https://buttondown.com/edyong209/archive/the-eds-up-unbreaking/
"I hope you’re all hanging in there.
In the earliest months of the COVID-19 pandemic, people knew that the
coronavirus that reached the U.S., but no one knew where exactly it was or how
intensely it was spreading. There was barely any testing, and the trickles of
data we had were not being collated. From that void rose the Covid Tracking
Project—a group of volunteers who wrangled the data that we needed and that the
nation’s top health agency was failing to provide. Their data became a bedrock
for COVID reporters and government agencies alike. I think about the CTP a lot,
as an example of what ordinary folks can collectively accomplish in times of
crisis. It reminds me of what my wife Liz Neeley always says: there are no
walls to put our backs against except each other.
Liz’s latest project is built upon the same principle. She and five other
co-founders, including CTP leader Erin Kissane, have launched a new site called
UNBREAKING to track how the current administration is breaking the government,
and what that means for all of us.
Unbreaking is written for you, for us. Its purpose is to “help orient and
ground our communities in clear and rigorously cited explanations of what’s
happening to our government and why it matters.” The site consists of regularly
updated explainers, written by the founders and a larger team of volunteers,
that track the attacks on our institutions, why they matter, and the
countermoves that are in play. As the team writes, “We believe that mapping the
damage done and its human costs—and the pushback and resilience work already
underway—is necessary groundwork for building and retaining political agency.”
Six pages are currently live, on: the federal workforce, food safety, Medicaid,
the postal service, trans healthcare, and medical research funding. More will
come. But if you want to start somewhere, try the page on medical research
funding to see the extent of what this administration is destroying, and why it
costs us all. It also doubles as perhaps the best explanation I’ve read of
why research funding actually matters, whom it serves, and how.
I cannot recommend the site highly enough. The pages are so well written, so
clearly structured, and so helpful in helping us make sense of the chaotic mess
we’re in. I’ve said repeatedly that I likened the pandemic to a raging torrent
that threatened to sweep us away, and my reporting as an attempt to create a
stable platform from which people could observe the deluge without drowning in
it. The same applies to Unbreaking. It’s exactly what we need right now."
Via Violet Blue’s
Threat Model - Covid: July 3, 2025
https://www.patreon.com/posts/covid-july-3-133203780
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
