Dispatches from the Empire


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She’s a Foot Soldier in America’s Losing War With Chronic Disease

About half of the county’s 22,000 residents were obese, a quarter of them smoked cigarettes and almost 20 percent were diabetic — numbers that had become increasingly typical in rural America, where working-age adults were dying at higher rates than they were 20 years earlier, according to data from the C.D.C. People in the country’s poorest places were now almost twice as likely to develop chronic disease as those who lived in wealthy, urban centers on the coasts, helping to create a political climate of resentment. Mingo County had been solidly Democratic for much of its history, but more than 85 percent of voters supported Donald J. Trump in the 2024 presidential election.

When we have billion-dollar corporations focused solely on generating profit, each advertising directly to the people, what did we expect would happen?

When Google and Facebook — advertising companies, not social media companies — have direct control over the algorithms that show us what they want us to see, all in the service of giving Mars and Pepsi and ConAgra and Monsanto and every other enormously wealthy corporation the ability to advertise to us right on the computer in we keep in our pocket, what did we expect would happen?

In a society organized around the accumulation of money and wealth above all else — above morality, above compassion, above human life, above happiness — what did we expect would happen?

This crisis we Americans find ourselves in — can we agree we're in a crisis? — has been a long time coming. When Reagan deregulated in the 1980s and Republicans cheered "trickle-down economics," when Bush 1 negotiated NAFTA and Clinton signed it, what did we expect would happen? 


We Americans have prioritized access to cheap goods over the health of our economy and our citizenry.  Saving money is the only thing we care about, and in the process we sold out our rural towns and factory cities, we sold out our fellow citizens who might not have the ability to control their impulses. Perversely, this doesn't affect those of us who can, and certainly not most of us fortunate enough to have an education. (And thus tend to skew to the Left.) 

This country is grounded in a delusion that we are each in control of our lives. We call it individualism, and it's right there in the foundational document of America, the Declaration of Independence: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. We tell ourselves this story that we're all equal to one another and thus we're all equally able to control our impulses, nevermind the science that says otherwise. 

We unleash these million- and billion-dollar profit-seeking corporations on the most vulnerable populations, all under the guise of 'liberty.' Let them buy whichever sugary drink they want! Let them pick which fast food restaurant they can afford for dinner! And if they don't buy healthy food, let's blame them for it — after all, we choose to (and can afford to) eat our vegetables, so they must just be stupid (or lazy).


We Americans are so thoroughly convinced of the delusion of individual liberty (ignoring neurology, genetics, and environmental circumstance) that we use it to blame the poor, uneducated, and unhealthy for their poverty, ignorance, and sickness.

It is unspeakably cruel.

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What Are Microplastics and What Are They Doing to Our Bodies

Earlier this month, six years after that pivot, Campen published an alarming paper that made headlines around the world. The adult human brain, his research found, today contains about a disposable spoon’s worth of plastic — roughly 50 percent more than eight years ago. The rate of accumulation mirrors the rate that plastic is increasing in prevalence in our environment. “It’s frighteningly correlated,” he said when he announced his results. To illustrate his findings, Campen, who is sandy-haired with a youthful face and a wry sense of humor, held a disposable spoon next to his head. “My prop,” he called it. “I certainly don’t feel comfortable with this much plastic in my brain,” he said, “and I don’t need to wait around 30 more years to find out what happens if the concentrations quadruple.”

Goddamn.

Other studies have looked at the way the chemical compounds in these particles might harm the body. Some of the most common additives in plastics, like bisphenols and phthalates — which make products more flexible, durable, or flame resistant — have been extensively studied for decades. These additives are known to be endocrine disrupters, meaning they can wreak havoc on our hormones; this can be particularly dangerous for the developing bodies of infants and children. Once lodged in our tissues, microplastics may leach these chemical compounds continually into our bodies. They are “what we call sustained-release vehicles,” Don Ingber, a professor at Harvard’s medical and engineering schools, told the Harvard Gazette. “They’re just sitting there, and every day they’re releasing a little bit for the rest of the lifetime of those cells in your gut or other organs.”

I think microplastics will turn out to be the cause of many of our modern ailments: autism, dementia, many of the neurological disorders we're discovering in older generations, low fertility rates, etc. They're everywhere, and there's nothing we as individuals can do to avoid them. It's terrifying, yet feels so obvious in hindsight, no? Of course plastics do this to us… 

What was that famous DuPont slogan? "Better Living…through Chemistry."