boomers controlled over 25% of US wealth. What worked for Boomers not only won’t, but can’t work now, until we divest from preying on schools & students. Most economic models don’t seem to factor in the absolute disaster of sending our best and brightest into young adulthood already saddled with the equivalent of a mortgage. (Certification creep can be discussed later.) It’s both scary and baffling to see pundits & economists talk about the younger generations delaying or missing major adult milestones without ever connecting the dots to predatory student loans. Every $1  spent on education returns about $8 to the economy. It’s worth investing public money in education at all levels.

Our economy would TAKE OFF if all student loans were just canceled tomorrow. Add in a UBI kicker (Every $1 sent to someone in poverty returns more than $1 to the economy. Every $1 given to the investor class decreases that dollar’s value in the economy more than 10%. It’s part of why & how our industries chasing shareholder profits are helping Long Covid in collapsing the economy. We should still send the UBI to everyone, no means testing, no purity testing, yes even addicts, layabouts, and felons, because it’s cheaper and more effective that way.) and with a lot more of your contagious joy and we’d be back to being unstoppable without having to disappear protester leaders into cop cities (which absolutely will happen if we don’t stop those abominations) or without needing to let Israeli soldiers keep sniping Doctors, Aid Workers, Professors, Press, and, I cannot stress this enough, Toddlers. They’re sniping toddlers on our watch. Please make them stop. 

We’ll be able to stand behind you when we can all afford a safe place to stay and food for the foreseeable future. Joy is easier when community, including government, works for the people, all the people, yes, even those people.

I haven’t even hit needing to stop the “War on Drugs”, a mindset that needs rethinking. Prohibition is more dangerous than regulated supply. Criminalizing addiction prevents rehab. We can be smarter and kinder about how we regulate and educate about currently illicit drugs. We can let people in prison for drug charges out. We can live with pot (& probably coke) much more safely and productively than we can live with Covid. 

I know this is too long. The world is in chaos with not enough people putting forth vision for a better future. You have a slog and a half in front of you. Give me, give us, the promise of a better, more joyful tomorrow by course correcting. Please.

Monday, July 29, 2024

I Have a Great! Hypothesis (or two)

The Great Lakes Are Weird, geologically speaking. 

I haven’t really heard a great explanation for why they exist as they do, and I’ve been paying attention for one since 6th grade. That’s when I learned about Glacial Lake Agassiz (GLA story & maps), the draining of which carved the Minnesota River valley south of Mpls/StP into a wide enough trough that it affects local weather. (In milder storms, it may snow on one side but not the other.) GLA was larger than all the current 5 Great Lakes combined, about 260km sq. It moved north (downhill) along the retreating 1-3 km thick Laurentide ice sheet border, covering nearly a million square km in its travels. It moved and drained — rapidly, for rocks, moderately for water, and “completely”— by the end of the ice age, leaving “merely” a few Great Canadian Lakes behind. It ended NW of the current border Great Lakes and drained S via Red & MN rivers, E via GL/St Lawrence Seaway, NW along the retreating Laurentide ice sheet border, and ultimately NE into Hudson Bay when the ice sheet collapsed. But look at those paths. Most regional underlying rock in Canada is elderly precambrian shield built up on over millions of years of by shallow seas and scraped back with glaciers. There’s a border stripe running NW to SE through Agassiz with Lake Manitoba & Lake Athabasca of similar shape and scale to Lakes Erie & Ontario, and not too different from James Bay. Clearly glacial flood erosion and other shared processes explain these. 

The deepest Great Lakes,  Superior, Michigan, and Huron, (M & H having very similar depths), deeper than the runoff carved lakes) lack an explanation for being so different that satisfies me. (If someone else has published these details, sing out & pass on the links.) I’ve come up with an explanation, or rather a hypothesis, the technical term for a scientific guess that seems to fit known info, but wants corroboration or correction to become accepted theory, or not. 

Edited 22Aug2024 to add: lake formation date “end” bracket for significant changes, more info on water vapor generally, a couple more reference links, rhetorical flourishes to better link ideas/storytell, and correcting my omission of discussing ice boulders near lakes. And a newer thought about how GL Agassiz may help explain Lake Superior with a new riff on the Lake. I was kind of expecting some of this to be a little cringe, but I’m pretty satisfied with the post — maybe not with the em dashes — including my side quest hypotheses, enough so that my seeky neurons are calming when I re-read it. 

First, Niagara Falls causing erosion, between lakes  Ontario and Erie, of the dolomite layer it’s on dates it to only ~13K years ago (ya). Which is also the start of the Younger Dryas Cooling Period (12,900ya) and the extinction of most North American megafauna, including sabertoothed tigers (yes, cats, I know) and people. Notably, 13Kya is Very Young geologically speaking. Geologic features can form over millions of years or in moments. I posit that the Lakes’ formation was initiated by a momentary, if momentous, event, then — gradually for humans, quickly for rocks — eroded into their current forms over ~10K years.  In the weeks since I first posted, I learned that the Great Lakes have only been their current sizes for about 3000 years, so from ~13,000 to ~3000 they were still changing significantly. (I think this helps my case.)

A broader “Round or Dead” Rule: I’m coming to the conclusion that whenever there’s an abrupt, wide area geologic or biologic anomaly, or a very circular feature, impact from meteors should be ruled out rather than in. Because nothing else short of impacts, or a very massive supervolcano, causes such widespread destruction, rapidly on a continental or global scale.

(Side Quest 1: Volcanoes ๐ŸŒ‹ are on the R/D Rule short list. The Tonga volcano threw so much water into our atmosphere, the new-ish satellite sent to orbit to monitor water vapor has its sensor maxed out. It speaks to how OOS it is that no expert thought it could go as high as it is, so the sensor doesn’t have the range. The partly underwater eruption increased the water vapor in the stratosphere by 10%. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas. Greenhouse gasses absorb heat that would otherwise escape to space, trapping it ‘within our climate’. We don’t usually worry politically about it like we do CO2 or methane, figuring our planet is mostly water so the amount in the atmosphere is from ocean evaporation and otherwise stable so it’s not something we can affect much. Turns out direct water injection will do it. Here’s a clear  explanation of atmospheric water vapor’s importance.

Tonga side quest cont… The amount of water vapor in the atmosphere is largely stable but the distribution isn’t. We do monitor amounts and distribution closely for weather and other science, hence the satellite. Hotter air holds exponentially more water than colder air.  The amount at 90°F (32°C) is about double the amount held at 70°F (21°C).” Surface air is hotter than high atmospheric air; equatorial air is hotter than arctic air. Air movement causes hot and cold air meet up. The hot wet air dumps water as fog, rain, or ice when it cools off. Hotter air can keep gathering moisture longer before it hits cool air and dumps it. Shorter rain cycles in moderate temperatures bring useful soaking rains. Long cycles in hotter air bring droughts and monsoons. Changing agricultural area rain conditions from soaking rains to monsoons isn’t ideal for growing reliable food. Just saying.

Side Quest 1A: Water vapor is mostly gone by 5km, which explains somewhat why Denver is high desert, and the western plains don’t get much water. The ~4.2km high Rocky Mountains can collect water from the coast that might get over or through that top ~0.8km in strong weather patterns, but air cools as it rises, holding less, so it precipitates out, leaving the water/snow closer to the mountain peaks. As it continues E, it descends and gets warmer but mixes with already dry air, so rain stops falling… until it runs unto hot, wet Gulf air heading NE  near the Mississippi.

SQ 1 resumes: Only 1% of atmospheric water vapor is in the stratosphere. But it can still trap escaping heat. It just went up by 10%, thanks to the Tonga ๐ŸŒ‹. Now we have both extra water & a sudden blip of more greenhouse gas in our atmosphere. We know hotter air holds more water. We know that methane released from arctic permafrost takes a full year cycle to migrate to the southern hemisphere.  After the volcano, there were “suddenly wiping out whole suburbs” floods in Australia. A year later, and there are similar floods in northern hemispheres, including enough water and snow to partially relieve the California drought. I’m not suggesting that only Tonga water is coming down. My hypothesis is that the extra heat from the extra water vapor also increased the water carrying capacity of the atmosphere a bit which can be modeled by increasing the effective diameter of the atmospheric layers that hold water, maybe by a cm, maybe by a meter. And maybe that’s enough more extra water than usual to cause massive flooding, first in similar latitudes, then the following year or two (so far…) in all latitudes. So volcanoes can and do cause worldwide issues, but it takes [more than a Southern Hemisphere volcano you can hear in Alaska] to cause a continent wide extinction.

SQ 2: Guesstimating the volume of water in 1cm or 1m of expanded troposphere, a [back of the] Taco bell bag calculation. Assuming (nonexistent) uniformity & perfect spheres, Rearth =6378km, top of troposphere at 9km, effective R=6425km, at 200mbar, -40°C, mixing ratio of 0.002g vapor per 1kg dry air, and an olympic swimming pool (OSP) having 2.5X10^6 L of water in it…

  adding to the height to the troposphere

    + 1cm ➡️ 8.9X10^7 L or  ~35 OSP of water  

or

     +1m ➡️ 8.9X10^9 L or  ~3500 OSP of water  

and while I calculated with the numbers for 50° latitude, as a ballpark figure, most of the precipitated water would hit the tropics. So, ballpark, every +1cm the effective height (diameter) the troposphere expands, we get 35 olympic swimming pools worth of water that could come down as extra rain. Add +1m (to 6425km), and 3500 OSPs come raining down on, say, Pakistan.

/Side quests about atmospheric water vapor are now done.  

Back to Great Lakes Formation Hypothesis.

I’m on team “Glacial ice impact theory” for what happened 12,900ya. Briefly, a pretty sizeable meteor 2-3km) hit Michigan. Likely there were concurrent fragments of varying sizes, similar to how Shoemaker-Levy-9 broke up before crashing into Jupiter. But a main piece impacted on or directly over Michigan. Trick was, at the time, there was a mile of ice covering it, so the meteor or its๐Ÿ’ฅ burst hit the ice sheet, not the ground rock directly. 

That’s not my hypothesis/theory, I just find it the most sensible explanation. , A. Zamora has good videos on it, and further explains how a ~2km meteor hitting a 1-3km thick ice sheet would detonate the ice and spew ice boulders over a large percentage of the North American continent, wreaking havoc. These ice boulders, where they hit soils with high water tables, created ballistic impact craters, which then mostly filled in leaving conic outlines as rims. He posits the Carolina Bays & Nebraska rainwater basins formed this way.  I believe his assertion best fits the data, and as more data is found, it supports his case. For instance, inverted stratigraphy on the crater rims dates to the YD period.

I think we need to look at more than the bays & basins. I’ve been looking at maps of Michigan for a few years now, seeing map after map showing some kind of concentric circle centered there that’s much larger than a tiny crater.  What if the ice sheet caused the very large concentric deformation that formed Mainland Michigan itself?  Without an impact/explosion event on/over the ice sheet, I don’t think it would have its massive lake borders, maybe no Lake Michigan at all. The escarpment is (semi) circular (to the north) and is gigantic. I want to know why the circular dolomite cap formed there and not in other places with the same geology & same glaciation. Can Dolomite form rapidly with a shock while under pressure? I think it’s likely but I don’t insist on this to support my hypothesis. Dolomitization occurs by swapping in CaMg for Ca in limestone, but which & how many circumstances support its formation is unclear and contested. I  don’t know from rocks in the wild, but explosions are often used to get energy for chemical reactions, and shocking fluids can cause dissolved minerals to suddenly crystallize and precipitate out of solution. A water saturated limestone layer high in Mg, under a km of ice, getting slammed by the impacted ice could have been the initiating force, or the pressure followed my substantial ground tremors. At any rate, there’s salt for days capped by limestone and dolomite over mainland Michigan. And the salt caves are dry enough to mine.

One thing that’s hard for me to wrap my mind around is underground water but it’s critical to my (admittedly brand new) hypothesis. Suffice it to say, subsurface stone can be porous enough for flowing underground rivers, or it could collect in some areas more than others. Other stones can absorb water and mineral water solutions. The Great Lakes area was frequently covered in shallow seas for millions of years. There are extensive midwestern aquifers. But in the Michigan and Minnesota areas, we get deep lakes. The Great Lakes are actually pretty young, geologically, they’re extreme examples of their type. So why do they exist as they are instead of being smaller and shallower, or just remaining as aquifer covered with 10,000 lakes?? I have thoughts on that.

That underground water? It’s located in holes in rocks (or absorbed into rocks under pressure). The rocks carry the load of the land above them while the water sits there or flows or does its thing. BUT if the water containing rock is disturbed — shocked, rattled, vibrated, etc — and that rock and porosity distribution changes, the effect is liquefaction. When the rattled rock compacts, it no longer supports the land above it; the land sinks. The weight of the sinking land forces the underground water out. (For a fictional example, read LMBujold’s Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance, a comedic sci/fi novel I enjoy enough to reread.)

That displaced water finds its way sideways or up to the surface.   Here is groundwater being forced up during an earthquake. ) This happens with earthquakes, pile driving, or simply stomping on beach sand enough to get water to pool at the surface.  There are findable geologic remnants of this process at all scales, like fractals.  The water can come up in fairly round tubes, or it can come up in long cracks. Spoiler alert, those tubes are, or can grow to be, sinkholes. After the event, depending on what the ground is made of and what minerals are dissolved or suspended in the water there, the rock that fills those newly opened holes and cracks over time is often softer or harder than the original rock surrounding the scars. After erosion of the crack shaped scars, or their surrounds, there are either cracks or walls left. Think vertical mudflat, drying out. After the erosion of tubular scars, either pits or towers remain. The round remains may erode more or less at the center, , due to what precipitated out or otherwise filled the sinkhole like cream in a Twinkie.

Under Michigan are layers and layers upon layers of rock deposited in shallow seas, and that rock can/could still hold water. But that rock is also under neighboring states that don’t have a round dolomite cap on them or lake borders. Remember where I said the Carolina Bays were filled in? Yeah, I thought not. I also didn’t pay much attention to that part after I heard the explanation once. But the mechanism for the bats filling in almost as soon as they formed was seismic vibration. The seismic activity of the impact liquified some area of land, ice boulders hit some liquified land, formed oval (conic section) craters, then the seismic shaking of millions of tons of ice boulders relentlessly pelting half a continent, and all the dire bears and people thereon, made the land shake enough that the bays mostly filled back in, resettling the liquidized ground, leaving only bays with raised rims and flat, level centers.

So my hypothesis is that when the meteor hit the Laurentide ice sheet over Michigan, it caused a shock that destabilized the underlying water bearing rock layers. (And maybe shock crystalized the dolomite but that’s not necessary for this.) Those water filled layers liquified and collapsed under the weight of the ice. Given the thickness of the ice sheet, it sank as a large piece rather than splitting up piecemeal, leaving mainland Michigan as a plateau of sorts. The water had to escape somewhere, so I posit it went sideways until it was able to surface. I think the gigantic aquifer formerly undeneath it was reduced and the water came up in a ring around most of the crater, forming Lake Michigan & Lake Huron.

The largest ice boulders would have landed, piled in a ring around the Saginaw bay impact area. That secondary impact event (of multiple ice boulders raining down) could have extended the pressure out in a larger ring, blocking water from coming up in the central area, or they could have landed preferentially in the (now) lake areas, making piles of uncertain composition — glacial ice contains rocks and soil it picks up as it grows, leaving some astonishing and chaotic heaps of debris when the ice melts. Tumbling that debris laden ice around even more could increase the chaos of the remains or create subtle terrain buildup. It would be something to keep an eye out for while investigating primary issues, but the concentric rings of Lake Huron invite explanation.

Supporting this is the pattern of sinkholes. the pattern of sinkholes. Like how the cenotes in the Yucatan peninsula have strong ties to the Chicxulub crater, marking a distant ring around it where subsurface earth was fractured but took a while to erode. Inside the escarpment, and mostly towards the lake borders, Michigan gets sinkholes where the underground water seeps into the lakes. 

We’re pretty sure there weren’t similar lakes to the Great Lakes before these formed. It was largely flattened land or shallow seas covering vast swaths. So what changed? An impact could do it  The impact distorted area is larger than normal because it was distributed thru a massive ice sheet.  And while a lot of the ice sheet got blasted to kingdom come, as it were, and distributed to at least Nebraska and Georgia, I can imagine a scenario where the most fragile rock of the aquifer would collapse wholesale with a major impact PLUS the weight of an ice sheet.  Just an impact wouldn’t distribute the water so far radially. Just ice sheet advances and retreats and the lakes would be shallower and have the rectilinear karst like features of the region. But shock destabilize it & squash it with ice before it can rebound? The water squirts sideways before it can come up. And it’s a lot of water. All that liquified land roiled, making it easy to wash away more ragged edges with the post glacial floods (and all that meltwater from the ice boulders). What’s left is very unstable patches of very wet quicksand like land that grew into a big, rounder lake like Michigan, and concentric rings of erosion in Huron.

 (Updated, re Superior. Keep in mind the ice sheet was sinking the land to the NE so as it retreated, melt waters mostly ran that way across/into Superior before being shunted toward Michigan. I now don’t think there was a 2nd equivalent impact a bit west of the main impact at Saginaw bay. Disturbances at or near Lake Superior were likely secondary effects and runoff. I think it’s deeper, perhaps due to Glacial Lake Agassiz filling it with excess water runoff, ice boulders, and maybe ice bergs.  (Possibly it’s composed of 2-3 larger initial lakes. Two spurs draining NE towards Hudson Bay, another running NW-SE along the stripe of terrain housing Canada’s great lakes, including Erie and Ontario. The underwater terrain is scraped mostly NE in the deeps. My nascent opinion is that water, ice, and rock slurry was trying to drain down toward Hudson Bay, got blocked by the ice sheet, and had to bank SE, at least closer to the surface, which maybe connected 2 pits, (or bays or trenches). It might have gotten water from Agassiz after the main impact damaged the ice sheet and lobbed a bunch of ice boulders into the lake like a frozen margarita. That sloshy run off could have made it to Superior, sloshed around a bit more, trying to escape N or to Michigan, where, for a while at least, it may have met with an accumulation of ice boulders. By the time it emptied the overflow, it wouldn’t have unduly carved up Erie on the way out. This is not the main thrust of my hypothesis, but the formation of Superior can’t be overlooked despite my focus being on the rounded, smoother shapes of Huron and Michigan.)

Adding - the standard explanation for Minnesota’s 10,000 lakes is that the glaciers deposited an uneven amount of debris when they receded, leaving many depressions to be filled with water. That’s probably mostly true  But what if some lakes in MN & WI & the UP were bolstered by seismic shifting in underground aquifers when the overlying ice sheet vibrated from a meteor impact? The temporary force pushing michigan water to the edges wouldn’t be there, though the overlying ice sheet still was. The effect would be more evenly distributed water rising up rather than clumped around a central node. And possibly the ice boulders helped with residual rock boulder distribution. 

Another piece of evidence about the meteor is fire. Huh? I thought this was all ice, all the time. No. The YD layer has a platinum spike indicative of impact, but also a layer of “black mat” which, some people report, smells like fire when initially dug up. This black mat is the destruction of the surface biomass that was so monumental it didn’t even properly decay fully. A large meteor coming in from the southwest to Saginaw could have heated the atmosphere enough to start fires before blasting the areas with ice boulders, thus pulping whatever is still there. If the shock wave thru the ice and into the ground went mostly NE plus some on the sides, it would explain why michigan isn’t an island in my hypothesis.  It explains why Lakes Michigan and Huron have similar depths and form most of a ring. The incoming meteor’s direction wouldn’t have prevented surface ice from blasting back the way it came, as evidenced by most having circular craters, but the direction it slammed into the ice sheet would matter a bit more for under ice and under ground force propagation.

Anyway, watch geology videos. We’ve figured out a lot of wacky stuff in a very short amount of time, and it’s fascinating. By short time, I mean My high school geology teacher had a professor who stubbornly refused to believe plate tectonics existed. Today, any kid with an internet connection to satellite maps can look and say “wow, Africa fits *right there*, I wonder what happened?”

Side Quest the 3rd: While I’m here speaking heresy I will also record my stance that the tidal effects of the moon keep our planet’s core heated enough to preserve the magnetic field that protects our atmosphere and oceans from being blown away by solar effects like what may have happened on Mars.

Cautionary wording: No one in any of the links I posted or allude to has stated that they think a meteor caused, in effect, great clastic dikes that became the Great Lakes Huron & Michigan. So far as I know, it’s just me.  So if you think my assertion is heretical, bother me, not the people detailing geologic processes from other places or proposing different effects, as I put these pieces together myself. (Some people have quite a lot of ego invested in earth sciences. My ego wants a good explanation more than I want to be the one to figure out the explanation.) If you think there’s something to my hypothesis, or really not, let me know where I can find more information. Because “retreating glaciers did it” isn’t good enough. The glaciers retreated all over the place and there aren’t circular features near Lake Manitoba. Those lakes had access to more water yet wound up shallower. I think the Glacial ice impact hypothesis is sound enough to be theory  Working from there, the soil liquefaction and compression in the region makes sense, So yeah, Great Clastic Dikes plus subsequent erosion and some potential overflow from Agassiz helping dig out Superior.

But I dare you to look at Michigan and not see the ⭕️ . (Sorry but I don’t currently know how to add pictures stored on my phone to the blog.) Then I dare you to find other geologic features the size of a state that are circles but aren’t related to impact events. 

Side Quest the 4th: My heart still clutches when I think they there used to be buffalo herds the size of Rhode Island roaming the plains. And my ancestors came over and wiped them out for sport  But working through the impact and subsequent blanketing by ice boulders, plus immediate climate destabilization, North America lost most of its people, all its native camels & horses, most mastadons, all the dire bears, all the dire wolves, & all the sabertoothed tigers. Maybe buffalo herds that size were only possible relatively recently (last ~13,000 years) in the absence of co-evolved dire predators. In a land nearly denuded of large mammals, the buffalo made it. Until the US decided conquest was easier than cooperation, and all but killed them off. 

Freeze, burn, bam, giant hail, jiggle jiggle, squirt, wash the debris away for 10K years, & there you have them, Great Lakes.














Tuesday, July 2, 2024

Energy, itching, & ozempic

I can tell, in retrospect, when my disability started to ramp up by how my blog posts ramped down. I still regularly think up posts, but I do very little these days, and my energy level is enough for doomscrolling what’s left of Txitter, not quite enough to restart on BlueSky, and marginally enough I started enhancing Wordle posts with health updates on Mastodon, but not enough for me to interact much there or feel up to committing to a blog post here.  

Today I had the spoons (energy) to tweet the following thread. It seemed like a good blog update on how I am so here ‘tis. 

TL;DR tired & cranky, taking meds that help, and will hopefully improve my baseline over time, but right now are frustratingly making some things worse as they make some things better. In the process of picking a contractor to finish the house rehab I can’t muster for.


Chronic fatigue is such ๐Ÿ‚ ๐Ÿ’ฉ


I finished getting up & ready for my day - I’m in clothes I can wear outside, I put anti-itch cream on all my hives I get from taking the medicine that keeps me awake enough to do those things - sent 1 text & I want to get lunch ๐Ÿฑ 

I need a nap now
sigh

I also have metabolic dysfunction making fatigue worse. 

I produce overdoses of insulin. Insulin naps put me out. There is no willpowering myself awake. 

I’ve set up my life to minimize the times postprandial insulin knocks me out so I can, sometimes, do things.

Insulin & gut issues also cause assorted other symptoms. 

I looked up the symptom cluster & found a match in an article. I got hopeful of finding a research link to get to root cause & treatment. 

It said people with AIDS who got that symptom cluster stopped taking anti-AIDS meds ๐Ÿ˜

So my annoying, & frankly, least interfering symptoms, so pissed off people used to looking good (& the very real perks that come with looking “right”) that people literally risked death to avoid developing my body shape. 

So that felt nice. /s

Luckily for them, doctors were at the point of taking AIDS seriously by then & developed other medication options so eventually they didn’t have to die to avoid looking like me. 

Unluckily for me, I have yet to find a doctor willing to discuss this symptom cluster seriously with me. (To be fair, we usually have to wade thru the more serious symptoms first, but I have tried.)

I lucked into vitamin K2, which helps vitamin D work, & resolved a few things like systemic fasciitis. 

One of the many oddball symptoms it fixed, and part of the dread cluster, was the out of nowhere, livid purple stretch marks. They’re entirely gone!

But the visceral fat gain & buffalo hump remain.

Visceral fat deposits preferentially when a body has too much insulin. Also, presumably, the buffalo hump. Doctors will tell you to lose weight. If that worked without intervention, I wouldn’t be asking a doctor for help. “Eat right and exercise” worked fine for me in 2004. Then I got plantar fasciitis & couldn’t keep running. Over 10 years the PF turned into systemic fasciitis I got down to walking only 15 min/day without damaging myself further. 

All of this to say I started taking Ozempic. It spikes my insulin after meals so I’ve gone from 2-3 postprandial insulin comas a month to that many or more per week.

But!

After 2 weeks on Ozempic, moving barely enough to keep myself fed & hydrated, I lost 5 pounds & the buffalo hump has gone from nearly rigid to squishy & seemed to be decreasing. 

My eye color, which had started fading, even bluing at the top, is back to a deep intense brown.

I managed to find an autistic masseuse whose hyperfocus is body systems. She managed to explain more of my symptoms than any doctor yet. Noticed the eye color shift too. 

Ozempic has reduced my bloating & excess lymph & lymph pooling (possibly 5 pounds worth).

I had been leery of trying ozempic because it’s a weekly dose, so both effects AND side effects last a week or more. 

I had trialed Victoza, but got only side effects with no noticeable benefit. Aka I slept 14-18 hours a day most days, (rousing enough only to doomscroll).

The ozempic trial went better than Victoza, with benefits I could see & feel. A1C dropped ~1.3, but I still have the sleep issue.

It ramps up both chronic fatigue & insulin coma naps.

I can offset this somewhat with ADHD stimulant meds… which make me allergic to my sweat.

When I *need to get stuff done!*, I have to pause Ozempic & get extremely itchy hives. 

Last week was such a week, interviewing contractors for the house rehab. I am now half hives & look like the before image on an eczema ad.

I have spent an hour (writing this &) working up the oomph to acquire lunch (a 6-15 min task). Still iffy.

I would really, really love to be able to think “I want lunch from a place around the corner” & just ~do that~

I would love to be able to pick up minor messes without thinking about it, while on my way to do a thinking task, instead of it turning into a thinking task.

Ozempic makes those ADHD/chronic fatigue problems worse. 

I am actually hopeful that, given the noticeable benefits thus far (I’m back on this sauce & the buffalo hump is already receding), over time my insulin spikes will ⬇️ & energy will ⬆️ 

But today is not yet that time.


Sunday, September 11, 2022

Nine Eleven is 21 Today

My dad asked this morning if I was in Boston when 9/11 happened.  “Yes” is the short answer. 

Here’s the longer answer, some of which I sent him. It’s a little rage-ier, and my adrenaline is still up, so there might be typos. These are not complete thoughts, but bookmarks for footnotes of detail that periodically flood my brain. 

Yep. I was in Boston. The equipment engineer who sat next to me told us all to find online news video ASAP. So I saw the first crash in the earliest video reruns & wondered why we hadn’t scrambled the air force to track down every off-flight-plan passenger flight, and ~15 minutes after I had that thought, the 2nd plane hit in NYC. 1 plane hit the pentagon. Enough time to have implemented *something*.  One flight’s passengers got wind of what was up and thought “we might not be able to survive  this, but we can stop them meeting their goal”, said “Let’s roll”, and crashed without killing more than themselves in the crash. 

Taking passengers hostage wasn’t routine but it wasn’t so rare that there weren’t cultural scripts for it. People might not know that prior to Flight 93, standard policy was “let the hijackers do their thing, you’ll land in the wrong place, but we’ll deal with the detour once you’re down”.  Finding out the other planes were crashed into populated buildings changed the stakes away from cooperation. It was heroic, changing that norm.

Keep in mind it was also a Tuesday. (Aside: Like the Challenger explosion, which I saw constant repeats of for 4 days because I was home sick that Tuesday & only had network TV.) Tuesday flights run lean of passengers. The hijackers picked a day with low passenger volume but flights going long to get minimum resistance & maximum jet fuel.

Back to scrambling the USAF. We didn’t do it.

Not saying they should have shot down passenger airlines but not getting “eyes on” with capability we’ve maintained since at least the 60s was inexcusable. We didn’t have leadership, & more critically, *we didn’t have plans in place that could be authorized down the chain of command* while Shrub read children books for 7 critical  minutes. I learned later, from my mom’s friend whose husband was head of security for a major airline, that airlines at the time were on alert at the highest levels for some kind of threat. That’s too nebulous to act on, but the urgency was there, and there are only so many ways air travel can go wrong. There should have been standing orders for a half dozen scenarios prepped and ready to deploy. The US leadership at the time had no interest in governing, did not prepare, and refused to allow what I, a numpty civilian, knew were standard response options to be deployed. I woke up the next morning to fighter jets circling the city.  It was both too late and pathetic - all non-mil flights had been grounded for a day & remained so for a week. 

(Aside 2: One friend got stranded overseas for a couple weeks without their spouse. Another friend had recently married & picked a “cheap Tuesday” to leave for their honeymoon. Their bad luck they had a layover in the states on 9/11. Friend saw the writing on the wall early, got a rental car before they were all gone, and “shacked up in a bridal suite in WV with the best box of wine they could lay hands on”.)

Bush was fundamentally incapable as a president but the GOP installed him so Cheney & cronies could finish wrecking any progress gained by Clinton or Carter. Then they started their money grifting wars, which ironically, they used to decimate some of the US’s strongest military units. They farmed out CB/SeaBee work to contractors like KBF, which helped break lines of institutional knowledge while hiking Cheney’s investment portfolio, & used navy SEALs as show ponies which got huge numbers of them killed. Prior to that, being a SEAL was dangerous but not especially deadly because they were sent out covertly and were valued as assets that were hard to replace, not as disposable units for showing off. I will never understand why any of them have fondness for Republicans after that. 

I have mixed feelings about invading Afghanistan, mostly negative, but it at least had tenuous links to OBL and it was a proxy war because we wouldn’t go after Saudi Arabia. But Iraq? That was a clown show from the jump. Shrub invaded Iraq to show up his Daddy, and the grifters steering him into it did it for profiteering. OBL & SH hated each other. They didn’t collaborate. Cheney burned an active spy, and made everyone Plame knew a target. They lied about WMD  They lied and lied and lied and we killed a million Iraqis for Shrub’s bruised ego. How dare someone tell him “no”?

The GOP blacklisted several prominent Republicans for speaking out against the Iraq war.  The one name I remember was Max Cleland but there were 5 or 6. I kept waiting for his fellow congress members to stand up and say “stop the slander, what you’re doing is not ok!”, but none did. Not Dems, not Reps, not Independents. No one. I didn’t record their names at the time because I kept waiting for the NYT to publish a story linking Cleland’s treatment and that of the professor & the think tank person, & the few others, to a pattern of behavior of the GOP trashing them because they spoke out against invading  Iraq. That piece never showed up & in the years since, I’ve seen how the NYT carries water for fascists. 

Long story short, severely disabled war vet Cleland was a belived Georgia senator  By the time Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, & Rove got done blackballing him, he couldn’t get a job in his hometown for 10 years, & they replaced him with Saxby Chambliss. It took them less than a dozen examples - all successfully blackballed with no pushback - to get compliance.

Then they astroturfed the Teabaggers via Fox entertainment network calling itself News, but Fox is a whole genre of wrong to delve into some other time. (Then had to scramble to rebrand Teabaggers as the Tea Party, which the media helped them do. Check Urban Dictionary if you need to.) The GOP has voted in lockstep against Democrats ever since. One senator, a few other prominent people, and seeing that not one other legislator spoke up to say the blackballing was out of order was all it took for them to get their Lockstep. It wasn’t until Trump was so egregiously dรฉclassรฉ in his failson nepotism (includes daughter & SIL) that the lock step started to falter.

Yet even now our news media is letting the GOP target trans people, ban books, remove rights to bodily autonomy, and the Dems are barely able, and almost reluctant, to stem the arterial bleed leading us to fascism. The world is objectively worse because America reacted to 9/11 attacks wrongly in the moment & evilly & discriminatorily in the subsequent years. We managed to squeak in gay marriage & smartphones, and regain a toehold in solar energy, but every other aspect of the US dominant culture is fundamentally moving backwards and it was kickstarted by 9/11.  We did it to ourselves against my personal will.

We targeted Muslims & random brown people & equated those, and Islam, with “terrorists”.  Despite the largest threat to United States’s citizens safety being lack of health care for all, and armed, entitled cis white men who don’t like being told no, we focused all our efforts on killing & policing Black & brown people. We’ve enacted ridiculous security theater for air travel, like taking off shoes to walk thru everyone else’s foot fungus, as if cell phones, laptops, or any other ubiquitous electronics couldn’t be used to trigger an explosive remotely ๐Ÿ™„. We’ve stolen & thrown away rivers of shampoo and toothpaste.  We don’t let people bring on water! - despite dehydration leading to angry passengers who are more likely to get belligerent, and sick, than fully hydrated ones. These pesky rules make it easy to detain any traveler at will, but also means the screenings are less likely to catch a true threat. Meanwhile we lose millions of person-hours of labor every single day because every passenger must spend extra time packing to be in compliance, spend extra time at the airport to ensure they get thru the security line, which could take 5 or 55 minutes or more. And it’s less safe because we must stand in close proximity to hundreds of other people, multiple times, to go anywhere. (sarcasm alert) I’m particularly a fan of the Ft. Myers airport where the security line is a wide skyway, under which they drive the fuel trucks. People enough for 3 flights packed cheek to jowl, getting hangry, over a driveway for fuel trucks. What could possibly be unsafe about this security line?

Dad also texted that a neighbor who, after 9/11, was called to service for the National Guard & sent to Iraq, mentioned that the NYC “Ground Zero” Museum is closing (or might close?) for lack of funding. Miwed feeling there too. Assuming their point is to highlight the people killed & injured, the people who helped, and be a time capsule of the era, it should remain to counter the jingoism the day inspired.

I went to the 9/11 museum site in 2019 but did not pay to go in. I know what happened & I think the deaths were horrific but don’t justify the fallout. Plus, I cannot take in that kind of pain. It’s excruciating. I’ve learned whatever lessons I will.  I don’t personally know anyone who died in the towers but I have friends who do. Closest to me was one friend who checked in that day while walking home across the Brooklyn bridge, who has subsequently enrolled their kids in the Moderna clinical trials for young kids. I think that is more positive an act for society than most of the post 9/11 fallout.

But probably the museum is in trouble because of the Covid-19 pandemic, and 2 administrations failing to quell it that led to low museum visitation, along with it being about an event 21 years ago, about a tiny fraction of people killed violently compared to over a million Iraqis dead violently from our war, and a million Americans dead from covid, & seeing no commensurate level of response to 1M dead.

That we take off our shoes and protective gear and  assistive devices and allow ourselves to get mugged to get on planes but won’t wear masks on public transit or fund good HVAC in classrooms is a level of disproportion that shows we choose what and who we care about, and post 9/11, it’s increasingly billionaires’ quarterly profits, not the health of the nation, or the world. The US has long been a global bully, and nasty to Black folks here, but we at least pretended to be a model of better things on an improvement trajectory  That trajectory is more imperiled now than it was before 9/11. We have about 2 months to figure out if American will spend the next 21 years being a failed state that we have to claw back from fascism, or if we’re going to treat marginalized citizens as fully human and get on a progressive trajectory without a second civil war. 

I, uh, may have been holding that rant in for a while.


Sunday, October 25, 2020

COVID-19 is spread by Fascism

US readers: *Vote Biden/Harris & downballot Democrats or be prepared to require a civil war*  No, I am not kidding or being hyperbolic  Vote early to maximize success. Even if your state doesn’t have “early voting”, they might, like MO, offer “in person absentee voting”. Choose one of the reasons listed to tell the poll workers, and vote Dem.

My aunt in Florida asked me why covid seems to be hitting harder in the North. This blog is my response. I may get around to linking the articles where I got the info - the specific info is all from articles I retweeted if you want to brave Twitter search before I get to it. The more general news about fascism and ant-masking is more from distilled news, but read books (Hiding in Plain Sight) or listen to Gaslit Nation podcasts by Sarah Kendzior if you want citations sooner.

Why?

Ironically, wealth. Most of the early spread was due to rich people flying the world for ski vacations. So it spread where rich people flew. The other thing is Murdoch propaganda outlets like Fox News in the US, UK, Aus undermining truth in news for decades. All the countries with the most fascistic leaders, like here & Brazil who have chosen to make “not wearing masks” loyalty tests instead of “wearing masks” are doing badly. 

Covid-19 hotspots depend a lot on government response, local compliance, and spread. Where the virus has landed in Africa, shows us this. The places hit hard by Ebola a few years ago have very little spread. The places that don’t push germ theory & masking are hit harder. But Africa has a lot of places doing well because they have practice fighting off contagious disease, and had fewer rich travelers during ski season, and took the warning seriously. Unlike Peru where there are lots of tourists but many poor people without a proper pandemic response team. 

Indian slums are faring better than most US states because the government provided paid for testing & room & board for quarantine and once it got out that people came back from quarantine, they had good compliance.  South Korea ramped up testing and mask wearing fast and quashed community transmission. Island nations are taking quarantine seriously. 

The places where there’s most resurgence are where wealthier people who aren’t used to being told “no” decide they’re over the pandemic & go to places that can’t/won’t pay for or insist on PPE like masks or distancing. Or where teachers (ahem) are threatened with job loss for not teaching in person in places where community spread isn’t contained enough or tested enough for schools to be safe. 

—-

So that’s it. People who want to pretend the pandemic is over are being allowed to engage in contagious behaviors by countries who don’t take the threat seriously. The US under Trump & a GOP senate is so far the worst. With a competent president AND a congress where the GOP doesn’t treat Democrats as illegitimate actors, and absent Fox News not being force fed to millions of viewers, the US would be leading the global response, not failing it most spectacularly. 

Friday, August 21, 2020

Listen to Your Body

My alarm goes off. My body says, “stay in bed; sleep more.” I will be fired if I listen.

I need to shower before work. My body is cold and says, “let’s stay dry”. I do not listen. 

I have to eat something now or wait for lunch. My body says “I’m not that hungry.” I do not listen.

My brain is foggy in the morning but I have to work. My brain says, “later would be more efficient.” I do not listen.

Lunch comes an hour before I get hungry. My body says, “don’t eat yet”. I dare not listen. 

I have a meeting. My body & brain say “we’d like a walk. Or a nap.” I don’t have time to listen. 

I’m thirsty. My body says, “something sweet would be best.” I brew my tea and do not listen. 

It’s time to leave work. My brain says, “but we’re just getting efficient at this! Stay.” Sometimes I listen.

Now is when I have time to exercise. My body says, “I’m depleted, let’s not.” I try very hard not to listen.

On good days the exercise can feel ok after I warm up. Most days, my body says, “this is uncomfortable; I am sore.” I do another set or lap before I listen. 

Now I am hungry, but I need to make or acquire dinner. My body says, “snack first!” I do not listen.

I measured my food. I have plenty. My body says, “That’s not enough, I’m still hungry!” I may have a glass of water but I do not listen.

I start on a hobby & get lost in pursuit. My brain never says, “I’m tired” at night, so I don’t even try to listen. 

My timer dims my lights. My body & brain are still alert but I need to sleep. I say, “calm down, let’s rest now.” They do not listen. 

Headlines advise, “listen to your body!”
When would I have learned to listen to my body?
I have never been allowed to listen.